BY CHRIS HEDGES
Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and
fractious movement known as the Christian Right, have begun to dismantle
the intellectual and scientific rigour of the Enlightenment. They are
creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law” and shutting out all
those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer
to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit
before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social
deviants, beginning with homosexuals and moving on to immigrants, secular
humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as “nominal
Christians” – meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and
heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who defy the mass movement
are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country
and the family. All will be purged.
The followers of deviant faiths, from Judaism to Islam,
must be converted or repressed. The deviant media, the deviant public
schools, the deviant entertainment industry, the deviant secular humanist
government and judiciary and the deviant churches will be reformed or
closed. There will be a relentless promotion of Christian “values”,
already underway on Christian radio and television and in Christian
schools, as information and facts are replaced with overt forms of
indoctrination. The march toward this terrifying dystopia has begun. It is
taking place on the streets of Arizona, on cable news channels, at tea
party rallies, in the Texas public schools, among militia members and
within a Republican party that is being hijacked by this lunatic fringe.
Elizabeth Dilling, who wrote The Red Network and
was a Nazi sympathiser, is touted as required reading by trash-talk
television hosts like Glenn Beck. Thomas Jefferson, who favoured
separation of church and state, is ignored in Christian schools and soon
will be ignored in Texas public school textbooks. The Christian Right
hails the “significant contributions” of the Confederacy. Senator Joseph
McCarthy, who led the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, has been
rehabilitated and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is defined as part of
the worldwide battle against Islamic terror. Legislation like the new Jim
Crow laws of Arizona is being considered by 17 other states.
The rise of this Christian fascism, a rise we ignore at
our peril, is being fuelled by an ineffectual and bankrupt liberal class
that has proved to be unable to rollback surging unemployment, protect us
from speculators on Wall Street or save our dispossessed working class
from foreclosures, bankruptcies and misery. The liberal class has proved
useless in combating the largest environmental disaster in our history,
ending costly and futile imperial wars or stopping the corporate
plundering of the nation. And the gutlessness of the liberal class has
left it, and the values it represents, reviled and hated.
The Democrats have refused to repeal the gross violations
of international and domestic law codified by the Bush administration.
This means that Christian fascists who achieve power will have the “legal”
tools to spy on, arrest, deny habeas corpus to and torture or assassinate
American citizens – as does the Obama administration.
Those who remain in a reality-based world often dismiss
these malcontents as buffoons and simpletons. They do not take seriously
those like Beck who pander to the primitive yearnings for vengeance, new
glory and moral renewal. Critics of the movement continue to employ the
tools of reason, research and fact to challenge the absurdities propagated
by creationists who think they will float naked into the heavens when
Jesus returns to earth. The magical thinking, the flagrant distortion in
interpreting the Bible, the contradictions that abound within the
movement’s belief system and the laughable pseudoscience however are
impervious to reason. We cannot convince those in the movement to wake up.
It is we who are asleep.
Those who embrace this movement see life as an epic battle
against forces of evil and Satanism. The world is black and white. They
need to feel, even if they are not, that they are victims surrounded by
dark and sinister groups bent on their destruction. They need to believe
they know the will of god and can fulfil it, especially through violence.
They need to sanctify their rage, a rage that lies at the core of the
ideology. They seek total cultural and political domination. They are
using the space within the open society to destroy it. These movements
work within the confining rules of the secular state because they have no
choice. The intolerance they promote is muted in the public assurances of
their slickest operators. Given enough power, and they are working hard to
get it, any such cooperation will vanish. The demand for total control and
for a Christian nation and the refusal to permit any dissent are on
display within their inner sanctums. These pastors have established within
their churches tiny, despotic fiefdoms and they seek to replicate these
little tyrannies on a larger scale.
