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Despair drives the Christian right
Philadelphia Inquirer ^ | 1/14/2007 | Chris Hedges

Posted on 01/14/2007 6:01:26 AM PST by SHOOT THE MOON bat

Extremism: Radical preachers offer a magical world for battered believers.The engine that drives the radical Christian right in the United States - the most dangerous mass movement in American history - is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker's paradise, fraternité-egalité-liberté, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

During the last two years of work on the book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment whether I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded-up storefronts, dilapidated houses, potholed streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans.

We as a nation have turned our backs on the working class, with much of the worst assaults, such as NAFTA and welfare reform, pushed through during President Clinton's Democratic administration. We stand passively and watch an equally pernicious assault on the middle class. Anything that can be put on software, from architecture to engineering to finance, will soon be handed to workers overseas, who will be paid a third what their American counterparts receive and who will, like 45 million Americans, have no access to health insurance or benefits. There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. And such distortions, as Plutarch reminded us, have grave political consequences for democracies. The top 1 percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy.

The stories believers told me of their lives before they found Christ were heartbreaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world - the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world in which news and information were not filtered through the comforting ideological prism of radical religion, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits - betrayed them. They hated this world.

And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by radical preachers - a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened daily to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me toward those who challenge this belief system - to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible - was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.

The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East, and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes, as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.

Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be "raptured" upward, while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.

Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to "secular humanists," to "nominal Christians," to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.

All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power. And we are not in a period of crisis now. But another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a series of huge environmental disasters, or an economic meltdown will hand to these radicals the opening they seek. Manipulating our fear and anxiety, promising to make us safe and secure, giving us the assurance that they can vanquish the forces that mean to do us harm, these radicals, many of whom have achieved powerful positions in the executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the military, will ask us only to surrender our rights, to give them the unlimited power they need to battle the forces of darkness.

They will have behind them tens of millions of angry, disenfranchised Americans longing for revenge and yearning for a mythical utopia, Americans who embraced a theology of despair because we offered them nothing else.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chris Hedges' new book is "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: 2ignorant4words; 2stupid2ton; ac; americanfascists; brownacid; chrishedges; christophobia; dementalillness; fauxchristians; neverbeeninachurch; nutjob; offhismeds; persecution; projection; religiousleft; theocracy; waronchristianity
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To: DollyCali
These radicals, from James Dobson....

He's kidding, right?

21 posted on 01/14/2007 6:15:08 AM PST by Northern Yankee ( Stay The Course!)
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat
The engine that drives the radical Christian right in the United States - the most dangerous mass movement in American history

Who knew?

22 posted on 01/14/2007 6:15:21 AM PST by Timmy
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat

Chris Hedges has no brain left.


23 posted on 01/14/2007 6:15:38 AM PST by bmwcyle (Don't forget to send the bouquet of pork chops for Saddam's family)
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat

With this article there is a lesson for all: Never take the brown acid.


24 posted on 01/14/2007 6:16:14 AM PST by savedbygrace (SECURE THE BORDERS FIRST (I'M YELLING ON PURPOSE))
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat
For we are to God a sweet savor of Christ, in those being saved, and in those being lost; to the one we are the savor of death to death, and to the other we are the savor of life to life.

II Corinthians 2:15-16

25 posted on 01/14/2007 6:17:43 AM PST by DeaconBenjamin2
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat
The author is using a pen name - his real name is B. L. Zebub
26 posted on 01/14/2007 6:18:09 AM PST by xcamel (Press to Test, Release to Detonate)
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To: savedbygrace

LOL-LOL!


27 posted on 01/14/2007 6:18:42 AM PST by Earthdweller (All reality is based on faith in something.)
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat
the most dangerous mass movement in American history

I say it's newspapers that give free space to dingbat authors.

28 posted on 01/14/2007 6:19:21 AM PST by Drango (A liberal's compassion is limited only by the size of someone else's wallet.)
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To: Excuse_My_Bellicosity
Is that even a word?

Richard John Neuhaus in First Things mentioned recently that "mainstream journalism" is using "religiosity" all the time now, in place of "religion," "faith," "belief," or other more meaningful words.

29 posted on 01/14/2007 6:19:53 AM PST by Tax-chick ("I don't know you, but I love who you seem to be.")
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat
And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by radical preachers - a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened daily to protect them and perform miracles in their lives.

And this must be the world offered by Mr. Hedges:

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
Nowhere below us
Above only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for 
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

(Imagine, by John Lennon)

30 posted on 01/14/2007 6:20:47 AM PST by A. Pole (Jesus:"Will ye also go away?" Peter:"Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life")
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat

"forgetting for a moment whether I was in Detroit or Kansas City " I have no doubt that he forgets where he is all of the time...Delusional is what it is called in mental hospitals.


31 posted on 01/14/2007 6:21:21 AM PST by richardtavor (Pray for the peace of Jerusalem in the name of the G-d of Jacob)
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To: All

I wonder why most of you attack the messenger instead of the message.


32 posted on 01/14/2007 6:21:25 AM PST by Moolah
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat
This guy is the former Middle East newsman for the NYTIMES and his hatred for Christians is not anything to laugh at or ignore.

His disgusting display of bias, hatred, and his inability to see who the true enemy of this nation is (Islam) makes one believe he is truly a follower of Islam's teachings.

If anyone would like to voice their opinion to this odious impuissant little slug here is his email address: chedges@truthdig.com
33 posted on 01/14/2007 6:21:48 AM PST by Paige ("Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." --George Washington)
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To: cinives
"the radical Christian right in the United States - the most dangerous mass movement in American history"

Not to mention the longest surviving, albeit a bit shaky at this point, beginning with the founders, who ignited controversy with lightning rod phrases like "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" and "nature's God".

I know I personally "despair" this very day about which part of the Gulf Coast I should take the boat to .

Moron. Dangerous Moron.

34 posted on 01/14/2007 6:22:06 AM PST by prov1813man (While the one you despise and ridicule works to protect you, those you embrace work to destroy you)
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To: Northern Yankee

What's even stranger is that he must live in a social milieu in which he can express these opinions without being challenged.

Who are these people, where do they live, and how can I be sure of avoiding them?


35 posted on 01/14/2007 6:22:16 AM PST by Tax-chick ("I don't know you, but I love who you seem to be.")
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To: Oberon

pingferlater


36 posted on 01/14/2007 6:23:28 AM PST by Oberon (What does it take to make government shrink?)
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat

where would the left be without the word "fascist"?


37 posted on 01/14/2007 6:23:29 AM PST by InvisibleChurch (Tempus Fidget - The time between the final hymn and recessional.)
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat
The only ones more insane than this insect-eater are his editors at the Philadelphia Inquirer. The writer should be terminated immediately. Then the publisher should terminate the editors.

This is the perfect cameo of the rampant mass lunacy in upper echelons of print journalism today.

One can only pray desperately for the quick demise of these newspapers and the retirement of the madmen who control them and those who write for them.

Leni

38 posted on 01/14/2007 6:23:43 AM PST by MinuteGal (The Left takes power only through deception.)
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To: SHOOT THE MOON bat

Well, at least we're not cutting anybody's head off for not believing.


39 posted on 01/14/2007 6:24:09 AM PST by rabidralph
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To: Moolah

The message is just plain loopy.


40 posted on 01/14/2007 6:24:55 AM PST by BenLurkin
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