Trump
and the Christian Fascists
By Chris
Hedges
July
26, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Donald
Trump’s ideological vacuum, the more he is
isolated and attacked, is being filled by the
Christian right. This Christianized fascism,
with its network of megachurches, schools,
universities and law schools and its vast radio
and television empire, is a potent ally for a
beleaguered White House. The Christian right has
been organizing and preparing to take power for
decades. If the nation suffers another economic
collapse, which is probably inevitable, another
catastrophic domestic terrorist attack or a new
war, President Trump’s ability to force the
Christian right’s agenda on the public and shut
down dissent will be dramatically enhanced. In
the presidential election, Trump had
81 percent of
white evangelicals behind him.
Trump’s moves to restrict abortion, defund
Planned Parenthood, permit discrimination
against LGBT people in the name of “religious
liberty” and allow churches to become active in
politics by gutting the
Johnson Amendment,
along with his nominations of judges championed
by the
Federalist Society
and his call for a ban on Muslim immigrants,
have endeared him to the Christian right. He has
rolled back civil rights legislation and
business and environmental regulations. He has
elevated several stalwarts of the Christian
right into power—Mike Pence to the vice
presidency, Jeff Sessions to the Justice
Department, Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court,
Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education, Tom
Price to Health and Human Services and Ben
Carson to Housing and Urban Development. He
embraces the white supremacy, bigotry, American
chauvinism, greed, religious intolerance, anger
and racism that define the Christian right.
More important, Trump’s disdain for facts and
his penchant for
magical thinking
and conspiracy theories mesh well with the
worldview of the Christian right, which sees
itself as under attack by the satanic forces of
secular humanism
embodied in the media, academia, the liberal
establishment, Hollywood and the Democratic
Party. In this worldview, climate change is not
real, Barack Obama is a Muslim and millions of
people voted illegally in the 2016 election.
The
followers of the Christian right, like Trump and
his brain trust, including Stephen Bannon, are
Manicheans.
They see the world in black and white, good and
evil, them and us. Trump’s call in his speech in
Poland for a crusade against the godless hoards
of Muslims fleeing from the wars and chaos we
created replicates the view of the Christian
right. Christian right leaders in a sign of
support went to the White House on July 10 to
pray over Trump. Two days later Pat Robertson
showed up there to interview the president for
his Christian Broadcasting Network.
If the
alliance between these zealots and the
government succeeds, it will snuff out the last
vestiges of American democracy.
On the
surface it appears to be incongruous that the
Christian right would rally behind a slick New
York real estate developer who is a very public
serial philanderer and adulterer, has no regard
for the truth, is consumed by greed, does not
appear to read or know the Bible, routinely
defrauds and cheats his investors and
contractors, expresses a crude misogyny and an
even cruder narcissism and appears to yearn for
despotism. In fact, these are the very
characteristics that define most of the leaders
of the Christian right. Trump has preyed on
desperate people through the thousands of slot
machines in his casinos, his sham university and
his real estate deals. Megachurch pastors prey
on their followers by extracting “seed
offerings,” “love gifts,” tithes and donations
and by selling miracle healings along with
“prayer clothes,” self-help books, audio and
video recordings and even protein shakes.
Pastors have established within their
megachurches, as Trump did in his businesses,
despotic fiefdoms. They cannot be challenged or
questioned any more than an omnipotent Trump
could be challenged on the reality television
show “The Apprentice.” And they seek to
replicate their little tyrannies on a national
scale, with white men in charge.
The
personal piety of most of the ministers who lead
the Christian right is a facade. Their private
lives are usually marked by hedonistic squalor
that includes mansions, private jets,
limousines, retinues of bodyguards, personal
assistants and servants, shopping sprees, lavish
vacations and sexual escapades that rival those
carried out by Trump. And because they run
“churches,” in many cases church funds pay for
their tax-free empires, including their
extravagant lifestyles. They also engage in the
nepotism found in the Trump organization,
elevating family members to prominent or highly
paid positions and passing on the businesses to
their children.
