Getting Fascism Wrong

Last updated on: September 10, 2022 at 2:46 pm By Gene Veith

“You keep using that word,” said Inigo Montoya in Princess Bride. “I do not think it means what you think it means.” The word they were referring to was “inconceivable.” The statement also applies to the word “fascism.”

President Biden refers to Donald Trump and his followers as “semi-fascist.” Progressives are frequently warning that Republicans are “fascist.”

The term has become, as has been said, an all-inclusive term of abuse. But it has a specific, historical meaning. Fascism, as a political and economic ideology, refers to a system in which the state controls everything. It is a totalitarian, which means that the scope of the government is total. Communism is also totalitarian, but fascism holds to “national socialism,” which allows for private property in an economy totally directed by the state. It is collectivist, in that it opposes individualism, civil liberties, and any kind of dissent, with the goal of creating a single national organism.

Trump might uncharitably be accused of being a demagogue or even a would-be authoritarian, but that does not make him a fascist or even a “semi-fascist.” Those who believe in small, limited government cannot be fascists.

Lance Morrow–who is no fan of Trump–explains this in his Wall Street Journal column entitled Biden’s Speech Had It All Backward with the deck “Biden’s Democrats seek a one-party state. Trump’s followers want freedom from government power.” The piece is behind a paywall, but here is a sample:

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” . . .

Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think.

I’ve written a book on the subject, Modern Fascism, which shows that the ideology was a modernist phenomenon, favored by the modernist avant garde, as illustrated with the poet Ezra Pound, and specifically the faction of modernism that would evolve into postmodernism. This is evident in the commitment to the Nazi Party of Heidegger, whose brand of existentialism was foundational to postmodernism, and Paul DeMan, who is the father of “deconstruction.” I also look at the centrality of the “will” for Fascist thinkers, which has survived today in “pro-choice” ethics. Fascist religion ranged from overt neopaganism to theologians who sought to purge Christianity of its “Jewish” elements–that is, of the Bible–by employing higher criticism and rejecting Biblical authority.

There are other elements of fascism that I get into–including Darwinism, eugenics, and anti-rationalism–but I show that it is anything but “conservative.”

To be sure, one can get to fascism from the right–I worry about the “conservative” intellectuals who are flirting with “illiberalism”–but right now that mindset is most evident on the left.

Photo by Alisdare Hickson from Canterbury, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Lessons on Illiberalism from the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

Last updated on: September 8, 2022 at 8:39 pm By Gene Veith

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August 24 was the 450th anniversary of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which, at the behest of the French king Charles IX, soldiers and mobs slaughtered as many as 30,000 Protestants because of their faith.

Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, reflects on this horrific event in his essay for the online journal Providence, St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’s Lessons for Today.

He goes over the historical events and their context, then discusses the impact of the massacre. In France, the king’s brutality in wiping out the Huguenots, extending the king’s sovereignty over his subject’s inner faith, led to a tradition of absolutism that would result in the French Revolution. In the Protestant nations, the mass-martyrdom intensified fears of Catholicism. Eventually, though, the massacre led thoughtful people and political leaders to realize the necessity of religious toleration, leading to laws assuring religious liberty, including the First Amendment in the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Tooley then applies these hard-won lessons to today, a time when some thinkers are playing around with “illiberalism“–eliminating democracy, freedom, and human rights–and some Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, are arguing that nations need to be governed by a single religion.

There is today in America, and the world, a rising tide of intolerance and impatience with if not disdain for liberty, democracy, “liberalism,” and religious freedom. Why should “false” beliefs be tolerated? Why should people who are “wrong” have the same liberty with the people who are “right?” Isn’t freedom chaotic, decadent, and ultimately unsustainable? Doesn’t the common good require a central political and religious authority dictating the terms under which all shall live?

Some of these post-liberals are Catholic integralists who romanticize France’s old regime in which throne and altar were partners in silencing dissent. Other post-liberals are arch Calvinists who insist a truly godly society must be legislated accordingly to their theology, as in perhaps Calvin’s Geneva.

