Fundamentalists often wonder why mainstream citizens are uneasy with some of
their ideologies.
Chris Hedges does a good job of explaining why,
regards
tallex
from '04
THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN FASCISM
By -- CHRIS HEDGES
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity
School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80,
we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."
The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat
Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a
new political religion that would direct its efforts at 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. 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 was 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 Adolph Hitler placed over the contents inside his
suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-
called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few
individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and
Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the
top of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Fuhrer and closed them
up again. I watched hours of the grainy black and white films as he
narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.
He 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, under the
guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired
of 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 nor the cold reality of how the world
worked. The current hand wringing by Democrats in the wake of the
election, 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 that if the Nazis took over
America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures
with the Nazi salute." 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.
Christian fundamentalists now hold a majority of seats in 36 percent
of all Republican Party state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along
with large minorities in 81 percent of the rest of the states. Forty-
five Senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives earned
between an 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most
influential Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian
Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Tom Coburn, the
new senator from Oklahoma, has included in his campaign to end
abortion: a call to impose the death penalty on doctors that carry
out abortions once the ban goes into place. Another new senator, John
Thune, believes in Creationism. Jim DeMint, the new senator elected
from South Carolina, wants to ban single mothers from teaching in
schools. The Election Day exit polls found that 22 percent of voters
identified themselves as evangelical Christians and Bush won 77
percent of their vote. The polls found that a plurality of voters
said that the most important issue in the campaign had been "moral
values."
President Bush must further these important objectives, including the
march to turn education and social welfare over to the churches with
his faith-based initiative, as well as chip away at the wall between
church and state with his judicial appointments, if he does not want
to face a revolt within his core constituency.
Jim Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, who held weekly
telephone conversations with Karl Rove during the campaign, has put
the President on notice. He told ABC's "This Week" that "this
president has two years, or more broadly the Republican Party has two
years, to implement these policies, or certainly four, or I believe
they'll pay a price in the next election."
Bush may turn out to be a transition figure, our version of Otto von
Bismarck. Bismarck used "values" to energize his base at the end of
the 19th century and launched "Kulturkampt," the word from which we
get "culture wars," against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck 's attacks
split the country, made the discrediting of whole segments of the
society an acceptable part of the civil discourse and paved the way
for the more virulent racism of the Nazis. This, I suspect, will be
George Bush's contribution to our democracy.
DOMINIONISTS AND RECONSTRUCTIONISTS
The Reconstructionist movement, founded in 1973 by Rousas
Rushdooney, is the intellectual foundation for the most politically
active element within the Christian Right. Rushdooney's 1,600 page
three-volume work, Institutes of Biblical Law, argued that American
society should be governed according to the Biblical precepts in the
Ten Commandments. He wrote that the elect, like Adam and Noah, were
given dominion over the earth by God and must subdue the earth, along
with all non-believers, so the Messiah could return.
This was a radically new interpretation for many in the evangelical
movement. The Messiah, it was traditionally taught, would return in
an event called "the Rapture" where there would be wars and chaos.
The non-believers would be tormented and killed and the elect would
be lifted to heaven. The Rapture was not something that could be
manipulated or influenced, although believers often interpreted
catastrophes and wars as portents of the imminent Second Coming.
Rushdooney promoted an ideology that advocated violence to create the
Christian state. His ideology was the mirror image of Liberation
Theology, which came into vogue at about the same time. While the
Liberation Theologians crammed the Bible into the box of Marxism,
Rushdooney crammed it into the equally distorting box of classical
fascism. This clash was first played out in Latin America when I was
there as a reporter two decades ago. In El Salvador leftist priests
endorsed and even traveled with the rebel movements in Nicaragua and
El Salvador, while Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, along with
conservative Latin American clerics, backed the Contras fighting
against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the murderous military
regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile and Argentina.
The Institutes of Biblical Law called for a Christian society that
was harsh, unforgiving and violent. Offenses such as adultery,
witchcraft, blasphemy and homosexuality, merited the death penalty.
