By Harold W. Anderson, Ph.D., M.A., M.Div.
I wondered. Why had she said that? How could someone make such a blatantly false assessment of a message of love and peace? Sure, the topic of my talk that evening was a premillennial romp through the apocalyptic literature of the Bible, making almost no distinction between the words of Revelation and those of Daniel, two works separated by nearly 600 years and spanning the history of two different religions. The apocalyptic vision portrayed in the narrative that I embraced was one of a cataclysmic end when finally, the purveyor of peace and love—Jesus as the Christ, the slain Lamb of God—would prevail. Those who opposed Christ would be defeated and left behind, abandoned to an eternity of punishment and torture, while those who embraced the “true” teaching of Christianity would reign supreme in the glorious reality of God’s presence. One way of thinking; one way of believing; one people redeemed. At the time, I thought it was a beautiful story of love, redemption, and justice. Why wouldn’t people want to embrace it? But a young woman in attendance not only rejected it; she held that the narrative paralleled the hateful and vicious teachings of the Third Reich in fascist Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. At that time, I thought to myself “What nonsense!” But the words of that young woman have haunted me for more than 50 years. In this essay, I will explain why.
While I enjoyed Sunday School as a child, as I grew older it became something I dreaded. Rather than friends, I most often encountered bullies. Instead of love, very often I found scorn. Instead of peace, conflict was often the reality. All of this began to take its toll and when I was older, I no longer wanted to go to Sunday School. Because the difference between the message preached and what I experienced became so evident, a deep-seated fear began to well up inside of me. Sunday School didn’t feel safe, and I didn’t want to go, but alas, my parents made me.
Forced to attend Sunday School, I became adept at avoiding bullies and began to concentrate on the lessons I was taught. They were interesting Bible stories, but I was curious about the fantastic nature of what I heard. A man was swallowed by a whale only to be regurgitated by the creature on land. Really? A man was thrown into the midst of lions thirsting for blood and yet none of them harmed him. Is that true? A young boy kills a giant warrior with a sling shot. Oh, come on! Three men are thrown into the fire and yet they are not burned. That may be a bad lesson to teach a young boy. A man is executed and three days later he comes back to life. That sounds too fantastic to be true. The God to whom we pray is really three persons but one God. That just doesn’t make sense.
Because the stories and dogma we learned seemed so unbelievable, I began to ask questions. Lots of them. And in a Socratic fashion, the more questions I asked, the less they were satisfactorily answered and the less the teachers seemed to know. In fact, most of the answers were along the lines of “That’s not the kind of questions we ask. These stories and teachings are true, and we just have to believe.”
As I began to “grow” in my faith, my faith began to change and so did my understanding of biblical texts. The Bible did not consist simply of stories. It was a compilation of complex documents written at different times under different conditions, the historical trajectory finally giving rise to a new religion, which was eventually called “Christianity.” Gaining insight into the complexity of this scenario and the religious diversity that arose from it, I began to realize there were many ways to understand not only Christianity, but the texts upon which I expounded that evening. As I grew in my faith, I saw more clearly the complicated history of the Christian Church, its divisions, its feuds, its differing interpretations of God and Jesus as the Christ.
One way of thinking; one way of believing; one people redeemed.
The tradition in which I was raised was a conservative, evangelical tradition on the one hand, while on the other it embraced an anti-Calvinistic narrative brought into focus by the preaching of John Wesley and finding theological expression in Holiness teachings of “perfection.” This tradition brought together differing narratives that portrayed the complex meaning of Scripture and the historic dogmas of the Christian Church in a way that conflicted with the narratives embracing John Calvin. This difference—the difference between Wesley and Calvin—created an almost unbridgeable divide in the Western branch of Christianity, but the Holiness tradition created yet another deep division in the Wesleyan tradition. Since Holiness people seemed to have more in common with the evangelical branch of Protestantism however, Holiness people gravitated towards it and if those under its umbrella didn’t mention Calvin, they seemed to get along quite well. The more mainline Wesleyan traditions found a home in Methodism. Whereas the Holiness folk were more premillennial and closed to difference, the latter were more tolerant of different ways of thinking. When I gave my message that evening, I embraced the evangelical, premillennial tradition and today I wonder. Is it fascist?
