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Twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists first spoke of the United States becoming a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedom and our way of life. In American Fascists, Chris Hedges, veteran journalist and author of the National Book Award finalist War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, challenges the Christian Right's religious legitimacy and argues that at its core it is a mass movement fueled by unbridled nationalism and a hatred for the open society.
Hedges, who grew up in rural parishes in upstate New York where his father was a Presbyterian pastor, attacks the movement as someone steeped in the Bible and Christian tradition. He points to the hundreds of senators and members of Congress who have earned between 80 and 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups as one of many signs that the movement is burrowing deep inside the American government to subvert it. The movement's call to dismantle the wall between church and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America are pumped into tens of millions of American homes through Christian television and radio stations, as well as reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools. The movement's yearning for apocalyptic violence and its assault on dispassionate, intellectual inquiry are laying the foundation for a new, frightening America.
American Fascists, which includes interviews and coverage of events such as pro-life rallies and weeklong classes on conversion techniques, examines the movement's origins, its driving motivations and its dark ideological underpinnings. Hedges argues that the movement currently resembles the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s, movements that often masked the full extent of their drive for totalitarianism and were willing to make concessions until they achieved unrivaled power. The Christian Right, like these early fascist movements, does not openly call for dictatorship, nor does it use physical violence to suppress opposition. In short, the movement is not yet revolutionary. But the ideological architecture of a Christian fascism is being cemented in place. The movement has roused its followers to a fever pitch of despair and fury. All it will take, Hedges writes, is one more national crisis on the order of September 11 for the Christian Right to make a concerted drive to destroy American democracy. The movement awaits a crisis. At that moment they will reveal themselves for what they truly are -- the American heirs to fascism. Hedges issues a potent, impassioned warning. We face an imminent threat. His book reminds us of the dangers liberal, democratic societies face when they tolerate the intolerant.
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slavetrade, as criminal. - Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
I grew up in a small farming town in upstate New York where my life, and the life of my family, centered on the Presbyterian Church. I prayed and sang hymns every Sunday, went to Bible school, listened to my father preach the weekly sermon and attended seminary at Harvard Divinity School to be a preacher myself. America was a place where things could be better if we worked to make them better, and where our faith saved us from despair, self-righteousness and the dangerous belief that we knew the will of God or could carry it out. We were taught that those who claimed to speak for God, the self-appointed prophets who promised the Kingdom of God on earth, were dangerous. We had no ability to understand God's will. We did the best we could. We trusted and had faith in the mystery, the unknown before us. We made decisions - even decisions that on the outside looked unobjectionably moral - well aware of the numerous motives, some good and some bad, that went into every human act. In the end, we all stood in need of forgiveness. We were all tainted by sin. None were pure. The Bible was not the literal word of God. It was not a self-help manual that could predict the future. It did not tell us how to vote or allow us to divide the world into us and them, the righteous and the damned, the infidels and the blessed. It was a book written by a series of ancient writers, certainly fallible and at times at odds with each other, who asked the right questions and struggled with the mystery and transcendence of human existence. We took the Bible seriously and therefore could not take it literally.
There was no alcohol in the manse where I grew up. Indeed, my father railed against the Glass Bar, the one bar in town, and the drinking in the VFW Hall. We did not work on Sunday. I never heard my father swear. But coupled with this piety was a belief that as Christians we were called to fight for justice. My father took an early stand in the town in support of the civil-rights movement, a position that was highly unpopular in rural, white enclaves where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most hated men in America. A veteran of World War II, he opposed the Vietnam War, telling me when I was about 12 that if the war was still being waged when I was 18, he would go to prison with me. To this day I carry in my head the rather gloomy image of sitting in a jail cell with my dad. Finally, because his youngest brother was gay, he understood the pain and isolation of being a gay man in America. He worked later in life in the gay-rights movement, calling for the ordination and marriage of gays. When he found that my college, Colgate University, had no gay and lesbian organization, he brought gay speakers to the campus. The meetings led gays and lesbians to confide in him that they felt uncomfortable coming out of the closet to start an open organization, a problem my father swiftly solved by taking me out to lunch and informing me that although I was not gay, I had to form the organization. When I went into the dining hall for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the checker behind the desk would take my card, mark off the appropriate box, and hand it back, muttering, "Faggot." This willingness to take a moral stand, to accept risk and ridicule, was, he showed me, the cost of the moral life.
