Christofascism by Dorothee Sölle
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This essay appears in the third part of the difficult-to-find out-of-print book The Window of Vulnerability: A Political Spirituality from Fortress Press in 1990 (ebook on archive.org, buy used on biblio, amazon). This third and final part is titled “Cells of Resistance” and contains
“The Three Theologies” 105–116
“Søren Kierkegaard and the Concept of Anxiety” 117–121
“Rudolf Bultmann and Political Theology” 122–132
“Christofascism” 133–141
“Civil Disobedience: Variations on a Theme From Henry David Thoreau” 142–148
“God is All-Sharing” 149–156
…..
Christofascism
America, as a nation and a people, has stood in her brief history as the mightiest (and perhaps the last) great home of the FAITH. She is known to the peoples of the world as a “Christian nation.” It follows naturally that she and her people are the special target of Satan as he seeks to devour the planet and everyone on it…
–Christian Voice Newsletter (Shriver, The Bible Vote: Religion and the New Right and Conway, Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America’s Freedoms in Religion, Politics and Our Private Lives)
Christian Voice is a New Right organization in Pasadena, California, that works much like the Moral Majority to activate fundamentalist Christians and especially their pastors politically. What has established itself in America since the beginning of the eighties as the New Right is a weaving together of goals of the ultraconservative Old Right with the pragmatic strategies of liberals, making skillful use of the media. In letters like the one cited above, addressed to “Dear Brother in Christ,” in television programs and conventions, the faithful members are urged again and again to “put feet to their prayers,” that is, to give money and to write to their government representatives, television stations, school principals, and officeholders.
Prayer chains are often combined with telephone trees–for example, to defeat progressive senators or block liberal laws. In this way a law for equal rights for homosexuals was headed off in Minnesota in 1977: “In less than twenty-four hours, 100 prayer chains were contacted, and hundreds of phone calls were made to key legislators.” (Shriver, Bible Vote, 28) Without the media and their technicians, without the electronic church, the development of this extreme New Right would be un-imaginable. I will begin by describing my own observations from viewing religious television, then offer some interpretation in light of the contemporary background in the United States, and finally attempt a theological critique.
I. The Electronic Church
Europeans can scarcely imagine the size, financial power, and growth of the religious television movement. In the United States it is no
(end p. 133)
longer a matter of old-fashioned tent meetings in the great tradition of rhetorical preaching. The new evangelists are creatures of television, cool transmitters of the message. They do not shout; they speak softly, skillfully, and movingly. They are perfect masters of the medium: “These people sell their product,” said a young born-again man in an advertising agency, seated between images of cowboys and sensuous women, “and we are here for our own purpose: we are selling the gospel.” Can the gospel be sold like soap, Bahama vacations, and sex?
There are a couple of simple recipes for spreading the new religion. The most important is success: show the successful that religion really helps! On almost every program there are people who give testimony–an interview with the manager who had been an alcoholic, a talk with the hit singer who was shy. Things were just terrible for me, they relate, I didn’t know what to do, my marriage was going badly, my boss was giving me suspicious looks, I was in a crisis! Until I found Jesus. Accepted him as my Lord. (The organ music swells gently.) How wonderful everything is now, praise God! Success in business, in marriage. Wealth, fame, and power are the basic American values that are unconsciously addressed, simply through the aura of the persons who appear on the screen. Just as cigarette advertising speaks to our unconscious longing for green forests, rushing water, and clear air, so the well-groomed, rich, white man on the screen offers us promises: Take this cigarette, take God, and it will go as well for you as it has for me.
One agency is called Seeds of Faith. It explains the unbelievable financial success of the electronic church, far greater than that of the traditional denominations. The message here is: Give in order to receive. If you give God something today, if you really sacrifice something, he will repay you your gift tomorrow, and a “heaped-up measure” (Luke 6:38) will be yours. First give, and then you can expect miracles in your life. BUt what if they don’t happen? You didn’t receive anything from God in return? Then you must not have given enough! Give more, you’ll see…And the simple fact that religious programs of this kind go on and on, paid for by the donations of their viewers, is a proof that prayers are heard. The connection between money and religion, being rich and being pious, is no longer even a subject for reflection. The answer of the religious Right to the question of what religion and faith are all about is simple and striking: “It works.”
