AMERICAN FASCISM WILL COME "CARRYING
CROSSES AND CHANTING THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE"

This Modern World excerpts from an article in the current Harper's Magazine (unavailable online, unfortunately) written by religion writer Chris Hedges (who was interviewed by Democracy Now only a few weeks ago):

I can't help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists flirt with fascism in the 1930s.

Click here for the rest.

This is all starting to come together. It's not that I'm angry with the religious right because of their warped view of, well, everything, and I am angry with them: it's that these people are dangerous, the first real threat that this country has encountered from within since the Civil War. Actually, in many ways, this whole thing very much comes down from the Civil War, stupid, racist, violent, homophobic, anti-sex Southern attitudes on the cusp of regaining legitimacy. I remember years ago telling an intellectual New Yorker friend of mine that the fundamentalists are a major threat to America. He told me that these people are just nutjobs on the fringes of society, no threat at all. Well, they're pretty much in charge now, and it looks like they're starting to make some serious power plays. Are we in real trouble yet? I just don't know.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$