American Fascists

by Chris Hedges

  The ecstatic expectation of the Rapture, in which the elect are raised up into heaven while the damned suffer unspeakable torments below, creates, for the despairing, a dramatic and miraculous reversal of roles. This belief comforts those thrust aside in America, and in an age of greater and greater inequality, allows people to privatize their morality. They are told that people who suffer are responsible for their suffering; they must not be right with God. These believers can ignore their own social responsibility for inadequate inner-city schools, for the 18 percent of American children who don’t get enough to eat each day, for the homeless, for the mentally ill. They accept the curtailing of federal assistance programs and turn inward, assisting only those within their exclusive Christian community and damning the world outside.10 This social concern is replaced by tiny, more manageable acts of personal charity, such as giving food packages to a family in the church or teaching young girls about abstinence. Learned, like many in the movement, has little time for those who depend on the state. Goodness has become, in the new creed of the Christian Right, a question of judgment and carries with it condemnation. The movement allows marginalized people the pleasure of denouncing others, of condemning those they fear becoming. The condemnations give them the illusion of distance, as if by denouncing the indigent they are protected from becoming indigent. But this road also leads to a disastrous disengagement with the larger, more complicated systems and imbalances that fuel poverty and injustice.

  “I think welfare has played a huge role,” Learned says when asked about what contributed to the sickness of American society. “I know that I am speaking just for my own area, but these men are not taking responsibility for their children. They live with their welfare moms until the welfare moms get sick of them. They spit them out to some other welfare mom. And these guys don’t work! They don’t work. They live off the welfare money of these girls. They create babies all over the place. It is sickening! It is absolutely sickening that we are not making these men take responsibility for their babies. And what sickens me is these guys are driving around in these incredible cars, and you know they are dealing drugs!”

  But while the movement depends on the dislocation and rage of millions of working-class Americans, it is not defined solely by economic boundaries. The common denominator is despair, a despair creeping into a threatened middle class, where jobs are also being outsourced and company layoffs are throwing older workers out of jobs. There may be more despair in places like Youngstown, but it exists in communities across the nation, including those of the middle and upper classes, where people feel isolated and adrift. In interview after interview, those in the movement spoke of desires for suicide before finding Jesus. Even if the feelings were fleeting and never acted upon, they indicate how terrible life had become before conversion. Despair is the most powerful force driving people into the movement.

  June Hunt is the daughter of Texas billionaire H. L. Hunt, one of his 15 children by three different mothers. Her father, a staunch conservative who hated President John F. Kennedy, was a bigamist and con artist. He abused her mother and was remote, often terrifying. The terror, the fear and the instability of her childhood mirrored that of Learned. And as with Learned it was this shame, abuse, loss of control, and guilt that drove her to embrace religious utopianism.

  “I grew up in a home where immorality abounded,” she told an audience of Christian broadcasters in Anaheim, California, where she spoke for the first time in public about her past. “I grew up in a dysfunctional family, before there was knowledge of the word ‘dysfunctional.’ And it was not fun. There was fear, walking on eggshells. There was disarray, there was disruption and dissension. During my teenage years, my father was an enormous success in the business world, but an enormous failure in our family world. We were all eggshell walkers, at least around him.

  “And let me try to explain. Until I was 12 years old, I grew up with a different name, a different last name. My name was June Wright. My father became romantically involved with my mother although he was twice her age. He was a married man with six children. My mother’s father, meaning my grandfather, whom I never knew, died when she was three years old. And I believe she was trying to fill the father-void when he came along. And he was persuasive. And we were a covert family on the side, with four children, me being one. Actually, I will say this: truthfully, I discovered my father had a third family with four children in another city, another major city. We were the ‘Wright’ family. W-R-I-G-H-T. I was told it was because my parents did what they thought was right. My mother was deceived, and later, she lived with horrendous guilt and shame. And I, as I share this with you, I can remember her taking us to church, and her craving to go inside, but she felt too guilty, and so she couldn’t walk into the doors of church. Shame poured out of every pore of her being. And she loved the Lord, and she felt trapped. She didn’t know what to do. She certainly didn’t have the skills to deal with my father; at least she didn’t know how to handle the situation. And I saw the agony on her face, and many times she would just go to a church, during the week, and just stay there for hours and just pray.

  “I prayed, I wasn’t even a Christian at the time, but I prayed, ‘Oh God, give my mother a friend.’ You see, mother was afraid to have a friend, because she thought no one would accept her, that she would be rejected, and she didn’t want to bring shame on a friend. Eventually, the first Mrs. Hunt died, and my father married my mother, and I became June Hunt. It was very difficult to explain this because my name already on the birth certificate was June Hunt. Ruth June Hunt. You’d think this would make things so much better, but it didn’t. Dad was totally possessive of Mother. She was a beautiful, gracious, and kind woman, but she was his trophy whom he showed off nightly to his dinner guests. We kids were forbidden to speak at dinner; children were to be seen not heard, unless there was a conversation that would be of interest to everyone, and nothing was ever of interest to him.

