American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

AuthorFlavelle, Christopher
PositionBook review

AMERICAN FASCISTS: THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND THE WAR ON AMERICA Chris Hedges (New York: Free Press, 2007), 272 pages.

America's Christian Right has had a devil of a year. George Bush, the country's first modern evangelical president, is politically isolated; Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, dead; and Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition, tarred by scandal. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, threatened to boycott the 2008 presidential election if Rudy Giuliani, a twice-divorced Catholic who supports abortion rights, wins the Republican nomination. As of this writing, Giuliani remains his party's frontrunner.

Against this backdrop, Chris Hedges' book American Fascists, which argues that the Christian Right poses a gathering threat to democracy, seems counterintuitive. Hedges argues that, like the fascist movements of the 1920s, today's radical Christian Right has co-opted the language of democracy to subvert America's system of government and create a theocratic state.

Hedges' culprit is a subset of the Christian Right he calls "dominionists," from a passage in the Book of Genesis in which God gives man dominion over the world. According to Hedges, Dobson and his...

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