So the week after next, campuses across America will be treated to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, since there is not enough awareness, it turns out, about Islam and fascism. The event is the brainchild of well-known pathological liar and enemy of academic freedom, David Horowitz. But we shouldn't pre-judge it on that basis, even if others will.

I know this may surprise readers, but I think this event is a great idea. And I have an even better idea, which is we follow it up with: Christian-Fascism Awareness Week.

Now I don't want to interfere with Horowitz's effort, which is in the spirit of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan: "fundamentalism is the enemy of all civilized humanity." So one week devoted to Islamic fundamentalism seems right; but why not devote the next week to Christian fundamentalism? The rise of Christian Fascism has gotten some attention lately, but not nearly enough in our "politically correct" culture. Sure, the Christian Fascists aren't quite as scary, since they rarely commit terrorist acts (except against abortion service providers); on the other hand, they're right here in our midst (even in the White House some say), while the Islamic Bogeyman-In-Chief is in a cave somewhere in Pakistan. Here's what one expert on Christian Fascism has to say:

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."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed....

The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic -- to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true -- the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens....

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....

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 to100 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....

The radical Christian right, calling for a "Christian state" -- where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens -- awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. 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....

So clearly there is a lot of awareness-raising to be done during Christian-Fascism Awareness week. But, of course, the idea would not be to target Christians in general, most of whom aren't fascists or fundamentalists or zealots or theocrats or anti-democratic. We'd just be targetting the extremists, the kind who advise George W. Bush and threaten to run third-party candidates in Presidential elections. So there is no reason for most Christians to take offense. We are just trying to warn everyone else. Just like David Horowitz.

Posted by Brian Leiter on October 10, 2007 at 06:00 AM in Academic Freedom, Texas Taliban Alerts (Intelligent Design, Religion in the Schools, etc.) | Permalink