We must attend to growing social and economic inequities in order to stop the most dangerous mass movement in American history — or face a future of fascism under the guise of Christian values.
The stated goal of the Christian Right is to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power is a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It is hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who support it.
The Nazis and Fascists are not coming to the United States with swastikas and brown shirts. Instead, they’ll be, as Sinclair Lewis warned, wrapped in the American flag and carrying a cross.
Totalitarian movements are built on deep personal and economic despair. There is currently an assault on the middle class that is unparalleled in the history of the United States. Following World War II, as a result of Government programs that spurred economic growth, the ranks of the middle class grew as never before. The children of these wartime couples, through little effort of their own, became the most prosperous generation the United States has ever produced. These Baby Boomers, like many groups who have been handed opportunity on a silver platter, also became the most selfish and self-centered generation the United States has ever produced. They have consistently voted against any government spending that did not directly benefit them. They have denied to future generations the very advantages they were so freely given. As a result, Their children and their children’s children now live in a world in which anything can be outsourced; the only consideration being profit for those at the top. Competition for a piece of the ever shrinking economic pie has led most to the conclusion that, apart from a radical change in the structure of society, the American Dream is at best a distant memory.
This despair empowers dangerous dreamers — those who today bombard the airwaves with idealistic and religious propaganda that promises, through apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed Americans.
These Christian propagandists promise to replace this internal and external emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are solved while the mounting despair across the United States remains unaddressed. The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic, angels and miracles; a childlike belief that God will take care of everything as long as they believe as they’re told and vote as their masters dictate.
They possess a worldview that has no use for science or honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long their god is on their side. It plays on the emotions of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true — the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to destroy those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers its corporate supporters whose only motivation is maximum profit at the expense of ordinary citizens.
We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial.
“The great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense — not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide.”
Arthur Schlesinger, “The Cycles of American History”.
The Christian Right displays disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that will, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle our open society. The leaders of the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to 100 percent from three of the most influential Christian right advocacy groups — the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council.
During his unfortunate administration, President Bush handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups to help dismantle federal programs in science and research and to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right.
In terms of history, Bush will probably be seen as a weak transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck — who also used “values” to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched “Kulturkampf,” the word from which we get culture wars, against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck’s attacks, which split Germany and made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse, paved the way for Nazi racism, repression and the Holocaust.
The radical Christian right, calling for a “Christian state” — where whole segments of American society, from liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens — awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, or another catastrophic terrorist strike, either inflicted or manufactured, to usher in a period of instability that will permit them to push through their radical agenda; one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity.
This movement — the most dangerous mass movement in American history — will continue to grow until the overwhelming social and economic inequities now crippling this nation are addressed; until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in low wage jobs with no reasonable hope for improvement are reincorporated into an American society that offers a future of hope, adequate wages and job security; the ability to live as residents of the wealthiest nation in the world should, and not as residents of the third world do.
Accomplishing this will require a radical redistribution of the nation’s wealth. What remains to be seen is whether this will be accomplished voluntarily or involuntarily. I suspect the latter will be necessary. The unchecked rape of America by the super rich and corporations, interested only in thier own prosperity, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, invites not only the empowerment of the christian right, but the eventual death of the democratic process and the birth of American fascism.
The Christian Wrong 