As I said above, the Holiness and evangelical traditions didn’t encourage a questioning spirit. Asking too many questions about long held and cherished beliefs was of the devil and as I asked more and more questions, I began to encounter resistance and beyond that, exclusion…so I left. I didn’t abandon the Christian Church per se, but I put behind me the evangelical tradition and while I embraced the worth and amazing potential of people to do wonderful things and perform amazing acts of kindness, I began to realize that existence is struggle. Struggle cannot be escaped; it is the way life is and we need to learn to live meaningfully within it. If the idea of God and Jesus as the Christ is to remain meaningful, salvation should lead us redemptively through the struggle. The spiritual pursuit of living a Christlike life even when it seemed that everything was against you is the challenge of faith. To some degree, the Holiness movement seemed to grasp this, but its emphasis upon petty ethical dos and don’ts mixed with formulaic platitudes of how to become “right” with God deemphasized faithful struggle and highlighted instead premillennial aspirations of heaven. Put differently, the benefit of my involvement in the Holiness tradition was that it bequeathed to me the importance of a loving lifestyle as an expression of one’s spirituality. We may not live a perfect life, but our spirituality is defined by our commitment to living a loving life, a lifestyle committed to peace instead of conflict or war. If one were to strip the Holiness movement of its close-minded dogma and its premillennial aspirations, the result would be a type of spirituality grounded in a zeal to embrace the struggles of life in a loving and accepting way. This seemed to be a spirituality that I could accept…but was it fascist?
If we are to answer this question, a more complete analysis of the resistance I encountered in my home tradition needs to be examined. A couple of examples will help illuminate the problem. When, in college—a small liberal arts Holiness college—I began to prepare for the ministry, I studied Koiné Greek, the ancient language in which most of the New Testament was written. The Greek text had a critical apparatus that determined which textual variant was more dependable based upon a comparative examination of primitive texts, most of which were written on decaying papyrus. It was nearly impossible for many evangelicals—especially from the Calvinist and Pentecostal traditions—to imagine that the Bible had variant readings. To them, the Bible was inerrant, and they thought the words they read were God-breathed and hence, beyond any type of error much less the possibility of variant texts. When one couples this with the fact that their
favored version of the Bible—the King James Version—was based upon later Latin texts rather than earlier Greek texts making it one of the less reliable “translations,” the bearer of this news—me—was looked upon with skepticism. There is one text that is inerrant, they thought, because they are God’s words, and they warned that to suggest differently is heresy. In addition, if one were to embrace a biblical-critical method to understand the biblical texts, which I did, evangelical opposition including Holiness people would increase exponentially. Embracing these things made me an outsider and they thought I was no longer a person of faith. During my college experience—even though it was a Holiness college—we at least wrestled with these issues, but when I attended a Holiness Seminary, I was labeled a communist for doing so, a moniker that again placed me on the outside of Christianity looking in. In fact, even though I had the highest GPA in my graduating year (1982), I was not given the “theology student of the year” distinction. The faculty labeled me a philosopher not deserving of the award. I was beginning to get greater clarity on “one way of thinking; one way of believing; one people redeemed” leading me to conclude that the young woman I met so many years ago at my talk may have had a point. Is this type of closed-minded thinking fascist?
The second example took place in the same seminary when a couple of female students asked if I would be the faculty advisor of the women’s group they wanted to begin. I taught philosophy but only as a student, not a faculty member, so I had to decline but I found someone who agreed to do so. I agreed, however, to aid them in their pursuits. While attending Pacific School of Religion (PSR) prior to this seminary experience I met a woman who was the president of the women’s group. I wrote her and she sent me a copy of their founding documents, which the women longing to start a group used as a model. While the women’s group at PSR confronted all sorts of feminist issues, the issue these women wished to address was this: This Holiness church required that an aspiring preacher serve as the minister of a church for two years before they could be ordained. Since the polity was congregational, local churches hired their own minister. They weren’t appointed. Normally, this was a white man, and most churches were skeptical of hiring a woman making it difficult for women to be ordained. The women who came to me wanted to address this deficiency and thought a women’s group was the best way to do it.
