Darkness for Light: Christofascism and the Right-Wing Appropriation of Religion

The word “evangelical” is derived from the Greek euangelion, which in classical Greek meant “the reward for bringing good news.” In New Testament times the sense of the word was transferred to mean the good tidings themselves. The 2nd century Church Fathers  began referring to the authors of the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – as Evangelists, “bringers of the “good news” of Jesus Christ.

Martin Luther used “evangelical” to describe his theology when he separated from the Catholic church in the 16th century in part over his belief that sins are forgiven based on faith alone, and not “works” – acts performed with the expectation of a reward.

“Evangelical” became associated with the first “Great Awakening,” in eighteenth century America where under the influence of Puritan Jonathan Edwards, among others, it represented the “good news” of salvation through Christ, emphasizing the need for a personal conversion experience. It was the latter that can be identified with the phrase “born again.” As the emphasis on conversion extended to converting outsiders, evangelicalism became associated with revivalism. In its focus on spiritual rebirth and individual devotion American evangelicalism drew on the doctrine of pietism, which rejects political control of spiritual affairs, in the words of James Emery White, rejecting the “compulsory and cultural” in favor of the “voluntary and personal.”

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) was founded in 1942. By its own account the timing did not seem particularly auspicious for the creation of an ecclesiastical organization. The US was just emerging from the Great Depression, and had suffered through two world wars, which, along with advances in organic chemistry, astronomy and anthropology, called into question the existence, power, and goodness of a deity.

For observers of religious institutions, at least, the term “evangelical” quickly came to mean anyone who belonged to one of the dozens of denominations associated with the NAE. By 1960 NAE comprised 32 denominations and nearly 1.5 million people. Two thirds of the membership were represented by five denominations, however: Assemblies of God, Church of God (Cleveland), International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Pentecostal Church of God, and the Pentecostal Holiness Church.

In 1969 a group of African-American parents of school-age children sued the US Treasury Department, challenging the tax-exempt status of three white-only schools in Holmes County, MS, including East Holmes Academy and Central Holmes Christian school. By 1970 zero white students in Holmes County were enrolled in public schools. A 1972 report commissioned by a number of southern human rights organizations would later find that “one could usually identify a segregation academy by the word ‘Christian’ or ‘Church’ in the name.”

The suit in what came to be known as Green v. Kennedy (later Green v. Connally) argued that the schools’ segregated status made them ineligible for consideration as “charitable” institutions. (David M. Kennedy was Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1969 - 1971, succeeded by John Connally.) The plaintiffs were awarded a preliminary injunction in January 1970, denying segregated private schools tax-exempt status while the case was reviewed. In 1971 US District Court for the District of Columbia upheld the policy that segregated schools were not entitled to tax exempt status, and that contributions to them were not tax deductible.

Throughout the 50s and 60s, despite popular evangelist Billy Graham’s well-publicized association with Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, self-identified evangelicals had remained largely apolitical. With the Green v. Connally decision Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich saw an opportunity to change that. In the mid-70s he wrote:

The new political philosophy must be defined by us in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition…. When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation…. The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated…. If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.

Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist school in Greenville, NC, resisted the Green v. Connally ruling. Founder Bob Jones, Sr. believed that racial discrimination was mandated by the Bible. In response to a letter from the IRS in 1970 the school admitted a single African-American part-time student who soon dropped out. The school went on to admit married African-American students, and expelled students who participated in or advocated interracial dating. In January 1976 the IRS withdrew the university’s tax-exempt status.

The presidential election of 1976 pitted Democrat Jimmy Carter against incumbent Republican Gerald Ford, thrusting evangelicalism into the public eye as Carter identified as a “born again” Christian. Newsweek ran a cover story labeling 1976 “the year of the evangelical.”

After Carter’s election, fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell joined Weyrich in blaming Democrat Carter for the IRS ruling withdrawing tax exemption from segregated schools, despite the decision having been reached during the Nixon administration. Falwell and Weyrich also sought to frame the discussion of the Green v. Connally ruling in terms of religious freedom rather than racial discrimination. The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to have an abortion provided Falwell, Weyrich, and associates with an opportunity to motivate conservative voters who in the aftermath of Green v. Connally and the Bob Jones episodes had been indifferent, or reluctant to engage politically. In the 1978 Senate race Republicans picked up three seats; Democrats lost their filibuster-proofing but retained an absolute majority 58-41.