The world was to be subdued and ruled by a Christian United States.
Rushdooney dismissed the number of 6 million Jews killed in the
Holocaust as an inflated figure and his theories on race echoed Nazi
Eugenics.
"The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture and the
discipline and selective breeding this faith requires...," he
wrote. "The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his
heredity has been governed by radically different considerations."
"The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the
purposes of the magic are control and power over God, man, nature,
and society. Voodoo, or magic, was the religion and life of American
Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power
goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a
modernized power drive." (see The Religious Right , a publication of
the ADL, pg. 124.)
Rushdooney was deeply antagonistic to the federal government. He
believed the federal government should concern itself with little
more than national defense. Education and social welfare should be
handed over to the churches. Biblical law must replace the secular
legal code. This ideology remains at the heart of the movement. It is
being enacted through school vouchers, with federal dollars now going
into Christian schools, and the assault against the federal agencies
that deal with poverty and human services. The Office of Faith-Based
and Community Initiatives is currently channeling millions in federal
funds to groups such Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing , and
National Right to Life, as well as to fundamentalist religious
charity organizations and programs promoting sexual abstinence.
Rushdooney laid the groundwork for a new way of thinking about
political involvement. The Christian state would come about not only
through signs and wonders, as those who believed in the rapture
believed, but also through the establishment of the Christian nation.
But he remained, even within the Christian Right, a deeply
controversial figure.
Dr. Tony Evans, the minister of a Dallas church and the founder of
Promise Keepers, articulated Rushdooney's extremism in a more
palatable form. He called on believers, often during emotional
gatherings at football stadiums, to commit to Christ and exercise
power within the society as agents of Christ. He also called for a
Christian state. But he did not advocate the return of slavery, as
Rushdooney did, nor list a string of offenses such as adultery
punishable by death, nor did he espouse the Nazi-like race theories.
It was through Evans, who was a spiritual mentor to George Bush that
Dominionism came to dominate the politically active wing of the
Christian Right.The religious utterances from political leaders such
as George Bush, Tom Delay, Pat Robertson and Zell Miller are only
understandable in light of Rushdooney and Dominionism. These leaders
believe that God has selected them to battle the forces of evil,
embodied in "secular humanism," to create a Christian nation. Pat
Robertson frequently tells believers "our aim is to gain dominion
over society." Delay has told supporters, such as at a gathering two
years ago at the First Baptist Church in Pearland, Texas , "He [God]
is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical
worldview in everything I do and everywhere I am. He is training me,
He is working with me." Delay went on to tell followers "If we stay
inside the church, the culture won't change."
Pat Robertson, who changed the name of his university to Regent
University, says he is training his students to rule when the
Christian regents take power, part of the reign leading to the return
of Christ. Robertson resigned as the head of the Christian Coalition
when Bush took office, a sign many took to signal the ascendancy of
the first regent. This battle is not rhetorical but one that
followers are told will ultimately involve violence. And the enemy is
clearly defined and marked for destruction.
"Secular Humanists," the popular Christian Right theologian Francis
Schaeffer wrote in one of numerous diatribes, "are the greatest
threat to Christianity the world has ever known."
One of the most enlightening books that exposes the ultimate goals of
the movement is America's Providential History, the standard textbook
used in many Christian schools and a staple of the Christian home
schooling movement. It sites Genesis 26, which calls for mankind
to "have dominnion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the
air, over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping
thing that creeps on the earth" as evidence that the Bible calls
for "Bible believing Christians" to take dominion of America.
"When God brings Noah through the flood to a new earth, He
reestablished the Dominion Mandate but now delegates to man the
responsibility for governing other men." (page 19). The authors
write that God has called the United States to become "the first
truly Christian nation" (page 184) and "make disciples of all
nations." The book denounces income tax as "idolatry," property tax
as "theft" and calls for an abolish of inheritance taxes in the
chapter entitled Christian Economics. The loss of such tax revenues
will bring about the withering away of the federal government and the
empowerment of the authoritarian church, although this is not explict
in the text.
