Apocalypse No! Christian Fascism And The Nazi Legacy
By Juan Santos
06 November, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Part 2 of Apocalypse No! An Indigenist Perspective
“Apocalypse implies that the destruction and desecration of the land and world is divinely and spiritually mandated. This is a fallacy, a pernicious lie. This idea is dangerous to all living things.
“Rather, the activities that encourage the end of the world, particularly through sowing fear, enacting violence, waging war, degrading the environment, rampantly hunting and killing animals, relentlessly chopping down trees, using up all the resources and despoiling the environment itself, are acts against the divine.
“I cannot find other words for what is insisting itself to be said: The holy intent is for us to cease and desist our destructive activities, and find all the beautiful and sacred ways to sustain the natural world and to restore creation.
“I hereby stand with those who refuse the language and intentions of apocalypse.� - Deena Metzger, From Grief into Vision
“These are the demons Christ cast out, spitting blood in the president’s ear. He slips the black hood over his face, lifts his palms, his arms, opens himself in the shape of the cross, and spins in one place until there are no walls left standing, nothing between himself and the black night, himself and the stars. He will send missiles and praises in the morning. Jesus is coming soon. He will have no tongue, only a sword in his mouth. He will not come to heal the Earth, but to destroy it.� – Juan Santos, from Poem for Lebanon
There is nothing between us and the stars; almost nothing between us and the fate of the Earth as they have foretold it, nothing between us and destruction; only time.
The Clock stands at seven minutes to midnight, seven minutes until nuclear holocaust.
Our chances are vanishing in thin air. Global Warming, a force that breathes with all the power of the Bomb itself, has the potential to destroy Life on Earth.
The great warming may have already passed its tipping point; the button of irreversible mass extinction may already have been pushed.
The air is invisible but the signs are everywhere.
Some say we live in the Age of Apocalypse, of the unveiling, the time of the disclosing of secrets, of the plan for the destiny, the Final Solution, of the world.
Some see the potentials for destruction as signs of the “last things� or end of things, and celebrate them as a sign that the messiah draws near. For them, their faith is confirmed, and an Earth ruled by the agency of Evil is soon to meet its doom in a struggle for power of cosmic dimension.
Figures like mega-church evangelist John Hagee, who some have dubbed Pastor Strangelove, believe a nuclear attack by the US against Iran would set off a battle of Armageddon in the Middle East; he and his allies are literally pushing the Bush administration to attack for that reason.
They are, in a word, mad – but the biblical method that guides them is the baseline logic of western civilization, a logic that they’ve embraced, like a David Koresh or an Adolph Hitler, with the grip of death.
It’s been said that by their fruits you shall know them, that our intentions are shown in our actions and in the ultimate impact of our actions on others and on the world. The Bush regime is the unripe fruit of Christian Fascism, of planetary death.
Others read the signs differently; with a different intent.
Corbin Harney, a spiritual elder of the Shoshone nation, says:
“As I see it all around me, the trees are dying out, our water is contaminated, and our air is not good to breathe. Those are the reasons why today I'm trying my best to come back to our ways of thousands of years ago.
“We have to come back to the Native way of life. The Native way is to pray for everything, to take care of everything. Our Mother Earth is very important. We can't just misuse her and think she's going to continue. We can see what's taking place: the animal life, the tree life, even the water is telling us, but we're not paying attention to it.�
Millions in the US, and billions world wide, are awakening to the potentials for destruction, and hope to avert them.
But the utter inaction of the Bush regime on issues like global warming is no more of an accident than their nuclear bullying of Iran or the invasion and colonial occupation of Iraq. Bush, too, is following the logic of the Christian apocalypse, just as he follows the logic of empire.
“Apocalypse� means revealing what is hidden, to bring what is obscured into the light. It is the purpose of this essay to reveal the depth of what Terence Des Pres has called the systemic “dedication of life's energies to the production of death,� that characterized Nazism and that, as this essay asserts, also characterizes apocalyptic Christian Fascism in the early 21st century.
Walter A. Davis suggests that to deal with extreme developments, it is necessary to break the mold of the everyday, to stand outside the paradigms of the “normal.�
“…theories that remain within the orbit of neurosis and normalcy are unable to deal with the present historical situation, which is defined by what happens when traumatic events create catastrophic anxiety in a collectivity threatened with psychological fragmentation and dissolution under the sway of a nameless terror...�
The drama of Christian Fascism is motivated by a fundamental terror, by the need to deny that terror and to control and mitigate it through a resort to scapegoating and the exercise of power. Davis lays bare the underlying dynamic:
“One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking. That’s why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore [fundamental social and cultural] guarantees… to contain and interpret it… to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration, a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered…�
The drama of the rise of Christian Fascism is the drama of a cultural nervous breakdown in the face of potential global destruction, of a psychosis that aims to cover or “re-cover� a cultural identity – a social “normalcy� – in the face of traumatic global developments that make “normalcy� obsolete.
