Suburbia and the Radical Christian Right

Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
has an article on the same topic at Alternet. While Alternet is a radical lefty site that deserves a bit of skepticism, Chris Hedges himself is a respectable journalist. He was even on the Stephen Colbert show recently, which is a sure sign of legitimacy. Anyways, this is a great article worth the short read, and goes along great with the documentary Jesus Camp and a handle of gin. The growing Evangelical movement is certainly very fascist in nature, and there must be reasons why it is growing so rapidly. The idea that The Decline of American Suburbia is a catalyst for the growth of Christian radicalism is reasonable, and I imagine the book itself provides more grounding for it. From the article,

The stories believers such as Learned told me of their lives before they found Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits, betrayed them.

They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.

The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.

read the article

A related article along the same thread comes from the Americans United web site, entitled Targeting Public Schools and written by Rob Boston. It is about how the Religious Right, aka the RR, is trying to evangelize public school kids. If you are going camping with your kids, I recommend printing this out and reading it instead of the usual fireside spook story.

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