It is a well-known sales technique a la Madison Avenue: offer small gifts–pamphlets, religious books, Bibles, pins, American flags–all
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free for just calling in. Jerry Falwell gave away two million pins inscribed “Jesus first” in one year. Free, no cost. While the music soars and a prayer begins, the telephone number appears again and again on the screen. Anyone who calls gets plugged into the sales system. The electronic church is not only television, it is a sales technique combining television, telephone calls, letters, address lists. Once you get the free gift, you will be bombarded with letters and folders. The “great need that can only be answered by your own personal gift” is explained, and the addressed envelope for the check is enclosed. If nothing comes back after two or three letters, the computer spits your name out again. If you do give anything, more letters arrive, sorted according to size of your gift: in cream-colored envelopes for those who have pledged ten dollars a month, rust-colored for those who give five hundred dollars or more.
Every call and every letter is answered personally. The scientifically tested method is perfect. Computers sort the mail according to marriage, alcohol, or other problems, and write long, personal letters, indistinguishable from real ones; the stamps are stuck on. Everyone who, attracted by the television program, calls the prayer number receives advice and Bible verses; name and address go into the computer. Later you receive a prayer list to check off: alcohol, anxiety, arthritis, asthma…for every problem from A to Z, a personal prayer from a volunteer helper.
Jerry Falwell, a fundamentalist pastor with his own Baptist congregation in Lynchburg, Virginia, got into business with his television program, “The Old Time Gospel hour”: he receives checks for $50,000 a week. Whom is he reaching? These are the people for whom the American dream has not become a reality, people who have been impoverished by inflation, isolated suburbanites, politically frustrated little people. The Moral Majority promises them that everything will be fine again…the way it was. America will be Number One again, sexuality under control, criminality abolished. The values of the Moral Majority are “decency, home and family, biblical morality, and free enterprise, the great ideals that are the cornerstone of this great nation.” The continually repeated message is simple, and it is hammered into insecure and unsuccessful people with teh confidence of the successful. Jesus loves you. The moral strength of the nation has been weakened. Give Jesus your heart, and he will give you what you want. An optimistic message: Be positive!
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II. The Theologizing of Politics and the End of Secularization
After the attack on Grenada, in the fall of 1982, Robert McAfee Brown, a leading Presbyterian theologian, wrote an open letter to Christians outside America, in which he showed how much “civilian control of the military (one of our most cherished traditions) has been replaced by military control of the civilian population (one of the best tests for the beginning of a turn toward military fascism).” Brown pointed out how both of the most important instruments of American democracy, Congress and the free press, had been set aside during the occupation of Grenada “in the name of the ideology of national security.” The military-political doctrine of national security has largely replaced the older political values and convictions of democracy, freedom of the press, and human rights; instead, “national security” has become the foundation of politics.
This program has an external military side, but it also has an internal religious and cultural side. The political debate in the United States is, according to my observation, being increasingly theologized. It is not mere ideological positions, but two religions that are fighting with one another. This means the end of the liberal era and especially the end of its thesis about the secularization of society. The steps taken by Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, for example, from his The Secular City in the sixties to Religion in the Secular City in the eighties, testify to the survival and the new polarizing of religion. What is new is the alliance of the theological element with the extreme political Right.
The historical perspective of neoconservatism is a comprehensive critique of those liberals who, twenty years ago, still maintained the secular and optimistic notion that capitalism would eventually free the world from want and misery. This illusion collapsed in the sixties, both in the Third World and in the ghettos of poverty in North America. The great revolutionary liberation movements in the Third World were repressed by coups, economic boycotts, CIA plots, and–when necessary–wars. But the challenges behind them and the injustice of the existing economic order were not perceived. The self-confidence of the United States was deeply wounded in the early seventies by the loss of the Vietnam war and by the oil crisis. The extreme Right has a ready answer for all that: it demands a politics of strength, not of justice. The conservatives united by blaming liberalism for all the problems it neither could solve nor wanted to solve. The welfare state had caused the collapse of the Protestant work ethic; a weak program of national defense had allowed the Soviet Union to “win” the arms race. And finally, the women’s movement had “destroyed” the American family.
