Wednesday, April 12, 2006

 

The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism

Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a searing account of the conflicts in Bosnia, El Salvador and Israel, which he covered as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. His article on "The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism" isn't exactly new, it was published by Theocracy Watch back in 2oo4, but a reader, FS, recently called our attention to it, so it's new to us. We think its still worth reading. Here's a brief excerpt and a link:

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...
Highly recommended, as is his brillant, troubling book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Update: Sorry about the bad link... It's been fixed.

|



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?