Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross — An Introduction to Evangelicalism and Fascism Part 1: Tradition and the Mythic Past

Sinclair Lewis probably never said "When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." But he should have because he would have been right.

Introduction: White American Evangelical Christianity and Fascism 

This post will begin a series on the rise of fascism in the US today and the ways in which it intersects with, co-opts, and is suborned by white American Evangelicalism. My goal is to work through what is happening in our current political moment and how it has happened. Umberto Eco's 14 features of Ur-Fascism from his essay Ur-Fascism together with Jason Stanley's 10 pillars of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them are my key texts for the nature of fascism. Much (but not all) of my analysis of white American Evangelicalism comes from Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America together with my own experience as someone who experienced Christian homeschooling in my elementary and middle school years, matriculated at a conservative Bible College, and who identified as an Evangelical for at least the first 30 years of my life. I will also bring in additional readings and sources as appropriate and necessary. While this series of essays will take the form of a series of positive arguments informing one another and building towards a final conclusion, I hope that it will be read as an invitation to discussion. To that end I would invite reflection, reaction, push back and suggestions in the comments section of each post.

Recommended reading for this blog series

One important caveat I want to make at the outset is that I am not claiming that all white American Evangelicals are fascists or crypto-fascists. I do not at all believe that to be the case. I do, however, believe that some white American Evangelicals and particularly American Fundamentalists, are functional fascists (by which I mean that they do not recognize or realize the fascist nature of their own politics) and that there are significant historical and thematic strains within white American Evangelicalism which render its adherents particularly vulnerable to fascist ideology and leadership. It is, for instance, importantly true that 19% of the Evangelicals who voted in the 2016 election rejected Trump, but it is equally important that 81% of voting Evangelicals voted for him. Specifically this means that Trump received a higher percentage of the self-identified white Evangelical vote than any previous Republican candidate on record. The most fascist GOP president to date was more attractive to white Evangelicals than any previous GOP presidential candidate. Even that does not mean that the 81% of voting white Evangelicals who voted for a fascist president are themselves fascist, but it does at least suggest they were drawn (reluctantly or enthusiastically) by some degree of fascism. In this series I hope to explore that.

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

Jason Stanley provides an overlapping "list of pillars" of abstracted Fascism in How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

• 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"

My plan is to combine the two lists where I can but also bring them into conversation with one another and with what I have seen and read about what is happening in US politics and with white American Evangelicalism.

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.

R.J. Rushdoony a Christian Fascist

...

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.

PART 2 ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AND THE REJECTION OF MODERNISM

Let's think about Reformation Day Differently This Year.

This post contains quotes and references to extremist hate speech. I have provided these for the purpose of making the point that they (and what happened as a result) are evil.

This last Saturday (Shabbat) saw one of the most violent, blatant, and bloody acts of antisemitism that has taken place in the United States in some time with the murder of eleven congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. That is not at all to say that the US has been, in any way, free from the stain of that hate at any point in its history, but to acknowledge that a particular atrocity has been committed—an atrocity which ought to elicit renewed reflection on the part of those of us in the Christian tradition. Co-incidentally this coming Wednesday is often celebrated among Protestants in this country as Reformation Day. October 31st was chosen because it is the putative anniversary of the moment Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg cathedral and thus works as a beginning point for the Protestant reformation.

The near coincidence of these dates should be uncomfortable.

While there is much that I appreciate and even admire about the teachings and thoughts of Martin Luther, the fact of the matter is that he was virulently antisemitic and that the legacy of his public andThe Jews and their Lies
published antisemitism fueled the gas chambers eighty years ago and persisted through to haunt the gunman last week. It did not begin with Luther, he may even have resisted its influence on his soul for a time, but he is finally and terribly complicit in promulgating and amplifying it. Here are just a few quotes from his demoniac work entitled

I had made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that these miserable and accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have published this little book, so that I might be found among those who opposed such poisonous activities of the Jews who warned the Christians to be on their guard against them. I would not have believed that a Christian could be duped by the Jews into taking their exile and wretchedness upon himself. 

