American Fascists

by Chris Hedges

  “You know,” he says, “really, all of those things are true. All of those things are true of what happens in our lives. ‘The blood of the Lamb,’ that’s a great, great phrase. ‘The Gospel,’ ‘washed in the blood of the Lamb,’ ‘born again when the Holy Spirit spoke to me at the altar of God.’ What’s wrong with those statements? Way too churchy. Now you think how lost people think, and they don’t think that way. They don’t understand that. That is a jargon, and they just don’t have any clue. . . . We use phrases like that and toss them back and forth, and a lost person thinks we’ve dropped off another planet. So what we want you to do, we want you to go into your prayer groups and we want you to talk them through your story.”

  The class of 60 evangelism students, many of them pastors, breaks up into preassigned prayer groups to practice their personal testimonies again.

  We are told to always emphasize the positive and to find common interests, experiences, or viewpoints that will allow “your prospect,” as the potential converts are called in our manual, to identify with us. We are told to pepper our talk with uplifting thoughts, such as the comfort we have of going to bed every night and knowing that if we do not wake in the morning we will be in paradise with God. We are instructed to paint detailed pictures of terrible personal tragedies that have been solved by God. As an example, the manual quotes a parent saying that they had “a Christian son killed in Vietnam” but they are at peace with the loss because the parent knows that, since the son was a Christian, he has eternal life, and the parent will be reunited with him in heaven. Our testimonies and conversions must be sprinkled with words like “love,” “peace,” “faithfulness,” “hope,” “purpose,” and “obedience.” But the core of the message, the point we must impart to the potential convert, is that conversion has obliterated our fear of death, not only for ourselves, but the fear we have of losing those we love. This is what is being sold. And we, as the salespeople, are meant to stand as proof that humankind’s deepest fear, the fear of nonbeing, the fear of death, can be banished from life.

  Two women from the church walk up in front of the group to role-play the conversion process. One sits in one of two green leather chairs on a raised platform. The other stands and pretends to knock on an imaginary door. The woman in the chair gets up to greet her visitor and welcomes her inside. They sit. The evangelist exchanges a few banalities about how nice the house looks and compliments her hostess on her taste in home furnishings. She “makes a friend.” She then gives her personal testimony. After the testimony, in quick succession, she asks the two questions that have to be asked early of every potential convert. The class has been cautioned that “when two people are present, begin by asking the person who seems least likely to have the correct answer.” The goal is to elicit incorrect answers, answers that allow the evangelist to push home the message that time is running out, sin is accumulating. The gift of eternal life waits to be taken, but without salvation everyone is damned to eternal punishment.

  “ ‘Have you come to the place in your spiritual life where you know for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven, or is that something you would say you’re still working on?’ ” the evangelist says, repeating verbatim the first question.

  “I would say I am still working on it,” the other woman answers.

  The evangelist launches into the second question.

  “Suppose you were to die today and stand before God and He were to say to you, ‘Why should I let you into My heaven?’ What would you say?”

  Her mock recruit fumbles, talks about having lived a good life.

  The evangelist repeats the answer, because, as the instructor has told the group, “this will help preclude the prospect saying at the end of the Gospel presentation, ‘I’ve always believed in Jesus Christ and trusted Him alone for salvation.’ ”

  This is an important moment, we are told, because the conversion process depends on potential converts saying they are not sure they will be granted eternal life and they have not placed their total trust and faith in Jesus Christ for salvation.

  “When you answered that first question, I thought I had some good news for you,” the evangelist says, lifting the sentence verbatim from the manual. “But after hearing your answer to this second question, I know that I have the greatest news you have ever heard.”

  The workbook, lying open in front of the onlookers, instructs the evangelist to say this sentence with “great enthusiasm,” since, the workbook adds, this “precludes a hostile reaction.”25

  Heaven, the potential convert is told after the questions are asked, is “unearned, undeserved, and unmerited. It’s free.” But it can come only through a commitment to Jesus Christ.

  And then the discussion in the conversion process turns to sin. The evangelists are told to disabuse converts of the notion that sin is limited to robbery, murder, adultery or other specific acts. We are informed that sin “is anything that doesn’t please God or is a transgression of His law.”26 Sin, the convert is to be told, is “the fatal malignancy which infects the soul of the entire human race.”27 The convert is to be told that there is no escape from sin and that even the most righteous commit innumerable sinful acts.

  This definition of sin is a subtle and pernicious twist to the traditional Christian concept of sin. As defined by Paul in his letters, sin is a state of being, a split between our conscious will and our real will, between us and something strange and alien within us. Sin is not, as Kennedy claims, a scorecard of rights and wrongs. For Paul, as well as many theologians such as Paul Tillich, there is no action, no matter how moral and good, which is totally pure or moral, totally free from sin. Sin is, rather, a way of describing our estrangement from others and ourselves, from what Tillich calls “the ground of our being.”28 It is estrangement from the origin and aim of life. When we carry out acts that further this estrangement, when we violate our relationships with others and with ourselves, we sin. But Kennedy paints sin as something quantifiable, as if there were a digital counter that recorded one sin after another and stored the information in some heavenly bank account.

