Christian Fascism in America

In Counterpunch, Professor of History Gary Leupp describes Christian fascism in America, and counsels that the antidote may be Christian anti-fascism:

Fascism feeds on fear. Hitler's Reichmarshall Hermann Goering declared that "people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and attack the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." Question for discussion, ladies and gentlemen: How does this apply here? Are the myriad threats the movement has used to frighten all who will listen (weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds over New York, Muslims in general, liberal college professors, homosexuals) working to get people to do the bidding of leaders in this country?

Fascism also feeds on ignorance. "Good Germans" were truly persuaded that Jews, Slavs and Bolsheviks threatened them in 1939. Fascism is inherently anti-intellectual, deploying emotions (national pride, resentment at "outsiders," feelings of injury, millenarian hope) and targeting prominently among internal enemies those who challenge its self-validating myths. A key factor in the American variety is a frontal assault on whole fields of science, especially those challenging the Biblical depiction of the earth as merely 6000 years old.

A top Bush aide actually told the New York Times' Ron Suskind that administration officials disparagingly dismiss what they call "the reality-based community"---specifically, people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality" as irrelevant. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he declared. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality---judiciously, as you will---we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

In other words, truth is for wimps; forget about it. We are the champions, the powerful, we make it up as we go along and if you want a piece of it, embrace the delusion. We will punish the French for rationally rejecting the attack on Iraq, and for that matter for inflicting the Enlightenment (with its emphasis on unmanly, unheroic rational empiricism) a few centuries back. We will punish the CIA for obnoxiously promoting reality-based intelligence over the requested, required disinformation before the Iraq attack. This is the sort of fascistic thought not only trumpeted by right wing talk radio, but from countless pulpits, cable news, and the White House---proudly irrational, fear mongering, sneering, creating its own reality with the calculated support of large sections of corporate America.

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The question in my mind is this: Given that this fascist tide is so related to a post 9-11 foreign policy so shaped by non-Christians, can we indeed call the movement "Christian fascist"? If one does so, one acknowledges the obvious: that Bush's social base is largely a Christian fundamentalist one, committed to what it perversely terms a "family values" agenda. But Christian fundamentalists, who have been agitating for years for prayer in the schools, textbook censorship, public display of the 10 Commandments, etc., haven't from the grass roots been demanding U.S. military action to achieve regime change in the Middle East. The movement to achieve that central aspect of the fascist program comes from the elite, with the neocons in and out of government playing key roles. Their plans for the Middle East do happen to dovetail with the fundamentalists' "End Times" hopes and expectations for that region, such that even the collapse of the original justifications for the Iraq War doesn't daunt the latter in their support for what they see as God's plan. The neocons in power, in concert with their fundamentalist colleagues (Bush and Cheney among them) have played the Christian fascists at the grass roots like a harp.

Does calling the fascist trend in general "Christian fascist" send the wrong message to those Christians who reject it and find it irreconcilable with what they consider Christianity? Surely such believers are the majority among the 75-80% of the American people who identify themselves as Christians. Is it unfair to staunch Catholics, who follow their church's teachings on issues such as abortion and homosexuality and might, say, vote to ban gay marriage but who passionately oppose the war? Might we, noting the non-Christian input into this fascist trend refer to it merely as "religious fascism"? Or just "American fascism"?

Yes, you have at the summit Bush and Cheney, registered Methodists who may or not sincerely believe in the theology of John Wesley, which is not all that dissimilar to that of his contemporary Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, but derive support from the religious right, especially the less educated among them. But then you have the above-quoted Methodist minister Rev. William E. Alberts too. The problem is not any specific religion but the specific necessity of crisis-ridden capitalism to transform the world, exploiting religion whenever it's useful to do so. Hitler embarked on his world-transforming mission depicting himself as devout God-fearing man; in Mein Kampf he refers repeatedly to "the Lord," "the Almighty," and Jesus as "the great founder of a new doctrine." "I am fighting for the work of the Lord," he declared, and a whole lot of German Christians, Protestants and Catholics, believed him. Soldiers for the Wehrmacht wore belt buckles with the slogan Gott mit uns (God is with us).