American Fascists
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Toward the close of the Second World War, Adams was asked to give a lecture about the Nazi faith to a large group of U.S. Army officers preparing for service in the occupation army in Germany. He described the views expressed by the officers at the meeting as “an orgy of self-righteousness.” Bigotry, in all its forms, had to be vigorously fought. He was not going to let this opportunity escape him. Adams wrote later:
This self-righteousness, I decided, ought somehow to be checked. Otherwise I might succeed only in strengthening the morale of a bumptious hundred-percent “Americanism,” and that was not the faith we were supposed to be fighting for. Toward the end of the lecture I recapitulated the ideas of the Nazi “faith,” stressing the Nazi belief in the superiority of the Teutons and in the inferiority of other “races.” I also reminded the officers of similar attitudes to be observed in America, not only among the lunatic and subversive groups but also among respectable Americans in the army of democracy. Then I asked these Army officers to pose one or two questions to be answered by each man in his own conscience. First: “Is there any essential difference between your attitude toward the Negro and the Jew, and the Nazi attitude toward other ‘races’—not the difference in brutality but a difference in basic philosophy?” “If there is an essential difference,” I said, “then the American soldier might logically become a defender of the Four Freedoms [freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear], but if there is no essential difference between your race philosophy and that of the Nazis, a second question should be posed: “What are you fighting for?”
I blush when I think of some of the responses I received. I was immediately besieged with questions like these: “Do you think we should marry the nigger?” “Aren’t Negroes a naturally indolent and dirty race?” “Haven’t you been in business, and don’t you know that every Jew is a kike?” Questions like these came back to me for over an hour. I simply repeated my question again and again: “How do you distinguish between yourself and a Nazi?” Seldom have I witnessed such agony of spirit in a public place.
Many of these Americans who could not distinguish between themselves and Nazis came from “religious” homes, or they claimed to be representatives (or even leaders) of the American faith. Apparently their faith was quite different from the faith behind the Four Freedoms. On the other hand, many of them no doubt would have disclaimed possessing anything they would call faith, yet all of them, whatever their answers to these questions, spoke the faith that was in them, and for many of them it was a trust in white, gentile supremacy—faith in the blood.8
Adams, finally, told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. The Nazis had used “values” to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating in the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and the permanent exile of its director, Magnus Hirschfeld. Thousands of volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a bonfire. The stripping of homosexuals of their civil rights was largely cheered by the German churches. But this campaign legitimized tactics, outside the law, that would soon be employed against others. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first “social deviants” singled out and disempowered by the Christian Right. We would be the next.
Those arrayed against American democracy are waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will allow them to shred the Constitution in the name of national security and strength. And those in the movement often speak about such a moment with gleeful anticipation. Howard Phillips, a right-wing strategist who helped Jerry Falwell create the Moral Majority, has warned Christians to be ready. “My friends, it is time to leave the ‘political Titanic’ on which the conservative movement has for too long booked passage,” he told the Council for National Policy. “Instead, it is our task to build an ark so that we can and will be ready to renew and restore our nation and our culture when God brings the tides to flood.”9
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. Naive attempts to reach out to the movement, to assure them that we, too, are Christian or we, too, care about moral values, are doomed. This movement is bent on our destruction. The attempts by many liberals to make peace would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. These dominionists hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution, a world they blame for the debacle of their lives. They have one goal—its destruction.