These illiberalisms ignore the bloody lessons of compromise and accommodation that led to toleration in Britain and Holland, thanks partly to the sufferings of the French Protestants, and eventually to full religious freedom, freedom of speech and democracy, with protected equal rights for all. Regimes that dogmatically enforce what is religiously “right” typically betray the intent of their own professed religions and create the conditions of their own destruction.

Notice his observation that today’s Christian illiberalism comes primarily from Catholics and Calvinists. Not all of them, to be sure, but the political theories that have the church ruling the secular realm come from those two theological traditions, both of which are inimical to Lutheranism. So Lutherans, whose two kingdoms theology allows for “secular” government and religious liberty, should stay away from “integralism,” whether of the Catholic or the Protestant variety.

Illustration: St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre by François Dubois (1529 – 1584) – Current valid link to file (same source): Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts; direct link to the image: [2]Original link (museum homepage only): Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46815694

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The Disappearance of the Redemption Arc

Last updated on: September 10, 2022 at 5:43 pm By Gene Veith

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Literature can tell us a lot about how people in any given era think and feel. So an observation from a literary critic about contemporary literature reveals much about our culture as a whole and for the people we interact with every day.

Kate Shannon Jenkins has written an essay entitled The Lost Redemption Arc, with the deck “Contemporary literature seems largely interested in moral transformation.”

The “redemption arc” is a plot line in which a character changes from bad to good. Showing how characters change always been a staple of fiction, and the change is often a moral or even spiritual transformation. Sometimes this is explicitly Christian, as when the murderer in Crime and Punishment is changed by Christ. Other times the religious parallels are in the background or not brought up at all. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice seems to be of bad character until he comes through as a noble romantic hero. Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is a bad father and husband, but in the end he dies for his family. The redemption arc, when written well, grows out of a character’s complexity and inner struggles. And it reflects what can really happen, since actual human beings are also complex and undergo inner struggles.

Today, though, Jenkins observes, the redemption arc can hardly be found in contemporary literature. She cites “a widely acknowledged problem: what Lauren Oyler called ‘the self-conscious drama of morality in contemporary fiction,’ in which ‘self-development is just a matter of figuring out your own essential goodness or badness.’”

Another factor is a “moral neurosis. . .which seems to stem from an anxiety that the characters’ moral failures could implicate their creators.” That is to say, authors are worried lest they be accused of transgressing the woke moral code because of the characters they create, so instead of making them complex or send them on a redemption arc, they make them clearly either woke or evil–my description, not Jenkins’, who comments:

But I am less interested here in the neurosis as in the idea that goodness and badness are, indeed, essential. That these are qualities to be revealed, rather than worked toward or against. This sense of moral stagnation can neuter the internality of the characters, obscuring not just their weaknesses, resentments, prejudices (or lack thereof), but also their willingness to confront these things, their desire to be relieved of them, their fantasies of something different.

The disappearance of the very possibility of redemption has aesthetic implications, resulting in simplistic, less interesting stories:

Rather than questions about transformation, what we do get plenty of (though not from the aforementioned authors) are tidy answers as to why characters are the way they are. . . .

Redemption does not and cannot happen online. We love to critique and interpret online apologia, dissecting the texts for evidence of their sincerity. But I maintain that redemption is a lonely, internal process of “getting right with God,” of wrestling in the dark with the worst parts of oneself. It is suspect if performed, and the intimacy of the struggle makes it among the most fertile and timeless subjects for literature.

To redeem oneself — or alternately, to fall from grace — means to work against one’s presumptive destiny. That’s what makes it interesting.

Notice that today’s literature is still obsessed with morality. It isn’t lawless or even relativistic, as we might expect. The morality is not that of the Ten Commandments; rather, it tends to be of the social-justice or psychological variety. But some elements of Biblical morality–such as loving others and denying oneself for them–are still evident. The point, though, is that people today are still tormented by their failure to keep the Law. They can’t even keep their own made-up laws. They earnestly desire to be righteous, hence the “virtue-signaling” in personal interactions, on social media, and in writing fiction.