Ronald Reagan himself referred to pornography, drug addiction, and the collapse of the family, once “the cornerstone of our society,” as the symptoms of the moral decline of the United States. According to his view of history: “All our material prosperity and all our influence are founded on our faith in God and the basic values that follow from that faith.”
Americans are urged to believe in the moral superiority of the United States, a faith that stands in marked contrast to the political and cultural isolation of the United States today in almost every international forum and to the still growing anti-Americanism resulting from the militarization of its satellite states. Reagan of course insisted that he would never cease “to pray that the leaders [of the Soviet Union], like so many of their own people, would come to know the liberating nature of faith in God.” But this rhetoric does not bear the least relation to the new strategic plans for total destruction of the enemy through a lightning war, as developed in the Pentagon’s document “Airland 2000.” The new American chauvinism and the unchecked militarization of the earth and the heavens require inner religious armaments; they need James Robinson’s television show, “Wake Up, America!” in which Christians are instructed to articulate their faith politically. Viewers who respond to Jerry Falwell’s television preaching receive letters challenging them to become Faith Partner Crusaders.
The second value in neoconservative religion is work, hard work: no sympathy is wasted on those who do not work. In the context of Reagan’s economic policies, that meant no health care for the masses of elderly, sick, and so-called unemployables. The denial of reality, the refusal to acknowledge certain thigns that do not accord with the ideology, is in my opinion characteristic of aggressive neoconservatism. In Jerry Falwell’s book, Listen, America! Milton Friedman the ultraconservative economic theorist of the Chicago school, appears in the role of evangelist. Every form of welfare, aid, or solidarity with the weaker is regarded not only as counterproductive, but also as anti-biblical. This religious legitimation of capitalism in its most brutal forms has never before existed even in the United States. “The system of free enterprise is clearly prescribed in the Bible, in the Proverbs of
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Solomon. Jesus Christ makes clear that the work ethic is part of his plan for mankind. Private property is biblical. Business competition is biblical. Ambitious and successful business practice is clearly prescribed as part of God’s plan for his people.” (Falwell, Listen, America!)
The third value in the new Christofascist civil religion is the family and, within it, the role of the woman. Being religious means keeping women in the place ordained for them by God. A patriarchal ideology of the family complements an attitude of extreme hostility toward labor unions and a rejection of all social measures. Reagan was a master at playing on the deep-seated anxieties of people caught up in massive technological change. He exploited their fear of inflation and of the loss of jobs and turned it toward a different point–namely, sexuality. It is not the nuclear bomb that threatens our survival; it is love between two men or two women that endangers everything we have achieved! THe moral scandal of our time is not the starvation of a million children in the Third World, thanks to our masterly economic planning, but the abortion of unborn life! Unemployment is not the problem; pornography is!
III. Theological Critique
People are told repeatedly that pornography, homosexuality, and promiscuity go with secular humanism, satanism, and communism; these last three are lumped together without distinction. The primitiveness of the argumentation is scandalous. For believers who are dependent on authority and in search of something to hold on to, religion is instrumentalized in order to engender hate, to lead them into battle, into crusades. It is this instrumentalization of religion for completely different ends that inspired me to formulate a concept that needs some further clarification: Christofascism.
In our public discussion the concept of fascism has been almost completely reduced to totalitarianism, even by the moderate Right. All the other essential elements of German fascism in particular, such as its racist mania and its militarism, are dismissed as irrelevant. According to the strange logic of some of our guardians of democracy, President Reagan, because he was democratically elected–albeit by only 27 percent of the U.S. Population–simply cannot have any fascist tendencies. In this debate the electoral process as such takes on a sacrosanct quality, as if no democratic country had ever stumbled into genocide (in Southeast Asia, for example). Democracy, in this way of thinking is a purely formal structure, and its lack of political substance,
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so evident in its militarism, racism, sexism and in the neo-colonial exploitation of the peoples of the Third World is of no further interest.