We have a choice to make, and to make it we need to understand the myth of mass death that drives the central religion of western civilization, and to understand the systematic nature of the cultural war that is being waged as part of the drama of a coming destruction.
We need to understand it in depth, to venture into the heart of the apocalyptic darkness before us, pierce its veil and reclaim our lost intelligence, so that we might take clear, unequivocal action to reverse our course.
Chief Arvol Looking Horse of the Lakota nation has told us:
“We have come to a time and place of great urgency.
The fate of future generations rests in our hands…
It's our own choice -- each of ours and all of ours.
You yourself are the one who must decide.
You alone-- and only you -- can make this crucial choice.
Whatever you decide is what you'll be, to walk in honor or to dishonor your relatives.
You can't escape the consequences of your own decision.
This essay is dedicated to our survival, to the survival of Life on Earth, and to the indigenous survivors of the American Apocalypse.
Part 1: “It is dominion we are after.�
“We thank god that it has come to us instead of to our enemies, and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His way and for His purposes.� – President Harry Truman on his decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan.
When the world shattered they closed themselves, folded in upon themselves, sought security in the known; it was the beginning of the era of the great fear, the era of atomic war. Joe McCarthy was their shaman, the one who would fix the crack, bring everything back into order, under control.
They blamed everyone but themselves, anything and everything but the white imperial “we� – the “we� that people mean when they say “we� invaded Iraq, or “we� are the “richest nation in the world.� That same “we� had dropped the Bomb.
For them it wasn’t real. For them it meant power, god’s will. It wasn’t a death sentence for the world, for life on Earth; it was only a sentence on the Others, the dangerous ones. And the sentence had been executed.
The world had not shattered, it had not split, the Sun was still in the sky - not on this Earth: the Sun was not boiling here, on this block, this street; the sun had only spilled its force there, among the Others, the dark skinned Japanese. “We� – they - still had bicycles and bobby socks, Shetland ponies, fringed cowboy suits, white hats, the movies and Dad’s Chevy. Everything was still “normal.�
But shadows were burnt into the wall.
The message was plain and it could not be hidden. Millions read its writing. The world turned upside down, millions spoke the unspoken, the forbidden: power comes from the barrel of a gun: turn on, tune in, drop out: earth first: get your laws off my body: and worse, Black Power, Red Power, Brown Power and the rebirth of an Earth based spirituality rooted in non-Western traditions.
With the advent of the bomb, the foundations of the culture had cracked; “civilization� now threatened the foundation of life itself. Reality itself had imposed the need to re-evaluate all values, to question the foundations of morality, culture, purpose and the relationship of human beings to the Earth and the millions of other living beings that are her creation.
People sought and demanded new myths to live by, a new sense of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going.
The questions were fundamentally religious and ontological. The very foundations of the political world and the world of production came also came under attack as people raised the most basic questions about social organization; whose needs are to be met; by whom; and on what terms. Everything came open to question.
For white middle class fundamentalist Christians it meant that everything, therefore, had come under assault.
The Empire itself was threatened with disintegration as hundreds of millions rose up in anti-colonial struggles across the globe.
To listen to Christian radio in the 60s and 70s was to hear an ongoing litany of a culture in disintegration; the stunned litany of a religious white middle class that had become, in its own mind, a victim – a victim of the savages, Blacks revolutionaries, radical women, crazed gun-toting Indians, Brown Berets, LSD, birth control, lesbians, gays, and New Age “occultists.�
The Christian Anti-Communism Crusade urged its members to heed the advice of the Book of Ephesians: "And do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them."
For the emergent Christian Right, it was not the Earth and Life itself that were threatened, it was their place in the world as they knew it, their small power, the rules they lived by that secured their position; their sense of belonging in a world that no longer was.
They weren’t about to take it lying down. Power and privilege were theirs by “right,� by assumption, by training, by virtue of their race, class and culture. “God� had “given� them “this great country� to conquer. It was their manifest destiny, their prophecy, a populist white version of the divine right of kings.
The world would get back in its place. Or they would kill it, as surely as they had wiped out or enslaved all the rest of the savages.
This faith was the very foundation of their heritage. That’s what they mean when they say this is a “Christian Nation.� That’s why, in the 1950s, they added “one nation, under god� to the pledge of allegiance.
