Warning: Christian Fascists on the March.

Chilling Article by Chris Hedges at truthdig.com.



Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age—he was then close to 80—we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward 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. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. 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 had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” were stories of this failure—personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers—those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

more

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070128_christianists_on_the_march/

It is interesting to note now just how many "regular" parish priests were dragged off to concentration camps back then. And why they were targeted. It is a lot more than a footnote in our history.

There is no doubt that a christian right emerged under B*sh, I suppose. There are always "Millerites" out there.

But they were never a majority - they were just loud.

You understand - to be able to take on a christian right vision of the world does by definition mean you have to totally ignore the sermons on the mount - totally. How can that view leave anyone christian??

There really is a christian left - it is very strong and growing daily. I am not worried about the christian right at all. They, however, have a lot to be worried about.

Joe

You know, there is going to be a "collapse" one day - economic or otherwise.

This has happened to our country before - and it would be foolish to think it can't happen again.

BUT - there is good reason why we reacted the way we did in 1929 or 1857 and why the Germans reacted differently.

And it does have a lot to do with the world view of religion we have and the country's ability to react in appropriate ways.

I think I am not afraid of the impact of the last six years on our 200+ year history. Just a blip for us as a nation.

We could have turned to strongmen - religion based or otherwise many times - we didn't.

We really are a pretty smart country on the whole.

Joe

In the midwest, at least.

When I graduated high school in 1977 - I grew up hearing just how inferior the California schools were. Thing is - I was born on the Ohio river and whenever I went (and go) back I can plainly see just how many of those kids don't get thru high school at all. I did and graduated fom college, too - guess California schools aren't so bad after all - you know??

I think education is a very poor excuse for anything. You can drag a kid to the watering through (and we all do) but they either drink or not. And we can't force it.

Anyway, how educated do you think the country was the last time we really faced hard times - say 1929??

And the other thing - how much do you really learn from school compared to life??

Joe

1) Most of us having to learn from life's lessons.
2) It not being possible to make someone learn.

Nonetheless, my parents had tremendous educations, even though they only graduated high school, back in the late forties. They were taught how to think and how to learn.

In 1929, let's say the average person had an eighth grade education. They would've been taught reading, writing, basic arithmetic, and GEOGRAPHY. My grandpa fell into that category right there. He made a good living as a salesman. He traveled all around, and was comfortable in any circle. He could've found Iraq on a map, in about five seconds! Again, he was taught how to learn.

I don't pretend to understand why fewer people want to learn, and . . . think for themselves. But I sure see it, even worse since I graduated high school, which, ironically, was in '77 also. There are no doubt many many factors.

I do think that that unwillingness, or maybe . . . fear of learning, puts us in greater danger than we as a nation have ever been in.

I respect your views, as always.

You know what I think it is - and I am clearly prejudiced by the times we grew up in -

But when we went thru school - we understood just what a draft was - and meant to our brothers - and these kids don't - they are lazy that way.

Some of the smartest people I ever met in life didn't go to college - they worked. And I look back now - I think 99% of the really important things I ever learned they didn't teach in college.

I don't know if they are so much worse - just lazy.

GO CLASS OF 1977!!!

Joe

I started reading Life magazine, then the KC Star, at about age eleven. The war was on everyone's minds. My parents were clearly worried about it--my mother actually told me once, that if it didn't end, she'd figure out a way to get me to Canada rather than having me blown up for Richard Nixon. I'm sure you remember the girls wearing the POW bracelets--it was etched into all our psyches.

Later, Mr. Joe,

--Mark C.

'77 Rocks!

My parents were army officers in the 2nd WW - they came down so hard against the whole war.

They were really upset when some of my brothers enlisted.

Your mother sound great!!

Joe

The original uppity-woman!

Your family's story sounds really interesting, too.

(This is a pretty damned interesting place, to be honest.)

:D

I agree.

Joe

"...I don't pretend to understand why fewer people want to learn, and . . . think for themselves..."

I think it's because it's hard work, & it can hurt & be frightening. That doesn't mean it's not worth it. But those qualities can be off-putting. Also, there is little support for, & much pressure against, thinking for one's self in our society.

. . . against thinking. Pretty weird.

Lulled into some strange false-security by the TV?

Alien Stoopid-Rays?

High-Fructose Corn Syrup? Yeah, maybe that's it . . .



:D

What prescience he had.

I remember sitting in the dorm lobby on Sunday morning, laughing at these fools like Robertson. We saw them as buffoons, and nothing more. They clearly had never read anything that Jesus said. They were in it for the money.

What we didn't understand . . . was that the killing of education, that was happening even then in the early Raygun Regime, would facilitate their rise to real power.

I DID know the disappearing factory jobs would come back to bite us in the ass . . . and it sure has. We have virtually no manufacturing base left. So much for unregulated capitalism, and no tariffs.

It's so hard though, to get through to people . . . that we are in deep trouble. Good-hearted, smart people, I mean. They don't want to believe it.

I hope we are wrong.

Don't think we are.