The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government
By Chris Hedges
There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans,
lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to
destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically
diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical
law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and
“Christian” America. Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives.
This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the
government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay
men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a
curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once
these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals,
feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor
African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning
Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will
also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the
“deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents
of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants”
will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new
state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be
handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with
relentless indoctrination.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid
right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire
International ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of
whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology
known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on
anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws
of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little
more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It
fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American
imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate
capitalism. The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant
distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within
it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the
military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are
impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.
The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements,
pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to
sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over
reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions.
Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male
physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a man
of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites
and ultimately slaying nonbelievers. This cult of masculinity, with its
glorification of violence, is appealing to the powerless. It stokes the anger
of many Americans, mostly white and economically disadvantaged, and encourages
them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The
paranoia about the outside world is fostered by bizarre conspiracy theories,
many of which are prominent in the rhetoric of those leading the government
shutdown. Believers, especially now, are called to a perpetual state of war
with the “secular humanist” state. The march, they believe, is irreversible.
Global war, even nuclear war, is the joyful harbinger of the Second Coming. And
leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms billions of
apostates to death.
“What we have here is
our core values as Americans and Christians slipping away into this facade
where we should take care of our poor, sick, and disabled,” Ted Cruz said in
the Senate last month during a 21-hour speech that he gave in an attempt to
block the funding of Obamacare. “It is disheartening to know that the nation
our forefathers built is no longer of importance to our president and his
Democratic counterparts. Not only that, we are falling away from core Christian
values. I don’t know about you, but I believe in the Jesus who died to save
himself, not enable lazy followers to be dependent on him. He didn’t walk
around all willy-nilly just passing out free health care to those who were
sick, or food to those who were hungry, or clothes to those in need. No, he
said get up, brush yourself off, go into town and get a job, and as he hung on
the cross he said, ‘I died so that I may live in eternity with my Father. If
you want to join us you can die for yourself and your own sins. What do I look
like, your savior or something?’ That’s the Jesus I want to see brought back
into our core values as a nation. That’s why we need to repeal Obamacare.”
Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle
against the forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white.
They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their
destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know
God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center of the
ideology. It leaves them sputtering inanities about Barack Obama, his corporate-sponsored
health care reform bill, his alleged mandated suicide counseling or “death
panels” for seniors under the bill, his supposed secret alliance with radical
Muslims, and “creeping socialism.” They see the government bureaucracy as being
controlled by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the family and make war
against the purity of their belief system. They seek total cultural and
political domination.
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All ideological, theological and political debates with the
radical Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and
discussion. Its adherents are using the space within the open society to
destroy the open society itself. Our naive attempts to placate a movement bent
on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have “values,” only strengthen
its supposed legitimacy and increase our own weakness.
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in what they see as
the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state. They work with the
rest of us only because they must. Given enough power—and they are working hard
to get it—any such cooperation will vanish. They are no different from the
vanguard described by Lenin or the Islamic terrorists who shaved off their
beards, adopted Western dress and watched pay-for-view pornography in their
hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack. The elect
alone, like the Grand Inquisitor, are sanctioned to know the truth. And in the
pursuit of their truth they have no moral constraints.
I spent two years inside the Christian right in writing my
book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I
attended services at megachurches across the country, went to numerous lectures
and talks, sat in on creationist seminars, attended classes on religious
proselytizing and conversion, spent weekends at “right-to-life” retreats and
interviewed dozens of followers and leaders of the movement. Though I was
sympathetic to the financial dislocation, the struggles with addictions, the
pain of domestic and sexual violence, and the deep despair that drew people to
the movement, I was also acutely aware of the dangerous ideology these people
embraced. Fascist movements begin as champions of civic improvement, communal
ideals, moral purity, strength, national greatness and family values. These
movements attract, as has the radical Christian right, those who are
disillusioned by the collapse of liberal democracy. And our liberal democracy
has collapsed.
We have abandoned our poor and working class. We have
created a government monster that sucks the marrow out of our bones to enrich
and empower the oligarchic and corporate elite. The protection of criminals,
whether in war or on Wall Street, is part of our mirage of law and order. We
have betrayed the vast and growing underclass. Most believers within the
Christian right are struggling to survive in a hostile world. We have failed
them. Their very real despair is being manipulated and used by Christian
fascists such as the Texas senator. Give to the working poor a living wage, benefits
and job security and the reach of this movement will diminish. Refuse to
ameliorate the suffering of the poor and working class and you ensure the
ascendancy of a Christian fascism.
The Christian right needs only a spark to set it ablaze.
Another catastrophic act of domestic terrorism, hyperinflation, a series of
devastating droughts, floods, hurricanes or massive wildfires or another
financial meltdown will be the trigger. Then what is left of our anemic open
society will disintegrate. The rise of Christian fascism is aided by our
complacency. The longer we fail to openly denounce and defy bankrupt
liberalism, the longer we permit corporate power to plunder the nation and
destroy the ecosystem, the longer we stand slack-jawed before the open gates of
the city waiting meekly for the barbarians, the more we ensure their arrival.
truthdig.com