But by the time the 60s passed, conservatism was in shambles, and white colonialist US culture was on the defensive in every sphere.
Finally, Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and co-founder of the Moral Majority, called for a retreat from politics and for a conservative re-grouping, for the formation of a more conscious reactionary agenda.
What emerged was a drive for a new drama, a new counter-counterculture, or an alternative counterculture, as they called it, a drive to create a cult of normalcy whose aim was to reverse the verdicts of the 60s and “reframe this struggle as a moral struggle, as a transcendent struggle, as a struggle between good and evil� along traditional Christian lines.
The means were to be the building of “alternative� right wing counter-institutions like Fox News, the Washington Times, a massive network of radical right wing talk shows, counter-cultural efforts like home schooling, and massive outreach to radical Christian fundamentalists of every persuasion, to the Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and to the Catholic Charismatics.
They sought to spark and capture a counter-imagination, to spawn a “culture war,� a Christian Cultural Counter-Revolution to appeal to the fantasies of those in the deepest denial. They wanted to crush, once and for all, the religious, cultural and political questions of the 60s counterculture, and to wipe away any memory of the verdicts it had rendered about the nature of oppression, racism and genocide, ecological destruction, the “one true god,� and the very nature of Western civilization.
It was to be a new movement – with a vengeance.
The world was to be what god said it was. “Civilization� and “civilized� values would reign: no matter that it was only a moment until midnight on the atomic clock; no matter global warming and the limits to growth – no matter reality itself.
Today, the extreme Right criticizes its opposition as “reality based,� holding that reality is something created by action and power – ultimately fascist action and fascist power backed by “god� – nothing more and nothing less.
The “reframing� of the struggle “as a moral struggle, as a transcendent struggle, as a struggle between good and evil,� would require not only the delegitimization of bourgeois democratic institutions and the creation of “alternatives,� but the waging of the fiercest kind of counterattacks against post-Hiroshima culture in the US and anti-colonial cultures around the world. Christian Fascist strategist Eric Heubeck wrote:
"We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment's rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American. We will offer constant reminders that there is an alternative, there is a better way. When people have had enough of the sickness and decay of today's American culture, they will be embraced by and welcomed into the New Traditionalist movement. The rejection of the existing society by the people will thus be accomplished by pushing them and pulling them simultaneously.�
This repressive “spiritual warfare� is one of the hallmarks of Christian fascist practice as they prepare the ground for the apocalypse. Disgraced former House Speaker Tom DeLay – who believed the US invasion of Iraq would open the gate to Armageddon, called the 2000 election a "battle for souls."
Katherine Yurica summed up the Right’s new rules of engagement this way:
1) Falsehoods are not only acceptable, they are a necessity. The corollary is: The masses will accept any lie if it is spoken with vigor, energy and dedication.
Think Iraq.
2) It is necessary to be cast under the cloak of "goodness" whereas all opponents and their ideas must be cast as "evil."
Think: “War on Terror.�
3) Complete destruction of every opponent must be accomplished through unrelenting personal attacks.
Think, among others, of Bill Clinton, who the fascists see, amazingly enough, as a dangerous embodiment of the 60s counter-culture.
4) The creation of the appearance of overwhelming power and brutality is necessary in order to destroy the will of opponents to launch opposition of any kind.
Think: the legalization of torture - virtually unknown since the Christian Inquisitions.
Think of the fundamentalist-backed death squad regime of Rios Montt in Guatemala, as he carried out the genocide of 250,000 Mayan Indians with the praises of fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell.
The historical legacy of Eurocentric Christianity is a record of racist and sexist genocide – 100 million dead Native Americans and 100 million dead Africans – conquered, colonized, converted and enslaved by the sword and the cross; millions of women burned at the stake under a regime of mass torture called The Inquisition; millions of Gypsies and Jews burned in ovens, the shadows of Japanese burned into the walls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…
Break the taboo. Think.
The Christian fascism we see arising before us is not the historical exception – it’s the rule, a rule proven time and again over the last half – millennia. Christian Rome got its start slaughtering pagans and Gnostics in a drive for imperial cultural conformity and conquest. It’s little different now.
This is a deadly serious business. The top priority and main target of the Christian Right in its first period in power under Ronald Reagan was peoples of color in the US. They carried out, not a “War on Terror,� but a “War on Drugs� which was successfully aimed at creating police state conditions in the nation’s ghettos, barrios and reservations.
Fascism always targets the Other, and comes first for the Other.