  An instructor turns to a church member and illustrates how to speak about sin to a potential convert:

  “Suppose I could get to the point where only ten times a day or five times, or let’s say three times a day, maybe one attitude [of] sin—jealousy or anger or bigotry—maybe one thing . . . slips from my mouth that’s hateful,” he says. “And maybe I miss doing something that I know I should do, like help my neighbor when they’re having a special need. What do you suppose would happen if I got that good? Man, I’d practically be a walking angel! But do you realize that at the end of the year I [would] have a thousand violations against God’s law? And if I live to be, well I’m 59 right now, so I’d have 59,000 violations against God’s law. What would happen if I died right now, or not died right now but stood before a judge right now with 59,000 traffic violations? Think what would happen. He’d say, ‘This is a habitual offender; let’s get him off the road.’ And he’d basically take my license and I wouldn’t be able to drive. Well, imagine standing before the judge of the universe with 60 or 70 thousand violations against God’s law. And that’s at the very best, that’s at the very best! But what we’re really trying to say with this is, you know, not only does a little add up to a lot, but our sin problem is serious. And then you can move right in.”

  At that point the pairs form again to practice delivering the message about sin.

  After the practice session, the instructor asks: “Why do we put the three-sins-a-day illustration in there?” Several people call out answers.

  “A little bit of sin turns into a lot of sin,” he says. “All right. It’s that multiplication again.”

  The point the evangelists are instructed to make is that eternal life cannot be achieved through good deeds or even a good life. It is impossible to earn your way into heaven. We must accept that we have sinned, will always commit sins, and ask to be born again so J
esus will take our sins upon Him. Once this is done we can learn to live a new way, a way that, while not totally free of sin, allows us to live a life approved by God, a life in which, with the help of the church, we learn to reject sinful acts. The believer can learn to condemn and avoid sinful acts—acts defined for him or her by church leaders as anything that doesn’t please God or is a transgression of His law. The leaders determine these acts, rousing the believer against what they label as sins, such as abortion or homosexuality. The emphasis, once the conversion is made, is on acts, acts that please or displease God. The believer can delineate these acts only with the aid of church leaders. There is a calculated destruction of individual conscience. All must submit to the will of those godly men who define the communal good. Sin, in short, is anything the leaders do not like.

  “Because He is a just judge, He must punish our sins; His law declares that our sins must be punished and that He ‘will by no means clear the guilty.’ There is no doubt about this!” the instructor tells us.

  The potential convert is to be told, finally, that Jesus came to earth and died “to pay the penalty for our sins and to purchase a place in heaven for us” and that “to receive eternal life you must transfer your trust from yourself to Jesus Christ alone for eternal life.”29 The convert is asked whether he or she is willing “to turn from what you have been doing that is not pleasing to Him and follow Him as He reveals His will to you in His Word.”

  The evangelist and convert bow their heads and pray, with the convert repeating each line after the evangelist.

  “Lord Jesus, I want You to come in and take over my life right now. I am a sinner. I have been trusting in myself and my own good works. But now I place my trust in You. I accept You as my own personal Savior. I believe You died for me. I receive You as Lord and Master of my life. Help me to turn from my sins and to follow You. I accept the free gift of eternal life. I am not worthy of it, but I thank You for it. Amen.”

  When this prayer is over the believers are told, “Welcome to the family of God.” They are told to read a chapter a day in the Gospel of John and that they will be visited again in a week to talk about the Bible. They are encouraged to pray because God “promised to hear and answer our prayers.” They are told to find “a good Bible-believing church and become a part of it.” They are told to join a Christian fellowship group. And they are told to witness to their families. With this, the process of deconstructing an individual and building a submissive follower is begun.

  The goal is more than building the church; it is building a Christian America. Kennedy talks often about the recruitment of legions of new believers to the political as well as the religious arena. He claims to have brought in millions through Evangelism Explosion.

  Kennedy insists that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” The denial of the Christian roots of the nation, he says, is a “great deception [that] has been used to destroy much of the religious freedom and liberty this country has enjoyed since its inception.”30 And Kennedy’s crusade is well funded and well organized. He is backed with grants, often for millions of dollars, from conservative trusts such as the Orville D. and Ruth A. Merillat Foundation and the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which has over the years given nearly $6 million to his church organizations.31 The drive to bring in new souls is also an open drive to broaden the political base of the movement and impose a theocracy.

