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At the notorious Scopes Trial of 1925 Christianity in America was dealt a severe blow. After the Scopes Trial ended, Christians retreated from American public life with their tails tucked amongst their legs. Then, over the next 50 years Christian Americans stayed almost silent and permitted Secular Humanism to replace Christianity as the official religion of America.
The result, our cherished freedoms to express our Christian faith eroded before our eyes. Judges started out banning nativity scenes, merchants who sells goods at retail renaming Christmas trees “Holiday trees,” public schools forbidding our children from having group prayer or from even singing Christmas carols. The quality of our Christian education also sank to new depths.
It was not until 1975 and the “born-again” era ignited that Christians begun to re-emerge and re-engage the American culture once again. Christians have made progression since 1975. Many Christian American ministries and Christian American organizations have risen out of this “Christian Reawakening” to challenge and debunk the theory of evolution, to challenge the ACLU, and to take on the 14 percent of those that do not believe
God exists.
Yet, with all the ground we have taken back from the secular humanists and the non-believers, there is still work to be done. If the 86 percent of Americans who believe in God want America to veritably be restored to the Christian American nation it once was, we original need to instruct and prepare this generation, and the generations that follow to recapture their Christian American future.
Since 1999 I have also noticed that galore Christians seem to be paralyzed by an obsession with life in the “Last Days.” Because of this notion galore Christians have lost sight of our fight to restore our nation to the same Christian American values it once held in our government foundations and as a way of life demonstrated publically in our culture. These Christians will have to refocus on what it means to genuinely be a Christian in America!
Over 200 years ago, our “Constitution” made the following statement:
“We have staked the whole of all our political foundations upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
Should we abandon what are Constitution says for Christian Americans to do? Are we to forsake our heritage? The very primary Supreme Court Justice, John Jay, said:
“Americans ought to select and prefer Christians as their rulers.”
He made this statement to reinforce what are Constitution instructs us to do as Americans to support make sure that our Christian heritage, values, and way of life will never be changed.
Are we so preoccupied with our each and everyday lives that we will just stand by and stay silent, as the Christian Americans once did for 50 years following the Scopes Trial, and proceed to let our America’s values, heritage, and way of life erode? Remember, in a Democracy the majority rules, but only if each and each person of that majority takes action and speaks out, may we exercise our Democratic rights and genuinely make a difference.
In his Inaugural Address on Friday, January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy said, “United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we may do-for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.” Then later in his speech he goes on to say, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country may do for you-ask what you may do for your country.”
And so my fellow Christian Americans, what are you going to do for your country today?
American Fascists Christian Right America
Twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists basi spoke of the United States getting a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedom and our way of life. In American Fascists, Chris Hedges, veteran journalist and author of the National Book Award finalist War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, challenges the Christian Right’s religious legitimacy and argues that at it is core it is a mass motion fueled by unbridled nationalism and a hatred for the open society. Hedges, who grew up in rural parishes in upstate New York where his father was a Presbyterian pastor, attacks the motion as someone steeped in the Bible and Christian tradition. He points to the hundreds of senators and members of Congress who have earned amongst 80 and 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups as one of a good deal of signs that the motion is burrowing deep inside the American government to subvert it. The movement’s call to dismantle the wall amid church and state and the intolerance it preaches versus all who do not conform to it is warped imaginativeness of a Christian America are pumped into tens of millions of American homes through Christian television and radio stations, as well as reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools. The movement’s yearning for apocalyptic violence and it is assault on dispassionate, intellectual inquiry are laying the foundation for a new, exceptionally bad or displeasing America. American Fascists, which includes consultations and coverage of events such as pro-life rallies and weeklong classes on conversion techniques, examines the movement’s origins, it is driving motivations and it is dark ideological underpinnings. Hedges argues that the motion presently resembles the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, movements that often times masked the full extent of their drive for totalitarianism and were more than willing to make concessions until they achieved unrivaled power. The Christian Right, like these early fascist movements, does not in an open way call for dictatorship, nor does it use physical violence to suppress opposition. In short, the motion is not yet revolutionary. But the ideological architecture of a Christian fascism is being cemented in place. The motion has roused it is followers to a fever pitch of desperation and fury. All it will take, Hedges writes, is one more national crisis on the order of September 11 for the Christian Right to make a concerted drive to ruin American democracy. The motion awaits a crisis. At that moment they will disclose themselves for what they genuinely are — the American heirs to fascism. Hedges issues a potent, ardent warning. We face an imminent threat. His book reminds us of the dangers liberal, democratic societies face when they tolerate the intolerant.
