Sermons

May 13, 2007
Fascism: Can It Happen Here?

Fascism: Can It Happen Here?
A sermon by the Rev. Mark Worth

READINGS:
1. From James Luther Adams (1901-1994) in The Essential James Luther Adams: Selected Essays and Addresses, edited by George Kimmich Beach, Skinner House Books, Boston, 1998.
“The differences among people do not lie in the fact that some have faith and others do not. They lie only in a difference of faith. The Gestapo put its confidence in obedience to the Fuherer, in obedience to the call of ‘blood and soil.’ Its victims placed their confidence in something thicker than blood, in something stronger than death or fear of death...
“Fortunately, not many of us have had the experience of confronting Gestapo agents. We like to believe that we did not share their faith, yet we all have had some part in creating or appeasing Gestapos – and we could do it again. We also had some part in stopping the Gestapo. In fact, the spirit, if not the brutality of the Gestapo has to be stopped in ourselves every day, and we are not always successful, either because of our impotence or because of our lack of conviction. The faith of the unfree can raise its ugly head even in a ‘free’ country.”

2. From Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America, Free Press, New York, NY, 2006.
“This movement [the Christian Right] seeks, in the name of Christianity and American democracy, to destroy that which it claims to defend. I do not believe that America will inevitably become a fascist state or that the Christian Right is the Nazi Party. But I do believe that the radical Christian Right is a sworn opponent of the open society. Its ideology bears within it the tenets of a Christian fascism... All Americans – not only those of faith – who care about our open society must learn to... challenge aggressively this movement’s deluded appropriation of Christianity and to do everything possible to defend tolerance. The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, and those they dismiss as ‘nominal Christians,’ and those they brand with the curse of ‘secular humanist’ are an attack on all of us, on our values, our freedoms and ultimately our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.”

THE SERMON
James Luther Adams was one of the most influential Unitarian Universalist thinkers of the twentieth century. The son of a fundamentalist preacher, he converted to Unitarianism, went to Harvard, studied in Germany in 1935-36 where he learned about the Nazis first-hand, got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, served as a Unitarian minister, taught at Meadville-Lombard Theological School in Chicago, and later taught at Harvard Divinity School. As the Unitarians became increasingly humanist, James Luther Adams was a thoughtful liberal Christian voice in the Unitarian movement.
Near the end of the Second World War, Adams was asked to lecture on the “Nazi faith” to a large group of U.S. Army officers who were preparing for service in the occupation army in Germany. As he lectured about the beliefs of the Nazis, he began to fear that he was teaching the officers to engage in “an orgy of self-righteousness.” This self-righteousness, Adams decided, ought somehow to be checked. Toward the end of the lecture he summarized the ideas of the Nazi faith, stressing the Nazi belief in the superiority of the northern European Teutons and the inferiority of other “races.” He also reminded the officers that there were similar attitudes in America, even among respectable Americans in the army of democracy. After all, before the war we had turned away a shipload of German Jewish refugees when they tried to find safety in America. Even after the war Jews were not allowed in many American hotels, resorts or private clubs; and blacks were segregated in the South and discriminated against in the North.

“How are you different from the Nazis?” --
Then Adams asked the officers to ask themselves one or two questions. First: “Is there any essential difference between your attitude toward the Negro and the Jew, and the Nazi attitude toward other ‘races’ – not a difference in brutality but a difference in basic philosophy?”
“If there is an essential difference,” he said, “then the American soldier might logically become a defender of the Four Freedoms [set forth by President Franklin Roosevelt as freedom of speech, freedom of every person to worship in his or her own way, freedom from want, and freedom from fear], but if there is no essential difference between your race philosophy and that of the Nazis, a second question should be posed: ‘What are you fighting for?’”
Adams was immediately besieged with questions like, “Do you think we should marry the nigger?” “Aren’t Negroes a naturally lazy and dirty race?” “Haven’t you been in business, and don’t you know that every Jew is a kike?” Questions like these came back to Adams for over an hour.
Adams simply repeated his question again, “How do you distinguish between yourself and a Nazi?” The officers agonized over that question. Adams said that many of these Americans who could not distinguish themselves from Nazis came from “religious” homes, or they claimed to be representatives (or even leaders) of the American faith. All of them, Adams said, spoke that faith that was in them, and for many of them that faith was a trust in white, Protestant Christian supremacy.
We all have a faith of some kind. “A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples,” Emerson said. What we love, we serve. Our faith determines what we will sacrifice for, what we will fight against, what we will tolerate.

