Michelle Goldberg's explored the same ground in her Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, but with the tentativeness of an outsider. Chris Hedges's American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007, Free Press) minces fewer words. The book makes me wonder why, in this age of neoliberal and neoconservative, we don't just come out and honor the new American right as the neofascists they are.

These quotes have been gathering dust in my files for a while now. They could be better annotated, but are well worth reading.

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Hedges starts by quoting Blaise Pascal: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

He then reprints a piece by Umberto Eco, "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt." I'll quote the subject heads and a bit more from two points I found particularly striking (no page numbers):

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. [ . . . ]

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. [ . . . ]

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Herman Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "egg-heads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. [ . . . ]

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. [ . . . ]

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. [ . . . ]

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. [ . . . ]

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. [ . . . ]

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. [ . . . ]

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. [ . . . ]

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. [ . . . ]

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. [ . . . ]

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

Hedges' father was a Presbyterian preacher, and Hedges attended seminary at Harvard Divinity School. Hedges talks about faith as he was taught (p. 2):

We were taught that those who claimed to speak for God, the self-appointed prophets who promised the Kingdom of God on earth, were dangerous. We had no ability to understand God's will. We did the best we could. We made decisions -- even decisions that on the outside looked unobjectionably moral -- well aware of the numerous motives, some good and some bad, that went into every human act. In the end, we all stood in need of forgiveness. We were all tainted by sin. None were pure. The Bible was not the literal word of God. It was not a self-help manual that could predict the future. It did not tell us how to vote or allow us to divide the world into us and them, the righteous and the damned, the infidels and the blessed. It was a book written by a series of ancient writers, certainly fallible and at times at odds with each other, who asked the right questions and struggled with the mystery and transcendence of human existence. We took the Bible seriously and therefore could not take it literally.

(p. 5):

There is enough hatred, bigotry and lust for violence in the pages of the Bible to satisfy anyone bent on justifying cruelty and violence. Religion, as H. Richard Niebuhr said, is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people. And the Bible has long been used in the wrong hands -- such as antebellum slave owners in the American South who quoted from it to defend slavery -- not to Christianize the culture, as those wielding it often claim, but to acculturate the Christian faith.

(pp. 10-11):

These values, democratic and Christian, are being dismantled, often with stealth, by a radical Christian movement, known as dominionism, which seeks to cloak itself in the mantle of the Christian faith and American patriotism. Dominionism takes its name from Genesis 1:26-31, in which God gives human beings "dominion" over all creation. This movement, small in number but influential, departs from traditional evangelicalism. Dominionists now control at least six national television networks, each reaching tens of millions of homes, and virtually all of the nation's more than 2,000 religious radio stations, as well as denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention. Dominionism seeks to redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to take political power. It shares many prominent features with classical fascist movements, at least as it is defined by the scholar Robert O. Paxton, who sees fascism as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of command nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Dominionism, born out of a theology known as Christian reconstructionism, seeks to politicize faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief in magic along with leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians. It also has, like fascist movements, an ill-defined and shifting set of beliefs, some of which contradict one another. Paxton argues that the best way to understand authentic fascist movements, which he says exist in all societies, including democracies, is to focus not on what they say but on how they act, for, as he writes, some of the ideas that underlie fascist movements "remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language," and "many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions."

(p. 24):

It is perhaps telling that our closest allies in the United Nations on issues dealing with reproductive rights, one of the few issues where we cooperate with other nations, are Islamic states such as Iran. But then the Christian Right and radical Islamists, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other. They share the same obsessions. They do not tolerate other forms of belief or disbelief. They are at war with artistic and cultural expression. They seek to silence the media. They call for the subjugation of women. They promote severe sexual repression, and they seek to express themselves through violence.

(p. 81):

Fundamentalism, Karen McCarthy Brown wrote, "is the religion of those at once seduced and betrayed by the promise that we human beings can comprehend and control our world. Bitterly disappointed by the politics of rationalized bureaucracies, the limitations of science, and the perversions of industrialization, fundamentalists seek to reject the modern world, while nevertheless holding onto these habits of mind: clarity, certitude, and control."

(pp. 115-116):

In the promulgation of the totalitarian belief system, at first we are told we all have a right to an opinion, in short, a right to believe anything. Soon, under the iron control of an empowered totalitarian movement, facts become worthless, kept or discarded according to an ideological litmus test. Lies become true. And once the totalitarians are in power, facts are ruthlessly manipulated or kept hidden to support the lie. Hannah Arendt called the principle behind this process "nihilistic relativism." The goal of creationism is not to offer an alternative. Its goal is the destruction of the core values of the open society -- the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong. To be self-critical, to challenge authority, to advocate for change and to accept that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable.

(p. 118):

Evolution implicitly challenges the possibility of miracles, the Second Coming of Christ, the Resurrection, and an apocalyptic end to human existence in which the saved are lifted up into heaven. For believers who have found in the certitude of Christian fundamentalism a shelter from despair, a despair that threatens to consume them again if they return to a reality-based world, evolution is terrifying. The miracles they insist they see performed around them, the presence of the guiding, comforting hand of God in their lives, the notion that there is a divine destiny specially preordained for them, crumbles into dust under the cold glare of evolution. Evolution posits what they fear most: a morally neutral universe. It obliterates the fantastic constructs of their belief system. And the steady efforts by creationists to erode the authority of evolution and discredit Darwin are, because of all this, unrelenting and fierce.

