Commentary - Amy Ridenour: Lots of claims but no proof in case for coming Christian right coup

“American Fascists” fails to prove its case. One suspects Hedges’ real objection to the Christian right is his disagreement with its theology and conservative political views.

Evidence the nation is vulnerable to this extra-constitutional government takeover stops at Hedges’ theory that “followers” of the Christian right are too traumatized by the supposed brutality of living in capitalist America to object to anything the Christian right leadership demands. Readers are to take it — ahem — on faith that the Christian right leadership actually plans a coup.

Hedges has said the Christian right leadership is “completely conscious” of its goal of imposing a totalitarian system on the United States, and has named James Dobson and Pat Robertson among the conspirators. The book, however, includes no smoking gun.

“The [Christian right] movement,” Hedges says, “is marked … by its infatuation with apocalyptic violence and military force.” He cites the use of military metaphors (a Christian rock band sings “we’re an army of God”; a group calls its members “to the spiritual warfare for souls”), concluding, “the seductive language of violence … soon enough leads to acts of real violence.”

But does it? In 130 years, has the fabled hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” even once led to actual bloodshed?

Hedges continues: “Apocalyptic visions inspire genocidal killers who glorify violence … such visions nourished the butchers who led the inquisition and the Crusades, as well as the conquistadores.”

By such a link, the Christian right then is metaphorically tied to the slaughter of Indians by Puritans, to Nazis running extermination camps, to the USSR’s genocide in the Ukraine, to Argentine torturers and to “Serbian thugs.”

“American Fascists” feels more like tourism than a coup warning. Readers visit a creationist museum in Kentucky, the National Religious Broadcasters convention in California, voter rallies in Ohio and Florida’s Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. Their tour guide is unsympathetic.

After several pages detailing support for Israel as expressed at the religious broadcasters’ convention podium, a visiting Israeli’s comment, “these people are anti-Semitic,” is too little to persuade readers the speakers are insincere.

It’s a leap to say an Ohio pastor’s criticism of unbelief leads his followers to believe all evil exists outside the community of believers, and then, inevitably, to “the eradication of others.”

A Creation Museum in Kentucky is unlikely to rob its visitors, let alone a significant number of conservative Christians, “of the capacity to think”; it seems hyperbole to say, as Hedges does, that such a museum “presages a society where truth is banished.”

It, more likely, illustrates a society where diversity of opinion thrives — unlike in the pages of “American Fascists.”

“American Fascists” revels in irony. Hedges says Christian broadcasters should be “forced” to include other points of view in their broadcasts, but he criticizes what he perceives as Christian right advocacy of the “wanton destruction” of “a free press.”

A paragraph listing the ways America has gone “terribly wrong” includes both the existence of large SUVs and the closing of plants that manufacture them. An Ohio pastor is criticized for implying that if Christians do not defend themselves in civic life, they “will be hauled off in freight cars like the Jews in Nazi Germany,” as if the pastor’s fear of Nazi-like fascism didn’t mirror Hedges’ own.

“Tolerance,” says Hedges, “is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.”

Hedges says Christian broadcasters “must be made to treat their opponents with respect.” It is a respect they won’t get back from Hedges, who would probably do well to write his next book on a subject on which his emotions are less heavily engaged.

Amy Ridenour is president of the National Center for Public Policy Research.