Rushdooney's son-in-law, Gary North, a popular writer and founder of
the Institute for Christian Economics, laid out the aims of the
Christian Right.
"So let's be blunt about it: We must use the doctrine of religious
liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up
a generation of people who know that there is no religious
neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral
civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-
based social, political and religious order which finally denies the
religious liberty of the enemies of God." (Christianity and
Civilization, Spring, 1982)
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in the contaminated
environment of the secular, liberal state. They have learned,
therefore, to speak in code. The code they use is the key to
understanding the dichotomy of the movement, one that has a public
and a private face. In this they are no different from the vanguard,
as described by Lenin, or the Islamic terrorists who shave off their
beards, adopt western dress and watch pay-for-view pornographic
movies in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a
suicide attack.
Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the Center
for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University , who
runs the encyclopedic web site theocracywatch.org, was on a speaking
tour a few years ago in Iowa. She obtained a copy of a memo Pat
Robertson handed out to followers at the Iowa Republican County
Caucus. It was titled, "How to Participate in a Political Party" and
read:
"Rule the world for God."
"Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not
push an ideology.
"Hide your strength.
"Don't flaunt your Christianity.
"Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control
political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians
have a majority of leadership whenever possible, God willing."
President Bush sends frequent coded messages to the faithful. In his
address to the nation on the night of September 11, for example, he
lifted a line directly from the Gospel of John when he said "And the
light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it."
He often uses the sentence "when every child is welcomed in life and
protected in law," words taken directly from a pro-life manifesto
entitled "A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern." He quotes
from hymns, prayers, tracts and Biblical passages without
attribution. These phrases reassure the elect. They are lost on the
uninitiated.
CHRIST THE AVENGER
The Christian Right finds its ideological justification in a narrow
segment of the Gospel, in particular the letters of the Apostle Paul,
especially the story of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus in
the Book of Acts. It draws heavily from the book of Revelations and
the Gospel of John. These books share an apocalyptic theology. The
Book of Revelations is the only time in the Gospels where Jesus
sanctions violence, offering up a vision of Christ as the head of a
great and murderous army of heavenly avengers. Martin Luther found
the God portrayed in Revelations so hateful and cruel he put the book
in the appendix of his German translation of the Bible.
These books rarely speak about Christ's message of love, forgiveness
and compassion. They focus on the doom and destruction that will
befall unbelievers and the urgent need for personal salvation. The
world is divided between good and evil, between those who act as
agents of God and those who act as agents of Satan. The Jesus of the
other three Gospels, the Jesus who turned the other cheek and
embraced his enemies, an idea that was radical and startling in the
ancient Roman world, is purged in the narrative selected by the
Christian Right.
The cult of masculinity pervades the ideology. Feminism and
homosexuality are social forces, believers are told, that have
rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus
is portrayed as a man of action, casting out demons, battling the
Anti-Christ, attacking hypocrites and castigating the corrupt. This
cult of masculinity brings with it the glorification of strength,
violence and vengeance. It turns Christ into a Rambo-like figure;
indeed depictions of Jesus within the movement often show a
powerfully built man wielding a huge sword.
This image of Christ as warrior is appealing to many within the
movement. The loss of manufacturing jobs, lack of affordable health
care, negligible opportunities for education and poor job security
has left many millions of Americans locked out. This ideology is
attractive because it offers them the hope of power and revenge. It
sanctifies their rage. It stokes the paranoia about the outside world
maintained through bizarre conspiracy theories, many on display in
Pat Robertson's book The New World Order. The book is a xenophobic
rant that includes vicious attacks against the United Nations and
numerous other international organizations. The abandonment of the
working class has been crucial to the success of the movement. Only
by reintegrating the working class into society through job creation,
access to good education and health care can the Christian Right be
effectively blunted. Revolutionary movements are built on the backs
of an angry, disenfranchised laboring class. This one is no
exception.
