American Fascists

Last year I read this book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges. It was fascinating. Anyway, I was going to go through the book, chapter by chapter, here on my blog. But I was busy (or something) and the book was overdue. But two things today reminded me of what I had written. 1) Fresh Air's interview with Sister Pat Farrell head of the Leadership Conference of the Women Religious which was condemned by the Vatican for "radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic Faith." Sister Farrell became a nun around the Second Vatican Council but has since seen a spirit of regression in the church and an unwillingness to engage in dialogue. 2) This article in the Washington Post, "Texas GOP rejects 'critical thinking' skills. Really." This anti-intellectual rejection of critical thinking skills which also emphasizes "Judeo-Christian principles" (nevermind that the term "Judeo-Christian" is an oxymoron) is par the course. See Chapter Seven: The War on Truth. So here's what I wrote about four chapters in the book.

Chapter One: Faith
In the first and longest chapter, Hedges examines his own faith and contrasts it with the radical Christian right’s. Hedges learned from his father who was a Presbyterian minister and who fought for social justice supporting the civil-rights movement, opposing the Vietnam War, and calling for the ordination of gays. He spends some time discussing the Bible which he does not read literally: “we took the Bible seriously and therefore could not take it literally.” He notes, for instance, that the writers of Genesis knew nothing of the actual process of creation, what they were struggling with was the purpose of creation. He notes that mainstream Christians who use the Bible to depict a loving a merciful God and Jesus are ignoring, and failing to challenge or repudiate, the more hateful passages. He writes, “There is enough hatred, bigotry, and lust for violence in the Bible to satisfy anyone bent on justifying cruelty and violence.” Some of these people include the fundamentalists, evangelicals, and (especially) dominionists who make up the radical Christian Right. Dominionists are a small though increasingly influential sect of Christian reconstructionists rooted in a radical Calvinism who seek to politicize faith. Their major guiding document, R. J. Rushdoony’s The Institutes of Biblical Law—which is inimical to democracy, pluralism, and tolerance—seeks to impose Biblical law on the nation. Those who read the Bible literally and who act without doubt believe they have a divine mandate to silence the reality-based world, dismantle the institutions of democracy (born out of the rational Enlightenment), and establish an American Christian Empire.

Chapter Two: Culture of Despair
Hedges notes that “stories of rage are first stories of despair.” He attends two separate religious conventions and focuses on the stories of two women whose personal lives where in chaos before they found Jesus and lives of moral absolutes. However, embracing the Christian community means the destruction of the non-Christian communities that failed them. Their faith vindicates their rage. It allows them to set up a dichotomous world of good vs. evil, us vs. them, the blessed vs. the infidels. There is an ecstatic expectation of the Rapture, an ecstasy born out of despair. Hedges writes that the manufacturing and industrial world of America’s heartland has already seen its apocalypse. “The world has crashed and burned for them. Another apocalypse, one that will lift Christians out of this morass, seems a welcome relief.” Those who are living in despair begin to seek miracles and a form of magical thinking which allows the opening for the utopian visionaries of the Christian Right.


Chapter Three: Conversion
In this chapter, Hedges attends a training seminar in Evangelism Explosion led by Dr. D. James Kennedy who believes “our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost.” The seminar is about winning converts to Christ by becoming a friend, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. However, Hedges notes that the lectures are saturated with metaphors of war and sex: “Conversion is a form of sexual warfare, a form of seduction and finally a form of physical conquest.” They are told that the most susceptible people to target are those going through a crisis. During an interactive workshop, the attendees’ personal testimonies are scripted, rehearsed, and critiqued. And the friendships they proffer are often false, a form a “love-bombing” which is a technique also employed by cults. Rules are slowly and deliberately incorporated into the convert’s belief system to establish obedience where backsliding is a sin, doubt is a sin, and questioning is a sin. They are told to adopt more Christian lifestyles. “This control, while destructive to personal initiative and independence, does keep believers from wandering back into the messy situations they fled. The new ideology gives the believers a cause.” Finally, Hedges notes that the movement is actually the great divider of families, friends, and communities who are now split into groups of the saved and the damned. The movement seeks to replace the family with a new church family. In Letting Go of God, Julia Sweeney notes that the Old Testament family values seem mostly to be about “incest and mass slaughter and protecting your own specific genetic line at all costs” which were replaced by the new and improved New Testament family values where Jesus does not have a family of his own, he tells his followers not to have families and if they do to abandon them, and he puts his mother off cruelly and basically says to his disciples, Send her away, you are my family now.


Chapter Seven: The War on Truth
Here Hedges tours a Creation Museum in Kentucky and attends creationist seminars where audiences are largely made up of school teachers along with students and parents. The danger, as Hedges sees it, is that creationism not only allows Christian followers to retreat into a world of certainty and magic, but it also “allows all facts to be accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained ideology.” When the facts don’t support the literal reading of the Bible they are discarded. When facts are treated as opinions, then we no longer have a universal standard by which to determine truth. In a process called nihilistic relativism, lies become true while a totalitarian machinery ruthlessly manipulates facts to support the lies. In the 19th century two books where published which rocked the scientific world and shattered the biblical account of creation. They were Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Faced with such game changers, fundamentalists have responded by creating these “museums” and writing books such as The Genesis Flood and Biology: God’s Living Creation to discredit the theory of evolution with unsubstantiated claims dressed up as “science” which often points out gaps in scientific knowledge or the way science keeps changing. In Letting Go of God, Julia Sweeney says when she was young she always thought science was an immutable set of facts and that when a planet was no longer categorized as a planet or when our understanding of gravity changed, these were failings of science, signs of how unsure science can be. Now she realizes that this is the strength of science—the empirical method is working—allowing new and better information in to further our understanding. It's science, not religion, that is good at dealing with the uncertainties of life. When the Bible is regarded as immutable and creationism is dressed up in pseudoscience and there is no uncertainty, no doubt, then our open society is in danger. Earlier this year the Fordham Institute released their annual evaluation of state science standards. Only California got an “A” rating with nine states receiving “F” grades. Texas received a “C” with which creationist Don McLeroy was very pleased. One blogger, PZ Myers remarks, “That is so completely backwards. The weaknesses in the standards are the direct result of the meddling corruption of science pushed by the religious conservatives on the board; everything the Fordham Institute said was bad about their standards were the points the creationists pushed. The strengths are the product of the motivated, hard-working scientists and educators who fought against the religious conservatives.” Here we can see that the frontlines of the culture wars are being waged in the classroom, one that Hedges says “reality-based educators are slowly losing.” He finishes the chapter remarking, “When only one “truth” is allowed, empirical data becomes irrelevant. Intellectual, scientific and moral inquiry becomes unnecessary. . . . The lies, however enormous and absurd, defy criticism and unmasking because the rational world is discredited and finally silenced.”

In each chapter, Hedges points out the Fascist elements at play in certain elements of the Christian Right, based on Umberto Eco's essay on Ur-Fascism. American Fascists is a pretty interesting read, especially at a time when our nation is deeply polarized and where the culture wars are a newly prominent and contentious subject. Check it out, and let me know what you think.