We can have bad memories of Donald Trump and fear the return of the former president and his supporters, however is it not exaggerated to call an essay American fascists and to dedicate it to “the Christian right to assault the United States”? Its author, the journalist Chris Hedges, born in 1956 in Vermont, justifies his analysis by making us penetrate the secret of a country, so close but still unknown.
In the Quebec edition of his book translated by Nicolas Calvé, Hedges, interviewed by historian Pierre-Luc Brisson, he explains why the American religious right supports Trump, whose private life is opposed to the true Christian spirit. He notes that this right “is not a religious movement” in the Orthodox sense. According to him, it is a deviant movement “which, obsessed with practical power, thinks only of the sacralization of American power and imperialism”.
Its adherents compare themselves, Hedges shows, to the German pro-Nazi Protestants of the 1930s, of which, at Harvard Theology Faculty, James L. Adams (1901-1994) had taught him the harmfulness in the light of a stay (1935-1936). ) in Germany. For these pro-Nazi Protestants, the journalist sums up today, “Hitler was a messiah of the German people”. He finds in them, he believes, “a vision similar to that of many evangelical supporters of Trump.”
Son of a progressive Presbyterian pastor and himself, in 2014, a pastor of this denomination, Hedges knows American Protestantism from the inside and knows how to discern its tendencies. He measures the gap between religious liberalism, his own, from animating fundamentalism, he recalls, 28% of the electorate, 80% of whom support Trump. He portrays with flair the tendency that best represents fundamentalist politicization: “dominionism”, that is to say the aberrant theology of domination.
This brutal counterfeit of Christianity, Hedges states, could also be called prosperity theology. According to her, he exposes with clairvoyance, “Jesus would have advocated individual enrichment and the non-intervention of the State in the economy”. The doctrine thus concocted, ironically the journalist, “enchants the American business community”.
What Hedges, always slyly, calls “the commerce of God” is expressed primarily through Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), the global evangelist television channel, based in California. It is often accompanied by a crusade against abortion, homosexuality, evolutionism denying the biblical creation of the world in six days …
The German Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), executed for opposing Hitler, had a much deeper interpretation of Christianity. Hedges suspects he would have detected a link between Hitler and Trump.
Extract from “American Fascists”