In 1979, using Weyrich’s phrase Falwell founded the Moral Majority – a political organization claiming to advocate for conservative social values. In his 1989 study Georgetown University’s Clyde Wilcox found that people who spent “a good deal of time watching televangelists” were likely to support the Moral Majority. This demographic, which acquired the label “religious right,” did not necessarily overlap with “evangelicals.”

In her 1990 collection of essays published in English under the title The Window of Vulnerability, German theologian Dorothee Sölle analyzes what she calls the “electronic church” in a chapter titled “Christofascism” – a term Sölle is widely credited with originating. She characterizes the operations of the “electronic church” as “weaving together the goals of the ultraconservative Old Right with the pragmatic strategies of liberals, making skillful use of media.”

Sölle describes the application of Madison Avenue advertising tactics to the use of religious framing in a political context. She highlights an agency known as “Seeds of Faith,” in explaining the financial success of the electronic church. Seeds of Faith put a capitalist spin on Luke 6:38 (“Give and it shall be given to you.”) Viewers calling in to a television program were promised that if they donated today they would receive something in return “tomorrow.” If the viewer didn’t “receive anything from God in return,” their sacrifice must not have been great enough, and they were encouraged to give more. Says Sölle, “The connection between money and religion, being rich and being pious, is no longer even subject for reflection.”

Another Madison Avenue technique appropriated by the Moral Majority was to offer tokens and trinkets just for calling in to the organization. Sölle reports that in one year Falwell’s organization gave away two million pins bearing the message “Jesus first.” Moral Majority made early use of computers, sorting incoming mail into categories of problems (marital, alcohol, etc.), and wrote long pseudo-personalized letters in response.

The audience for the Moral Majority largely comprised what Sölle calls “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’s message muddled traditional Christian tenets with values of what the 1969 Black Panther newspaper called the “avaricious businessman.”

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.”

In addition to fund-raising, the Moral Majority participated in voter registration and lobbying. During the 1980 presidential campaign Moral Majority executive director Robert Billings was a Reagan campaign adviser.

On October 25, 1983 in response to political turmoil and a military coup the US invaded the Caribbean nation of Grenada. The nominal justification was to rescue American citizens on the island including 600 medical students. Lawrence Eagleburger, then Reagan’s Under Secretary for Political affairs would later admit that the real purpose of the invasion was to “get rid” of Soviet-trained coup leader General Hudson Austin. There was a press blackout around the Grenada occupation, and the Reagan administration did not seek Congressional authorization under the War Powers Clause of the US Constitution, which would later become the subject of litigation.

In response to the Orwellian behavior of the Reagan administration, Presbyterian theologian Robert McAfee Brown wrote an open letter to Christians around the world warning that civilian control of the military, which he termed “one of our most cherished traditions,” had “been replaced by military control of the civilian population (one of the best tests of a turn toward military fascism).” Brown warned that during the Grenada episode both Congress and the free press had been sidestepped in the interest of a vaguely defined “national security.” “National security,” Sölle observes, had become the foundation of politics, replacing traditional democratic values such as human rights and freedom of the press. Writing in 1990 as poverty dominated the ghettos of North America, and economic and military conflicts embroiled the Third World, Sölle describes the collapse of the “illusion that capitalism would eventually free the world of want and misery.” US pre-eminence had been shattered in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the oil crisis of the 70s. Characterizing the conservative account of the effect of liberal values Sölle writes:

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.

Sölle details three values comprising “Christofascist civil religion.”

First is a belief in the moral superiority of the United States. This she notes is in direct contrast to the US’s “political and cultural isolation,” and the “still growing anti-Americanism resulting from the militarization of its satellite states.” This chauvinism and “unchecked militarization” requires “inner religious armaments,” Sölle writes, which were provided in part by televangelists directing their viewers to “articulate their faith politically.”