  “I truly hated him,” she tells the gathering. “I remember being 14 years old. I had a friend who had a father who was a lawyer. I asked him one evening, ‘I have a friend who wants to know what would happen to a 14-year-old boy who commits murder.’ He answered, ‘Well, the 14-year-old is a minor, so he probably would be released at age 18.’ That’s all I needed to know. A few weeks later, I approached my mother with a proposition. I said, ‘Mom, I figured out a way, how I can kill dad. There won’t be much of a repercussion because I am just a minor.’ I was dead serious. What I appreciate, is my mother did not chide me, she did not laugh at me. Instead, with heart she said, ‘Honey, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but that really won’t be necessary.’ It’s not that I actually wanted to commit murder, I just wanted the pain to stop.

  “I know what it’s like also to look for love in all the wrong places, anything for security, anything for comfort,” she says. “I clearly know what it’s like to feel desperate for hope in the night. I had a nighttime of my life that lasted a number of years. The Book of Proverbs [Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25] says, there’s a way that seems right, but in the end it leads to death. Clearly, I was headed the wrong way.”

  Those propelled into the movement, like Learned and Hunt, seek forgiveness for what they have thought or said, for what they have done, often for how they have lived. They seek meaning out of meaninglessness, worth out of lives that felt worthless. They seek firm, moral absolutes after being unable to distinguish between right and wrong. They seek safety, the safety that comes with a utopian vision that tells them they are protected, loved, guided and blessed. They seek a world where good people, which they have become, have good things happen to them and bad people are tossed aside to be destroyed. Converts seek a world where they will never again have to return to the lives they led, never again wonder if it might be better to end their lives, never again be tempted by the dark impulses that beset them. They embrace a collective madness to crush their personal madness.

  This despair does not always rise out of sever
e want, the kind of want that plagues much of the developing world, or out of the immediate threat of war, but rather is the product of the disconnectedness and loss of direction that comes with living in vast, soulless landscapes filled with strip malls and highways, where centers of existence and meaning have been obliterated. It is a response to a national malaise. This despair has created, perhaps more than any other force, the opening for these utopian visionaries.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Conversion

  Thus there is such a thing as human absorption. It appears in all the forms of conversion wherever the superior power of one person is consciously or unconsciously misused to influence profoundly and draw into his spell another individual or a whole community. Here one soul operates directly upon another soul. The weak have been overcome by the strong, the resistance of the weak has broken down under the influence of another person. He has been overpowered. . . .

  —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together1

  Dr. D. James Kennedy, tanned and dapper in a dark brown suit with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket and meticulously combed silver hair, stands to the side of the podium and shares with us the most important tool in winning converts to Christ: becoming a friend. The seminar I am attending is being held in a hall of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church complex at Coral Ridge, Florida. Three spindly, white spires, all topped with crosses, tower above the cut-rate shopping centers and convenience stores stretched along North Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale. The five-day seminar is designed to train us to teach Evangelism Explosion. The program was begun by Kennedy in 1967 and is designed to train evangelists in the tactics and methods used to save souls for Christ.

  “I would always go in first, introduce myself, Jim Kennedy,” he begins. “I’m checking the lay of the land, and I will look around the living room and see if there’s something there that I can comment about. Frequently, there will be a large picture somewhere and where did they put it, this picture? Why would they put it over the fireplace? Significant.”

  “In Fort Lauderdale you don’t find too many fireplaces,” he adds, smiling, “but there’s some kind of central focus. Maybe . . . golf trophies . . . I’m over here looking at these golf trophies . . . painting . . . I say, ‘Beautiful painting. Did you paint that?’ The first rule about looking at trophies: don’t touch them . . . ‘Did you win all those trophies?’ So we have a little conversation about golf, but I know enough about golf to have this conversation. Now what have I done? I’m making a friend.

  “Compliment them on whatever you can,” Kennedy says. “Discuss what they do. You’re going to find out what are their hobbies, maybe right there in the living room. Then you’re going to ask them about what they do, where they’re from, how long they’ve been there . . . something to discuss with them . . . In doing this, you have made a friend.”

  We sit with our green marbled Evangelism Explosion workbooks open to the chapter titled “Making Friends.” We are being taught how to get prospective converts to open up and feel at ease. The manual suggests asking questions such as: “Tell me something about yourself.”2 We are instructed to listen attentively, since “people usually are most interested in what they themselves have to say.”3 Evangelists should “look the prospect in the eye, move your head up and down, echo what he says by repeating his words and voice inflection. Be sensitive to his felt needs and respond appropriately. Remember and use his name often in the conversation.” And, it adds, “Pay a sincere compliment.”4

  Kennedy warns us not to carry a large Bible, but to keep a small one hidden in our pockets: “Don’t show your gun until you’re ready to shoot it.”

  Metaphors of war and sex saturate the lectures and the readings. Kennedy says that the primary task of Christians is to recruit “soldiers in the army of Jesus Christ who are absent without official leave (AWOL).”5 He speaks of himself and other pastors as generals or admirals and of evangelists as soldiers. And he warns that it is Satan who convinces believers not to take part in the battle.

