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Christianists on the March
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig
Sunday 28 January 2007
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School,
told his students that when we were his age - he was then close to 80 - we
would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."
The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and
other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new
political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control
of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the
government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a
global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals
to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of
traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such
fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of
those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused
by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return
with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found
a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany
in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known
as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was
eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he
might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a
suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits
of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the
rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian
Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the
Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The
ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw
the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of
the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in
Cambridge.
Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep
personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of
manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class,
the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs
and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current
assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which
anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have
terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the
past two years as I worked on "American Fascists: The Christian Right
and the War on America" were stories of this failure - personal, communal
and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous
dreamers - those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and
religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic
purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many
Americans.
These Christian utopians promise to replace this internal and external
emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are
solved. The mounting despair rippling across the United States, one I
witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by
the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its
Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding. The Christian
right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel
abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based
world to one of magic - to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to
a
childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and
protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for
science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises
that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as
you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that
addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense
of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with
opinions, where lies become true - the very essence of the totalitarian
state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who
do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those
at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently
empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the
expense of citizens. We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent
control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have
legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial. Arthur
Schlesinger, in "The Cycles of American History," wrote that "the
great
religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in
the contemporary sense - not only for their acquiescence in poverty,
inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of
slavery, persecution, torture and genocide."
Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing
similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party,
similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social
instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the
guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S.
liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes
about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and
impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of
evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. The current
hand-wringing by Democrats, with many asking how they can reach out to a
movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic,"
would not
have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who
would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him
was an integral part of the biblical message, would come from the church
or the liberal, secular elite.
His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the
media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed,
compromised by their close relationship with government and
corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling
to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age.
They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and
comfort. He told me, I suspect half in jest, that if the Nazis took over
America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures
with the Nazi salute." But this too was not an abstraction. He had
watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the
philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students
before class.
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the
Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the
powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of
society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last
elections earned approval ratings of 80 to100 percent from the three
most influential Christian right advocacy groups - the Christian
Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. President Bush has
handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups
and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS
research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the
Christian right.
Bush will, I suspect, turn out to be no more than a weak transition
figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck - who also used "values"
to
energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched
"Kulturkampf," the word from which we get culture wars, against
Catholics and Jews. Bismarck's attacks, which split Germany and made
the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of
the civil discourse, paved the way for the Nazis' more virulent racism
and repression.
The radical Christian right, calling for a "Christian state" - where
whole
segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to
immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be
reduced, at best, to second-class citizens - awaits a crisis, an economic
meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of
environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to
push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened
American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as
moral purity and prosperity. This movement - the most dangerous mass
movement in American history - will not be blunted until the growing
social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed,
until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of
indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as
Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a
future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal
and state assistance. The unchecked rape of America, which continues
with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the
empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the
democratic state and birth of American fascism.
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