As we worked to organize the group, the opposition we encountered was swift, vocal, and mean-spirited. We were called the standard negative terms leveled against anyone the church didn’t approve of: communist, homosexuals, gays, liberals, atheists, antichrists, among others. The women, however, were brave and they persisted in their efforts. Soon, the school’s atmosphere reached a fevered pitch threatening the possibility of violence towards the women and that’s when professor emeritus Mildred Bangs Wynkoop stepped in. She was a woman and had experienced the opposition these women were experiencing, but even though many in the seminary didn’t agree with her theology, she was respected, and her words, wisdom and guidance quieted the mood and helped the women start their group. Still, the group encountered heated opposition from many within the school—faculty and students alike—who didn’t think women should be ordained. One way of thinking, one way of believing, one people redeemed began to don new meaning for me. Is this what fascism looks like?
It is probably wrong to argue that a church is fascist based on its close-minded attitude, its homogeneous predisposition, and its intolerance to different ways of understanding Christianity and the world. Belligerence is not a good definition of fascism and if this is what the young woman meant, she was probably wrong. But is there another way that such single-mindedness might lead to fascism? To understand this more fully is to understand the process of religious politicization in the United States. When religion is politicized, the line between religion and state is obliterated making religion vulnerable to the will of strong autocratic leaders, and ultimately, fascism.
The history of the United States is heavily influenced by Christianity with Protestantism taking the primary role. Since the Framers of the Constitution did not want to develop a nation where only one form of Christianity reigned supreme, they wrote the First Amendment, the first lines of which are called the “establishment clause.” It reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The vision is not to eliminate religion from civil discourse. Rather, the Framers wanted to assure that the Nation would be a place where Catholics, Deists, Protestants, other religious devotees and eventually, secularists could live in peace. It was not a particular denomination or church that defined religious civil discourse in this new country, but a civil religion, which drew heavily upon Christianity, but was loyal to none. The result of the First Amendment, then, was to establish a fuzzy line between the practice of government and the practice of religion, thereby creating a continuous balancing act, the balance established ultimately by the Courts. Believing was important, but ultimately it was legal reason that would settle the issue for any given moment, but moments changed and change often dictated if the line needed to be redrawn. The matter was never and will never be fully settled. The establishment clause, then, created a fuzzy line between religion and government that allowed for the establishment of civil religion, which has been drawn upon by people who were theological and political opposites, perhaps a testimony to its effectiveness. To that degree, it has been successful, but when the establishment clause is interpreted as allowing a single Christian narrative to be the religious narrative for a particular political party, the fuzzy line intended by the Framers is erased. Then the United States becomes God’s country, and a particular Christian narrative becomes one with the law of the land. Let me explain.
In my mind, the move from civil religion to “political religion” is a process of erasing the line between church and state, an erasure that creates something quite different than the state religions in Europe from which the Framers of the Constitution attempted to distinguish the United States. Political religion is much more totalitarian. The move from civil religion to totality, however, is facilitated by theological emphases important to fundamentalist and evangelical traditions: Providence, election, limited atonement, and eschatology. Providence and election are often combined, but they represent two different ideas. When we speak of God’s providence, we speak of the timeless wisdom of God’s knowledge. God was before time began but in God’s providence, God knew all that was and ever would be even before it came into being. This means that everything that happens, God knew in advance. This is determinism and because of God’s foreknowledge, there is not much left for human will. To a great extent, the things that human beings will and the roles they play in society has already been determined by God. That is God’s providence. On the other hand, God elects or chooses certain people to do God’s bidding, but more than that, Reformed theology (the tradition starting with Calvin) believes that God chose those who will be saved and those who will be damned before these people have ever come into being. Salvation, then, is not based upon merit, but the graciousness of God for none are worthy of God’s salvation. People, this line of thought goes, are sinful creatures from the time of birth to the time of death. Providence and election, as we will see, plays an important role in the politicization of religion, and firmly establishes the idea that the United States is God’s promised land and its citizens—with certain exceptions—God’s elect, God’s chosen people.
