American fascists : the Christian Right and the war on America /

OF course there are Christian fascists in America. How else to describe, say, the administrator of a faith-based drug treatment program who bound and beat a resident, then subjected her to 32 straight hours of recorded sermons? Or American Veterans in Domestic Defense, the uniform-clad cadres who took former Chief Justice Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument on tour after a judge banned it from the Montgomery, Ala., judicial building? (American Jews, the group's founder explained, are "a driving force behind trying to take everything to do with Christianity out of our system.") Whatever one's definition of this most vexed of "f" words, in a time when the chief of staff for United States Senator Tom Coburn tells a reporter soon after the Terri Schiavo crisis, "I don't want to impeach judges; I want to impale them," to flinch from examining the authoritarian impulses coursing through American life becomes a moral abdication. Chris Hedges' "American Fascists," unfortunately, is not a worthy attempt. The examples above don't even come from his book. The first two are from Michelle Goldberg's penetrating and wise "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism." The third is from Max Blumenthal, a brave and resourceful reporter adept at turning over rocks that public-relations-savvy Christian conservative leaders would prefer remain undisturbed. Hedges was a longtime foreign correspondent, for The New York Times and other publications. But he writes on this subject as a neophyte, and pads out his dispatches with ungrounded theorizing, unconvincing speculation and examples that fall far short of bearing out his thesis. In "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2002), Hedges' classic meditation on the perverse pleasure human beings derive from visiting violence upon one another, he wrote, "It took Milosevic four years of hate propaganda and lies, pumped forth daily over the airways from Belgrade, before he got one Serb to cross the border into Bosnia and begin the murderous rampage that triggered the war." Now he fears that Milosevics may be among us. They are ministers like Russell Johnson, who exhorts a few hundred people at an Ohio voter-registration rally in front of a banner that commingles the Christian cross and the American flag: "We're on the beaches of Normandy, and we can see the pillbox entrenchments of academic and media liberalism. We'll take back our country for Christ." Hedges' conclusion: "The crowds are wrapped in the seductive language of violence, which soon enough leads to acts of real violence." To reach it, he relies on a body of thought devised long ago to explain the rise of totalitarianism in the middle of the previous century - ideas about how alienation, economic dislocation, the deformation of language and exploitative authoritarian leaders become both the necessary and the sufficient cause for imminent purgative violence. The problem is that he can't point to any actual existing violence among the people he's reporting on. This is an argument in the subjunctive mood. Hedges is a serious Christian himself, a seminary graduate, and is best when he excoriates liberals who prefer to explain away preachers who say things like "Jesus was the most intolerant person in the world" (Hedges heard that at a conference aimed at "curing" people of their homosexuality). Instead, he insists, they must be fought - by anyone (which should be everyone) who believes in the open society. "I will not engage in a dialogue with those who deny my right to be," his book concludes, "who delegitimize my faith and denounce my struggle before God as worthless." He is right: they don't want to share America with people who hold different values; they want dominion - for the Lord to make an America where other values are impossible to hold. But unless I speak too soon, one notable thing about today's Christian dominionists is how little recent violence they have unleashed. Not too long ago, during another high tide of a culture war, purgative right-wing vigilantism occurred at regular intervals. Just to take a few examples: in 1966, pacifists were found shot in the back of the head on a dirt bank in Richmond, Va.; in 1967, the New Jersey State Police, after subduing the riots in Newark, went on to terrorize innocent bystanders in what a gubernatorial commission called "a pattern of police action for which there is no possible justification"; in 1968, Cuban exiles bombed more than a dozen offices, both of radical publishers and of nations trading with Castro, in the New York metropolitan area; in 1969, in Chicago, a vigilante beat a radical sociology professor in his office and left him for dead. Self-identified evangelical Christians have carried out acts like this in the past. But virtually none have occurred in years. There may now indeed be millions more Americans than ever who fantasize about the purgation of their spiritual-cum-political enemies. Readers have, after all, bought more than 60 million books in the "Left Behind" series, a pornography of violence in which the Almighty melts the flesh of unbelievers and wrong-believers off their bones. The message people seem to be imbibing from these novels and from their preachers, however, is not: Take vengeance. It is: Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Hedges is worst when he makes the supposed imminence of mass violence the reason the rest of us should be fighting for the open society. We should be fighting for it anyway. Hedges has written about Slobodan Milosevic. Now he fears that Milosevics may be among us.

The f-word crops up in the most respectable quarters these days. Yet if the provocative title of this expos? by Hedges (War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning)-sounds an alarm, the former New York Times foreign correspondent takes care to employ his terms precisely and decisively. As a Harvard Divinity School graduate, his investigation of the Christian Right agenda is even more alarming given its lucidity. Citing the psychology and sociology of fascism and cults, including the work of German historian Fritz Stern, Hedges draws striking parallels between 20th-century totalitarian movements and the highly organized, well-funded "dominionist movement," an influential theocratic sect within the country's huge evangelical population. Rooted in a radical Calvinism, and wrapping its apocalyptic, vehemently militant, sexist and homophobic vision in patriotic and religious rhetoric, dominionism seeks absolute power in a Christian state. Hedges's reportage profiles both former members and true believers, evoking the particular characteristics of this American variant of fascism. His argument against what he sees as a democratic society's suicidal tolerance for intolerant movements has its own paradoxes. But this urgent book forcefully illuminates what many across the political spectrum will recognize as a serious and growing threat to the very concept and practice of an open society. (Jan. 9) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved