I just finished reading Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming, the Rise of Christian Nationalism. It’s a short and scary book and I highly recommend it. Goldberg, a reporter for Salon, immersed herself in the Christofascist world over a period of a year, going to their churches, talking to leading preachers and ordinary “believers” in the pews, reading the works of their so-called theologians. She also documented Christofascist ties to the Bush administration, ties that affect everything from stem cell policy to choice of judicial nominees to the enormous ongoing wealth transfer (mostly from — no surprise here– “blue states” to “red states”) under the rubric of the Faith-Based Initiative.
Goldberg does not use the word Christofascism; that’s simply my preferred term for the phenomenon she discusses: a paranoid, anti-intellectual, patriarchal, hate-driven, war and death-loving syncretic cult, nominally Christian, that has an elaborate mythology and symbology derived from crackpot eschatology and an idiot-Disney invented history of the United States of America. This multifaceted cult, which boasts hundreds of prominent, sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating ayatollahs like Pat Roberston and Jerry Falwell, and tens of thousands of lesser clerics, claims George W. Bush (who swore an oath to preserve and defend the Constitution against all enemies) as an adherant, despite having the avowed goal of replacing our constitutional republic with a corporatist theocracy. “Christofascism” may not be the best term for the Christian Nationalist movement, but I can’t think of a better one, and since we’re all going to be bombarded with the Islamofascism “I-word” every day until either the Second Coming or the end of the war on terra (whichever comes first) anyway, I figure I might just as well trampoline off of it.
Goldberg’s tone is reportorial, God love her, but I can’t talk about this stuff in a neutral tone. Something about malevolent sanctimonious kitsch kinda brings out the invective from me.
Continue reading