The four Gospels, we understood, were filled with factual contradictions, two Gospels saying Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, while Luke asserted that John was already in prison. Mark and John give little importance to the birth of Jesus, while Matthew and Luke give differing accounts. There are three separate and different versions of the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20, Exodus 34, and Deuteronomy 5). As for the question of God's true nature, there are many substantive contradictions. Is God a loving or a vengeful God? In some sections of the Bible, vicious acts of vengeance, including the genocidal extermination of opposing tribes and nations, appear to be blessed by God. God turns on the Egyptians and transforms the Nile into blood so the Egyptians will suffer from thirst - and then sends swarms of locusts and flies to torture them, along with hail, fire and thunder from the heavens to destroy all plants and trees. To liberate the children of Israel, God orders the firstborn in every Egyptian household killed so all will know "that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel" (Exodus 11:7). The killing does not cease until "there was not a house where one was not dead" (Exodus 12:30). Amid the carnage God orders Moses to loot all the clothing, jewelry, gold and silver from the Egyptian homes (Exodus 12:35-36). God looks at the devastation and says, "I have made sport of the Egyptians" (Exodus 10:2). While the Exodus story fueled the hopes and dreams of oppressed Jews, and later African Americans in the bondage of slavery, it also has been used to foster religious chauvinism.
A literal reading of the Bible means reinstitution of slavery coupled with the understanding that the slavemaster has the right to beat his slave without mercy since "the slave is his money" (Exodus 21:21). Children who strike or curse a parent are to be executed (Exodus 21:15, 17). Those who pay homage to another god "shall be utterly destroyed" (Exodus 22:20). Menstruating women are to be considered unclean, and all they touch while menstruating becomes unclean (Leviticus 15:19-32). The blind, the lame, those with mutilated faces, those who are hunchbacks or dwarfs and those with itching diseases or scabs or crushed testicles cannot become priests (Leviticus 21:17-21). Blasphemers shall be executed (Leviticus 24:16). And "if the spirit of jealousy" comes upon a man, the high priest can order the jealous man's wife to drink the "water of bitterness." If she dies, it is proof of her guilt; if she survives, of her innocence (Numbers 5:11-31). Women, throughout the Bible, are subservient to men, often without legal rights, and men are free to sell their daughters into sexual bondage (Exodus 21:7-11).
Hatred of Jews and other non-Christians pervades the Gospel of John (3:18-20). Jews, he wrote, are children of the devil, the father of lies (John 8:39-44). Jesus calls on his followers to love their enemies and to pray for their persecutors (Matthew 5:44), a radical concept in the days of the Roman Empire. He says we must never demean or insult our enemies. But then we read of Jesus calling his enemies "a brood of vipers" (Matthew 12:34).
The Book of Revelation, a crucial text for the radical Christian Right, appears to show Christ returning to earth at the head of an avenging army. It is one of the few places in the Bible where Christ is associated with violence. This bizarre book, omitted from some of the early canons and relegated to the back of the Bible by Martin Luther, may have been a way, as scholars contend, for the early Christians to cope with Roman persecution and their dreams of final triumph and glory. The book, however, paints a picture of a bloody battle between the forces of good and evil, Christ and the Antichrist, God and Satan, and the torment and utter destruction of all who do not follow the faith. In this vision, only the faithful will be allowed to enter the gates of the New Jerusalem. All others will disappear, cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14-15). The Warrior's defeat of the armies of the nations, a vast apocalyptic vision of war, ends with birds of prey invited to "gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great" (Revelation 19:17-18). It is a story of God's ruthless, terrifying and violent power unleashed on nonbelievers:
The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch men with fire; men were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God, who had power over these plagues, and they did not repent and give him glory. The fifth angel poured his bowl on the throne of the beast, and its kingdom was in darkness; men gnawed their tongues in anguish and cursed the God of heaven for their pain and sores, and did not repent of their deeds. (Revelation 16:8-11)
There is enough hatred, bigotry and lust for violence in the pages of the Bible to satisfy anyone bent on justifying cruelty and violence. Religion, as H. Richard Niebuhr said, is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people. And the Bible has long been used in the wrong hands - such as antebellum slave owners in the American South who quoted from it to defend slavery - not to Christianize the culture, as those wielding it often claim, but to acculturate the Christian faith.
Many of the suppositions of the biblical writers, who understood little about the working of the cosmos or the human body, are so fanciful, and the accounts so wild, that even biblical literalists reject them. God is not, as many writers of the Bible believed, peering down at us through little peepholes in the sky called stars. These evangelicals and fundamentalists are, as the Reverend William Sloane Coffin wrote, not biblical literalists, as they claim, but "selective literalists," choosing the bits and pieces of the Bible that conform to their ideology and ignoring, distorting or inventing the rest. And the selective literalists cannot have it both ways. Either the Bible is literally true and all of its edicts must be obeyed, or it must be read in another way.