(pp. 142-143):

The strangest alliance, on the surface, is with Israeli Jews. After all, the movement generally teaches that Jews who do not convert are damned and will be destroyed in the fiery, apocalyptic ending of the world. It is early on Sunday morning in a ballroom on the second floor of the Hilton Hotel. The Israel Ministry of Tourism is hosting a breakfast. Several hundred people are seated at round tables with baskets of bread, fruit plates and silver pitchers of coffee. Waiters are serving plates of scrambled eggs and creamed spinach. Nearly everyone is white. On the platform is a huge picture of the Dome of the Rock, the spot where the Temple will be rebuilt to herald the Second Coming. Some 700,000 Christian tourists visit Israel each year, and with the steep decline in overall tourism, they have become a valued source of revenue in Israel.

Dominionists preach that Israel must rule the biblical land in order for Christ to return. The belief that Jews who do not convert will be killed is unmentioned at the breakfast. The featured speakers include Avraham Hirschsohn, the new Israeli minister of tourism; and Michael Medved, a cultural conservative and nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. Medved is one of the most prominent Jewish defenders of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and of the radical Christian Right. He wears a yarmulke and is warmly greeted by the crowd.

"A more Christian America is good for the Jews," he says. "This is obvious. Take a look at this support for Israel. A more Christian America is good for America, something Jewish people need to be more cognizant about and acknowledge. A more Jewish community is good for the Christians, not just because of the existence of allies, but because a more Jewish community is less seduced by secularism." [ . . . ]

He ticks off causes in which both Jewish and Christian people have been active, including the call for prayer in schools and the fight against abortion (although abortion is legal in Israel). He defends his Jewish integrity by saying he does not believe in the Rapture. But this is more than a religious alliance. It is a political alliance. It unites messianic Christians with right-wing messianic Jews, who believe God has annointed them to expand their dominion throughout the Middle East at the expense of the Arab majority.

(pp. 174-175):

The triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought. It expands the void, the mindlessness that makes the magic, mythology and irrationality of the Christian Right palatable. Television, the movement's primary medium, allows viewers to preoccupy themselves with context-free information. The homogenized empty chatter on the airwaves, the banal amusement and clichés, the bizarre doublespeak endlessly repeated on cable news channels and the huge spectacles in sports stadiums have replaced America's political,social and moral life, indeed replaced community itself. Television lends itself perfectly to this world of signs and wonders, to the narcissism of national and religious self-exaltation. Television discourages real communication. Its rapid frames and movement, its constant use of emotional images, its sudden shifts from one theme to an unrelated theme, banish logic and reason with dizzying perplexity. It, too, promises to lift us up and thrill us. The televangelists have built their movement on these commercial precepts. The totalitarian creed of the Religious Right has found in television the perfect medium. Its leaders know how television can be used to seduce and encourage us to walk away from the dwindling, less exciting collectives that protect and nurture us. They have mastered television's imperceptible, slowly induced hypnosis. And they understand the enticement of credo quia absurdum -- I believe because it is absurd.

Hedges reminiscences about Dr. James Luther Adams, his ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, who had spent 1933-36 working underground in Nazi Germany with Christian opponents such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (pp. 195-196):

He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities, he said that would, in the event of prolonged social instability, catastrophe or national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of Christianity, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed empty platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. His long discussions with church leaders and theologians in Nazi Germany -- some of whom collaborated with the regime, some of whom resisted and most of whom remained silent -- were the defining experiences of his life. He was preoccupied with how liberal democracies, which could never hope to compete with the fantastic, utopian promises of personal and collective salvation offered by totalitarian movements, could resist. Adams was a close friend of the theologian Paul Tillich, a vocal opponent of the Nazis who in 1933 became the first non-Jewish professor barred from German universities and soon went into exile. Tillich, he reminded us, taught that the role of the church was in society, that the depth of its commitment and faith were measured by its engagement with politics and culture. It was this engagement that alone gave faith its vibrancy and worth. Tillich did not retreat from the looming crisis around him. He spoke out against the intolerance and hatred preached by the Nazis before they came to power. And Tillich angrily chastised those in the church who, preoccupied with narrow Christian piety, were passive. He thundered against this complacency and begged Christians to begin to "take time seriously."

Adams had seen how the mask of religion hides irreligion. He reminded us that "our world is full to bursting with faiths, each contending for allegiance." He told us that Hitler claimed to teach the meaning of faith. Mussolini used to shout, "Believe, follow, and act," and told his followers that fascism, before being a party, had been a religion. Human history is not the struggle between religion and irreligion, Adams said. "It is veritably a battle of faiths, a battle of the gods who claim human allegiance."

(p. 201):

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 and lesbian 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 gay and lesbian Germans 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.

(p. 202):

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.

(p. 205):

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.