Pulitzer prize winning writer and former war correspondent for the New York Times Chris Hedges has written a controversial and powerful book which details a scathing indictment of the Religious Right. Citing both the psychology and sociology of fascism and cults, including the work of German historian Fritz Stern, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America, draws striking parallels between 20th-century totalitarian movements and the highly organized, well-funded “dominionist movement,” an influential theocratic sect within the country’s huge evangelical population.

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

Hedges, who grew up in rural parishes in upstate New York where his father was a Presbyterian pastor, attacks the movement as someone who has spent a life with the Bible and Christian tradition. He highlights hundreds of senators and members of Congress who have earned between 80 to 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.

Hedges shows that over-arching objective is remove the wall between church and state, and to build Robertson’s ‘political religion’. In its efforts, the intolerance the Religious Right preaches against those who don’t conform to its 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.

In several interviews following the release of the book, Hedges has candidly and streadfastly supported his assertions, offering examples and facts as rapidly and resourcefully as Noam Chomsky. He has appeared on most major nightly talk shows, and has been interviewed for magazines and online journals. Recently George Stroumboloupolous’ The Hour had an excellent feature and interview with Chris, which is available here.

Secularism asserts the freedom of religion, and freedom from government imposition of religion upon the people, within a state that is neutral on matters of belief, and gives no state privileges or subsidies to religions.

Without a secular government, state sanctioned discrimination is the inevitable result, and the provisions of guaranteed freedoms are removed.

Several books, magazines, and online journals have reported on the ties between George Bush himself and Christianity, him having been ‘born again’ after years of supposed alcohol abuse.

In December of 2003, President Bush punched a dangerous hole in the wall between church and state by signing an executive order that paved the way for religious groups to receive federal funds to run social services.

Shortly thereafter, the US tax office had announced tougher certification before families qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit, which boosted the income of low-income working families, while Medicaid received gross pressure to reduce it’s financial burdens by itself- of which tighter restrictions and more bureaucratic hurdles were the result as well.

So while boosting funding to ‘faith-based’ social services, the Bush administration also removed any barriers to the poor requiring them. At face value, the efforts of the ‘faith-based’ initiative appeared to attempt to create a vacuum for the disparate poor to cling to religious social services for support, an effort to indoctrinate in the most vile way.

The Christian Right as with many early fascist movements does not overtly call for dictatorship, nor does it commonly support physical violence to suppress opposition. In short, the movement is not yet revolutionary, yet the ideological underpinnings for such a movement are well established politically in the United States. All it will take Hedges asserts, is another national crisis of 911’s magnitude for the Christian Right to make a concerted drive to destroy American democracy for good.

What’s so important about this book is that it reminds us of the dangers that liberal democratic societies evoke when they tolerate the intolerant.

The defining difference between left and right wing ideologues is that the former sees means as ends in and of themselves, while the latter often see ends as justification for heinous means.

Will the more liberal among the American political spectrum recognize that the tolerance so afforded these groups need be disassembled from political discourse, and revealed as discriminatory usurpation?

“This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote “positive” Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah’s voice.â€?