Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Rise of the Theocrats

Alarmist? Shrill? An extreme interpretation of a cultural movement and its plans?

You could make any of those arguments about Chris Hedges impassioned treatise on the dangers of the religious right, The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger. What we shouldn't do is ignore him.
Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged.
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”
-Sinclair Lewis, 1935

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