  The prayer partners are told to separate into clusters. Those in the room take turns practicing their testimonies in front of their group of three or four, with the other members critiquing the performance. The final version of each participant’s written testimony is to be turned in the next day. My prayer group has three other people, including one of the few African Americans, a thoughtful man who grew up in the church and was converted as a child; a middle-aged man who overcame drug and alcohol abuse as an adult through his conversion; and a grandmother, who said that as a child she had a morbid fear of death that was overcome only when she was saved and assured of eternal life. I pair off with the grandmother, who is chatty and friendly. We read our testimonies, trying to get them exactly right.

  A woman from the church tells us how to share the Gospel with a person who suffers from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. She heads teams that go into 24-hour nursing homes and assisted-living facilities.

  “These precious people are basically confined to these types of facilities,” she says. “Now they say by the year 2025, there will be two seniors for every teenager on the face of this earth. And with multiplication and with people living longer, in the United States they say pretty soon there will be about 50 million people that are alive [who] will end up spending their final years in some type of facility. So this is an untapped resource.

  “They’re always there,” she tells the group. “And so we get to go back and we get to see Miss Mary, week after week after week, and share with her.

  “The other thing that we’re dealing with is different forms of dementia,” she adds. “The most common form is Alzheimer’s. So for most of us—and I mean, I forget things easily—we have to go back and repeat ourselves. But that’s OK. Maybe the first week we’ll just get through an introduction and maybe share our testimony, maybe the two questions. The next week we’ll go back, we’ll pick up with Miss Mary, maybe we’ll have to refresh her memory.

  “One thing that we get a lot with the elderly,” she says, “they are so works-oriented because of the culture in which they were raised and having gone through the Depression. So we really have to talk about eternal life as a free gift. That has to be emphasized over and over and over.”

  Disruptions, reluctance to accept the message, open hostility and interruptions during the evangelization process are always blamed on Satan, part of what is described to us as “spiritual warfare.”

  “The devil is so obvious,” an instructor says. “I mean, he’s so easy to figure out.”

  The instructor recounts the story of a house visit. The evangelists were sitting in the living room of a woman who asked the team to convert her unsaved husband. At the moment the evangelists were about to get him to accept Christ, the phone rang.

  “It was an old-fashioned message machine where you could hear the person,” the instructor says. Through the loudspeaker on the machine, the group heard a child call out, “Daddy, Daddy, I know you’re in there.”

  The group sat and listened to the plea of the child. Finally the father said, “ ‘Excuse me,’ and he walked over and just clicked it back off,” the instructor tells us. “He came back over, and my trainees at the time were just praying so hard, great drops of blood . . . that that guy could receive Christ. We got ahead of the distractions.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Cult of Masculinity

  The monumentalism of fascism would seem to be a safety mechanism against the bewildering multiplicity of the living. The more lifeless, regimented, and monumental reality appears to be, the more secure the men feel. The danger is being alive itself.

  —Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies1

  Roberta Pughe was in second grade when her family moved to Fort Lauderdale. The family attended the church run by the Reverend D. James Kennedy on Commercial Boulevard. She grew up, along with the congregation, which eventually moved to a sprawling white building on Federal Highway.

  By the time she was a teenager she was doing part-time modeling, taking tennis lessons from Chris Evert’s father and studying classical piano. She was an honors student and captain of the cheerleading team at Stranahan Public High School. When Pughe was 13, her mother was diagnosed with polycystic kidneys, a condition in which multiple cysts in the kidneys deplete their function. This moment of panic, of looming mortality, changed the household. Although she would learn to cope with the illness and survive for many years, her mother believed that her life was about to end.

  “It was somewhere in there that she told me that she was going to die,” Pughe says. “Her two kidneys were functioning as one. So s
he was going through her own depression and had a born-again experience.”

  Her mother, who had once attended Kennedy’s church as a Sunday ritual, threw herself into the activities of the congregation. She led coffeehouses and home Bible studies. She took part in healing services, and pastors from the church came to the home and did a hands-on healing with oil in an effort to thwart her disease.

  Roberta and her brothers fought their parents’ efforts to pull them into the church. They made fun of the teenagers who attended Westminster Academy, the church-run high school. Roberta, who retreated to the third balcony during Sunday services, passing notes to her friends, paid little attention to the sermons preached by Kennedy before a congregation that had swelled to 10,000 people.

  “Then one day, Nicki came along, who was a 25-year-old stud,” she says. “He was very, very good-looking, with brown eyes, brown hair, a mustache and he rode a motorcycle. I went after him. He was my ticket to God. He started taking me to Bible studies. I started attending Bible studies two weeks before my sixteenth birthday and had a born-again experience.”

  The embrace of the new community, the sense that she had found an extended family, was at first exciting and appealing. But it also soon brought with it radical changes. She was told to adopt a more “Christian” lifestyle. Funk and pop music, her nonbelieving friends, the part-time modeling jobs and even the secular high school were, she was told, thwarting her attempts to be a Christian. She destroyed her Motown and Michael Jackson records. She gave up modeling. She transferred to Westminster Academy, Coral Ridge’s Christian school. She walked out on her old community.