Christian-Hating Secularist Embarasses Supporters with Over-the-Top Rhetoric During Princeton Lecture

From the First Things blog, On the Square:

The audience was shocked. Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, delivered a Princeton University lecture on the religious right so appalling that even his supporters were embarrassed. One university administrator apologized that Hedges was “so reductionist and offensive,” promising that she wouldn’t have invited him had she known. A dean said Hedges’ “behavior was disappointing to everyone and did not reflect the intentions of the sponsors.”

Maybe he was just having a bad day? He wasn’t. In his new book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Hedges insists that today’s evangelical Christians are good old-fashioned fascists and Nazis reborn.

A former New York Times foreign correspondent, Hedges got some attention for War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a 2002 book drawn from his twenty years of field reporting on armed conflicts. Now, in American Fascists, he offers a critique of contemporary Christianity—drawing, he tells the reader many times, on his own experience as a Christian and the son of a Presbyterian minister. In fact, he writes, it was while studying at Harvard Divinity School that he first learned American Christians are the Nazis’ modern “ideological inheritors.” Bearing not “swastikas and brown shirts” but “patriotism and the pages of the Bible,” these new fascists are led by a “theocratic sect” of Calvinism called Dominionism.

Hedges isn’t just name-calling; when he says “fascist,” he means it. The Dominionist movement “shares prominent features with classical fascist movements.” It has, “like all fascist movements, a belief in magic along with leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and physical supremacy of a master race.” If Christian fascists win, then “labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship.”

The key, Hedges claims, is the certainty of evangelical faith. Confidence, we are told, is a fascist ploy, while real Christians accept that we “do not understand what life is about. . . . Faith presupposes that we cannot know. We can never know.” ...

***
Of course, Hedges is drawing caricatures of evangelical spirituality, even at its worst. He certainly shows no sign of having grappled with serious Christian theology, much less intellectually rigorous conservative political thought. And it quickly becomes clear that Hedges’ real target isn’t Dominionism but any form of Christian orthodoxy—and any orthodox Christian active in politics. On his own admission, his opponents extend beyond evangelicalism: Antonin Scalia is “steeped in this ideology,” “right-wing Catholics have joined forces with the movement,” and “the movement has seized control of the Republican Party.”

If the traits he picks out from American evangelicalism make it a manifestation of fascism, then the entire classical tradition of Christianity is fascist, too. By understanding faith as “an intellectual act, its object truth, and its result knowledge,” John Henry Newman must have been an anti-intellectual fascist, in Hedges’ definition. American Fascists contains an exposé of family members crying over their children’s salvation—which makes St. Augustine’s mother, St. Monica, a fascist ahead of her time. And Hedges’ analysis of the “male-dominated authoritarian church” defines Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and many non-Christian faiths fascist from the start.

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(emphasis added)

My Comments:
So, it's the "certainty" of traditional Christian faith that makes it fascist? It's ironic that those who make these sorts of claims themselves seem to have have no shortage of "certainty" in the wisdom of their own opinions, as well as some fairly dogmatically fascist tendencies.

In defense of certainty.