Many of the tens of millions within the Christian Right
live on the edge of poverty. The Bible, interpreted for them by pastors
whose connection with god means they cannot be questioned, is their
handbook for daily life. The rigidity and simplicity of their belief are
potent weapons in the fight against their own demons and the struggle to
keep their lives on track. The reality-based world, one where Satan,
miracles, destiny, angels and magic did not exist, battered them like
driftwood. It took their jobs and destroyed their future. It rotted their
communities. It flooded their lives with alcohol, drugs, physical
violence, deprivation and despair. And then they discovered that god has a
plan for them. God will save them. God intervenes in their lives to
promote and protect them. The emotional distance they have travelled from
the real world to the world of Christian fantasy is immense. And the
rational, secular forces, those that speak in the language of fact and
evidence, are hated and ultimately feared, for they seek to pull believers
back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them.
There are wild contradictions within this belief system.
Personal independence is celebrated alongside an abject subservience to
leaders who claim to speak for god. The movement says it defends the
sanctity of life and advocates the death penalty, militarism, war and
righteous genocide. It speaks of love and promotes fear of damnation and
hate. There is a terrifying cognitive dissonance in every word they utter.
The movement is, for many, an emotional life raft. It is
all that holds them together. But the ideology, while it regiments and
orders lives, is merciless. Those who deviate from the ideology, including
“backsliders” who leave these church organisations, are branded as
heretics and subjected to little inquisitions which are the natural
outgrowth of messianic movements. If the Christian Right seizes the
legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, these little
inquisitions will become big inquisitions.
The cult of masculinity pervades the movement. Feminism
and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male
physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian Right, is a
muscular man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist,
attacking hypocrites and castigating the corrupt. This cult of
masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is deeply appealing to
those who feel disempowered and humiliated. It vents the rage that drove
many people into the arms of the movement. It encourages them to lash back
at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the
outside world is stoked through bizarre conspiracy theories, many
championed in books such as Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, a
xenophobic rant that includes attacks on liberals and democratic
institutions.
The obsession with violence pervades the popular novels by
Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. In their apocalyptic novel, Glorious
Appearing, based on LaHaye’s interpretation of biblical prophecies
about the Second Coming, Christ returns and eviscerates the flesh of
millions of non-believers with the sound of his voice. There are long
descriptions of horror and blood, of how “the very words of the Lord had
superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and
skin”. Eyes disintegrate. Tongues melt. Flesh dissolves. The Left Behind
series, of which this novel is a part, contains the best-selling adult
novels in the country.
Violence must be used to cleanse the world. These
Christian fascists are called to a perpetual state of war. “Any teaching
of peace prior to [Christ’s] return is heresy…” says televangelist James
Robison.
Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, instability in
Israel and even the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seen as glorious
signposts. The war in Iraq is predicted, believers insist, in the ninth
chapter of the Book of Revelations, where four angels “which are bound in
the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of men”.
The march is inevitable and irreversible and requires everyone to be ready
to fight, kill and perhaps die. Global war, even nuclear war, is not to be
feared but welcomed as the harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the
avenging armies is an angry, violent messiah who dooms hundreds of
millions of apostates to a horrible and gruesome death.
The Christian Right, while embracing a form of
primitivism, seeks the imprint of law and science to legitimate its absurd
mythologies. Its members seek this imprint because despite their
protestations to the contrary, they are a distinctly modern, totalitarian
movement. They seek to co-opt the pillars of the Enlightenment in order to
abolish the Enlightenment. Creationism, or “intelligent design”, like
eugenics for the Nazis or “Soviet” science for Stalin, must be introduced
into the mainstream as a valid scientific discipline – hence the rewriting
of textbooks. The Christian Right defends itself in the legal and
scientific jargon of modernity. Facts and opinions, once they are used
“scientifically” to support the irrational, become interchangeable.
Reality is no longer based on the gathering of facts and evidence. It is
based on ideology. Facts are altered. Lies become true. Hannah Arendt
called it “nihilistic relativism” although a better phrase might be
collective insanity.
