‘By Joseph Rossell
Juicy Ecumenism
The Institute on Religion and Democracy
March 2, 2017
One writer on Medium – a website for (mostly progressive) opinion writing – recently compared Evangelicals to “The American Taliban” and equated saying “I’ll pray for you” with the “religious extremism” of Islamists. He further compared Evangelicals spreading the Gospel to ISIS attempting “to establish a global muslim [sic] caliphate.”
Granted the author of this post is a self-described “Multi Media Creator,” not a public policy analyst. But other commentators more eminently qualified have employed equally bombastic terminology to describe conservative Evangelicals.
Journalist and Princeton University Professor Chris Hedges wrote a book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, published in 2007. As the title implies, he details the rise of “Christian fascism” in the United States. He argued in a column in October 2013 that at the center of this movement are “Dominionists” bent on recapturing “Christian” America:
They are no different from the vanguard described by Lenin or the Islamic terrorists who shaved off their beards, adopted Western dress and watched pay-for-view pornography in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack. The elect alone, like the Grand Inquisitor, are sanctioned to know the truth. And in the pursuit of their truth they have no moral constraints. Read the rest of this entry
