Religion, Dictatorship and American Ambivalence

Americans have, in my judgment, a somewhat unique, naïve and increasingly dangerous view of religion. It is founded on the distinction between church and state as reflected in our Constitution. Because that distinction is so imbedded in our consciousness we assume that religion is politically innocent. Unlike our European forbears, we have little experience with religion as a major property owner, of prelates as major business operators and masters of serfs or religion as highly integrated into the politics and law of our country. As a result we are at best ambivalent about any attack on religion viewing religion as a private matter. Get over it. Religious fundamentalism has been a profound enemy of democracy and in this country has become the single largest threat to our democracy; larger in point of power than any terrorist group. One of the functions of the “war on terror” has been to distract Americans from the insidious efforts of fundamentalist Christian religions to carry out this destructive enterprise.

Chris Hedges is a war reporter, one time head of the New York Times’ Middle East bureau and author of a seminal book on the attractiveness of war for humans titled War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He has a new book out titled American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. Hedges, a divinity student at Yale, where he had a professor who observed the rise of Nazism in the German church, documents a similar rise in political power of the Religious Right. He details with direct quotes their ongoing strategy to use our Constitutional freedom of religion to establish an American theocracy not unlike John Calvin’s rule of Geneva. Democracy will be destroyed in the interest of Christian dogma and the military and economic power of the United States will be used to make Christianity the dominant religion world wide. As Hedges documents, the Nazi attack on the Weimar Republic was “values” based. Their initial scapegoats included homosexuals as does the Religious Right in this country. If this were a political movement a majority of Americans would be in vigorous opposition to the Religious Right, but this movement, using the gloss of religion, confuses people as to how to deal with it. This, as in Germany, is the purpose of using religion to gain political ends.

In the matter of tolerance, which religious differences raise in a democracy, Hedges quotes the philosopher Karl Popper “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

We are, in my judgment, faced with a serious threat of fascism in this country. We see it in the usurpation of authority by the Bush administration. We see it in the USA Patriot Act. We see it in the loss of habeus corpus. We see it in the way that an act of terrorism was converted into an act of war so that our democratic freedoms could be more easily abridged. We see it in the unconstitutional gifts of millions of dollars to religious groups in the name of service to the needy. We see it when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest military officer, publicly expresses his disdain for gays in the military. We see it in the incorporation of private armies into the American military. This was done by edict of Donald Rumsfeld thus making armies such as Blackwater and its Right Wing Christian owner immune from civilian courts for their crimes and yet as private companies they are not subject to military law. An armed camp of government subsidized freebooters was thus created. We see it locally when a religious group takes over the flagpole at our local high schools for daily prayer meetings thereby declaring ownership of that national symbol. We see it when the family is made the center of political and cultural concern, not the individual as the Constitution declares. We see it in the gross distortions of American history promulgated by the religious Right. We see it in their gross distortions of ordinary language in which, for example, the word freedom means freedom in Christ and from secular humanism. We see it in their exceptionally egregious claim to be a moral majority. In short we see it in every dimension of our cultural and political life. It is high time we recognize it for what it is and, lest this country follow the path exemplified by Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile and Spain’s Francisco Franco, we need to energetically defend our democracy against it. A fascist military superpower on this planet would be disastrous for humanity.

Bob Newhard