Histrionics Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

Are Christian fundamentalists who believe only in the separation of church and heaven worthy of the term "fascist"? According to Chris Hedges, they are. But more than that, they're analogous to the Nazis in 1933, poised with as much lethal determination to rise to power through democratic means. Right? Not quite:

There are problems with this analogy. First, democracy in America is much stronger than it was in Weimar Germany in 1933. Nor is the Christian right as widespread or powerful as Hedges suggests. Among conservative Christians who are working class or lower class, "a dramatic majority" voted for Bill Clinton for president — that's the finding of sociologists Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout in their recent book "The Truth About Conservative Christians." A 2004 survey for "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" on PBS found that a majority of evangelicals have an unfavorable view of Falwell and that a significant minority of them are more concerned about jobs and the economy than about abortion and gay marriage. And it isn't as if conservative Christians are the only obstacle to gay marriage: Yes, 85% of white evangelicals oppose gay marriage, but in the general population the figure is 61%. In fact, the differences between today's Christian right and the movements led by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are greater than the similarities. Hitler was more pagan than Christian. Street violence was a key tactic of Mussolini's Brownshirts; the Christian right has focused on nonviolent demonstrations outside U.S. abortion clinics and on changing laws at the ballot box. And there's a big difference between supporting laws against gay marriage and putting gays in concentration camps.

And unlike in Weimar Germany, there are no Communists in America declaring the evangelical movement the last gasp of bourgeois capitalism that must first "run its course" before the revolution comes. Here, talk of the impending threat of the Dobson Brigade is as loud as talk of the impending threat of Hitler was muted when he methodically ground his way to electoral victory in the Reichstag. Also, there was no palpable "thumping" of National Socialism until Dresden.

Those who fail to study history are doomed to use it as a caricature for fashionable political purposes.