What they lack is not a consciousness of morality; rather, they are unaware of the possibility of redemption. They don’t think they or the people they disagree with can change, much less be transformed. They are wholly oriented to the Law, however they conceive it.

This mindset leads many to self-righteousness, with all of judgmental zeal of the Pharisees. Though sometimes such external virtue-signaling correctness hides internal thoughts that are quite contrary to their own standards, resulting in hypocrisy and guilt.

But those whose transgressions have been made known have no way of finding grace and forgiveness, either from their peers or from themselves.

They need the Gospel, which bestows grace and forgiveness from God Himself. They may not be able to justify themselves on social media, but they can be justified by Christ, who bore their guilt and shame on the Cross, an atonement that gives full redemption.

The torment of the Law brings people to the Gospel. That seems to have happened with the controversial actor Shia LaBeouf, with his conversion to Catholic Christianity.

We should expect it to happen more often, so that casualties of our times find their own redemption arc.

Photo by cottonbro via Pexels

When Pastors Should–and Should Not–Be Political

Last updated on: September 15, 2022 at 1:47 pm By Gene Veith

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In general, the church should stay out of politics. But sometimes politics is foisted upon the church.

That’s the gist of an article in First Things by Ben C. Dunson, visiting professor of New Testament at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, entitled Should Pastors Be Political?

True, as Jesus confessed before Pilate, His Kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). I would add that making Jesus an earthly king was one of the temptations of Satan (Luke 4:5-8). The church and its pastors are preoccupied with God’s eternal kingdom, even as its members–and its pastors–must live also in God’s temporal kingdom.

Prof. Dunson gives two senses in which pastors do need to be involved in politics, and one sense in which they should not. First, the Bible does address temporal matters, including politics. Romans 13 explains how earthly authorities are instituted by God and that Christians need to be subject to them. It also explains the purpose and scope of earthly governments. The state, says Prof. Dunson, “exists to enforce justice, reward good, and provide for the common good of a nation (Rom. 13:2–7).” He concludes:

Pastors, just by teaching and preaching what the Bible says, will necessarily teach their people about the purposes and scope of the state, an important institution ordained by God. In other words, they will teach about politics, its (potential) goodness, and how it should be pursued.

His second sense in which pastors and their churches will be political is especially helpful. Of course pastors are to teach what the Bible says about moral issues. But some of those issues have been politicized–not by the church, but by the state.

Abortion, transgenderism, justice, marriage, the education of children, and so on, are all matters of fundamental Christian concern. They are also unavoidably political and partisan issues in our world, whether we want them to be or not. Laws are made in each of these areas that will significantly affect Christians and our non-Christian neighbors. They are not concerns that faithful pastors can ignore.

The church didn’t make abortion or same-sex marriage into political issues. The state did when it overturned centuries of moral teachings about such things and enshrined those changes in the law. So preaching about sexual morality and our obligation to protect human life will inevitably have a bearing on politics.

As for the sense in which pastors should not be political, has to do with the doctrine of vocation:

Those called by God to serve him as pastors must devote themselves to that vocation. In fact, from the standpoint of the Bible, for pastors to focus their labors on political activism (seeking political office themselves, extensive campaigning for candidates, and so on) would be a denial of their vocation as pastors, which is to preach the Scriptures and shepherd the people of God. . . .Most Christians aren’t called to be pastors. But some are called by God to serve in politics, just as others serve in education, trades, finance, the military, and so on. Pastors, while attending to the specific duties of their own vocations, should help their congregations serve in these ways.

I would just add that, according to Luther, all Christians, pastors included, do have a vocation of citizenship, in which we love and serve our neighbors by carrying out our civic duties that are common to all citizens, which, for us, would include voting, being informed, and working for the good of our country.

Though Prof. Bunson is Reformed, he is articulating what is, in effect, the Lutheran doctrines of the Two Kingdoms and Vocation! And he does so in a clarifying and insightful way.

Photo by Adam Schultz, President Joe Biden speaking in church, First African Methodist Episcopal Church – North Las Vegas, NV – February 16, 2020 via Flickr, Creative Commons License

The Price of Secularism

Last updated on: September 9, 2022 at 8:09 am By Gene Veith

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Does it seem to you that our society is mentally ill?