The depictions of violence that will befall non-believers are
detailed, gruesome and brutal. It speaks to the rage many believers
harbor and the thirst for revenge. This, in large part, accounts for
the huge sales of the apocalyptic series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B.
Jenkins. In their novel, Glorious Appearing, based on LaHaye's
interpretation of Biblical Prophecies about the Second Coming, Christ
eviscerates the flesh of millions of non-believers with the mere
sound of his voice. There are long descriptions of horror, 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 novel, part of The Left Behind series, are
the best selling adult novels in the country. They preach holy war.
"Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ's] return is heresy." said
televangelist James Robison.
Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, instability in Israel and even
the fighting of Iraq are seen as signposts. The war in Iraq was
predicted according to believers in the 9th 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
towards 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 millions of
non-believers to a horrible and painful death.
THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE AND LAW
The movement seeks the imprint of law and science. It must discredit
the rational disciplines that are the pillars of the Enlightenment to
abolish the liberal polity of the Enlightenment. This corruption of
science and law is vital in promoting the doctrine. Creationism,
or "intelligent design," like Eugenics for the Nazis, must be
introduced into the mainstream as a valid scientific discipline to
destroy the discipline of science itself. This is why the Christian
Right is working to bring test cases to ensure that school textbooks
include "intelligent design" and condemn gay marriage.
The drive by the Christian Right to include crackpot theories in
scientific or legal debate is part of the campaign to destroy
dispassionate and honest intellectual inquiry. Facts become
interchangeable with opinions. An understanding of reality is not to
be based on the elaborate gathering of facts and evidence. The
ideology alone is true. Facts that get in the way of the ideology can
be altered. Lies, in this worldview, become true. Hannah Arendt
called this effort "nihilistic relativism" although a better phrase
might be collective insanity.
The Christian Right has fought successfully to have Creationist books
sold in national park bookstores in the Grand Canyon, taught as a
theory in public schools in states like Alabama and
Arkansas. "Intelligent design" is promoted in Christian textbooks.
All animal species, or at least their progenitors, students read, fit
on Noah's ark. The Grand Canyon was created a few thousand years ago
by the flood that lifted up Noah's ark, not one billion years ago, as
geologists have determined. The earth is only a few thousand years
old in line with the literal reading of Genesis. This is not some
quaint, homespun view of the world. It is an insidious attempt to
undermine rational scientific research and intellectual inquiry.
Tom Delay, following the Columbine shootings, gave voice to this
assault when he said that the killings had taken place "because our
school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified
apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud." (speech
Delay gave in the House on June 16, 1999 )
"What convinces masses are not facts," Hannah Arendt wrote in Origins
of Totalitarianism, "and not even invented facts, but only the
consistency of the system 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
because it convinces them of consistency in time." (p.351)
There are more than 6 million elementary and secondary school
students attending private schools and 11.5 percent of these students
attend schools run by the Christian Right. These "Christian" schools
saw an increase of 46 percent in enrollment in the last decade. The
245,000 additional students accounted for 75 percent of the total
rise in private school enrollment.
THE LAUNCHING OF THE WAR
Adams told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to
homosexuals. He has seen how the Nazis had used "values" to launch
state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in
1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He
ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered culminating with
the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin .
Thousands of volumes from the institute's library were tossed into a
bonfire. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the
first "deviants" singled out by the Christian Right. We would be the
next.
The ban on same sex marriages, passed by eleven states in the
election, was part of this march towards our door. A 1996 federal law
already defines marriage as between a man and a woman. All of the
states with ballot measures, with the exception of Oregon, had
outlawed same sex marriages, as do 27 other states. The bans,
however, had to be passed, believers were told, to thwart "activist
judges" who wanted to overturn them. The Christian family, even the
nation, was under threat. The bans served to widen the splits tearing
apart the country. The attacks on homosexuals handed to the foot
soldiers of the Christian Right an easy target. It gave them a taste
of victory. It made them feel empowered. But it is ominous for gays
and for us.
