PUBLIC VIEWPOINT: Religious Right Harmful To America

Chris Hedges was a longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times and a graduate of Harvard University with a master’s in divinity. He conducted an extensive investigation of the Christian Right, going to megachurches throughout the country. One conclusion he reached was that the vast majority of its followers were good, well-intentioned people.

But he also concluded this: “The Christian Right has no religious legitimacy. It is a mass political movement.

It ignores the core values of the Christian religion, summed up by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, andthe core values of American democracy. They are, as the Rev. Sloane Coft n said, ‘not the biblical literalists they claim, but selective literalists choosing the bits and pieces of the Bible that conform to their ideology and bigotry, and ignoring, distorting or making up the rest.’”

Christian Dominionism takes its legitimacy from Genesis 1:26-31, in which God gives man complete dominion over all of creation. But this Scripture has been rationalized to give rise to what it is essentially a fascist movement that couches its political intent in the language of the Bible and the iconography of American patriotism (See ”Chris Hedges - American Fascists- The Radical Christian Right 1 of 6” on YouTube).

It hermetically seals off its followers from the real world and sets up an us-vs.-them mentality. It relies on spectacle to inculcate a form of magical thinking among its followers. It always appeals to emotions, never to reason or rationality. It allies itself with powerful factions like the local police force or the U.S. military to protect its interests. Like most fascist groups, it has an uneasy alliance with powerful corporate interests, and helps the latter to enforce a system of “inverted totalitarianism” by which the strings of political power are not wielded by a charismatic demagogue or leader, but bynational and multi-national corporations working anonymously and behind closed doors.

The Religious Right is one of the most destructive mass movements in American history. The time for viewing its leadership as simple religious kooks is gone. It has insinuated itself into virtually every level of power, from your local baptist church to the Arkansas Legislature to the Family Foundation on C Street in Washington, D.C., which hosts the National Prayer Breakfast. We ignore the threat they pose to our democracy and our way of life at our own peril.