Black, Red and Brown have lived under virtual fascism - mass terror, police occupation and mass incarceration - for a generation now, suffering the highest rates of incarceration in the world, since the War on Drugs and mass incarceration took the place of segregation and Jim Crow laws.
Not thousands, but millions have been snatched off the streets in a rigged war that targets not terror or drugs, but the oppressed nationalities in the US.
Colonized Black, Red and Brown peoples are Christian Fascism’s new “Jews,� the new “Other,� whose mass imprisonment has been met with silence by the white nation – and by the world - for 25 years. They’ve only recently been joined by Arab and Muslim as mass targets.
Remember Katherine Yurica’s point: the Christian Fascists hold that
The creation of the appearance of overwhelming power and brutality is necessary in order to destroy the will of opponents to launch opposition of any kind.
People in the US have become deeply adjusted to these conditions over a generation, now.
It’s no wonder, then, that the only mass resistance to emerging fascism has come from the millions of migrants and Chican@s who took the streets last Spring, a resistance that stopped Christian Fascist’s plans for mass roundups cold, and split the Republican Party wide open. These protests – with their implicit threats of mass resistance and rebellion - began the process of the Republican Party’s recent infighting, disintegration and unraveling.
Otherwise, since 1992, there has been little but silence.
Think of your own silence in the face of what is coming. It’s time now to come out of the fog. It’s time to see things for what they are.
It’s no secret. The Christian Dominionists, a fascistic cult that appears to include US President George W. Bush among its followers, seeks to end the separation of church and state and to replace current governmental structures with a theocracy ruled by Old Testament law. Only then, they believe, will Christ “return� to rule – and end - the world. Dominionist George Grant writes:
Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ - to have dominion in the civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
But it is dominion that we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
“Dominion� of course means “domination.�
Grant continues:
"World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less…
“Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land - of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ. It is to reinstitute the authority of God's Word as supreme over all judgments, over all legislation, over all declarations, constitutions, and confederations. True Christian political action seeks to rein the passions of men and curb the pattern of digression under God's rule.�
Gary North, one of the founders of Dominionism, complained that the counterculture of the 60s had undermined three basic tenets of Christian civilization: a faith in its cultural supremacy and destiny – or “predestination� ; rigid reactionary moralism, or “biblical law� ; and an assured sense of ultimate global “victory� for the West – what he called an end times “eschatological optimism.� <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->
Using slightly different language, North also made it clear that the Christian fascist movement would have to emulate the sense of certainty that motivates revolutionary Marxism and Islamic Jihadism:
Three basic ideas are crucial for the success of any religious, social, intellectual, and political movement. First, the doctrine of predestination. Second, the doctrine of law. Third, the doctrine of inevitable victory. The fusion of these three ideas has led to the victories of Marxism since 1848. Islam has a similar faith.
To restore these elements of faith in Eurocentric civilization would be to “have laid down the foundations of a paradigm shift,"
It is of urgent importance that we look closely at the notion of “evil,� remembering that a key goal of the Christian Right is to “reframe this struggle as a moral struggle, as a transcendent struggle, as a struggle between good and evil.�
“Evil� in this context means little more than opposition to the strictures, mores and authorities of an oppressive civilization.
M. Scott Peck, the popular Christian psychiatrist, spoke of evil in different terms altogether, placing primary focus on the use of power to scapegoat others in order to avoid one’s own spiritual and moral growth.
Yurica notes:
Peck draws a profile of the evil: they have no regard for the truth; they lie and live in a world of lies. They are masters of disguise and cloak themselves with masks of respectability, goodness and often piety. (Peck tells us that religiosity is a common and effective disguise.) But it is the appearance of propriety and respectability that is the important factor. Peck defines evil as: “The exercise of political power—that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion…� Or in other words: it is the use “of political power to destroy others,� for the purpose of defending or preserving the integrity of one’s sick self (or group).
The Christian fascist movement seeks political power; it is driven by a profound urge to scapegoat and punish the Other, especially those who will not accept the norms and mores it seeks to impose.
Most fundamentally, the movement is comprised of a group that seeks to avoid the growth inherent in facing the reality that the foundations of oppressive civilization have shattered: who refuse to believe that civilization, as we call it, has led us to the brink of collapse and an incomprehensible mass death of life on Earth.
This is a group comprised of people who refuse to take moral responsibility for the impact of this civilization on the living Earth, and on all her living beings. They refuse to acknowledge that we are responsible, that we are both the inheritors and authors of our cultures.
These are people who refuse to acknowledge that we, as Walter A. Davis suggests, “must listen to the details� of our illness if there is to be any hope for the world to heal.