Mainstream Christians can also cherry-pick the Bible to create a Jesus and God who are always loving and compassionate. Such Christians often fail to acknowledge that there are hateful passages in the Bible that give sacred authority to the rage, self-aggrandizement and intolerance of the Christian Right. Church leaders must denounce the biblical passages that champion apocalyptic violence and hateful political creeds. They must do so in the light of other biblical passages that teach a compassion and tolerance, often exemplified in the life of Christ, which stands opposed to bigotry and violence. Until this happens, until the Christian churches wade into the debate, these biblical passages will be used by bigots and despots to give sacred authority to their calls to subjugate or eradicate the enemies of God. This literature in the biblical canon keeps alive the virus of hatred, whether dormant or active, and the possibility of apocalyptic terror in the name of God. And the steady refusal by churches to challenge the canonical authority of these passages means these churches share some of the blame. "Unless the churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, come together on this, they will continue to make it legitimate to believe in the end as a time when there will be no non-Christians or infidels," theologian Richard Fenn wrote. "Silent complicity with apocalyptic rhetoric soon becomes collusion with plans for religiously inspired genocide."
As long as scripture, blessed and accepted by the church, teaches that at the end of time there will be a Day of Wrath and Christians will control the shattered remnants of a world cleansed through violence and war, as long as it teaches that all nonbelievers will be tormented, destroyed and banished to hell, it will be hard to thwart the message of radical apocalyptic preachers or assuage the fears of the Islamic world that Christians are calling for its annihilation. Those who embrace this dark conclusion to life can find it endorsed in scripture, whether it is tucked into the back pew rack of a liberal Unitarian church in Boston or a megachurch in Florida. The mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches, declining in numbers and influence, cannot hope to combat the hysteria and excitement roused by these prophets of doom until they repudiate the apocalyptic writings in scripture.
The writers of Genesis, as the Reverend William Sloane Coffin has pointed out, who wrote about the creation of the world in seven days, knew nothing about the process of creation. They believed the earth was flat with water above and below it. They wrote that God created light on the first day and the sun on the fourth day. Genesis was not written to explain the process of creation, of which these writers knew nothing. It was written to help explain the purpose of creation. It was written to help us grasp a spiritual truth, not a scientific or historical fact. And this purpose, this spiritual truth, is something the writers did know about. These biblical writers, at their best, understood our divided natures. They knew our internal conflicts and battles; how we could love our brother and yet hate him; the oppressive power of parents, even the best of parents; the impulses that drive us to commit violations against others; the yearning to lead a life of meaning; our fear of mortality; our struggles to deal with our uncertainty, our loneliness, our greed, our lust, our ambition, our desires to be God, as well as our moments of nobility, compassion and courage. They knew these emotions and feelings were entangled. They understood our weaknesses and strengths. They understood how we are often not the people we want to be or know we should be, how hard it is for us to articulate all this, and how life and creation can be as glorious and beautiful as it can be mysterious, evil and cruel. This is why Genesis is worth reading, indeed why the Bible stands as one of the great ethical and moral documents of our age. The biblical writers have helped shape and define Western civilization. Not to know the Bible is, in some ways, to be illiterate, to neglect the very roots of philosophy, art, architecture, literature, poetry and music. It is to fall into a dangerous provincialism, as myopic and narrow as that embraced by those who say everything in the Bible is literally true and we do not need any other kind of intellectual or scientific inquiry. Doubt and belief are not, as biblical literalists claim, incompatible. Those who act without any doubt are frightening.
"There lives more faith in honest doubt," the poet Alfred Tennyson noted, "believe me, than in half the creeds."
This was my faith. It is a pretty good summary of my faith today. God is inscrutable, mysterious and unknowable. We do not understand what life is about, what it means, why we are here and what will happen to us after our brief sojourn on the planet ends. We are saved, in the end, by faith - faith that life is not meaningless and random, that there is a purpose to human existence, and that in the midst of this morally neutral universe the tiny, seemingly insignificant acts of compassion and blind human kindness, especially to those labeled our enemies and strangers, sustain the divine spark, which is love. We are not fully human if we live alone. These small acts of compassion - for they can never be organized and institutionalized as can hate - have a power that lives after us. Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies. These acts recognize and affirm the humanity of others, others who may be condemned as agents of Satan. Those who sacrifice for others, especially at great cost, who place compassion and tolerance above ideology and creeds, and who reject absolutes, especially moral absolutes, stand as constant witnesses in our lives to this love, even long after they are gone. In the gospels this is called resurrection.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American Fascists by Chris Hedges Copyright © 2006 by Chris Hedges . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Anonymous
Posted October 12, 2007
This book is spot on. I was raised in an extreme fundamental Baptist home my father and almost every other male in my family for generations being a Baptist minister. I grew up knowing many of the key players in the fundamentalist evangelical movement in the U.S. They are closet bigots, homo-phobes, and harbor great hatred for 'the world' or what they view as the secular devils--any who are outside of their realm of Christianity. According to the Christian fundamentalists, all other 'Christians' and those of any other faiths are demonized and damned to an eternity in hell unless they've uttered the sinners prayer and convert. These are dangerous people, and while this author may be preaching to the choir, what he is saying and the parallels he makes to other totalitarian regimes needs to be taken very seriously by the people in this country. If we sit back and ignore what is happening with this movement, we'll one day wake up to find that all of our civil liberties have been revoked by a bunch of bible-swinging, child-beating, woman-hating, homo-phobic literalists. Wake up America, before it's too late!
