[Vision2020] American Fascists

[Ralph Nielsen]

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by  
Chris Hedges
Jonathan Cape GBP12.99

The next time you're in Petersburg, Kentucky, I recommend you drop in  
on the Creation Museum, which has been built in order to illustrate  
the literal truth of the creation as told in the book of Genesis. You  
will see tableaux of prehistoric children playing with dinosaurs; a  
display of the Garden of Eden with carefully positioned nude Adam and  
Eve, also frolicking with dinosaurs; and, perhaps best of all, a  
display showing how "a contemporary family experiences daily life  
without God". As Chris Hedges describes it: "It portrays a household  
in disarray, with fights and teenager drug use." Well, at least  
they've got one thing right.

You might think that Petersburg, Kentucky, is a long way away, and  
that all this mindless loopiness need not concern us too much, but  
after reading this book I'm not so sure. For what happens in America  
affects us all, and if Hedges is right, then we have plenty to fear  
from politicised evangelical Christians in the US. We should bear in  
mind that not only do they believe in the Rapture and that people  
once co-existed with dinosaurs (and that, until the Fall,  
Tyrannosaurus rex was a vegetarian); they also believe in a fiery  
apocalypse and are getting closer and closer to a position in which  
they can bring it about.

Hedges, an experienced foreign correspondent and author of War Is a  
Force That Gives Us Meaning, a gimlet-eyed look at how our nobler  
impulses are corrupted in order to condition us to slaughter, has  
looked at the rise of the Christian right and found in it a political  
agenda with disastrous implications for the future of liberty in  
America.

You may think that the term "American Fascists" is a little  
inflammatory. But Hedges does not claim that the Christian right is a  
Nazi party, nor that America will inevitably become a fascist state,  
as we understand the term. The Christian right is, though, "a sworn  
and potent enemy of the open society", which is just about as bad;  
and the book is a kind of checklist in which you can tick off their  
characteristics against those of their predecessors: implacable  
intolerance of others; manipulation of language; paranoia; lying on a  
grand scale; exploitation of people's fears; the creation of  
leadership cults; hate-mongering; the creation of a state of mind in  
which adherents are perpetually at war.

And the language, cited by Hedges, is chilling. Pastor Russell  
Johnson, who leads the Ohio Restoration Project and is an unofficial  
campaigner for Christian Republican candidates for high office,  
stands against an enormous American flag with a cross superimposed on  
it, saying: "We're on the beaches of Normandy, and we can see the  
pillbox entrenchments of academic and media liberalism . . . We'll  
take our country back for Christ."

Hedges is clear about the danger facing America and argues that part  
of the responsibility lies with a supine media and a church  
establishment too pusillanimous or namby-pamby to point out that you  
could hardly call the Christian right Christian in the conventionally  
accepted meaning of the term. "Debate with the radical Christian  
right is useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a  
dialogue. It is a movement based on emotion and cares nothing for  
rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John  
Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school . . . This movement  
is bent on our destruction."

It might all seem hopeless, but Hedges has written a stirring call to  
arms for the friends of tolerance, freedom, human love and  
understanding. It is a brave and timely book.

 From The Guardian Weekly (London)