Is there a danger of fascism today?
A recent book by Chris Hedges, who was a student of James Luther Adams, is titled American Fascism: The Christian Right and the War On America. Hedges, who was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for two decades, is, Like Adams (and myself), a preacher’s kid. His father was an evangelical Christian who did not allow alcohol in the house. He writes, “We did no work on Sunday, and I never heard my father swear.” At the same time, Hedges’ father took an early stand in favor of Rev. Martin Luther King and the struggle for black Civil Rights. And, perhaps because Hedges’ uncle was gay, Hedges’ father understood the pain and isolation of being gay in America, and late in his life he worked for equal and fair treatment for lesbians and gays.
Hedges writes passionately about the radical Christian Right in America today. He says that twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and other televangelists first spoke about turning the United States into “a Christian nation” (rather than a land of religious liberty and toleration), and building a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such talk seriously.
Today, with the Christian Right’s hold over the Republican Party and with George W. Bush in the White House, such language no longer sounds like mere talk. Instead, Hedges says that it poses a real threat to our way of life. Hundreds of Senators and U.S. Representatives have earned between 80 and 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups. The movement’s call to dismantle the “wall of separation between church and state,” as Thomas Jefferson named our religious liberty, and the anti-gay intolerance preached by many on the radical right, are broadcast into millions of homes on a daily basis by a host of Christian Right radio stations and cable TV channels, and reinforced by the intolerant and anti-science curriculum taught in “Christian” private schools. The Christian Right’s yearning for apocalyptic violence is promoted through the best-selling Left Behind books and in the big-budget Left Behind movies. The Christian Right supports a militarist Israel, but envisions an apocalypse in which all Jews will either convert or be killed. Big pressure groups like Focus on the Family, the Traditional Values Coalition, Concerned Women for America, and the Intelligent Design movement, cast a long shadow in Washington.
Hedges argues that the movement currently resembles the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s, movements that often masked the full extent of their drive toward totalitarianism and were willing to make concessions until they achieved total power. Hedges claimed that the German and Italian fascists didn’t call for dictatorship in their early stages, nor did they (at first) use physical violence to suppress the opposition. I’m not entirely convinced by that argument – Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, was clear about Hitler’s goals, and the Nazi Party began using violence as a tool even before it took power.
In Germany and Italy, many churches either made peace with the fascists or openly supported them. The pro-Nazi “German Christian Church” was an official part of the Nazi movement. A few Christians, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church, resisted the Nazis.

Is the accusation of “fascism” an unwarranted insult? --
The linking of the term “fascism” with the Christian Right has generated a great deal of debate in America. Many conservative Christians regard the accusation of “fascism” to be clearly offensive. Stanley Kurtz, who writes for the conservative magazine National Review, says that the accusation of “Christian fascism” is based on guilt by association, political paranoia, and flat-out looniness. There really are fringe groups of Christian “Dominionists’ and “Reconstructionists,” Kurtz says, who would like to see an American theocracy, and who support the death penalty for sodomy, adultery, witchcraft, and blasphemy, but this is a small movement with little significance.
Conservative Christians, Kurtz says, didn’t turn to politics because they were egged on by the crazy Christian Dominionists. Rather, they turned to politics because they believed their values were under attack from a post-sixties challenge to their way of life. According to Kurtz, Hedges’ use of the term “Christian fascism” is an overreaction.
Hedges, however, is convinced that it is not an over-reaction at all. Pat Robertson, James Dobson and D. James Kennedy are not “fringe” elements of the Christian Right but are in the center of the movement. They have big budgets and millions of radio listeners and television viewers. They are speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including main-line Protestant denominations and the government.
Pat Robertson says, “There will never be world peace until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.” Jerry Falwell says, “This is a Christian Nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.” D. James Kennedy has advocated the impeachment of judges who fail to acknowledge “God as the sovereign source of law, liberty or government.” Kennedy, who claims that Darwin’s theories caused Hitler to murder millions in the Holocaust, seeks to “reclaim America for Christ” and to have laws that are consistent with evangelical Christianity. Dr. James Dobson, head of “Focus on the Family,” is probably the most powerful of all current evangelical leaders. Americans United for Church and State calls Dobson “the Religious Right’s 800 pound gorilla.” He has a daily radio audience of 200 million world-wide, and is very influential in the Republican Party. Dobson, who advocates spanking children, says that the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child is a “dangerous document” which “has worried me for years.” He also claims that “the homosexual activist movement” is working to destroy marriage and undermine God’s plans.