9 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 29, 2007
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, is a powerful expose of the Christian Right and its attempts to create a new America ruled by them and their extreme and dangerous beliefs. Hedges exposes the dominionist movement, as he calls it, and the war it is waging on American freedom and democracy. Dominionism, he says, is a movement which takes its name from a chapter in Genesis, and desires to use the Christian religion to gain political power on a scale never before seen. I became especially interested when he exposed the dangerous conversion aspirations of Dr. D. James Kennedy and his Evangelism Explosion program. I, for various reasons, have watched Kennedy¿s program, and I have thus gained an insight into his politics and aspirations. Hedges thus added an extra dimension to what I already knew helping me to understand further how dangerous Dr. Kennedy¿s beliefs are. The fight for Creationism to take precedence over evolution is a major issue in our nation, and it has been for decades. Hedges, like others, believes that the evidence to support the various claims of literal biblical creation is suspect. However, the central theme of the chapter revolves around the laughable Creation Museum in Kentucky, which has displays that purport to show the dinosaurs being on Noah¿s Ark and a family without God being in chaos. Two of the more disturbing parts of this book are the chapters on the war-like language used by the movement to call their flocks into service and the chapter on televangelism. Hedges finds that the deliberate combination of Christian symbols and national symbols are a step in the direction of a Christian fascism, made worse by the rhetoric that characterizes current day America as being involved in a cultural and religious war, the Christians being under siege, which is a claim that Hedges wholeheartedly disputes. Televangelism, he claims, is used to ¿seduce and encourage us to walk away from the dwindling, less exciting collectives that protect and nurture us. They have mastered television¿s imperceptible, slowly induced hypnosis.¿ To support all of these claims and charges that Hedges makes, he uses his own experiences with the dominionist movement as well as testimonials and interviews with those who have experience with dominionism. In the first chapter, he says that the Bible is one of the ¿great ethical and moral documents of our age.¿ He also says that to not know the Bible is to be in some way illiterate, as the Bible has had a profound effect upon world civilization. Hedges claims, however, will probably only be received openly by those who are not of the fundamentalist or conservative persuasion. Ultimately, American Fascists has the effect of preaching to the choir. That, however, does not mean it is not a powerful work. After reading the book, I felt just that much more passionate about the things which Hedges describes. This is definitely a must-read book.
9 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 22, 2007
Mr.Hedges proves the true worth of an education at Harvard Divinty School by attempting to prove the continued existence of Christianity is only thru fascism. How quaint! His writings are semantical twisters,proving people are able to talk out of both sides of their mouths at one time.He is an humble child from rural upstate NY (this apparently makes him a greater authority). Mr.Hedges writes of the many bloody battles found in the Bible,but with the exception of a few passing references,he almost totally sets the blame for all sins in the New Testament. Once again,revisionism is rife- the Old Testament was the bloodiest, sir. Jesus came in peace. The absurd notion in this book that Pat Robertson and others are more evil and fascistic as Christians than atheists is worthy of the confused logic this writer brings to this book. This was what communism attempted to do-rip belief and faith from people's lives in order to make them feel hopeless and down trodden.Spread doubt and guilt.Mr. Hedges follows the Communist path here. Do not waste your time reading this book it is more or less a work of fiction and opinion on the author's part.
5 out of 11 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 16, 2007
American Fascists is poorly developed and skips around confusingly. The author uses some fairly boring and colorless naratives without conclusion.