The
Christian right’s scandals, which give a glimpse
into the sordid lives of these multimillionaire
pastors, are legion. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s
Praise the Lord Club, for example, raked in as
much as $1 million a week before Jim Bakker went
to prison for nearly five years. He was
convicted of fraud and other charges in 1989
because of a $158 million scheme in which
followers paid for vacations that never
materialized. As the Bakker empire came apart,
there also were accusations of drug use and
rape. Tammy Faye died in 2007, and now Jim
Bakker is back, peddling survival food for the
end days and telling his significantly reduced
television audience that anyone who opposes
Trump is the Antichrist.
Paul
and Jan Crouch, who gave the Bakkers their
start, founded Trinity Broadcasting, the world’s
largest televangelist network, now run by their
son Matt and his wife, Laurie. Viewers were
encouraged to call prayer counselors at the
toll-free number shown at the bottom of the TV
screen. It was a short step from talking with a
prayer counselor to making a “love gift” and
becoming a “partner” in Trinity Broadcasting and
then sending in more money during one of the
frequent Praise-a-Thons.
The Crouches reveled in tasteless kitsch, as
does Trump. They sat during their popular
nightly program in front of stained glass
windows that overlooked Louis XVI-inspired sets
awash in gold rococo and red velvet, glittering
chandeliers and a gold-painted piano. The
network emblem, which Paul Crouch wore on the
pocket of his blue double-breasted blazer,
featured a crown, a lion, a horse, a white dove,
a cross and Latin phrases among other elements.
The Crouches would have been at home in Trump
Tower, where the president has a
faux “Trump crest”—allegedly plagiarized—and
has decorated his penthouse as if it was part of
Versailles.
The
Crouches were masters of manipulation. They
exhorted viewers to send in checks for $1,000,
even if they could not afford it. Write the
check anyway, Paul Crouch, who died in 2013,
told them, as a “step of faith” and the Lord
would repay them many times over. “Do you think
God would have any trouble getting $1,000 extra
to you somehow?” he asked during one
Praise-a-Thon broadcast. Viewers, many of whom
struggled with deep despair and believed that
miracles and magic alone held them back from the
abyss, often found it impossible to resist this
emotional pressure.
Trinity
Broadcasting Network (TBN) is home to many of
the worst charlatans in the Christian right,
including the popular healer Benny Hinn, who
says that Adam was a superhero who could fly to
the moon and claims that one day the dead will
be raised by watching TBN from inside their
coffins. Hinn claims his “anointings” have cured
cancer, AIDS, deafness, blindness and numerous
other ailments and physical injuries. Those who
have not been cured, he says, did not send in
enough money.
These
religious hucksters are some of the most
accomplished con artists in the country, a trait
they share with the current occupant of the Oval
Office.
I
wrote a book on the Christian right in 2007
called “American Fascists: The Christian Right
and the War on America.” I did not use the word
“fascist” lightly. I spent several hours, at the
end of two years of reporting, with two of the
country’s foremost scholars on fascism—Fritz
Stern and
Robert O. Paxton.
Did this ideology fit the parameters of
classical fascism? Was it virulent enough and
organized enough to seize power? Would it go to
the ruthless extremes of previous fascist
movements to persecute and silence dissent? Has
our
deindustrialized society
replicated the crippling despair, alienation and
rage that always feed fascist movements?
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The evangelicalism promoted by the Christian
right is very different from the evangelicalism
and fundamentalism of a century ago. The
emphasis on personal piety that defined the old
movement, the call to avoid the contamination of
politics, has been replaced by
Christian Reconstructionism,
called Dominionism by some. This new ideology is
about taking control of all institutions,
including the government, to build a “Christian”
nation. Rousas John Rushdoony in his 1973 book,
“The Institutes of Biblical Law,” first
articulated it. Rushdoony argued that God gives
the elect, just as he gave Adam and Noah,
dominion over the earth to build a Christian
society. Their state will come about with the
physical eradication of the forces of Satan. It
is the duty of the church and the elect to
“rescue” the world so Christ can return.
This is an ideology of death. It promises that
the secular, humanist society will be physically
destroyed. The Ten Commandments will form the
basis of our legal system.
Creationism or
“Intelligent
Design” will be
taught in public schools. People who are
considered social deviants, including
homosexuals, immigrants, secular humanists,
feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals and those
dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning
Christians who do not embrace the Christian
right’s perverted and heretical interpretation
of the Bible—will be silenced, imprisoned or
killed. The role of the federal government will
be reduced to protecting property rights,
“homeland” security and waging war. Church
organizations will be funded and empowered by
the government to run social-welfare agencies.
