The Christian fascists have coalesced in cult-like fashion around Donald Trump. They are bankrolled by the most retrograde forces of capitalism. The capitalists permit the stupidities of the Christian fascists and their self-destructive social and cultural wars. In exchange, the billionaire class gets corporate monopolies, union-busting, privatized state and municipal services, including public education, revoked government regulations, especially environmental regulation, and are free to engage in a virtual tax boycott.
The war industry loves the Christian fascists who turn every conflict from Iraq to Ukraine into a holy crusade to crush the latest iteration of Satan. The Christian fascists believe military power, and the “manly” virtues that come with it, are blessed by God, Jesus and the Virgin Mary. No military budget is too big. No war waged by America is evil.
….
The glue holding this Christianized fascism together is not prayer, although we will get a lot of that, but war. War is the raison d’être of all systems of totalitarianism. War justifies a constant search for internal enemies. It is used to revoke basic civil liberties and impose censorship. War demonizes those in the Middle East, Russia or China who are blamed for the economic and social debacles that inevitably get worse. War diverts the rage engendered by a dysfunctional state towards immigrants, people of color, feminists, liberals, artists, anyone who does not identify as a heterosexual, the press, antifa, Jews, Muslims, Russians or Asians. Take your pick. It is a bigot’s smorgasbord. Every item on the menu is fair game.
I spent two years with the Christian right reporting and researching my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” These Christian fascists have never hidden their agenda or their desire to create a “Christian” nation, any more than Adolf Hitler hid his demented vision for Germany in “Mein Kampf.” They prey, like all fascists, on the despair of their followers. They paint gruesome portraits of the end times. when the longed-for obliteration of nonbelievers presages the glorious return of Jesus Christ. The battle at Armageddon, they believe, will be launched from the Antichrist’s worldwide headquarters in Babylon once the Jews again have control of Israel. The closer we get to Armageddon, the giddier they become.
These people believe this stuff, as they believe in QAnon or the election fraud that supposedly put Biden in office. They are convinced that a demonic, secular-humanist ideology propagated by the media, the United Nations, elite universities, the ACLU, the NAACP, NOW, Planned Parenthood and the Trilateral Commission, along with the U.S. State Department and major foundations, is seeking to destroy them.
Violence is embraced as a cleansing agent, a key component of any fascist movement. The Christian fascists do not fear nuclear war. They welcome it. The insane provocations of Russia by the Biden administration, including the decision to provide $33 billion in assistance to Ukraine, target 10 Russian generals for assassination and pass on to Ukraine the intelligence to sink the Moskva, the guided missile cruiser that was the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, supercharges the ideology of the Christian right. The marriage of the war industry, determined to make war forever, with the Christian fascists yearning for the apocalypse is terrifying. Biden is sleepwalking us into a war with Russia and perhaps with China. The Christian fascists will accelerate the bloodlust.
— Chris Hedges, Salon, Jesus, endless war and the irresistible rise of American fascism, May 10, 2022
I think this sums up the problem succinctly. And yet, outside of the Christian fascists is a slew of uncaring, indolent Americans who only look at the price of gas to determine who they vote for. And if we get the GOP in office and controlling everything? I’m almost convinced that lazy Americans deserve for it to happen, while they live in a make-believe land where if they get theirs, they are fine with vulnerable minorities suffering.
That article is a total piece of garbage. It is an atheist, Vladimir Putin (whose name isn’t even mentioned in the article) who is invading Ukraine and killing hundreds of children and innocent people. He has caused the deaths of over 20,000 of his own soldiers.
Atheist leaders have caused far more deaths than any “Christian Fascists” by far. Kim Jong Un and Xi of China, both atheists, are more to be feared than any”Christian fascists”.
The article is ridiculous.
Putin is an Orthodox Christian.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1579996/Vladimir-Putin-religion-does-he-believe-in-god-evg
Joe, it’s time for you to say whatever you want to say and move on. Pick a post, any post, and say whatever you want to say. After that, you are done.
Try research, dude. I’ve read a number of Hedges books. They are all serious and well done. You’re just spewing the stupidity of Fox and other conservatives who have an aversion to facts and a love of yelling stupid things.
Making factual errors like the one Joe Sperling made about Putin is common among Christian conservatives and illustrates why conservative Christianity gets associated with intellectual inferiority. Chris Hedges won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2007. My respect for well-researched writing like his, for evidence-based best practices, and for reality-based daily living, is why I keep company with Bruce and other atheists such as those on this blog.
Joe fails again and shows that Christians have no problem lying, ignoring what their god says as they find convenient.
As many Christians do, he tries to claim that atheism causes the problems in dictatorships/authoritarian gov’ts since he has nothing else to try to demonize us with. he desperately ignores the fact that it is megalomania that causes these problems, not atheism. The need for a being to demand blind obedience and threatening to kill anyone who disagrees with it should be familiar to Joe since this describes his religion quite well.
Actually, the Christian Roght are torn right now on the issue of Russia. Their Faux Golden Calf Idol Trump adores Putin, who supports the Orthodox Church (not True Christians by evangelical standards but they seem to be willing to tumble into bed with anyone bearing a Christian name as their numbers dwindle and as they aspire to greater power). But the images and stories of absolute horror inflicted by Russian soldiers on innocent Ukrainians have right-wingers in a bind – do they feel appalled at crying toddlers and ancient holocaust survivors whose lives are threatened, or do they support their idol’s crony? Can they buy the notion that Ukrainians are all Nazis? In fact, the far right number Nazis among those who sit in their own tent. What a quandary! They can comfortably ignore the Old Testament God-ordered genocide of “The Promised Land” but it’s hard to unsee images of innocent people being murdered and displaced in Ukraine. So much for bashing infants’ heads against stones as God ordered his people to do in TPL.
indeed. Conservative Christians are having quite the dilemma, which lie do they go with?