Most great artists and thinkers are outsiders in some sense or another. This ability to observe from the outside often uncovers patterns that are invisible because they are too close. Chris Hedges spent most of his adult life outside of the United States, covering wars and despotic regimes. On his return to America, he was able to see our society with an eye unblunted by habit or assumptions, which, combined with his theological education and visceral experience and understanding of totalitarian systems, gives him a uniquely penetrating perspective into the growing movement known as the Christian Right.
In "American Fascists," Hedges never makes the simplistic claim that the Christian Right is the Nazi party, or that Bush is Mussolini, or that America will inevitably become a fascist state. His investigation is much more nuanced, identifying the incipient stirrings, invisible to many Americans, of a complex, mass political movement that is mobilizing and gaining strength and support beneath the surface of our democracy.
In characteristically muscular and clear prose that fuses the minister and veteran reporter, Hedges not only details multiple facets of the movement, but also examines the ideological undercurrents that drive them and how they translate into political consequences.
At The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which "prove[s] that God's word is true," Hedges writes "The danger of creationism is...that it allows all facts to be accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained ideology."
At a Love Won Out conference, an organization founded to "cure" those who suffer from "same sex attraction," and which denounces and warns against unrepentant homosexuals who seek to corrupt children and destroy the family, Hedges observes that "This cultivated sense of persecution - cultivated by those doing the persecuting - allows the Christian Right to promote bigotry and attack any outcry as part of the war against the Christian faith. A group trying to curtail the civil rights of gays and lesbians portrays itself, in this rhetorical twist, as victims of an effort to curtail the civil rights of Christians."
Of the gospel of consumerism relentlessly peddled by televangelists on massive Christian broadcasting networks, which promises its 141 million viewers that all they need to fix their lives is belief in Jesus and a regular "love offering" in American dollars to the network, Hedges writes, "...when faith alone cures illness, overcomes emotional distress and ensures financial and physical security, there is no need for...social-service and regulatory agencies to exist. There is no need for fiscal or social responsibility... To put trust in secular institutions is to lack faith, to give up on God's magic and miracles. The message...dovetails with the message of neoconservatives who want to gut and destroy federal programs, free themselves from government regulations and taxes and break the back of all organizations, such as labor unions, that seek to impede maximum profit."
Among other events and interviews, we also see an Evangelism Explosion workshop run by D. James Kennedy at his Coral Ridge mega-church which trains participants to convert non-believers, an anti-abortion weekend organized by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, an Ohio Restoration Project rally where the Christian cross is superimposed upon a huge American flag.
The collective portrait is that of a non-reality-based movement, based on magic and miracles, which no rational argument can penetrate. The leaders of the Christian Right claim they speak for God, and as such, can brook no dissent. Unquestioned obedience to these ambassadors of God becomes the only test of faith. In totalitarian movements, the responsibility of making decisions about right and wrong is lifted from the people, along with the anxiety that attends that responsibility. But the surrender of conscience only comes with the abdication of democratic power and civil rights.
Yet it would be a mistake to view "American Fascists" as nothing but a frontal assault on the Christian Right. It is also an unexpectedly compassionate hearing of the stories of despair and pain that are the hidden, private side of this movement. Hedges clearly makes a distinction between the leaders and the followers, and his anger at how the movement exploits the shame and guilt of its followers for political and economic purposes is one of the driving forces of the book. The Christian Right is built on economic and personal despair, Hedges argues. Again and again, he encounters followers whose lives were shattered by sexual abuse, drug addiction, child abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism, extreme poverty, multiple abortions, broken families, and profound alienation and loneliness. It was this despair that drove them to embrace the Christian Right, which promises them miraculous solutions and apocalyptic revenge against those who had destroyed their lives. These stories of despair turned to rage are vital to understanding this mass movement and its power.
The Christian Right seeks to destroy that which it claims to defend. Hedges accords them no religious legitimacy, as they trample the core values of Jesus' teachings, love and compassion, and seek to use the veneer of religion as a route to political power. There is a vast difference between the "religion" of the Christian Right and the true meaning of faith. Near the close of the book, Hedges writes:
"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."