Alvin Toffler wrote that if you don’t have a strategy you end up being part of someone else’s strategy. There are isolated groups and individuals who, at some cost, are fighting back. The nonviolent protests of the Reverend Mel White’s Soulforce outside of Christian universities and service academies that discriminate against gays and lesbians are, according to the ideas of theologians such as Adams and Tillich, acts of faith. The clergy and rabbis who have banded together in Ohio to challenge the tax-exempt status of the megachurches that promote “Christian” candidates are performing an act of faith. The rulings of independent judges—such as the Republican-appointed Judge John E. Jones III in Dover, Pennsylvania—who have prohibited the teaching of creationism in public schools because it is not science, are acts of faith. Cardinal Roger Mahony, the head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest, has called on Catholics to be prepared to defy the laws now being considered in Congress and backed by the Christian Right that make it a felony to shield or protect or offer support to illegal immigrants. Such civil disobedience would be an act of faith. The hate-crimes legislation now stalled in Congress because of bitter opposition from the Christian Right must be made law. Its passage would be an act of faith. Programs to protect or establish community, to direct federal and state assistance to those truly left behind, those trapped in America’s urban ghettos and blighted former manufacturing towns, are acts of faith. And the valiant struggle by former Vice President Al Gore and others to wake us up to the impending catastrophe that will beset us if we do not curb global warming is an act of faith. The accelerated rate of global warming could, within a decade, bring about epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves. To face this challenge, to do something about it, is to embrace a theology of hope, of life. To do nothing, to paint these ecological catastrophes as messages from an angry God rather than the folly of humankind, to believe blithely that global warming is a fiction and God alone determines human fate, is to accept this theology of despair, this radical evil.
Finally, we must dismantle the corporate state. American democracy has become a consumer fraud. If we do not halt the corporations that, in the name of globalization, are cannibalizing the country for profit, we will never blunt the appeal of the radical Christian Right to those the corporate state casts aside. We must redirect our national wealth and resources to fund a massive antipoverty campaign. We must end corporate welfare, corporate crime, the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate bailouts and seriously address issues such as labor law reform. We must curb the cycle of perpetual war that enriches the military—industrial complex—and by extension the two political parties that dominate Washington. If we do not, we must accept an inevitable Christo-fascism.
Corporations have poured hundreds of millions into pseudo think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, to invent bogus disciplines including cost-benefit and risk-management analysis, all geared to change the debate from health, labor and safety issues to the rising cost of big government. They run sophisticated ad campaigns to beguile voters. These corporations have wrenched apart, through corruption, lavish campaign donations, and shady lobbying, the ties between public interest groups and the Democratic Party. Washington is now besieged with 25,000 corpor
ate lobbyists and 9,000 corporate action committees.
These corporations, and their enraged and manipulated followers in the Christian Right, tens of millions of them, if left unchecked will propel us into despotism. The corporate state has now rigged our system, hollowed out our political process and steadily stripped citizens of constitutional rights, as well as federal and state protection and assistance. This may be the twilight of American democracy. And it is better to stand up and fight, even in vain, than not to fight at all.
There are battles, big and small, that we can join. Many of them are being waged nearby, at our local school board. So much of maintaining a democracy is simply about showing up, and Adams felt that none of us had a right to profess our faith without this daily involvement in the life and well-being of our community, our nation and the planet Earth. “Repeatedly,” Adams told us, “I heard anti-Nazis say, ‘If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler.’ ”
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ends with Huck facing the moral dilemma we now face: whether to pay homage to a false moral code, one which has become law, or to damn ourselves in the eyes of many by opposing it. Here is Huck, faced with the choice of turning in his friend and escaped slave Jim, or living in defiance:
So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter—and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:
Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn.
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.10
The radical Christian Right calls for exclusion, cruelty and intolerance in the name of God. Its members do not commit evil for evil’s sake. They commit evil to make a better world. To attain this better world, they believe, some must suffer and be silenced, and at the end of time all those who oppose them must be destroyed. The worst suffering in human history has been carried out by those who preach such grand, utopian visions, those who seek to implant by force their narrow, particular version of goodness. This is true for all doctrines of personal salvation, from Christianity to ethnic nationalism to communism to fascism. Dreams of a universal good create hells of persecution, suffering and slaughter. No human being could ever be virtuous enough to attain such dreams, and the Earth has swallowed millions of hapless victims in the vain pursuit of a new heaven and a new Earth. Ironically, it is idealism that leads radical fundamentalists to strip human beings of their dignity and their sanctity and turn them into abstractions. Yet it is only by holding on to the sanctity of each individual, each human life, only by placing our faith in tiny, unheroic acts of compassion and kindness, that we survive as a community and as individual human beings. These small acts of kindness are deeply feared and subversive to these idealists, as the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman wrote in Life and Fate.
