Religious People Sound the Alarm on Christian Fascism

[Guest guest]

Sun, 8 Jan 2006 20:37:26 +0800

Religious People Sound the Alarm on Christian Fascism

S

 

 

 

http://rwor.org/a/029/religious-sound-alarm-christian-fascism.htm

 

 

 

Religious People Sound the Alarm on Christian Fascism

 

Revolution #029, January 8, 2006, posted at revcom.us

 

There is a crying irony in American political life today. A growing

and powerful fascist movement has increasingly set the terms for the

political discourse in this country and has put its followers into key

positions in the legislatures, courts, army, and White House.

 

This fascism dresses itself in religious, indeed Christian, clothing.

And yet some of the people who take this threat of theocratic fascism

the most seriously, and often sound the alarm the loudest, are from

the ranks of the religious--while all too many secular people fail to

get the depth of the threat.

 

Listen to these three thinkers and writers. First, Dr. Hubert Locke,

the African-American theologian, and the former trustee and acting

president of the Pacific School of Religion, speaking last May:

 

...I am persuaded we face in our country a movement that is trying

its best to hijack this nation in the name of a set of ideals and

values it claims to be Christian but which, on examination, are the

very antithesis of the Gospel that our Lord preached and by which we,

as Jesus' disciples, are challenged to live our lives in the world. If

this movement is successful--if it is not stopped in its tracks--it

will transform the United States into a political and cultural

nightmare that not only turns its back on two hundred years of

American history, it will also be one that leaves this nation

unrecognizable from all that we have been and all that we might aspire

to be as a democratic society.

 

Now Bill Moyers, speaking at the Union Theological Seminary, this past

September. While conceding that religious people " have always tried to

bring their interpretation of the Bible to bear on American law and

morals, " he went on to say that:

 

...[W]hat is unique today is that the radical religious right has

succeeded in taking over one of Americas great political parties--the

country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is--and they

are driving American politics, using God as a battering ram on almost

every issue...

 

What's also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they

have brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers,

evangelists, and homegrown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance--their

loathing of other people's beliefs, of America's secular and liberal

values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and

the search for objective knowledge--has become an unprecedented

sectarian crusade for state power.

 

Moyers went on to say that the " radical Christian right... now control

much of the United States government and are on the verge of having it

all. "

 

Finally, there is Chris Hedges, writing in the May Harpers on the

immense power of the right-wing Christian media network:

 

I can't help but recall the words of my ethics professor at

Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when

we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be

fighting the " Christian fascists. " He gave us that warning twenty-five

years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began

speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at

taking control of all major American institutions, including

mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the

United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard

to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned,

would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological

inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they

would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.

 

Revolution has and will continue to highlight the voices of religious

thinkers and writers, as well as clergy people, who are sounding the

alarm on and exposing the depths of this threat.