Limited atonement lies at the heart of fundamentalism’s understanding of soteriology. According to the teachings of Christianity in a broader sense, Jesus as the Christ was sent by God to atone for the sins of humanity. For many, this means that Jesus died and was resurrected to save the world from sin and assure humanity’s salvation. However, when this is combined with God’s providence and election, God chose only the elect to be saved. Jesus did not come to save all; Jesus came only to save the elect, but as advocates of this view sometimes argue, the merit of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is “sufficient” for all meaning that while the elect are still the elect, Christ’s atonement makes it possible for everyone else to act in a civilized way. Politically, this means that the mission of those chosen by God is to civilize other parts of the world according to the teachings of “Christianity.”
Finally, fundamentalist eschatology, the topic of my talk so many years ago, is the belief that the world will end in an apocalyptic scenario orchestrated by God. Understood variously by different fundamentalist and evangelical traditions, this looks forward to a time when Jesus, as the slain Lamb of God, will return in militaristic fashion to conquer evil, lay waste to all empires opposed to God’s chosen land and who seek to oppress and persecute God’s chosen people. In a cataclysmic war of global proportions, God through the militant Christ will save all of God’s people by assuring them a place in heaven while permanently destroying all God’s enemies—the sinful ones—who will then spend eternity in the suffering and torments of hell. It is this apocalyptic scenario that, I believe, is one of the more dangerous beliefs of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, which when combined with these dogmatic formulations—God’s providence, election, and limited atonement—aligns them nicely with the political ideology of the far right. If so, the young woman may have been correct. Politicized religion may very well be fascist. However, I am getting ahead of myself. Let me explain why.
In 1845, a term was coined by John L. O’Sullivan, “manifest destiny.” Drawing upon Christian mythology and American civil religion, O’Sullivan argued that the United States could reasonably expand its borders to annex large parts of Mexico (most of what is now Western United States) and Oregon and Washington, which were under British rule. In coining this term and the political-religious theory that lies behind it, O’Sullivan played a large role in the politicization of religion claiming the United States was God’s chosen land and would lead the world towards God’s foreordained end. Later, Rousas J. Rushdoony (1916 – 2001)—a Reformed minister, author and lecturer who embraced a fundamentalist understanding of Christianity—would claim that indeed the United States was not only a Christian nation, but if it were to fulfill its destiny as God’s chosen nation, it would have to be a theocracy, not a democracy, the laws of which are those found in the Bible. While there is a great deal that O’Sullivan and Rushdoony would not see eye-to-eye on, they nonetheless share the belief that the United States is a Christian nation preordained by God to greatness, a greatness through which God will work towards a preordained end, an eschatology that dovetails nicely with most eschatological notions of fundamentalists and evangelicals.
Manifest destiny and the theocracy envisioned by Rushdoony greatly erased the line between church and state making the two one. Because this erasure was grounded in the authority of God through divine providence and election, any political leader or political party sympathetic with the dogma of fundamentalist and evangelical thought and whose ends were sympathetic with their eschatology were not just any candidate or party. They were, rather, God’s candidate and God’s appointed party. While O’Sullivan equated the United States with God’s chosen land and its people with God’s chosen people, it was Rushdoony who influenced the Christian right to embrace politics for theological ends. As many in the Christian right understood, a political party and its leaders deemed ideologically similar to the teachings of fundamentalist dogma had the power to move the United States, and indeed, the world closer to God’s apocalyptic end. This power was not human power, however. Political power rightly understood is God’s power. The import of this came to a stark focus in the presidential campaign of Ronald Regan whose embrace of evangelical and fundamentalist Christian premillennialism aligned him with evangelicals who represented a large part of the electorate and who helped him solidify his “landslide” (Lehmann, 2015). Through the help of Jerry Falwel and the “moral majority,” the evangelical branch of Christianity became the bride wedded to the GOP, her groom, and unleashed a flurry of political and religious transactions that further cemented the relationship. It is a marriage that has allowed this sort of thinking to rise from the fringes of society and religion and into the mainstream of the evangelical and fundamentalist churches (J.L. Conn, 2011; S.E. Jones, 2015).
