Former Christian Fundamentalist’s Warning:

The Grave Danger of Christian Fascism

September 5, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Note: Vice President Mike Pence is exactly the kind of fundamentalist Christian Fascist that is spoken about in the article below. Trump’s cabinet is also riddled with these Christian Fascists, including Betsy DeVos, secretary of education. And Trump has appointed another of these Christian Fascists, Neil Gorsuch, to the Supreme Court. All this is one of the crucial reasons why the whole Trump/Pence fascist regime must go!

*****

Katherine Stewart, the author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, at one point quotes Rich Lang, himself a former Christian fundamentalist who broke with that and became a liberal Christian pastor, as follows:

It astonishes me that people don’t get it, that ideas have consequences....

When I was born again, faith was something inside of you, something you were supposed to reflect through your life. But in the 1980s, something happened. Fundamentalist Christianity jumped back into the public square with the intention to reshape the country as a Christian nation as defined by them.

Stewart notes that, “In Lang’s view, the American public remains inexcusably ignorant about the new religion in its midst.” Then she quotes Lang again as follows:

Fundamentalism is a global phenomenon, and it has come back on steroids since the 1970s and 1980s. Whether you’re talking Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, all forms of fundamentalism are on the rise....

And they all want the kids.... It’s no different than the Nazis wanting to start with the Hitler Youth. That is where you’d want to start if you were trying to build a fascist movement.

Stewart then remarks: “He pauses to make sure I’ve heard him correctly.” Then she quotes Lang again:

That’s the word, “fascism.”  Nobody likes to use it in this country.  But I believe that in this country, underneath the appearances, that is exactly the great temptation of our time.... and you have to call it what it is—“Christian Fascism.”

Stewart further summarizes Lang’s views this way: “Modern fundamentalism, like fascism in earlier times, he says, involves a strong feeling of persecution, typically at the hands of godless liberals or a religious ‘other’; the belief that one belongs to a pure race or national group that is responsible for past greatness, suffers unjust oppression in the present, and is the rightful ruler of the world; the impulse to submit unquestioningly to absolute authority; and the relentless drive for power and control.  It is, he says, a kind of supremacist movement, with religion rather than race at its core.”

And then Stewart quotes the following chilling remarks by Lang:

People have no idea it’s going on....

What does it mean that the conservative church that’s growing in America is an end-times church? What does it mean that we are raising a generation of children to believe that they are the last generation? What is going to happen if we keep on telling them, “Don’t care about the environment, and bring on the war, because we’re going to be lifted out of here, and you can forget about loving your neighbors, because they’re just going to get blown away”?

Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.