But the most dangerous thing about Christofascist religion is precisely that it is not compulsory, nor is it brought about in totalitarian fashion by violence. It is a matter of what critical Americans call “soft fascism”: chauvinistic nationalism, militarization of one’s own land and all its dependent countries, the still-unconquered racism that expresses itself also in the reintroduction of capital punishment, the celebration of violence in films–to the extent that the victims are described as “communists”–all these fascist tendencies are not imposed by violence, but instead are freely “bought.” And one of the essential differences between this and European fascism is, in my judgment, the geopolitical fact that nowadays the concentration camps are not close to Weimar or Munich, but are far away: in El Salvador, in the Philippines, in South Africa, and wherever the great world power permits or encourages torture and murder, or has done so in the past.
These connections–the internal and external brtalizations–must remain as invisible as possible, and here too the religious-ideological support system of the Western world plays a key role. It leads the population to a freely chosen acceptance of militarism. And militarism, that is, the absolute priority of military ends over all other public obligations, is in fact a substantial criterion for Hitler-style fascism. “Whoever votes for Hitler votes for war,” could be read on the walls of houses in Berlin in 1932. Anyone who questions American militarism–like the Catholic bishops or some cautious voices in the National Council of Churches–is demonized by the religious right and called an aide to the communists.
Within the Moral Majority, excessive nationalism has increasingly taken on the features of anti-Semitism as well. Dr. Bailie Smith, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, declared at a meeting, “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.” Add to that an image of the enemy that is not troubled by any kind of knowledge or experience, as clearly expressed by Ronald Reagan when he called the Soviet Union “the root of all evil.” This remark recalls the Nazi slogan, “The Jews are our misfortune.”
Everyday anticommunism is unimaginably blind; I myself was in a discussion in a middle-class church where, when I mentioned a friend of mine who is a pastor in East Berlin, a woman shouted at me: “That can’t be so; there are no pastors in the East they are all in concentration camps and the churches have been burned!” This ideological mixture of nationalism, militarism, family ideology, hostility to working people, and blind hatred of communism is compounded with Christianity by the religious Right; the Christian religion is made the vehicle of these ideologies, so that in many cases people who are outside the churches have no conception of Christianity except in this Christofascist form. The deepest meaning of the Christian religion is conformed and subordinated to fears and threatening lies, to hate and the will to destroy.
In a theological perspective it is evident that the content of this fascist religion contradicts the message of the Jewish-Christian tradition. The God of the prophets did not preach the nation-state, but community between strangers and natives. The apostle Paul did not base the justification of sinners on the Protestant work ethic, but on grace, which appears for young and old, for diligent and for lazy people! And Jesus did not make the family the central value of human life, but the solidarity of those deprived of their rights. The most important norms of the Moral Majority are not constrained in Christian faith, as we can see from the many critical remarks against the family that appear in the gospels. It is characteristic of Christofascism that it cuts off all the roots that Christianity has in the Old Testament, in the Jewish Bible. No word about justice, no mention of the poor, whom God comes to aid, very little about guilt and suffering. No hope for the messianic reign. Hope is completely individualized and reduced to personal success. Jesus, cut loose from the Old Testament, becomes a sentimental figure. The empty repetition of his name works like a drug: it changes nothing and nobody. Therefore, since not everybody can be successful, beautiful, male, and rich, there have to be hate objects who can take the disappointment on themselves. Jesus, who suffered hunger and poverty, who practiced solidarity with the oppressed, has nothing to do with this religion.
At a mass meeting a thousand voices shouted: “I love Jesus” and “I love America”–it was impossible to distinguish the two. This kind of religion knows the cross only as a magical symbol of what he has done for us, not as the sign of the poor man who was tortured to death as a political criminal, like thousands today who stand up for his truth in El Salvador. This is a God without justice, a Jesus without a cross, an Easter without a cross–what remains ia metaphysical Easter Bunny in front of the beautiful blue light of the television screen, a betrayal of the disappointed, a miracle weapon in service of the mighty.
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