With either title, the import of the article is telling. The moneyquote:
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.”
As he goes on to say, that was 25 years ago!
Dr. Adams knew of what he was speaking. He was in Germany 1935-36 when the Nazi's were coming to full power. The corollaries between that time in Germany and today in the US are remarkable.
Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly 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. The current hand-wringing by Democrats, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them “demonic” and “satanic,” would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.
Hedges brings the comparison to the present day - 25 years later:
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to 100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups—the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. President Bush has handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right.
Hedges has a more complete profile of his views with his book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. He is trying to guard us from becoming a closed society based on one extreme view that wants to encamp minority groups and rights to fit their own worldview. [Sounds a lot like the islamists, doesn't it?]
One last quote from his op-ed:
This movement—the most dangerous mass movement in American history—will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance. The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.
Am I frightened? You bet. I see examples of this in the news, on blogs, with television, and by people's actions. Our liberties have slowly been eroding with signing statements and patriot laws, abstinence versus responsibility and autocracy against democracy. The stakes are very high.
The Handmaid's Tale is not too many steps away. will we take them? detour? or return to the course we were?
just asking...
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