From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. The f-word crops up in the most respectable quarters these days. Yet if the provocative title of this exposé by Hedges (War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning)—sounds an alarm, the former New York Times foreign correspondent takes care to utilise his terms precisely and decisively. As a Harvard Divinity School graduate, his investigation of the Christian Right agenda is even more alarming given it is lucidity. Citing the psychology and sociology of fascism and cults, including the work of German historian Fritz Stern, Hedges draws striking parallels amidst 20th-century totalitarian movements and the highly organized, well-funded “dominionist movement,” an influential theocratic sect within the country’s big evangelical population. Rooted in a radical Calvinism, and wrapping it is apocalyptic, vehemently militant, sexist and homophobic imaginativeness in patriotic and religious rhetoric, dominionism seeks sheer power in a Christian state. Hedges’s reportage profiles both former members and unfeigned believers, evoking the queer characteristics of this American variant of fascism. His argument versus what he sees as a democratic society’s suicidal tolerance for intolerant movements has it is own paradoxes. But this urgent book forcefully illuminates what galore throughout the political spectrum will recognize as a severe and growing threat to the very conception and exercise of an open society. (Jan. 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review”Chris Hedges may be the most creditable figure yet to detect real-life fascism in the Red America of megachurches, gay-marriage bans and Left Behind books. American Facists is at it is most daring when it enunciates…the perversities that are evident to those of us not beholden to political exigencies.” — New York Observer
“Throughout, Hedges documents, and reflects on, what he feels is the bigotry, the homophobia, the fanaticism — and the deeply un-Christian ideology — that pose clear and present peril in our former and fragile republic.” — O, the Oprah magazine
“This is a powerful book that looks inside a good deal of of the darkest movements on American soil.” — Time Out New York
About the AuthorChris Hedges was a alien correspondent for almost two decades for The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He was a fellow member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges is the author of the bestseller American Fascists and National Book Critics Circle finalist for War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He is a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lannan Literary Fellow and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.
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354 of 375 humans found the following review helpful.
 When Unquestioned Obedience Is The Only Test Of Faith
By W. Szewai
Most outstanding artists and thinkers are outsiders in galore sense or another. This capacity to observe from the outside many times uncovers patterns that are invisible because they are too close. Chris Hedges expended most of his adult life outside of the United States, covering wars and despotic regimes. On his return to America, he was capable to see our society with an eye unblunted by habit or assumptions, which, combined with his theological education and visceral experience and understanding of totalitarian systems, gives him a in a unique manner penetrating perspective into the growing motion known as the Christian Right.
In “American Fascists,” Hedges never makes the simplistic assert that the Christian Right is the Nazi party, or that Bush is Mussolini, or that America will inevitably become a fascist state. His investigation is much more nuanced, identifying the incipient stirrings, invisible to a good deal of Americans, of a complex, mass political motion that is mobilizing and profiting strength and support beneath the surface of our democracy.
In characteristically muscular and clear prose that fuses the minister and veteran reporter, Hedges not only details multiple facets of the movement, but also examines the ideological undercurrents that drive them and how they translate into political consequences.
At The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which “prove[s] that God’s word is true,” Hedges writes “The danger of creationism is…that it allows all facts to be accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained ideology.”
At a Love Won Out conference, an establishment founded to “cure” those who suffer from “same sex attraction,” and which denounces and warns versus unrepentant homosexuals who seek to corrupt children and destruct the family, Hedges observes that “This cultivated sense of persecution – cultivated by those doing the persecuting – allows the Christian Right to publicize bigotry and attack any outcry as share of the war versus the Christian faith. A group attempting to curtail the civil rights of gays and lesbians portrays itself, in this rhetorical twist, as victims of an effort to curtail the civil rights of Christians.”
Of the gospel of consumerism relentlessly peddled by televangelists on massive Christian broadcasting networks, which promises it is 141 million viewers that all they need to repair their lives is faith in Jesus and a regular “love offering” in American dollars to the network, Hedges writes, “…when faith alone cures illness, overcomes aroused distress and ensures financial and physical security, there is no need for…social-service and regulatory agencies to exist. There is no need for fiscal or social responsibility… To put trust in secular foundations is to lack faith, to give up on God’s magic and miracles. The message…dovetails with the message of neoconservatives who want to gut and demolish federal programs, free themselves from government regulatings and taxes and break the back of all organizations, such as labor unions, that seek to impede greatest or most complete or best possible profit.”
Among other events and interviews, we also see an Evangelism Explosion workshop run by D. James Kennedy at his Coral Ridge mega-church which trains players to convert non-believers, an anti-abortion weekend organized by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, an Ohio Restoration Project rally where the Christian cross is superimposed upon a huge American flag.
The collective portrait is that of a non-reality-based movement, based on magic and miracles, which no rational argument may penetrate. The leaders of the Christian Right assert they speak for God, and as such, may brook no dissent. Unquestioned obeisance to these ambassadors of God becomes the only test of faith. In totalitarian movements, the obligation of making conclusions regarding right and defective is lifted from the people, along with the anxiety that attends that responsibility. But the surrender of sense of right and wrong only comes with the abdication of democratic power and civil rights.
