According to Chris Hedges, we must attend to growing social and economic inequities in order to stop the most dangerous mass movement in American history—or face a future of fascism under the guise of Christian values.
Not surprisingly, Hedge’s apocalypse reminded me of the near-future setting of Hugo- and Nebula-winning Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Mindscan — a socially liberal Canada that provides a haven from fundamentalist Christian-controlled America — which I almost found as equally compelling as a plot offering plenty of philosophical speculation on the ethics of biotechnology and the nature of consciousness.
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From his AlterNet article:
“Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age—he was then close to 80—we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”
The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.”
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