The Christian Right has, for this reason, its own
creationist “scientists” who use the language of science to promote
anti-science. It has fought successfully to have creationist books sold in
national park bookstores at the Grand Canyon and taught in public schools
in states such as Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. Creationism shapes the
world view of hundreds of thousands of students in Christian schools and
colleges. This pseudoscience claims to have proved that all animal
species, or at least their progenitors, fit on Noah’s ark. It challenges
research in AIDS and pregnancy prevention. It corrupts and discredits the
disciplines of biology, astronomy, geology, palaeontology and physics.
Once creationists can argue on the same platform as
geologists, asserting that the Grand Canyon was not created six million
years ago but 6,000 years ago by the great flood that lifted up Noah’s
ark, we have lost. The acceptance of mythology as a legitimate alternative
to reality is a body blow to the rational, secular state. The destruction
of rational and empirically based belief systems is fundamental to the
creation of all totalitarian ideologies. Certitude, for those who could
not cope with the uncertainty of life, is one of the most powerful appeals
of the movement. Dispassionate intellectual inquiry, with its constant
readjustments and demand for evidence, threatens certitude. For this
reason incertitude must be abolished.
“What convinces masses are not facts,” Arendt wrote in
The Origins of Totalitarianism, “and not even invented facts, but only
the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief
in the masses’ inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only
because it convinces them of consistency in time.”
Augustine defined the grace of love as Volo ut sis
– I want you to be. There is, he wrote, an affirmation of the mystery of
the other in relationships based on love, an affirmation of unexplained
and unfathomable differences. Relationships based on love recognise that
others have a right to be. These relationships accept the sacredness of
difference. This acceptance means that no one individual or belief system
captures or espouses an absolute truth. All struggle in their own way,
some outside of religious systems and some within them, to interpret
mystery and transcendence.
The sacredness of the other is anathema to the Christian
Right, which cannot acknowledge the legitimacy of other ways of being and
believing. If other belief systems, including atheism, have moral
validity, the infallibility of the movement’s doctrine, which constitutes
its chief appeal, is shattered. There can be no alternative ways to think
or to be. All alternatives must be crushed.
Ideological, theological and political debates are useless
with the Christian Right. It does not respond to a dialogue. It is
impervious to rational thought and discussion. The naďve attempts to
placate a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too
have “values”, only strengthens its legitimacy and weakens our own. If we
do not have a right to be, if our very existence is not legitimate in the
eyes of god, there can be no dialogue. At this point it is a fight for
survival.
Those gathered into the arms of this Christian fascist
movement are desperately struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile
environment. We failed them; we owe them more: This is their response. The
financial dislocations, the struggles with domestic and sexual abuse, the
battle against addictions, the poverty and the despair that many in the
movement endure are tragic, painful and real. They have a right to their
rage and alienation. But they are also being used and manipulated by
forces that seek to dismantle what is left of our democracy and abolish
the pluralism that was once the hallmark of our society.
The spark that could set this conflagration ablaze could
be lying in the hands of a small Islamic terrorist cell. It could be in
the hands of greedy Wall Street speculators who gamble with taxpayer money
in the elaborate global system of casino capitalism. The next catastrophic
attack, or the next economic meltdown, could be our Reichstag fire. It
could be the excuse used by these totalitarian forces, this Christian
fascism, to extinguish what remains of our open society.
Let us not stand meekly at the open gates of the city
waiting passively for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching
toward Bethlehem. Let us shake off our complacency and cynicism. Let us
openly defy the liberal establishment, which will not save us, to demand
and fight for economic reparations for our working class. Let us
reincorporate these dispossessed into our economy. Let us give them a
reality-based hope for the future. Time is running out. If we do not act,
American fascists, clutching Christian crosses, waving American flags and
orchestrating mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, will use this
rage to snuff us out.
(Chris Hedges, an alumnus of Harvard Divinity School, is a
well-known journalist and columnist and author of American Fascists:
The Christian Right and the War on America. His latest book is
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
This article was posted on the online magazine Truthdig on June 7,
2010.)
Courtesy: Truthdig;
www.truthdig.com