“The second value …  is work,” Sölle asserts. Rather than work simply being regarded as a virtue, this tenet metastasized into policies like denying health care for the “elderly, sick, and so-called unemployables.” Sölle cites Jerry Falwell’s 1980 screed Listen America where, after a quote from free-market advocate Milton Friedman, Falwell writes:

The free-enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible. Jesus Christ made it clear that the work ethic was part of His plan for man. Ownership of property is biblical. Competition in business is biblical. Ambitious and successful business management is clearly outlined as part of God’s plan for His people.

The third value is “family,” which in practice means patriarchy. For Sölle this view of the family is consistent with “an attitude of extreme hostility toward labor unions and a rejection of all social measures.” She comments on Reagan’s elevation of social over economic and humanitarian issues. For Reagan, she writes: “It is not the nuclear bomb that threatens our survival; it is love between two men or two women that threatens everything we have achieved.The moral scandal of our time is not the starvation of a million children in the Third World, but the abortion of unborn life.”

Sölle warns of “religion being instrumentalized in order to engender hate….” With a German’s unique perspective on fascism, Sölle is critical of what she sees as a tendency in political conversation – even among what she terms the “moderate Right” – to equate fascism with totalitarianism, in the process ignoring growing “racist mania and militarism.” In this simplistic way of thinking, Reagan could not possibly have fascist tendencies because he was democratically elected. For Sölle, though, this is possibly the most dangerous aspect of Christofascism: it is not compulsory. It is a free-market fascism in which nationalism, militarism, racism, celebration of violence in popular culture (especially against “communists”), are all selected by individual choice, or as she says “bought.” Militarism, which she defines as “the absolute priority of military ends over all other public obligations,” is a precondition for “Hitler-style fascism.” And for the Christofascists, any individual or group who questions American militarism, such as members of the National Council of Churches during the Vietnam War, is labeled communist.

Within the Moral Majority nationalism was blurring into anti-Semitism. At the National Affairs Briefing Conference in Dallas, TX, August 1980, Southern Baptist Convention president Bailie Smith remarked that “God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.” Sölle describes the cumulative effect of the Christian right’s tactics as making the Christian religion “the vehicle of these ideologies.” “...[T]he content of this fascist religion contradicts the Jewish-Christian tradition,” she writes. Because in the Christofascist world only successful, attractive, wealthy males are blessed, “there have to be hate objects who can take the disappointment on themselves.” What remains is “an Easter Bunny in front of the beautiful blue light of the television screen.”

Jesus who suffered hunger and poverty, who practiced solidarity with the oppressed, has nothing to do with this religion.

A significant portion of the Moral Majority’s message was warning of danger and a dire future. So ironically when Reagan’s 1984 campaign message “Morning in America,” began to catch on, Moral Majority and similar organizations began having financial trouble. In 1987 Falwell resigned as Moral Majority was absorbed by the larger Liberty Federation. And by 1989 Moral Majority was dissolved, although Falwell’s excuse was that its mission had been accomplished.

A Gallup poll in the Carter era labeled as evangelical anyone who identified as a “born again” – something Atlantic contributor Jonathan Merritt calls a “simplistic definition.” The result was that the poll labeled 50 million people evangelical, or a third of the electorate at the time. The definition had at least one virtue: it focused on an attribute of religious and not political belief. The criteria developed by historian David Bebbington became a widely accepted definition of evangelicalism. Sometimes referred to as the “Bebbington quadrilateral,” the criteria are: a belief that lives should be transformed through a conversion (“born again”) experience; regard for the Bible as an ultimate authority; belief that one should participate in missionary and social reform efforts; belief that mankind has been redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. The NAE in conjunction with LifeWay Research developed a “standard for identification of evangelical belief” that mirrors Bebbington’s.