I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.11
Plato and Aristotle defended slavery and often attacked Athenian democracy, but this does not mean they should not be read for their deep and penetrating insights into political systems and ethics. Sigmund Freud understood little about love, viewed religion as infantile regression and viewed nearly every human motive through the lens of human sexuality, but at the same time Freud gave us one of the most powerful windows into and vocabularies for the workings of the subconscious. The Bible was written by numerous people over hundreds of years with wide and often varying concerns, some of which were and are morally indefensible. Within its pages, however, lie powerful passages that help illuminate our lives and our place before the mystery of human existence. I, too, struggle, like the writers of the Bible, to understand. I, too, often get it wrong. But it is the honesty and rigor of the search, the doubts and reverses, the mistakes and regrets, the ability to stand up again and keep trying that ultimately express faith. This humility before the unknowable, the acceptance that there is much we will never understand, makes possible self-criticism, self-awareness, self-possession and self-reflection. They make possible compassion and acts of kindness. They allow us to see ourselves in the stranger, to reach out in solidarity to those who travel with us on this dusty, brief and often lonely road of life. This honesty and humility make possible a diverse and tolerant human community. They sustain life and, in the midst of it all, impart hope.
I do not deny the right of Christian radicals to be, to believe and worship as they choose. But I will not engage in a dialogue with those who deny my right to be, who delegitimize my faith and denounce my struggle before God as worthless. All dialogue must include respect and tolerance for the beliefs, worth and dignity of others, including those outside the nation and the faith. When this respect is denied, this clash of ideologies ceases to be merely a difference of opinion and becomes a fight for survival. This movement seeks, in the name of Christianity and American democracy, to destroy that which it claims to defend. I do not believe that America will inevitably become a fascist state or that the Christian Right is the Nazi Party. But I do believe that the radical Christian Right is a sworn and potent enemy of the open society. Its ideology bears within it the tenets of a Christian fascism. In the event of a crisis, in the event of another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or huge environmental disaster, the movement stands poised to manipulate fear and chaos ruthlessly and reshape America in ways that have not been seen since the nation’s founding. All Americans—not only those of faith—who care about our open society must learn to speak about this movement with a new vocabulary, to give up passivity, to challenge aggressively this movement’s deluded appropriation of Christianity and to do everything possible to defend tolerance. The attac
ks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as “nominal Christians,” and those they brand with the curse of “secular humanist” are an attack on all of us, on our values, our freedoms and ultimately our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.
Acknowledgments
This book was written with the generous and unstinting support of the Nation Institute, which allowed me to work unfettered for many months on this project. I am deeply grateful for this support and encouragement, especially that of Hamilton Fish, Taya Grobow, Janine Jaquet and Jonathan Schell, as well as Peggy Suttle and Katerina vanden Heuvel at The Nation magazine. I also owe a huge debt to Princeton University, where I teach in the Program in American Studies. R. Sean Wilentz and Judith S. Ferszt, as well as C. K. “Charlie” Williams, Elaine Pagels, Sam and Liz Hynes, and many of my dedicated and brilliant students always lent encouragement and advice. I am blessed with supportive and thoughtful friends and colleagues.
Pamela Diamond, for the second time, oversaw the research and organization of a book of mine with her usual skill, patience, dedication and good humor. I cannot imagine having to go through this without her. Rebecca Beyer, a talented reporter and writer, worked extensively on the book, carrying out some interviews and attending events. She was a close and valued collaborator. Elyse Graham and Amy Paeth, two of my students at Princeton, did tremendous and important research, especially under heavy time pressure in the closing days of production. Timothy Nunan, another Princeton student, did a fine job documenting creationist attacks on Charles Darwin and evolution. I benefited greatly from his research. Lisa Winn, Lauren Brown, James Arnold, Maria Guerrero-Reyes, Linda Kane, Kate Peters, Jason Proske, Colin Maier, Moya Quinlan-Walshe and Kathryn Tippett constituted our small army of transcribers. I turned over hours of tape to them and relied on their care and dedication to produce the transcripts. I owe a tremendous debt to those few who have been among the first to investigate and explain dominionism. They include Katherine Yurica, who produces the Yurica Report, available online; Frederick Clarkson, whose three-part series in PublicEye.org in March/June 1994 called “Christian Reconstructionism” was a groundbreaking piece of journalism and who continues to do important research into the movement; and Sarah Diamond, whose books, such as Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, are indispensable.