A Close Look Now!

Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School and was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, is the author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

The radical Christian right has no religious legitimacy.

It is a mass political movement.

It is interchangeable, in many ways, with other traditional political movements ranging from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia. It shares with these movements an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt and uncertainty. It also embraces a world of miracles and signs and makes war on rational, reality-based thought. It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy. It places a premium on action. It dismisses those who do not bow down before its god—and the leaders who claim to speak for God—as heretics and traitors. This movement shares with corporatists, who are busy cannibalizing our society for profit, the belief that there are a chosen few who know the truth and therefore have the right to impose it.

The citizen, the individual, no longer has any legitimacy in this new world.

Apocalyptic visions like this one have, throughout history, cowed populations and inspired genocidal killers.