These are people who believe the answer to the crisis we face is to strengthen and reinforce the most reactionary aspects of an oppressive system that is destroying us all, and they are doing so for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of a sick, dying - and killing - civilization.
If our intentions are shown in our actions and in the ultimate impact of our actions on others and on the world, then these are worshippers of death, of a dead body hanging on a tree – not of a rising, living spirit.
They are traitors to Life. We dare not leave the fate of the Earth in their hands.
Part 2: The Blessed and the Cursed
“But first you must learn how to smile as you kill, if you want to be like the folks on the hill.� John Lennon, Working Class Hero
There is a profound appeal in Christianity, even for those who have been most oppressed by it: the promise of peace and of being blessed and cared for by god. To be “saved� is to be someone special, anointed by god, chosen for his purposes, secure in one’s struggle against a world that has lost its way. Some make the choice hoping for a sense of spiritual community in an alienated world, in a hope for hope, in a hope for healing.
But a glance beyond the surface shows the reality of a different social dynamic at work, a dynamic of exclusion, punishment, shunning, internalized oppression, and of a series of impossible hopes – impossible because the foundation on which they rest leads in exactly the opposite direction than the promise they seem to hold.
To be “saved� is also to be among god’s “elect.� The theory – the theology - is that god has pre-ordained who is to be “saved� and who is not – who’s in and who’s out, who’s blessed and who’s cursed. The problem of course, is that one can never know. But the “saved� act like they know. One of the signs of being among the “elect� is the accumulation of wealth. In the Protestant US, that’s the main way you “know.�
To be “blessed� is to be wealthy – or like the wealthy – in spirit. The “well being� of the blessed imitates the “special� well being of the wealthy, the wholesome, the privileged and the “beautiful.� It also imitates their smug sense of superiority.
Those who aren’t blessed, of course, are cursed. The elect, the blessed, and the chosen require the outsider, the cursed and the inferior, simply in order to exist as a category of special people in the eyes of “god.�
Just like the soldier needs an enemy, like the wife beater needs a wife, like the employer (user) needs the employee (the one used), like white needs black, like rich needs poor, and just as the oppressor needs the oppressed, the blessed need the cursed.
The truth is that everyone knows which category they fall in.
The anxiety over whether one is “chosen� masks an underlying fear that being “better� than others may actually constitute an arrogant sickness, or a fear that no matter what one does or becomes, one will never be good enough.
Under such conditions, there can be no real moral or spiritual community, no real acceptance of self or other, no moral equality, and no truly common purpose other than to punish the outsider, the Other, and a joint defense of the illusion of the special stature of one’s own group.
The imprint of the Inquisitions lies very heavily on white European Christian culture. Its legacy is a profound fear of being different, of being found out as different, of being punished – tortured and burned alive - for being different, of profound punishment for those who stray, who bring the family or the group under the suspicion of the authorities for being different.
It is a legacy of the “blessed� destroying those who are different, and of doing so on an unimaginably mass scale. For the Spanish conquerors in the Americas, human beings were referred to as Christians. The non-Christians, the Indians, were not a part of their blessed ranks. Not being Christians, they were, by definition, sub-human.
Part 3: A Manifest Destiny: “God has selected them to battle the forces of evil…�
“…every nation needs sacred legitimation. It needs the authority of transcendence: of a story larger than itself, a story that connects past with present and future. An Empire needs an even broader story: one that connects with cosmic and/or historical redemption and new creation.� – The Reverend Rich Lang in George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism
Many Americans disapprove of the Bush Administration's belligerent policies, but few are aware of its extremism, its totalism. – Robert Jay Lifton
The occult foundation of Christian fascism lies in the embrace of an impending apocalypse and the conviction that only “true� Christians will be saved from the coming period of the Great Tribulation and Armageddon. Everyone else – human and non-human alike, will die; the Earth herself will be destroyed.
Hal Lindsey, author of the best selling book The Late Great Planet Earth calls us the “terminal generation," in a scenario in which god is the Terminator.
According to a Time / CNN poll 59% of the people in the US believe the prophecies in the Book of Revelation will come true, while 36% believe that the Bible is the word of God and is to be taken literally. 35% say that, since 9-1-1, they are paying closer attention to news events and how they might relate to the coming end of the world.
Time says, “Talk to the people who were already inclined to read omens in the headlines, and you hear their excitement, even eagerness to see what happens next.�
Millions of people see – or, more often, only sense, the catastrophic potentials of the global war on terror, the nuclear threat posed by the US to the people of Iran, the unfathomable devastation promised by global warming and peak oil, and have no other language in which to describe an impending collapse other than the language offered by the Book of Revelations.