  What is [Satan’s] idea? It is this: that wars are very dangerous, complicated operations, and ordinary persons could get hurt needlessly; therefore, they should go home and let the generals and admirals fight wars . . . in the church this, in essence, is exactly what Satan has done!6

  Sexual metaphors are also sprinkled into the bellicosity of the conversion message. A “functionally mature, responsible, reproducing Christian”7 should be producing others like himself. Christians who receive the gospel for themselves but do not convert others “are like immoral seducers.” “The seducer,” Kennedy writes, “is satisfied merely to exploit and then tell of his exploits rather than entering into a meaningful marriage commitment.”8 Kennedy recalls the difficulties he had one night during which he was unable to “consummate the witness”9 with a new disciple’s wife.

  Conversion is a form of sexual warfare, a form of seduction and finally a form of physical conquest.

  You must “seek to identify with your prospect. If that person would talk about the fact that they were lonely and you had a lonely experience, man, you want to tie into that, you jump onto that . . . get all over that with your testimony . . . because they’re going to identify with you,” Kennedy says.

  The tactics of conversion come with layers of deception, including, we soon learn, false friendships and cooked testimonies, the promise that the evangelists are giving the “free gift” of eternal life and that what they preach is the inerrant word of God and cannot be questioned. Conversion is supposed to banish the deepest dreads, fears and anxieties of human existence, including the fear of death. This is the central message we are told to impart to potential believers. But along with this message comes a disorienting mixture of love and fear, of promises of a warm embrace by a kind and gentle God that yearns to direct and guide the life of the convert toward success, wealth and happiness, and also of an angry, wrathful God who must punish nonbelievers, those who are not saved, tossing them into outer darkness and eternal suffering. The message swings the faces of this Janus-like God back and forth, one terrifying and one loving, in dizzying confusion. The emotions of love and fear pulsate through the message. God will love and protect those who come to Him. God will torment and reject those who do not come to Him. It becomes a bewildering mantra.

  Conversion, at first, is euphoric. It is about new friends, loving and accepting friends; about the final conquering of human anxieties, fears and addictions; about attainment of wealth, power, success and happiness through God. For those who have known despair, it feels like a new life, a new beginning. The new church friends call them, invite them to dinner, have time to listen to their troubles and answer their questions. Kennedy tells us that we must keep in touch in the days after conversion. He encourages us to keep detailed files on those we proselytize. We must be sure new converts are never left standing alone at church. We must care when no one else seems to care. The new converts are assigned a “discipler” or prayer partner, a new friend who is wiser than they are in the ways of the Lord and able to instruct them in their new life.

  The intense interest by a group of three or four evangelists in a potential convert, the flattery and feigned affection, the rapt attention to those being recruited and the flurry of “sincere” compliments are forms of “love-bombing,” the same technique employed by cults, such as the Unification Church or Moonies, to attract prospects. It was a well-developed tactic of the Russian and Chinese communist parties, which share many of the communal and repressive characteristics of the Christian Right. This intense showering of affection on an individual, as psychiatrist Margaret Thaler Singer described in her 1996 book Cults in Our Midst, is often very effective:

  As soon as any interest is shown by the recruits, they may be love-bombed by the recruiter or other cult members. This process of feigning friendship and interest in the recruit was initially associated with one of the early youth cults, but soon it was taken up by a number of groups as part of their program for luring peopl
e in. Love-bombing is a coordinated effort, usually under the direction of leadership, that involves long-term members flooding recruits and newer members with flattery, verbal seduction, affectionate but usually nonsexual touching, and lots of attention to their every remark. Love-bombing—or the offer of instant companionship—is a deceptive ploy accounting for many successful recruitment drives.10

  The new convert is drawn gradually into a host of church activities by his or her new friends, leaving little time for outside socializing. But the warmth and embrace soon brings new rules. When you violate the rules you sin, you flirt with rebellion, with becoming a “backslider,” someone who was converted but has fallen and is once again on the wrong side of God. And as the new converts are increasingly invested in the church community, as they cut ties with their old community, it is harder to dismiss the demands of the “discipler” and church leaders. “Backsliding” is a sin. Doubt is a sin. Questioning is a sin. The only proper relationship is submission to those above you, the abandonment of critical thought and the mouthing of religious jargon that is morally charged and instantly identifies believers as part of the same, hermetic community. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton describes this heavily loaded language, the words and phrases that allow believers to speak in code, as “thought-terminating clichés.”11 “Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior” or “The wages of sin are death” are used, in this instance, to end all discussion.

  Rules are incorporated slowly and deliberately into the convert’s belief system. These include obedience to church leaders; the teaching of an exclusive, spiritual elitism that demonizes all other ways of being and believing; and a persecution complex that keeps followers mobilized and distrustful of outsiders. The rules create a system of total submission to church doctrine. They discourage independent thought and action. And the result is the destruction of old communities and old friendships. Believers are soon enclosed in the church community. They are taught to value personal experience over reason, and to reject reason. For those who defy the system, who walk away, there is a collective banishment. The exit process is humiliating, and those who leave are condemned as “backsliders” no longer favored by God.