Unhinged leaders, senseless violence, and irrational behavior are part of every news cycle. Paranoia, delusion, projection, obsession, anti-social psychosis–these clinical terms are descriptive of our politics and government, our social media and our opinions. And, on the individual level, who hasn’t been plagued by anxiety, depression, and hopelessness?

There is a word for what happens when the society and the people in it seem to have lost their collective minds: Anomie.

The word literally means “lawlessness,” not in the sense of violating laws but of not having any. “Normlessness” may be a better synonym, trying to live in a society that has no “norms,” no accepted standards of any kind. Here is the dictionary definition of anomie: “social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values. . . .personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals.“

The concept derives from the work of Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), the father of the discipline of sociology. He saw anomie as a consequence of the rapid social change and economic displacement brought on by the industrial revolution of the 19th century, as populations shifted from the close communities of rural villages into depersonalized cities and their work changed from farming and skilled crafts to mechanized factories. In his study of suicide, Durkheim saw anomie as a major factor when people kill themselves.

As historian Patrick Leech explains, Durkheim saw anomie as being the result of “massive socio-cultural changes, such as industrialization and modernization. According to Durkheim, these processes stripped an individual’s life of meaning and purpose, while displacing them from traditional social support networks. Thus, societies suffering from anomie exhibited markers of personal dissatisfaction, such as high rates of suicide, divorce, and alcoholism.”

Leech has written a guest post for Patheos blog Anxious Bench entitled The Growing Crisis of Anomie in the United States: Learning from Hungary’s Cold War Past. He argues that the anomie that afflicts Western culture today can be directly related to the rise of secularism.

He begins with a thought experiment raised by another scholar: “What would be the consequence if all religious institutions in society shutdown today?” Leech says that “we know the consequences of what would happen if all religious institutions shutdown because it happened in Hungary.”

Before the war, Hungary was officially Catholic, with significant Reformed and Lutheran minorities. Churches were very influential and powerful, though charges of corruption and collaboration with unpopular governments began to alienate much of the population. When communism was imposed on the country, religious institutions of all kinds were suppressed and silenced.

In 1956, Hungarians rose up against Communism, but the revolution was brutally put down by the Soviet Union. Afterwards, though, Hungarian communists implemented reforms, including some free-market practices, designed to give citizens a higher standard of living. But the loosening up did not apply to religion, which was still restricted by the state. Comments Leech,

Although these programs succeeded economically, they coincided with drastic increases in alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide. By the early 1960s, Hungarians experienced the world’s highest rates of suicide—including among children and adolescents—and remained atop that list for two decades, a rate which rose by 70%. During this same period, alcohol consumption and alcohol-related deaths dramatically increased, as did other indicators of social fragmentation, like divorce and drug abuse.

In 1977, after trying everything else, “the state cited these social problems as justification for readmitting religious institutions into civil society, despite the party’s persistent opposition to religion.” The state began to allow religious institutions to operate. Churches started ministries to address social problems. Evangelists, including Billy Graham, were allowed into the country. Sometimes church leaders showed up!

“These efforts did not magically fix the problems in Hungarian society,” says Leech. “Rather, they seem to have injected a slow-acting antidote: hope. While hope is hard to quantify, the plateauing rate of suicide suggests these programs blunted despair.”

After the fall of communism, churches have again assumed their influential role. Now 80% of the population considers themselves to be Christians, though only 15% go to church regularly. Though Leech doesn’t go into this, the controversial prime minister Viktor Orbán presents himself as a defender of Christian values and describes his rather illiberal and authoritarian ideology as “Christian Democracy.”

Leech concludes,

While the causes may differ from those of socialist Hungary, these symptoms sound eerily familiar. The United States is facing high rates of suicide, along with abuse of drugs and alcohol, sometimes in the toxic mix labelled “deaths of despair.” Some people exhibit the social dislocation of anomie through grievance or intolerance. The most tragic examples of this phenomenom include young men, who commit acts of mass violence, like the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. Additionally, many recent books anchor today’s political and social hyperpolarization to social fragmentation.