3 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 25, 2007
Hedges does an excellent job of articulating the extent to which right-wing extremism has hijacked the Christian faith for political and financial gain. A Christian myself, I have witnessed first-hand how easy it is for people to be swept up into this movement, all under the guise of restoring morality and patriotism and 're-Christianizing' America. I once bought into this brand of political fundamentalism until I realized it was in opposition to what Christ and the Bible actually teach, as well as in opposition to American freedom and democracy. This movement is fueled by converting the masses through 'easy-believism', depriving them of spiritual food and feeding them the garbage of the prosperity gospel, enticing them toward a lust for violence with apocalyptical yet unscripturally-founded eschatologies (and teaching it through fictional novels), and then whipping them into hysteria by exploiting their basest emotions using the very market-driven tactics of pop culture which it pretends to oppose. Hedges did his homework and provides detailed insight and an accurate diagnosis of the malignant cancer which is threatening to destroy the church, and has the potential to overrun America with its brand of self-righteous fascism. Though I differ with Hedges on some theological points, I still agree with his overall message and heed the warnings he is sounding. I am a teacher in a Christian school and really had to read it with an open mind, and am glad I challenged myself to read it and was required to think deeply.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 27, 2007
Having finished finished Hedges' book 'American Fascists', I would agree that Dominionists do present a real threat to our country's Freedom and Democracy, However, Hedges would appear to deny these individuals their rights of free speech under the First Amendment. While Hedges accurately views the Dominionists as proto-Nazis/Fascists, he never once mentions the vast differences between the Weimar Republic and present-day America. According to the book, all that would take the US to turn into a Theocracy is another 9/11. All through 'American Fascism', ( other than an incessant drum-beat for gay-rights issues ), is the P.C. Stalinist impulse to suppress those who Mr. Hedges is so opposed to. This is very unfortunate, as 'American Fascists' reveals much eye-opening and frightening info about the Religious Right, but again, the book is marred by its constant P.C. Stalinism and party-line gay-rights obsession. Jon Wiener, in a review of 'American Fascists' says it best: Hedges concludes that the Christian right 'should no longer be tolerated,' because it 'would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible.' What does he think should be done? He endorses the view that 'any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law,' and therefore we should treat 'incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal.' Thus he rejects the 1st Amendment protections for freedom of speech and religion, and court rulings that permit prosecution for speech only if there is an imminent threat to particular individuals. Hedges advocates passage of federal hate-crimes legislation prohibiting intolerance, but he doesn't really explain how it would work. Many countries do prohibit 'hate speech.' Holocaust denial, for example, is a crime in Germany, Austria and several other European countries. But does this mean that Hedges favors prosecuting Christian fundamentalists for declaring, for example, that abortion providers are murderers or that secular humanists are agents of Satan? He doesn't say.
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 1, 2007
Chris Hedges is a man of extraordinary brilliance. Chris is not merely a gifted writer, but one who is able 'think on his feet' with originality, spontaneity and grace. His deconstruction of today's apocalyptic forms of Christianity - and its most popular preachers, like John Hagey, Benny Hinn, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell - is devastating. Like vampires fleeing from the light of day, the re-born Christian community will flee from Chris' burning message. Hedges will light an inextinguishable fire under the feet of those who are trapped within the various illusions promoted by 'dominionistic' Christianity. There is not enough I can say about Chris in this review to praise him sufficiently. I am grateful, and we are all lucky, that he chooses to write books. Therefore, I suggest that you go and see him speak. You will be thunderstruck by the living spirit of Truth that emanates from his voice and the integrity of his person. His book is a timely and precious contriubution to those who desire to understand what the has been happening in this country, mostly under Republican administrations, since the Regan era. If you want to read a politically prophetic book, then read American Facists.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 15, 2008
INteresting viewpoints and shows opposite sides of the spectrum in each chapter. It's lso very good that he recieved his degree from Harvard deminary, so you know that it is not just some biased view based on opinion and not fact
1 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.This book was shocking yet thought provoking. Hedges uses plenty of strong examples supporting his claim of Fascism in America. Even if you are against Hedges, read the book and challenge yourself mentally. Thinking is always a good thing, and this book is mentally stimulating. It was a fair and objective approach, Hedges is clearly focused on the extreme 'right' in politics and their war on everyone else. Overall, excellent and a quick read.
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 28, 2007
I have seen Hedges a number of times on Book TV and have read 'War is a Force That Gives us Meaning.' His extensive background prepares him for authenticity in his chosen subjects. I have not yet read this book, but have done my own studies on this subject and unfortunately have family members that subscribe to the beliefs he details. At this point I don't think they have any idea of what it portends. I hope this book is widely read. I intend to promote it whenever possible.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Overview
Twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists first spoke of the United States becoming a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedom and our way of life. In American Fascists, Chris Hedges, veteran journalist and author of the National Book Award finalist War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, challenges ...