Judging by a current book title, America is under attack by a fascist enemy within its own borders. It isn’t al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or militant separatists – it’s the Christian Right.
Or so Chris Hedges would like people to believe. Hedges, a former New York Times reporter with a Master of Divinity from Harvard, has written a new book titled “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” In it Hedges warns that conservative Christians are a growing menace to America. Comparing Christians to fascists is an old trick for Hedges; following the 2004 election, he wrote an essay comparing the Christian Right and Nazism. He confuses political activism with totalitarian violence.
In the essay, Hedges argues that “the ban on same sex marriages, passed by eleven states in the election, was part of this march towards our door.” Like all Americans, conservative Christians have the right to pursue their political objectives through peaceful and democratic means. Which is precisely what they have done.
Despite the peaceful and democratic nature of their activism, Hedges attacks conservative Christians with the nastiest of slurs, revealing a frightening ignorance.
Of course, Hedges is an outlier. Very few liberals share his visceral fear of conservative Christians. Yet it may also be true that very few liberals would say a good word about conservative Christians. And that is a problem.
What Hedges and his ideological kin may not realize is that conservative Christians are not as homogenous as they appear. Best defined as a loose coalition of evangelical Christians and Catholics whose theological conservatism leads to political conservatism, the Christian Right encompasses a variety of ideas and temperaments. The political face of conservative Christianity, however, has not reflected the body’s diversity. While Christianity has always played a role in American public life, the Christian Right of today has relatively shallow roots. In the 1970s, after the cultural shifts of the 1960s and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, conservative Christians began organizing politically. Figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson emerged as visible leaders of the nascent movement, preaching about a “culture war” between the secular left and religious right. The culture war mentality has led the movement to adopt a narrow agenda of conservative policies, limited almost exclusively to abortion and social issues. There are promising signs, however, of a broadening agenda among some conservative Christians.
Last February a group of 86 evangelical leaders made headlines by launching the “Evangelical Climate Initiative,” a multifaceted campaign seeking to educate and mobilize Christians in response to global warming. The group acknowledged that while historically evangelicals have not been closely associated with environmental advocacy, global warming constitutes a matter of concern to Christians.
In another demonstration of a broadening evangelical agenda, Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church and author of The Purpose Driven Life, invited Democratic senator Barack Obama, D-Ill, to address his church’s Global Summit on AIDS this past November. Warren, together with his wife Kay, called the Global Summit on AIDS an opportunity “to use whatever influence we might have to help those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS.” This statement contrasts sharply with the mutterings of Falwell, who has called AIDS “the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.”
The move by some conservative Christians towards progressive stances on climate change and AIDS has encountered a backlash from some leaders of the Christian Right. The New York Times reported that 22 evangelical leaders signed a letter criticizing the “Evangelical Climate Initiative” because it is not a “consensus issue” among all conservative Christians. And Warren’s invitation to Barack Obama drew scorn from some quarters. In a column, conservative commentator Kevin McCullough asked “Why would Warren marry the moral equivalency of his pulpit – a sacred place of honor in evangelical tradition – to the inhumane, sick, and sinister evil that Obama has worked for as a legislator?”
The language that McCullough uses should make anybody, and especially liberals, uneasy. Fortunately, liberals will play a role in deciding whether the future voice of conservative Christians is angry like McCullough’s, or inclusive like Warren’s. The old guard of the Christian Right is stuck in the culture war mentality that originated in the 1960s. When liberals like Hedges adopt a similar culture war mentality, they only fortify the divide and lend ammunition to their adversaries.
While liberals may never agree with conservative Christians on certain key issues, they would benefit tremendously from a new Christian Right that acts as a partner on environmental and humanitarian issues. Taking the Nazi card out of the deck is an easy step towards a vital change.
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