All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach
this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for
rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John
Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School. These naive
attempts to reach out to a movement bent on our destruction, to prove
to them that we too have "values," would be humorous if the stakes
were not so deadly. They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened
world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not count.
This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an
authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay
at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is
considered murder, the press and the schools promote "positive"
Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our
primary form of communication with the rest of the world and
recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound
of the Messiah's voice.
The spark that could set it ablaze may be lying in the hands of an
Islamic terrorist cell, in the hands of the ideological twins of the
Christian Right. Another catastrophic terrorist attack could be our
Reichstag fire, the excuse used to begin the accelerated dismantling
of our open society. The ideology of the Christian Right is not one
of love and compassion, the central theme of Christ's message, but of
violence and hatred. It has a strong appeal to many in our society,
but it is also aided by our complacency. Let us not stand at the open
city gates waiting passively and meekly for the barbarians. They are
coming. They are slouching rudely towards Bethlehem. Let us, if
nothing else, begin to call them by their name.
Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of War
Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning . He holds a Master of Divinity from
Harvard Divinity School . His next book , Losing Moses on the
Freeway: America 's Broken Covenant With The Ten Commandments is
published by The Free Press.
Note from Joan Bokaer - Chris refers to a memo I received in Iowa
from Pat Robertson's organization. The year was 1986 -- two years
before his presidential bid, and three years before the Christian
Coalition was formed.
and this;
The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair
By Chris Hedges, AlterNet. Posted January 19, 2007.
Millions of Americans live trapped in soulless exurbs which lack any
kind of community, leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable.
Without alternatives for their social despair, they flock to
demagogues promising revenge and a mythical utopia.
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by
Chris Hedges (Free Press, 2007)
The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in
the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American
history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on
the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of
Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged
into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and
neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who
eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.
This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many
in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where,
lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel
deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most
easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia,
whether it is a worker's paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the
second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately
for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one
they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they
are protected, loved and worthwhile.
During the past two years of work on the book American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this
deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast
food restaurants and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting
for a moment if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There
are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former
manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing
world, with boarded up storefronts, dilapidated houses, pot-hole
streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an
abstraction to many Americans.
Jeniece Learned is typical of many in the movement. She stood, when I
met her, amid a crowd of earnest-looking men and women, many with
small gold crosses in the lapels of their jackets or around their
necks, in a hotel lobby in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. She had an
easy smile and a thick mane of black, shoulder length hair. She was
carrying a booklet called "Ringing in a Culture of Life." The booklet
had the schedule of the two day event she is attending organized by
The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation. The event was "dedicated to the
46 million children who have died from legal abortions since 1973 and
the mothers and fathers who mourn their loss."
Learned, who drove five hours from a town outside of Youngstown, Ohio
was raised Jewish. She wore a gold Star of David around her neck with
a Christian cross inserted in the middle of the design. She stood up
in one of the morning sessions, attended by about 300 people, most of
them women, when the speaker, Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther
King, asked if there were any "post-abortive" women present. Learned
ran a small pregnancy counseling clinic called Pregnancy Services of
Western Pennsylvania in Sharon, where she attempted to talk young
girls and women, most of them poor, out of abortions.
She spoke in local public schools, promoting sexual abstinence,
rather than birth control, as the only acceptable form of
contraception. And she had found in the fight against abortion, and
in her conversion, a structure, purpose and meaning that previously
eluded her. The battle against abortion is one of the Christian
Rights's most effective recruiting tools. It plays on the guilt and
shame of woman who had the abortions, accusing them of committing
murder, and promising redemption and atonement in the "Christian"
struggle to make abortion illegal, in the fight for life against "the
culture of death."