But for true fundamentalist “believers� every emergent horror we face - from the impending probability of nuclear war against Iran to the incomprehensibly vast mass extinctions that will come with global warming - is a cause for celebration. They are celebrating global genocide and ecocide – in a word, omnicide; the Death of Everything.
These are the sickened, hardened, psychologically split adherents of the “one true way� of life enforced by this civilization, those who greedily seek out each sign of approaching doom in what Walter A. Davis has called a “self-hypnotic iteration of all the signs or behaviors one maintains in order to reassure oneself of one's salvation.�
The signs affirm them and “prove� to them the validity of a sado-masochistic, Orwellian logic in which apocalyptic Destruction = Salvation, and Death = Life.
Each harbinger of doom is a sign that Jesus is “coming back� to save them, and only them, from the global destruction they have wrought.
The Reverend Rich Lang noted:
“It used to be that the Church could control people through the fear of eternal damnation. Today it is through fear of the future. The theology is basically this: The Bible is a code book that when rightly interpreted reveals that we are living at the end of history. History is scripted and is about to come to a catastrophic conclusion. The only hope is to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior so that you can be "saved" from the future apocalypse. God will "snatch you up" (Rapture) right before a seven year series of horrible events that will see the rise of Antichrist and the rebuilding of the Jewish temple. There will be world war with most of humanity dying. At that point Jesus will return to restore law and order. This theology of despair "fits" our current culture of powerlessness and fear. From… weapons of mass destruction to the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, to ecological collapse, the whole world seems to be on a "no exit" slide into an end times abyss. The theology of despair is very seductive. It is shaping the spirituality of Christians which provides a strong core from which Bush draws political strength.�
There’s nothing innocent or passive about any of this. Apocalyptic fears are being promoted and played on by the Christian Right to prepare their followers to play an active role in a coming holocaust. Their influence is profound.
One in eight people in the US has bought a book in the Christian apocalyptic Left Behind series: over 60 million copies have been sold.
Michelle Goldberg says Left Behind
“…creates a Christian theory of everything, one that slates current events into a master narrative in which the world is destroyed and then remade to evangelical specifications. It's an alternate universe in which conservative Middle Americans are vindicated against everyone who doesn't share their beliefs...�
In the Washington Post, Melani McAlister described the outlook of the Left Behind series as “Christian Jihadist,� deriding the
“chorus of fundamentalist commentators who, despite their protestations to the contrary, have expressed a perverse enthusiasm for the spilled blood and millions of dead that will signal the Second Coming…
“What they say is sobering: that war is not proof of the failure of politics, but the necessary sign of God's action in history and the path to world redemption.�
There are other, largely unnoticed and extremely violent signs of the times emerging, as the culture and propaganda of the Christian Right take on a sharper tone of militarism. This new, violent propaganda especially targets young people, and some of it, at a minimum, has the backing of prominent figures on the Christian Right like George W. Bush, Barbara Bush, Jerry Falwell, Tim La Haye, and Pat Robertson.
On November 7th, 2006, on election day and just in time for the Christmas shopping season, a new video game based on these novels will be released; it’s called Left Behind: Eternal Forces. It’s aimed at young teens, whose mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare," to train for a coming holy war against the anti-christ and the “forces of darkness.�
Left Behind: Eternal Forces will sell in the millions: some predict it will go mainstream. It’s being marketed through the same network of mega-churches that made the Dominionist guidebook The Purpose Driven Life a best seller. The game’s producers claim market surveys show that 92% of Left Behind readers will buy the game, as well.
One can “play� on the side of the (Christian) Tribulation Forces or the Global Community Peacekeepers (the “bad guys� ) in the final showdown between “good and evil.�
The game might better be called “Convert or Die,� “Christian Militia,� or even “Christian Death Squad.� Highly armed and newly converted Christians roam the streets of New York in a scene set during the Great Tribulation: their job is to “witness� to non-believers, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, Gays, moderate mainstream Christians and others, and if they fail or refuse to be “born again� on the spot, the task is to kill them.
And, of course, in the classic genocidal gesture, to let god sort them out.
One commentator complained that the game teaches Christian youth “that to kill nonbelievers is fun and consequence-free.�
The game prefigures a religious war in the US and Israel – it’s a computer version of the kind of madness seen in the documentary film Jesus Camp, “where kids are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in God's Army and are schooled in how to take back America for Christ.�
The "Kids on Fire Summer Camp," which is featured in the film, is a Christian camp consciously modeled on the Islamic Madrassa schools where individuals are indoctrinated in the outlook of the Jihad.