If the move right and the marriage of the GOP and fundamentalist and evangelical churches is to become fascist, however, the marriage needs to produce a litany of oppression grounded in a millennial eschatology, a 1000-year period where God’s chosen people will reign supreme. The litany glorifying this apocalyptic scenario also sanctifies violence as God’s way of overcoming evil and purging the enemy from God’s promised land by putting all those not elected by God to death and punishing anyone who is disloyal to divine law, which is a capital crime. Put simply, the end of the politization of religion is the “sacralization of politics,” as historian
and world renown student of fascism, Emilio Gentile (2004), puts it. In its most basic form, this means that the redemption story embedded in the New Testament becomes a story of redemption for a particular political structure located in one nation that has divine authority, an authority that is universal in scope. Paul’s new humanity is not people born of faith and commitment to Jesus as the Christ; the new humanity is the citizens of a nation that has been “reborn” as God’s chosen land. The newly reborn nation will be led by a divinely chosen leader who will lead God’s elect into the millennium by conquering all who oppose them. Many would be hesitant to call this Christianity, but for the nation that is rebirthed sacred, Christianity too has been reborn. It is different and no longer responsible to the historic teachings of the Church, except they support the reborn nation’s sacred ends. One way of thinking; one way of believing; one people redeemed.
But how does one distinguish God’s elect from God’s enemies? The answer might seem obvious. Those who live in the reborn nation are God’s elect, and those who do not are God’s enemies. However, this is not accurate. There are some living in the reborn nation who may refuse to comply. Their refusal identifies them as God’s enemies. Who are these people? Borrowing from the discourse of today’s GOP, they are “woke.” They are those who advocate for what the political right calls “the welfare state,” a government that provides for the welfare of the poor and demands equality for the disenfranchised. They are those who have experienced the sting of oppression—people of color, women, LGBQT folks, Islamic people, Jewish people, immigrants, and anyone who is a member of a religious body not condoned by the reborn government and church. Some people are enemies because they are critical thinkers dedicated to embracing different ways of thinking. Their books will be banned, and their thoughts censored. They are enemies of the state—sinners—and are therefore condemned by God. Some may be people of color whose voices are those of oppression that call out the injustices of a bigoted system. They will be limited to the fringes of society and if they publish, they too will be censored, and their books banned. Some are women, whose rights have been chipped away until once again they are enslaved by men. Redemption in this newly reborn nation is dependent upon confessing one’s wokeness, repenting of it, and becoming loyal to the reborn nation’s beliefs. In other words, the sinners, the enemies of the state, are anyone who stands prophetically against the newly reborn nation and questions whether the nature of its beliefs are truly just, are truly the ways of God. If this prophetic voice is lost, then the totality of the newly reborn nation is complete, and its leaders are free to proclaim its politics as the ways of God. Politics, then, are deemed sacred. One way of thinking; one way of believing; one people redeemed.