Her life, before she was saved, was, like many in this mass movement,
chaotic and painful. Her childhood was stolen from her. She was
sexually abused by a close family member. Her mother periodically
woke Learned and her younger sister and two younger brothers in the
middle of the night to flee landlords who wanted back rent. The
children were bundled into the car and driven in darkness to a
strange apartment in another town. Her mother worked nights and
weekends as a bartender. Learned, the oldest, often had to run the
home. Her younger sister, who was sexually abused by another member
of the family, eventually committed suicide as an adult, something
Learned also considered. As a teenager she had an abortion.
She was taking classes at Pacific Christian College several years
later when she saw an anti-abortion film called The Silent
Scream. "You see in this movie this baby backing up trying to get
away from this suction tube," she said. "And, its mouth is open and
it is like this baby is screaming. I flipped out. It was at that
moment that God just took this veil that I had over my eyes for the
last eight years. I couldn't breathe. I was hyperventilating. I ran
outside. One of the girls followed me from Living Alternative. And
she said, 'Did you commit your life to Christ?' And I said, 'I did.'
And she said, 'Did you ask for your forgiveness of sins?' And I
said, 'I did.' And she goes, 'Does that mean all your sins, or does
that mean some of them?' And I said, 'I guess it means all of them.'
So she said, 'Basically, you are thinking God hasn't forgiven you for
your abortion because that is a worse sin than any of your other sins
that you have done.'"
The film brought her into the fight to make abortion illegal. Her
activism became atonement for her own abortion. She struggled with
depression after she gave birth to her daughter Rachel. When she came
home from the hospital she was unable to care for her infant. She
thought she saw an 8-year-old boy standing next to her bed. It was,
she is sure, the image of the son she had murdered.
"I started crying and asking God over and over again to forgive me,"
she says. "I had murdered His child. I asked Him to forgive me over
and over again. It was just incredible. I was possessed. On the
fourth day I remember hearing God's voice. 'I have your baby, now get
up!' It was the most incredibly freeing and peaceful moment. I got up
and I showered and I ate. I just knew it was God's voice."
In the United States we have turned our backs on the working class,
with much of the worst assaults, such as NAFTA and welfare reform,
pushed though during President Clinton's Democratic administration.
We stand passively and watch an equally pernicious assault on the
middle class. Anything that can be put on software, from architecture
to engineering to finance, will soon be handed to workers overseas
who will be paid a third what their American counterparts receive and
who will, like some 45 million Americans, have no access to health
insurance or benefits.
There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a
steady Weimarization of the American working class. The top one
percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90
percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about
our democracy. As Plutarch reminded us "an imbalance between the rich
and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."
The stories believers such as Learned told me of their lives before
they found Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about
terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with
addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation
and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope.
The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual
inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not
filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where
they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to
corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits,
betrayed them.
They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world
for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of
magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on
a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives.
The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief
system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world
came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says
so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged
back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no
longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and
alone.
The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing
in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction.
It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling
wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that
have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging
signs that the end of the world is close at hand.
Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a
bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while
the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and
finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an
obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still
believe it is worth saving, deserve.
Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to
direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who
refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to "secular
humanists," to "nominal Christians," to intellectuals, to gays and
lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat
Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to
pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.
All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of
instability to achieve power. And we are not in a period of crisis
now. But another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a
series of huge environmental disasters or an economic meltdown will
hand to these radicals the opening they seek. Manipulating our fear
and anxiety, promising to make us safe and secure, giving us the
assurance that they can vanquish the forces that mean to do us harm,
these radicals, many of whom have achieved powerful positions in the
Executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the
military, will ask us only to surrender our rights, to pass them the
unlimited power they need to battle the forces of darkness.
They will have behind them tens of millions of angry, disenfranchised
Americans longing for revenge and yearning for a mythical utopia,
Americans who embraced a theology of despair because we offered them
nothing else.
Chris Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and former
Pulitzer-prize winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times,
is the author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War
on America.
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