However, the devil is the god of the world, and wherever God's word is absent he has an easy task, not only with the weak but also with the strong. May God help us. Amen.
What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengeance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere advice: 

First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly ­ and I myself was unaware of it ­ will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.

Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies. This will bring home to them that they are not masters in our country, as they boast, but that they are living in exile and in captivity, as they incessantly wail and lament about us before God. 

Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. (remainder omitted) 

Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. For they have justly forfeited the right to such an office by holding the poor Jews captive with the saying of Moses (Deuteronomy 17 [:10 ff.]) in which he commands them to obey their teachers on penalty of death, although Moses clearly adds: "what they teach you in accord with the law of the Lord." Those villains ignore that. They wantonly employ the poor people's obedience contrary to the law of the Lord and infuse them with this poison, cursing, and blasphemy. In the same way the pope also held us captive with the declaration in Matthew 16 {:18], "You are Peter," etc, inducing us to believe all the lies and deceptions that issued from his devilish mind. He did not teach in accord with the word of God, and therefore he forfeited the right to teach 

Fifth, I advise that safe­conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let they stay at home. (...remainder omitted). 

Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. The reason for such a measure is that, as said above, they have no other means of earning a livelihood than usury, and by it they have stolen and robbed from us all they possess. Such money should now be used in no other way than the following: Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred florins, as personal circumstances may suggest. With this he could set himself up in some occupation for the support of his poor wife and children, and the maintenance of the old or feeble. For such evil gains are cursed if they are not put to use with God's blessing in a good and worthy cause. 

Seventh, I commend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam (Gen 3[:19]}. For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.

- Martin Luther 

Unfortunately, this evil was not contained as a single aberrant view of Luther's; it persisted in the mainstream of Protestantism and was cited by the Nazis during the holocaust and beyond. In fact a deeply troubling complicity with antisemitism has existed within Christian theology for almost the whole of our existence; notice that Luther quoted the Bible in support of his evil. Luther's demoniac views have served among protestants (Lutheran and otherwise) as warrant for our own acts of prejudice and violence at lest as often as they have served as a warning of how easy it is for leaders who see some things clearly to be catastrophically blinded by prejudice, bigotry, and hatred.

As Protestants spend this week thinking about the reformation, we need to think not just about the reasons for the historical process we call "the reformation" we need to be thinking about what reformation needs to look like today. It is to late for Christianity to avoid complicity in the horrors of the shooting at Tree of Life; the culture we worked to shape shaped the man who selected an AR-15 "to kill Jews". If we want to have any hope that this act will be the last of its kind, we will have to recognized the story our own tradition has told and then work to tell a new and better story, we will have to continue to reform. C.S. Lewis recognized this in The Four Loves:

It will be noticed that the sort of love I have been describing [love which can become demoniac] and all its ingredients, can be for something other than a country: for a school, a regiment, a great family, or a class... All the same criticisms will still apply. It can also be felt for bodies that claim more that a natural affection: for a Church or (alas) a party in a Church, or for a religious order. This terrible subject would require a book unto itself. If ever the book which I am not going to write is written it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of "the World" will not hear us till be have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch.

- C.S. Lewis

That is a big process, indeed we will probably have to spend the rest of our lives acknowledging and confessing, but I have a recommendation for this particular reformation day. This year, think about not celebrating Martin Luther. This year, how about we spend reformation day recognizing the failings of the reformation and the ways in which we still need to be re-formed. The positive spiritual insights of Luther will not go away just because we work to recognized the poison with which he mixed them. The thing is, unless we point that poison out, unless we identify it for the evil that it is, no sip of reformation theology will avoid the risk of spreading plague. Remember that we are resurrection people. To return to C.S. Lewis: "Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death."