Others are intent on “saving� young people from the profound questioning inherent in post–Hiroshima culture, claiming that “today's teens are being attacked by popular culture like no other generation.�
At a series of heavy handed, thudding Christian “rock� concerts called Battle Cry, Ron Luce, concert organizer and head of Teen Mania Ministries, declares to the crowd, “This is war. And Jesus invites us to get into the action.� He calls of tens of thousands of young people to join the “battle for the souls of men� (sic). No battle can be won, he proclaims, and “no souls can be saved without the shedding of blood. Blood must be shed!�
Military imagery is a constant at these events, and Battle Cry attempts to enlist teens in what it calls “God’s Army: The Battle Cry Coalition.�
Sunsara Taylor, noting the “spectacular light shows, Hummers, Navy SEALs and military imagery on stage,� wrote:
“This merging of God’s army and the U.S. military echoed the event that opened the day: the reading of a letter of greeting and blessing from George W. Bush. After the reading, a minister led thousands to bow their heads and thank the Lord for giving them George Bush, the commander in chief of America’s military.�
Battle Cry attendees have also been addressed by Barbara Bush and by former President Gerald Ford. The group is backed by Christian extremists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell – infamous for their support of the Guatemalan death squads that carried out the genocide of 250,000 Mayan Indians in the 1980s.
Like the youth exposed to such “games,� “camps� and “concerts� however, not everyone who is drawn to the fundamentalist version of the apocalypse is a conscious or indoctrinated Christian Fascist.
But everyone in the US is immersed in a set of cultural assumptions that have laid the foundation for the particular form Christian Fascism is taking here, assumptions that are central to US history and the Euro-American sense of identity.
David Neiwert correctly maintains that the Christian Right holds “a religious view akin to Manifest Destiny, a belief in American exceptionalism viewed through a prism of apocalyptic fundamentalist Christianity.�
Manifest Destiny is an outgrowth of the apocalyptic world view of the early European invaders of the Western Hemisphere. Cristóbal Colón (Columbus) believed his “discovery� of the “new� world was an intimate part of god’s plan which would soon result in the “last judgment� and the apocalypse.
Converting the “Indians,� had to be accomplished before the world could end. Instead, as Patricia Eddy noted, “the world ended only for the Indians.� The real apocalypse - genocide – ended the world for some 100 million people.
The Puritans, who established a European colonial and totalitarian theocracy in the western hemisphere and who initiated a quarter – millinenum of English genocide in what is now the US, were also motivated by an apocalyptic world view.
Eddy writes, “In the seventeenth century… the Puritans, set several dates for the end. The most famous was 1666. They believed that God would punish wicked England with his heavenly fireworks, and they fled to these shores for safety. Some arrived as early as 1630 thinking the world will end in only 36 years.�
The Puritans saw themselves as “the elect,� a chosen people with an elevated role in the battle between christ and the anti-christ, a theme that has morphed over the centuries to include the special role Christian fundamentalists in the US imagine for themselves today.
There was nothing unusual in the Puritan interpretation. Avihu Zakai, in Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America, notes that:
“Protestant historiography based itself on a historical interpretation of divine prophecies and regarded the Apocalypse the guide to the entire course of the history of salvation and redemption. Consequently, the Reformation gave rise to a new form of historical consciousness… based upon apocalyptic interpretation of history.�
Martin Luther thought the world would end no later than 1600.
Manifest destiny, a direct outgrowth of Puritan theology and an apocalyptic sense of history, is a fascistic, messianic myth of divine nationhood and expansionism.
It was first used to justify the conquest of Native lands and peoples in what is for now the US, then to justify US colonialism and empire elsewhere, US interventionism, and, by the time of Woodrow Wilson, to justify the exportation and imposition of “democracy� on other peoples.
The myth is inherently racist, and rests on a belief in “progress� and European superiority. The “civilized race� still uses this myth to justify white subjugation of an entire world of Black, Brown and Yellow peoples. Theodore Roosevelt made it plain:
“Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion… That the barbarians recede or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows retrogression or conquest, is due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes of the world where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.�
In The Star of Empire Albert Jeremiah Beveridge said it even more succinctly:
“It is destiny that the world be rescued from its natural wilderness and savage men.�
These ideas are nothing antiquated. The logic of Manifest Destiny is precisely the same “logic� that underlies the current bid for a Pax Americana, and the crusade for US global domination - the crusade to “tame� the “savage� Muslims of the world.