Benefiting in part from pollsters’ imprecise definitions of evangelical, the Moral Majority was initially credited with having helped Reagan win the 1980 election, although subsequent analysis found he would not have needed the Christian Right to win. Post-election analyses found that the audience for televangelistic programs had been greatly overestimated. An early estimate of Jerry Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour” audience at thirty million was later countered by estimates of the combined audience for the top 10 televangelism shows at seven to ten million, which was less than the weekly audience for M.A.S.H. In a May 1982 article in the Washington Monthly titled “How the Media Made the Moral Majority,” journalist Tina Rosenberg argued that media coverage of Falwell and his like rather than clarifying the beliefs and intent of the “Christian right,” had in fact obscured and sanitized it. “What should have been portrayed as a relatively new social and political development of modest size and power was transformed into a nearly invincible juggernaut that seemed to be on the verge of overwhelming American life,” she wrote. Popular evangelist Billy Graham commented in 1981 that he did not want a “wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right,” adding “The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”

Televangelist Pat Robertson sought the Republican nomination for president in 1988, raising more money than any campaign in US history, but eventually losing to Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. “Poppy” Bush. With the election of Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992, Republican party leaders – among them Ronald Reagan – suggested that the party shift its focus back to free-market economics and away from the Christian right’s preoccupation with moral issues. Researchers Ted G. Jelen and Clyde Wilcox found, however,  that by 1993 conservative religious activists were shifting their focus away from the national arena and toward state and local contests. Robertson’s advocacy organization, the Christian Coalition, for example, had taken control of 20 state Republican organizations. At the state and local level the organization was content to serve as an umbrella for other evangelical activist groups, thus avoiding the need for constituents to support unified policies on a range of issues.

In 2001, Ralph Reed, who had been executive director of the Christian Coalition from 1989 to 1997, was elected chairman of the Georgia state Republican Party. The following year, under Reed’s leadership, Republican Saxby Chambliss defeated Democrat Max Cleland for a senate seat, and Republican Sonny Perdue defeated Democrat Roy Barnes for governor.

The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 provided a renewed stimulus to the Christian right fueled by “birtherism” – the false narrative that Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya – which contributed to anti-Muslim sentiment more generally. Between 2010 and 2017 more than 200 bills opposing Sharia law were introduced in 43 states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. (“Sharia law” is actually a misnomer; Sharia is a set of life guidelines found in the Quran.)

Using Obama’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) and other federal assistance programs as a pretext, and aided by a number of national conservative organizations, the nebulous entity calling itself the Tea Party emerged in 2009, and went on to play a role in the 2010 midterms. Despite its cultivated public image as a group of “rugged individualists,” Tea Party members tended to be ““financially secure members of the middle and upper-middle classes, predominantly male and middle-aged, and overwhelmingly Republican.” Ironically, although the premise for the Tea Party was nominally to reduce government spending, Kate Zernke, author of Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America found that roughly half of supporters were receiving Medicare or Social Security, or lived with someone who was. And not surprisingly, the Tea Party included a significant number of white evangelicals who were found to be five times more likely to support rather than oppose the loosely defined organization.

When Barack Obama won the presidential election twice, some Tea Party members blamed the Republican party, believing that “through action or inaction” the party had allowed “a set of economic, social, and cultural changes” that made them feel powerless. They felt their representatives in Washington had not acted quickly or forcefully enough. As Republican political consultant Rick Wilson describes it, for this faction, supporting Donald Trump felt like rebellion. “They crave a sense of agency in the face of a political culture in D.C. that they believe loathes and disregards them,” he wrote in 2017.

Joining these Tea Party refugees in the Republican Party of 2017 in what Wilson labels the “Troll Party,” he writes, were “the dregs of the creepier neighborhoods” of various online communities, including white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, birthers, and various conspiracy theorists. Wilson writes.

Nothing is more important to them than Trump as an avatar for their rage. They’ve become a fun house mirror version of everything we once mocked Obama supporters for being: cultish, immune to facts, swift to attack apostates, glassy-eyed and swaying as if the Great Man was going to lead them to the Kool-Aid troughs in the hot Guyana sun. They’ve become like Scientologists, only more fanatical, more vengeful, more sealed in a hermetic political domain where nothing matters but fury, acting out, and punishing the unbelievers.

On January 6, 2021 after rioters breached the security measures at the Capitol Building, Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman later sentenced to prison for his role in the day’s events prayed from the Senate dais: “Thank you divine, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent creator God, for filling this chamber with your white light of love, with your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ.”