Understanding the power and allure of evil:
Several years ago I debated Lawrence Lockman of “Concerned Maine Families” at Maine Maritime Academy on the question of whether lesbians and gays should be protected under hate crimes legislation. At the debate Lockman was distributing pamphlets that depicted gays as wealthy but despicable and promiscuous perverts who were undermining decent values and spreading disease. Gays did not deserve protection under the hate crimes law because they were already too rich and powerful. If you simply took out the word “gay” every time it was used, and replaced it with the word “Jew,” you would have had a propaganda piece that the Nazi Party could have proudly distributed in Hitler’s Germany. And remember that the Nazis murdered gays in the death camps along side of Jews and others they thought were “inferior.”
Chris Hedges looks at the influence and agenda of the Religious Right, and says he is simply taking seriously the warnings of his Harvard Divinity School professor, James Luther Adams. Adams was not a man to use the word “fascist” lightly. He was in Nazi Germany in 1935 and ‘36 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, the Confessing Church, and with dissidents such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was eventually detained by the Gestapo, who accused him of walking on the sidewalk with a Jew, and of visiting a synagogue. The Gestapo suggested that he might want to consider returning to the United States. He left on a night train with portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home made movie film he took of the pro-Nazi “German Christian Church,” and the few individuals who defied them. The German border police lifted up the tops of the suitcases, saw the pictures of Hitler, and closed the suitcases, letting Adams go. The films that Adams took have been preserved, have been shown to generations of his students, and remain a valuable resource.
James Luther Adams saw in the American Christian Right disturbing similarities with the pro-Nazi “German Christian Church,” similarities that Adams said would – in the event of social instability or a prolonged national crisis – see American fascists, under the guise of Christianity, rise to dismantle our open society. In the fascist way of thinking there are those who are worthy of love, and others – Jews, gays, pick any group who might be vulnerable – who are not worthy of love. In the totalitarian world, your private life choices become the business of the state.
Fascism promises harmony, unity, happiness – a utopia – and those promises have a seductive quality that can never be countered by the tepid offerings of small “d” democrats, who at best can offer citizens the opportunity to seek their own happiness. Adams worried that American liberals would be ineffectual and impotent in the face of a fascist threat, just as German liberals had been unable to stop the Nazi threat. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked.
Adams had seen how the mask of religion can hide irreligion. He reminded us that “our world is full to bursting with faiths, each contending for allegiance.” Hitler claimed to teach the meaning of faith, and Mussolini used to shout, “Believe, follow, and act!” Mussolini told his followers that fascism, before it had been a political party, had been a religion. Human history, Adams taught, is not a struggle between religion and lack of religion, but rather, “it is a battle of faiths, a battle of the gods who claim allegiance.”
I’m not sure how serious the threat of “American fascism” is. Having a few fundamentalist relatives, I know them to be decent well-meaning people who believe they are a part of a moral, biblical, Christian movement – even though I believe that movement’s agenda is intolerant, immoral, unbiblical and unchristian. I don’t think that James Dobson or George W. Bush wake up in the morning and say to themselves, “I think I’ll do something evil today.”
But I do recall that in his little book The Devil and Dr. Church (published in 1986), the Rev. Forrest Church said that the Devil (whether a real being or a metaphor) does not appear in red, with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. If he did, we would recognize him right away and know that he was up to no good. But by nature, the devil is a liar, a deceiver, camouflaged in the fashions of the times. He likes to dress up in his respectable Sunday-best. He/she is a “true believer” who employs all the powers of the present age – religion, the state, ideology, television – in order to convince us that good is evil and evil is good. Even Billy Graham reminds us, “Satan does not want to build a church and call it ‘The First Church of Satan.’ He is far too clever for that. He invades the Sunday school, the youth department, the Christian education program, the pulpit and the seminary classroom.” We might add the corporate board room, the halls of Congress, and the White House, but we should avoid beginning lists that have no end.
So I don’t worry about fascists who call themselves fascists. The American Nazi Party is a tiny group of loonies hardly worth worrying about. Don’t look for the Devil to dress up as a devil. But be wary of those who hold a Bible in one hand and an American flag in the other. All we have to remember, as St. Paul himself reminds us in 2 Corinthians 11:14-15, is that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is not strange that his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.”

MEDITATION/PRAYER
May we be capable of recognizing the evil in this world, whether it is in others or in ourselves, and may we be willing to oppose that evil through the strength of a faith that affirms the virtues of liberty, tolerance, inclusiveness, and the beauty found in the variety of ways to be human. Amen.