Yet it would be a fault to view “American Fascists” as not one thing but a frontal assault on the Christian Right. It is also an unexpectedly compassionate hearing of the stories of desperation and pain that are the hidden, private side of this movement. Hedges distinctly makes a distinction amongst the leaders and the followers, and his anger at how the motion exploits the shame and guilt feelings of it is followers for political and economic purposes is one of the driving forces of the book. The Christian Right is built on economic and personal despair, Hedges argues. Again and again, he encounters followers whose lives were shattered by sexual abuse, drug addiction, child abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism, uttermost poverty, multiple abortions, broken families, and unfathomed alienation and loneliness. It was this desperation that drove them to hug the Christian Right, which promises them miraculous solutions and apocalyptic revenge versus those who had destroyed their lives. These stories of desperation turned to rage are critical to understanding this mass motion and it is power.
The Christian Right seeks to demolish that which it claims to defend. Hedges accords them no religious legitimacy, as they trample the core values of Jesus’ teachings, love and compassion, and seek to use the veneer of religion as a route to political power. There is a tremendous divergence amongst the “religion” of the Christian Right and the true meaning of faith. Near the close of the book, Hedges writes:
“The radical Christian Right calls for exclusion, remorseless cruelty and intolerance in the name of God. Its members do not commit evil for evil’s sake. They commit evil to make a better world. To attain this better world, they believe, numerous ought to suffer and be silenced, and at the end of time all those who oppose them will have to be destroyed. The worst suffering in humane history has been carried out by those who preach such grand, utopian visions, those who seek to implant by strength their narrow, queer version of goodness. This is true for all doctrines of personal salvation, from Christianity to ethnic nationalism to communism to fascism. Dreams of a universal good develop hells of persecution, suffering and slaughter. No humane being could ever be virtuous sufficient to attain such dreams, and the Earth has swallowed millions of hapless victims in the vain pursuit of a new heaven and a new Earth. Ironically, it is idealism that leads radical fundamentalists to strip humane beings of their dignity and their sanctity and turn them into abstractions. Yet it is only by keeping on to the sanctity of each individual, each humane life, only by placing our faith in tiny, unheroic acts of compassionateness and kindness, that we survive as a community and as person humane beings.”
185 of 201 persons found the following review helpful.
I could not commend this book more highly
By R. Daniels
This is an magnificent study of fascism, it is past and present grips on the Religious Right and the catalysts that might usher in a Christian Fascism motion in the United States.
As a Christian with experience in both conservative and liberal evangelical congregations, I found utile perceptivenesses into the political and religious shifts I’ve witnessed since the 1970s and that we’ve all seen accelerate after 9/11. How is it that well intentioned churches and their members have come to believe that homosexuality is THE problem facing the U.S. today? How may self-professed Christians become unabased cheerleaders for war? How do Christians get so caught up in television personality cults masquarading as Christian ministries?
These and a great deal of a lot of other questions are asked and answered by Hedges. The historic background and his logic in reaching those answers are accessibly presented. Where those answers at long last lead is a cause for concern to all U.S. citizens and, as a Christian, the author makes it clear that the obligation for standing up to the unholy rise of Christian Fascism falls squarely on the shoulders of Christians.
The more “religous” you are, the more necessary I think it is that you consider the points made by the author. You’re not going to like most of them. But I think you will come to agree with too some of them to ignore his overarching concerns.
167 of 184 people found the following review helpful.
Progressive Christian confronts the Christian Right fringe
By David R. Cook
Chris Hedges has all the personal and experiential credentials to take on the Christian “dominionists” that pose a peril to our democracy and, by extension, the world. First, he is a fine writer. Second, he has covered from the ground most of the wars of the second half of the 20th Century. And third, he thinks deeply and personally in regards to religion, theology, ethics and morality. His admired father was a Presbyterian minister who cared deeply when it comes to tolerance and community. Having said all that, Hedges does not pull any punches in equating the little group of dominionists (about 7% of Christians) with the conduct and faith schemes that were percentage and parcel of fascism. He has read deeply in analyses of fascism, such as Hannah Arendt, and, being the good reporter that he is, has attended a lot of of the dissimilar gatherings of dominionists and talked to those who have been affected by their involvement in the cult like movements that pass for Christianity.
America today faces a heap of internal threats to our democracy. Not least of these threats comes from the imperialistic presidency with which we have been inflicted by Bush and Cheney. Would they were the only purveyors of American imperialism, but they have only taken this bent to a new level. The Christian Right, led by the dominionists, is directly tuned in to this imperialism, turning it into “God’s will”, with the stimulating twist that we are heading for the apocalypse when only the saved will attain heaven. Because these so-called Christians are to a great extent financed and control a disproportionate number of radio and TV outlets, their influence far outperforms their numbers. Elsewhere, it has been observed that history shows that nations can not maintain an empire abroad and democracy at home. Preserving democracy at home will in the long run require giving up the empire. Hedges argues that it will take a good deal of acts of faith in the political realm to counter these fascists, two examples of which are passing hate crimes legislation and universal healthcare legislation. Ending the Iraq war will aid also.
This is a book intended for consciousness raising in regards to a threat within our democracy that we ignore or placate to our peril. I urge my “mainstream” Christian and secular friends to read this book.
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