Introduction: White American Evangelical Christianity and Fascism
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| Recommended reading for this blog series |
Features of Fascism
In Ur-Fascism Umberto Eco identified 14 common features of "Eternal Fascism or Ur-Fascism" that is, Fascism as a political practice and ideology abstracted from its specific instantiation in early 20th century Europe. Eco suggests that each of these may be present in other forms of totalitarianism "But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it." The features are:
- The cult of tradition
- The rejection of modernism (but not technology)
- The cult of action for action's sake
- Disagreement is treason
- Fear of Difference
- Appeal to social frustration
- The obsession with a plot
- The enemy is both strong and weak
- Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy
- Contempt for the weak
- Everybody is educated to become a hero
- Machismo and weaponry
- Selective Populism
- Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak
- A Mythic Past
- Propaganda
- Anti-Intellectualism
- Unreality: the rejection of truth
- Hierarchy
- Victimhood
- Law and Order
- Sexual Anxiety
- Sodom and Gomorrah: heartland values vs. decadent cities
- Arbeit Macht Frei: portrayal of the out-group as "lazy"
The Cult of Tradition/Mythic Past
Both Eco and Stanley (and pretty much everyone else who has studied fascism) point out that fascism establishes, or reinforces a mythologized past in which the "us" flourished. Now, there can be some value in a national myth, so long as it is recognized as myth and not mistaken for an actual period in real history. A national myth which is known to be a-historical can be aspirational—a dream of what the nation hopes to become—and insofar as the aspirations are good, the myth will serve a good purpose. However when myth is mistaken for real history even good myth is going to corrupt; bad (racist, bigoted, xenophobic, imperialist etc...) myth will not be any better but it might be easier to spot. Contemporary US fascists use bad myth to feed their base supporters while using good-myth-mistaken-for-history as propaganda. Specifically, the myth they feed their base is the myth of northern Europeans "heroically" dominating the continent and "properly" subjugating indigenous peoples (they don't like to think of them as Americans) and African people in the service of a white nation. This myth minimizes all contributions and achievements of non-white (and usually non-Protestant Christian) people as often as possible. The myth that US fascists feed the moderates as propaganda on the other hand essentially erases the genocide and slavery which the first myth celebrates; it focuses on the good that the US has done (always incidentally crediting Euro-Christian folks for those achievements) and minimizes the harms and atrocities the country has committed, blaming them on "liberals", "humanists", "outsiders", and "socialists" when they can't get away with ignoring them. Of course the two myths are contradictory but that is entirely irrelevant to Fascists. The myths suit their purposes. They are each attractive to their target audience and they each occlude the actual history of the nation in favor of one which will elicit anger and defensiveness on the part of the adherent when it is challenged by factual histories. In the latter effort Fascists have made particular inroads with Evangelicals and Fundamentalist Christians.
Conservative and Evangelical home school and private school curriculum has long included a false American History narrative claiming that the american founders were Evangelical-equivalent Christians who founded the US as a Christian nation to the extent that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are really Christian documents thinly disguised as secular or pluralist documents. As it turns out, the connection between conservative Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism and U.S. Fascism goes back quite a ways. In the words of Frances Fitzgerald's magisterial history of Evangelicalism in US Politics The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
In the early 1930's a number of other leaders, among them Arno Gaebelein, James M. Gray, William B. Riley [whom Fitzgerald credits as the architect of northern fundamentalism] and Gerald Winrod, embraced the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and integrated it into their end times scenarios—uncomfortably, as it sat with their prophetic Zionism....Like the notorious Father Charles Coughlin and his Protestant associate, Gerald L. Smith, some of these fundamentalist leaders became Nazi sympathizers. Hitler, Riley wrote, has snatched his country "from the very jaws of atheist Communism" with "help from on high."(p.144-145)
They also tend to propagate Lost Cause revisions of civil war history, downplaying slavery and emphasizing states rights narratives. Certainly this is something I encountered in the the Christian homeschooling curriculum I grew up with (Bob Jones, and Abecka mostly). In general, the homeschool narrative (one which traditionalist conservatives, dominionist and Christian Reconstructionist thinkers have had a large hand in shaping) teaches a remarkably strident version of the myth of white Christian/Protestant American exceptionalism. Again from The Evangelicals:
A voracious reader and a prolific writer, Rushdoony [a prominent proponent of the Christian homeschooling movement and whom Fitzgerald credits as one of the two "thinkers of the Christian Right" in the second half of the 20th century] in the mid 1960's wrote two books on American history... he argued that the intellectual roots of the American Revolution were purely Calvinist and owed nothing to the Enlightenment... The Constitution, he maintained, was a secular document in appearance only... The early American Republic, he maintained, was an orthodox Christian nation with an economic and social Protestant feudal system. By 1860, however, only the South had a Christian system, and in the Civil War the Union troops destroyed it. ... The South, he wrote, had a right to defend slavery because the radical reordering of its society by atheists was a far worse alternative.