Referring once again to the work of Gentile, he notes that fascism is not so much an ideology as it is a totalitarian movement that draws upon populism to exalt a leader whose claims are to return a nation to greatness. It looks to other institutions for ideological coherence as was the case for fascism in both Italy under Mussolini and Germany under the rule of Hitler. While economics is a key component in this parasitic arrangement, religion most often provides an authoritarian element garbed in the dress of morality. Or, put differently, the parasitic nature of fascism thrives when it can draw its inspiration and authority from religion for then the state can speak with the voice of God. Political scientist and professor of American Democracy at Notre Dame, D. E. Campbell (2020), warns that the erasure of the boundary between church and state required by fascism is alarming for at least two reasons. First, he argues that such a deterioration would be the end of religious tolerance, something I argued is sewn into the fabric of the Constitution and an important component of American civil religion. Indeed, as Jon Meacham (2006) notes, the celebration of the Constitution’s ratification in 1788 was marked by jubilant clergy joining a procession to demonstrate the role of religious tolerance in America’s social structure. “The Clergy formed a very agreeable part of the Procession,” reports American revolutionary and Constitutional framer Benjamin Rush. “They manifested, by their attendance, their sense of the connection between religion and good government…. Pains were taken to connect ministers of the most dissimilar religious principles together, thereby to show the influence of a free government in promoting Christian charity….The Rabbi of the Jews…locked in the arms of two ministers of the gospel, was a delightful sight. There could not have been a more happy emblem contrived of that section of the new constitution which opens all its power and offices alike not only to every sect of Christians, but to worthy men of every religion” (quoted in Meacham, p. 99). From the beginning, religious toleration has been celebrated as guaranteed by the Constitution. Erasing the line between church and state, however, brings this celebration to an end.
The second problem Campbell sees with the politicization of religion demanded by fascism is this. Because the politicization of religion erases the line between church and state, it weakens the prophetic voice of the Church. Since the time of David, prophets have brought to light the improprieties of kings and military leaders while charting a moral trajectory. When religion has been politicized, calling its moral platitudes into question, and challenging the structures of society and government is tantamount to treason and hence, heresy, which is punishable by extreme measures including death. According to Campbell, “religious leaders can only speak prophetically if religion is not seen as merely an extension of partisanship. Religious leaders must be willing to transcend partisan divisions as they speak to the problems of our day” (p. 100). Put differently, if the line between church and state is erased, the only people to call into question the practices of the newly reborn state are criminals, and the policies of state and church lie beyond question. Asking questions is, as I was told when a child growing up in the church, a sin. One way of thinking; one way of believing; one people redeemed.
Politicized religion dresses all of this in eschatology, which is terrifying when one realizes that the end of the reborn state is to move the world closer to a militaristic and cataclysmic end, Armageddon, the event that hastens Christ’s return. The “second coming of Christ,” as it is called, assures that the chosen nation and God’s chosen people are victorious. Depending upon the narrative, this battle could be conventional, or it could be nuclear, but it brings the end of the world. One way of thinking; one way of believing; one people redeemed is complete. The reign of God is brought to fulfillment assuring that all think and believed the same. This…is fascism.
As I reflect upon my encounter with that young woman more than 50 years ago, her prescience not only haunts me, but it also fills me with awe. Even then, prior to the post-truth age in which we now live, she understood the dangers that the apocalyptic narrative I was espousing represented. Christianity and especially conservative Christianity has traditionally been something that was intolerant of questions, especially when they questioned conservative dogma and orthodoxy. Their vision has been traditionally myopic, and many would say it favors white men while dismissing the voice of the “least of these” (Matthew 25:40), those who live on the margins of social power structures. In itself, this does not make it fascist, but when conservative, evangelical Christianity is politicized so that politics becomes sacred, the line between church and state is erased. When this happens, the last feather of the chicken is plucked,[i] and fascism is the result. I guess I owe that young woman a debt of gratitude because she sewed the seed, the seed that grew and steered me away from the trajectory of fascism. My prayer is that such seeds might be sown in the hearts of evangelical Christians everywhere that they might understand the difference between their religion and the democracy in which they live and hopefully…love. Amen.
[i] In her book on fascism, Madeleine Albright (2019) notes that when Mussolini was asked about how he accumulated power, he commented that it was wise “to do so in the manner of one plucking a chicken—feather by feather—so each squawk is heard apart from every other and the whole process is kept as muted as possible” (p. 118). Today, power-hungry leaders in the United States are busy plucking feathers and minimizing the squawks. When the line between church and state is erased, it will then be too late, for the chicken will have been finally and completely plucked.
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