The poor, condemned for sloth, indolence and
sinfulness, will be denied government
assistance. The death penalty will be expanded
to include “moral crimes,” including apostasy,
blasphemy, sodomy and witchcraft, as well as
abortion, which will be treated as murder. Women
will be subordinate to men. Those who practice
other faiths will become, at best, second-class
citizens and eventually outcasts. The wars in
the Middle East will be defined as religious
crusades against Muslims. There will be no
separation of church and state. The only
legitimate voices will be “Christian.” America
will become an agent of God. Those who defy the
“Christian” authorities will be branded as
agents of Satan.
Tens of millions of Americans are already
hermetically sealed within this bizarre
worldview. They are given a steady diet of
conspiracy theories and lies on the internet, in
their churches, in Christian schools and
colleges and on Christian television and radio.
Elizabeth Dilling,
who wrote “The Red Network” and was a Nazi
sympathizer, is required reading. Thomas
Jefferson, who favored separation of church and
state, is ignored. This Christian propaganda
hails the “significant contributions” of the
Confederacy. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led the
anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, is
rehabilitated as an American hero. The
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with the
wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and
Libya, is defined as part of the worldwide
battle against satanic Islamic terror.
Presently, nearly 40 percent of the U.S. public
believes in Creationism or “Intelligent Design.”
And nearly a third of the population, 94 million
people, consider themselves evangelical.
Those
who remain in a reality-based universe often
dismiss these malcontents as buffoons. They do
not take seriously the huge segment of the
public, mostly white and working class, who
because of economic distress have primal
yearnings for vengeance, new glory and moral
renewal and are easily seduced by magical
thinking. These are the yearnings and emotions
Trump has exploited politically.
Those
who embrace this movement need to feel, even if
they are not, that they are victims surrounded
by dark and sinister groups bent on their
destruction. They need to elevate themselves to
the role of holy warriors, infused with a noble
calling and purpose. They need to sanctify the
rage and hypermasculinity that are the core of
fascism. The rigidity and simplicity of their
belief, which includes being anointed for a
special purpose in life by God, are potent
weapons in the fight against their own demons
and desire for meaning.
“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as
evil but as a necessity, or even a duty,”
Simone Weil
wrote.
These
believers, like all fascists, detest the
reality-based world. They condemn it as
contaminated, decayed and immoral. This world
took their jobs. It destroyed their future. It
ruined their communities. It doomed their
children. It flooded their lives with alcohol,
opioids, pornography, sexual abuse, jail
sentences, domestic violence, deprivation and
despair. And then, from the depths of suicidal
despair, they suddenly discovered that God has a
plan for them. God will save them. God will
intervene in their lives to promote and protect
them. God has called them to carry out his holy
mission in the world and to be rich, powerful
and happy.
The
rational, secular forces, those that speak in
the language of fact and evidence, are hated and
feared, for they seek to pull believers back
into “the culture of death” that nearly
destroyed them. The magical belief system, as it
was for impoverished German workers who flocked
to the Nazi Party, is an emotional life raft. It
is all that supports them. The only way
to blunt this movement is to reintegrate these
people into the economy, to give them economic
stability through good wages and benefits, to
restore their self-esteem. They need to live in
a society that is not predatory but instead
provides well-funded public schools, free
university education and universal health care,
a society in which they and their families can
prosper.
Let us
not stand at the open gates of the city waiting
passively for the barbarians. They are coming.
They are slouching towards Bethlehem. Let us
shake off our complacency and cynicism. Let us
openly defy the liberal establishment, which
will not save us, to demand and fight for
economic reparations for the poor and the
working class. Let us give all Americans a
reality-based hope for the future. Time is
running out. If we do not act, American
fascists, clutching Christian crosses, waving
American flags and orchestrating mass
recitations of the pledge of allegiance, united
behind the ludicrous figure of Donald Trump,
will ride this rage to power.
Chris
Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign
correspondent in Central America, the Middle
East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported
from more than 50 countries and has worked for
The Christian Science Monitor, National Public
Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York
Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent
for 15 years.
This
article was first published by
Truth Dig
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