Certainly, we are enduring much social change apart from religion–such as the technology revolution, economic dislocations, and the decline of the family–that no doubt also contribute to anomie. But certainly, in Durkheim’s terms, the loss of religion, almost by definition, “stripped an individual’s life of meaning and purpose, while displacing them from traditional social support networks.”

The breakdown of the family–evident not only in divorce but in the new phenomena of people now refusing to get married and refusing to have children–is certainly a major contributor to anomie, the family being the ultimate “social support network.” But the breakdown of the family is related to the breakdown of norms regarding sexuality, which, in turn, is connected to the breakdown of the church.

Even many of those who hold to a religion see it not so much in terms of belonging to a community of fellow-believers, who constitute a support system, but as a private, interior experience. Thus, many congregations are less of a community than they used to be.

So could it be that our current anomie–that is to say, the madness rampant in our society and the dysfunctions of those who participate in it–could be the direct result of the decline of religion? Is anomie the inevitable price of secularism?

Illustration: Edvard Munch, “The Scream,” CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Whatever Happened to Atheists?

Last updated on: September 1, 2022 at 12:04 pm By Gene Veith

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Ten years ago, in 2012, the nation’s atheists staged at “Reason Rally” at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., attracting a big crowd of up to 30,000. Four years later, they tried it again, but hardly anyone turned up.

You would think that atheism is growing, with the number of “Nones,” people who claim to hold to no religion, shooting up from 19% the year before the rally to 29% today. Back then the rally put forward the goal of creating a political coalition of 27 million atheists to counter the political and cultural influence of the religious right. But that effort seems to have fizzled out.

The online journal Religion & Politics published an article by Aysha Khan entitled A Decade After the First Reason Rally, What Happened to America’s Atheist Revolution?

For one thing, the Nones, upon whom the atheists put so much hope, are not predominantly atheists, with 72% believing in “God or a higher power.” As we have discussed, they are mostly “spiritual but not religious,” holding to an inward, self-constructed religion of one member.

Furthermore, it isn’t just that Nones don’t join churches. They don’t join anything. The article quotes atheist blogger Hemant Mehta: “’The demographic shift is shifting away from organized religion, but not to organized anything else, which makes it all but impossible to ask them to do anything,’ Mehta said. ‘Because most of them are apathetic. They’re not atheists.’” Which makes it hard to get a movement going, much less a political force.

But there are other factors. The flood of “New Atheist” books in the 2010s seem to have hurt their image. “Their hyper-intellectualism and brash anti-religious polemics left an unpleasant taste in the mouths of many non-believers and moderate believers,” comments Khan. “It became difficult to disrupt the longstanding image of atheists as angry white men in their 50s.”

Another problem, in these hyper-polarized times, is that atheists have a hard time getting along with each other. There are right-wing atheists, as in the “virtue of selfishness” followers of Ayn Rand. And there are left-wing, social-justice atheists, as in classical Marxism.

Some atheists hoped for an alliance with Muslims, Jews, and other religious minorities to push back against the dominance of Christianity in the public square. But that was never going to happen.

Then there is the leadership problem. Comments Khan, “Many of the old guard atheist leaders have faded from the mainstream spotlight—some in disgrace, like American Atheists’ firebrand former president David Silverman, after facing #MeToo-era sexual misconduct allegations.”

In light of all of these setbacks, Mehta said that instead of trying to form a political block, atheist activists are now focusing their efforts on issues they care about, such as the separation of church and state and abortion. He also mentioned racial equity, feminism, and the LGBTQ cause, sounding like the sort of woke atheist that right wing atheists oppose.

But atheists shouldn’t feel too bad about their setbacks. Though their numbers are small–about 4% of Americans are atheists–they exercise an enormous influence on the culture. Christians are far greater in number and have more political clout, but, unlike in other periods, they presently seem to have far less cultural, intellectual, and artistic clout than the atheists do.

As the number of committed Christians declines, perhaps the church can learn how to function so effectively as an influential minority.

Illustration: Sign of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Denver, Colorado, by Jeff Ruane, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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