For the founders of Christian Dominionism and its practitioners in power – men like R.J. Rushdoony and Gary North - racism and the urge to dominate the Other don’t start, or stop, with Muslims and Arabs.
These are some of the central political and cultural positions of Dominionists. The wedding of key elements of Manifest Destiny and Christian extremism should become obvious:
North on Native Americans:
Liberals, he writes, “never, ever say "American natives," since this is only one step away from "American savages," which is precisely what most of those demon-worshipping, Negro slave-holding, frequently land-polluting people were.... This was one of the great sins in American life, they say: "the stealing of Indian lands".... That a million savages had a legitimate legal claim on the whole of North America north of Mexico is the unstated assumption of such critics.�
Rushdoony on Black slavery and white guilt:
“The political cultivation of guilt is a central means to power, for guilty men are slaves; their conscience is in bondage, and hence they are easily made objects of control. Guilt is thus systematically taught for purposes of control… the white man is being systematically indoctrinated into believing that he is guilty of enslaving and abusing the Negro. Granted that some Negroes were mistreated as slaves, the fact still remains that nowhere in all history or in the world today has the Negro been better off.�
North on Citizenship:
“Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant--baptism and holy communion--must be denied citizenship, just as they were in ancient Israel.�
Rushdoony on Democracy:
“The church today has fallen prey to the heresy of democracy.�
North on European Superiority and Genocide:
“It occurs to me: Was Moses arrogant and unbiblical when he instructed the Israelites to kill every Canaanite in the land (Deut. 7:2; 20:16-17)? Was he an "elitist" or (horror of horrors) a racist? No; he was a God-fearing man who sought to obey God, who commanded them to kill them all. It sounds like a "superior attitude" to me. Of course, Christians have been given no comparable military command in New Testament, but I am trying to deal with the attitude of superiority--a superiority based on our possession of the law of God. That attitude is something Christians must have when dealing with all pagans. God has given us the tools of dominion.�
Rushdoony on Conquest
“All enemies of Christ in this fallen world must be conquered.�
North has said that “back alleys are where abortions belong,� and that women who have abortions should be executed - publicly, "along with those who advised them to abort their children.� Sunsara Taylor, attacking the Christian Right, has a different point to make:
“Today, their cruel attacks on the fundamental rights of women —to remove reality-based sex education, to criminalize and even kill doctors who provide abortions, to dry up access to and social acceptance of birth control, and to reassert the shackles of traditional marriage including through legally and culturally attacking divorce… hearken back to the traditions of this country which regard women as the legal property of their husbands.�
Dominionist theologian Rev. William Einwechter, wrote an essay entitled "Modern Issues in Biblical Perspective: Stoning Disobedient Children," in which he advocated a return to the practice.
“Contempt of parental authority, if left unchecked, is the death of the family, law, and order… Therefore, the execution of the rebel [the child] in view is just, merciful, and preventive. Just, in that the transgressor deserves to die; merciful, in that his quick death prevents the destruction of the family, society, and others; preventive, in that it strikes fear in the heart of other would-be rebels and restrains them from taking a similar ruinous course."
That’s what they mean by “family values.� Hate. And more than hate. Murder.
The list of those to be degraded and persecuted is ultimately endless because the hatred and resentment that give rise to it have no point of resolution in the outside world of “enemies.� Empire, and the “need� for it, are both endless and bottomless.
This is exactly the sensibility in which President Bush was immersed as part of his conversion experience. It’s what he was born into when he was “born again.�
George W. Bush’s religious training came at the hands of Dominionist preacher Dr. Tony Evans of the Christian male supremacist organization Promise Keepers, which holds a vision of an "apocalyptic masculinity,� and which targets lesbians, feminists and gays "as a threat to the pure community."
Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times, writes:
“It was through Evans, who was a spiritual mentor to George Bush that Dominionism came to dominate the politically active wing of the Christian Right. The religious utterances from political leaders such as George Bush, Tom Delay, Pat Robertson and Zell Miller are only understandable in light of Rushdooney and Dominionism. These leaders believe that God has selected them to battle the forces of evil…�
No one knows – or no one who knows is saying - whether Bush fully embraces Dominionism or whether he’s that other brand of fundamentalist – a premillinealist. Perhaps both influences are at work. Modern Christian fundamentalism is split on the question in what North calls a “theological schizophrenia.�
There’s little difference, however, in terms of its impact on his actions as a ruler. In one case he’s seeking to consolidate a Christian empire that dominates the globe so Christ and the apocalypse can come; in the other case he’s laying the groundwork for an Armageddon type scenario in the very short term.
Both involve an apocalyptic embrace of genocide and ecocide.
