I am always pleased when Harper's arrives in my mailbox, but this month, it features some especially insightful articles dealing with the recent growth far-right religion and it's old nexus with market capitalism.
In his short piece, 'Let There Be Markets' Gordon Bigelow reminds us that mainstream economics has it's roots in the early evangelical movement in 19th century England. He doesn't draw the connections back to the Puritans and the English Civil War or over to The Gospel of Wealth movement in the USa, but he does draw the connection forward beautifully to the USA of today.
Jeff Sharlet goes inside the belly of the beast so to speak with "Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch" and describes a kind of so-called Christianity most mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics of a generation ago would hardly recognize as Christian (I know I don't see my own religion reflected there).
Most frighteningly, the growth of Dominionist power in a broad religious institution is depicted by Chris Hedges in "Feeling the Hate With the National Religious Broadcasters"
For excerpts, discussions, and a poll go below the fold.
Alas, I offer no links because it's all from the May issue which is not online yet. I have the time to pass the word this week though, since I am home with some annoying maladies. I really recommend a trip to the newstand to support Harper's for publishing this stuff though.
These articles may be particularly instructive to those who continue to think of the corporate right and the religious right as somehow at odds with one another. The fact is that the religious type faith in markets cannot stand on it's own scientific basis but needs an external belief system, whether radical Hyper-Calvinism or Randian Objectivism to lean on.
In his look at the roots of mainstream economics, Bigelow shows us some connections I was not aware of before about how early economic thought was shaped by the morality of the era in 19th century England.
"The group that bridled most against the pessimistic elements of Smith and Ricardo was the evangelicals. These were middle-class reformers who wanted to reshape Protestant doctrine. For them it was unthinkable that capitalism led to class conflict, for that would mean God had created a world at war with itself. They believed in a providential God, one who built a logical and orderly universe, and they saw the new industrial economy as a fulfillment of God's plan. The free market, they believed, was a perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behaviour and to punish and humiliate the unrepentant ... Moreover, they regarded poverty as part of a divine program. Evangelicals interpreted the mental anguish of poverty and debt, the physical agony of hunger or cold, as natural spurs to prick the conscience of sinners. The believed the suffering of the poor would provoke remorse, reflection, and ultimately the conversion that would change their fate."
This led to what was the Victorian equivalent of the welfare 'reform' we've recently experienced in this country.
"Traditionally, people who could not work or support themselves, including orphans and the disabled, had been helped by local parish organizations ... the Poor Law (1834) nationalized and monopolized poverty administration. It forbade cash payments to any poor citizen and mandated that his only recourse be the local workhouse."
I will not quote the first hand account of life with the megachurch crowd in Colorado Springs, but would like to comment that it was an eye-opener for me, giving a picture of how these operations function. The collision of religion and business cold not be more overt. Moneychangers in the temple, I say. These folks really ought to drop the pretense of being Christian.
The most frightening piece explored the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters. I was blissfully unaware of how the Dobson led Dominionists had purged the more traditional Billy Graham type evangelicals from positions of power and now pretty much ran the show with the truly traditional fundamentalists now on the outside looking in. Before long they may be as demonized as Muslims, secularists, mainline ecumenicalists, traditional Roman Catholics and modernist Jews. Right-wing Catholics and Orthodox Jews are given a pass for various reasons.
Anyhow ...
It paints a chilling portrayal of the overt hate-mongering that is being done in the name of the Lord and and the way that Dobson has consolidated power. In closing his brilliant and enlightening piece, "Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters" Hedges recalls prescient comments by an old professor.
"I can't help recall the words of my ethic professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the `Christian fascists'.
He gave us the warning 25 years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct it's efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the US into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. It's ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance ...
Then as now, Adams said, liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil and when the radical Christians came, these people (liberals) would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched the German academics fall silent or conform. He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity.
He told us to watch closely the Christian Right's persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then he imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institutes' library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first deviants singled out by the Christian Right. We would be next "
Just last night, in a discussion under a diary by Devilstower, I argued that it may be hasty to call these folks fascists. I really don't know. I do know that the religion they practice is not Christianity and the political system they favor is not representative democracy.
Is fascism on the rise in America? Is it a more uniquely Anglo-saxon form of authoritarianism that is more moralistic and God-based? Is it a natural outgrowth of capitalism? A natural outgrowth of Christianity? What are we watching here?
Most importantly, how should we respond? I am really starting to fear that whatever small political gains are made, the underlying culture of this nation is one that I am queasy about starting a family in.