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| R.J. Rushdoony a Christian Fascist |
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Rushdoony discovered the works of Palmer and two other leading Presbyterian defenders of the Confederacy and used them to argue that the Civil War was essentially a "theological war"—and the civil rights movement anti-Christian. Rushdoony found both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments unconstitutional and nothing but an effort to impose the power of the federal government on the states. By his account, it was downhill from there on, with increasing federal power and increasing racial and religious diversity. "Minority groups," he wrote in 1965 "hold the balance of power in many states—Negroes, Catholics, Zionist Jews, pensioners, and the like... Only by restoring localism, by amending the Constitution to require the coincidence of the electoral college and its vote with the structure of Congress, can minority rule, with its attendant evils, hatred and injustice, be checked." Rushdoony's America was white and Calvinist, and at the heart of his politics was not just racism but an all-purpose, full-service bigotry"(p.339-340)If those don't sound to you like the talking points of "alt-right" today then may I suggest that you have not been paying attention. I think it is important to recognized the myth that conservative Evangelicals and the Christian Right have been promulgating as it does so much to explain the current co-incidence of Evangelicalism of far-right Trumpist Fascism. The Evangelical "myth of America" is a myth of a white and Protestant America which was founded on reformation (rather than enlightenment—I will be addressing the "rejection of modernism" in a future post) ideals, which was most fully instantiated in the Confederacy, and which has been under attack from "liberals" both theological and political (the conflation is a popular and much-exploited one) since the nation's inception. This provides them all the fodder that Fascists need from their Nationalist myths. In the words of Jason Stanley "Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed." The Fundamentalist/Evangelical "pure mythic past" which was lost because of the work of "the enemy" (political and theological liberals) but which good members of the "us" group (white, conservative, patriarchalist Evangelicals) can work to reclaim by (re)gaining political power integrates rather seamlessly with that of more readily identifiable alt-right and neo-fascist groups specifically because they both locate the mythic past in a fundamentally white and "Christian" America and both see "liberalism" (though they put different spins on the meaning of the term) as the villainous force responsible for the decline they are trying to reverse.
Further, of course, is the fact that Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism understand themselves largely in opposition to theological liberalism—particularly 19th century German liberalism—and as fighting to reclaim a Christian theological past which only they have preserved. Certainly my own experience with church history classes specifically structure the history of "true Christianity" as one which faded after the fall of Rome (one Church history course from the Reformed Theological Seminary ignores the Eastern Orthodox church altogether, not even mentioning the Great Schism) and was practically resurrected at the reformation. Again, this is not to say that all white American Evangelicals are fascists, but to point to themes within white American Evangelicalism which render its adherents more open to fascist propaganda and red pilling.
From this perspective, it is entirely consistent that the Charlottesville Protests, centered around the "Unite the Right" rally served as the first significant conflict between American fascists and an alliance of Liberal Mainline and Progressive clergy with Antifa counter-protesters. Nor should it be surprising that Evangelicals, in defending Trump for his "both sides" speech, have centered the question of "honoring the Confederate past" rather than the obviously racist intent of the initial rally.
Clearly this is about more than just statues for them
By now the heavy blending of the religious right with the Republican party—particularly the tea-party, freedom caucus, Trumpist arm of the GOP—has resulted in a state level pressure campaign to promulgate the myth of white and Christian American exceptionalism in public schools. Essentially, Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation and allied groups (the National Legal Foundation, and Wall Builders in particular) are pushing legislation which would make the Fundamentalist white, Christian revisionist US history of my home schooling days in the late 80's and early 90's the standard curriculum in public education after painting it with a thin veneer of secular pluralism. According to their Project Blitz playbook (they even name it after a Nazi battle tactic) the first focus category in their project is to enact "legislation regarding our Country's religious heritage".
All of this is to say nothing of the fact that the current president's campaign slogan was Make America Great Again a statement which both references and participates in the creation of nationalist mythology.
