More Worries about "Christo-Fascism"

Vice has pulled a video from Tik Tok that it believes illustrates a serious threat. I appreciate that they defined their terms.
Christian nationalists believe that their country’s national policies and laws should reflect evangelical Christian values, and culture war issues like LGBTQ rights, “critical race theory,” or immigration, are regarded as signs of moral decay that imperil their nation’s future. 

Christo-fascists take that one step further, and believe that they’re fighting primordial battles between West and East, good and evil, right and left, Christians and infidels. These two labels, however, sometimes overlap. 

On TikTok, ideologues from both ends of the spectrum are weaving together a shared visual language using 4chan memes, scripture, Orthodox and Catholic iconography, imagery of holy wars, and clips from movies or TV...

It’s no accident that this community is burgeoning on TikTok of all places, according to Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University in Iowa who focuses on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “You build your audience with a young demographic, and then you spread your ideas that way. This is how you build the next generation of fascists,” he said. 

Christianity could be associated with a fascist movement because both the faith and the ideology are corporatist. That doesn't mean 'corporation,' but rather comes from the Latin corpus meaning 'body.' The idea is that the Church or the state is a kind of organism, and the different parts of the organism have different functions. This is by analogy to the way that the hand or the eye are different organs with different functions, but each of which is part of a greater whole that it serves according to its functions. The Pope or Leader is supposed to be the brain; the eyes are inquisitors or police; the hands are the people who do the work they are assigned and directed to do. 

Fascism gets its name from the Roman fasces, a device that was both a weapon and a symbol. The fasces was a bundle of sticks bound together, sometimes with an axe head bound up in one end. Roman magistrates carried one to administer corporal punishment, but more to symbolize the way the Roman order worked: the sticks were individually brittle and weak, but bound together they became strong. 

The trick is that some version of that idea is necessary for any successful politics: if you can't come together in common purpose, you aren't going to build any sort of state. It is thus not merely fascists who have reason to talk this way; any political philosophy at all is going to have to do it. Anarchists may wish to do without leaders, but they can't do without common purpose and people pulling together to get things done. Together we are stronger, and it is only by pulling together that we get the garden dug and weeded and harvested. 

So you do get communities of a corporatist mindset in Christianity -- abbeys and monasteries and religious orders and the like -- but of course you do, because you couldn't build a society that didn't have some version of that idea. The presence of a necessary condition is not surprising just because it was necessary

There's something similar at work here, I think. Christianity is under attack -- I see memes designed to mock and belittle it every day -- and not only nor even especially from 'the East' but from those within our culture. Pulling together in defense of it is the only way in which it might survive.

Also, I notice the two images that they pulled as exemplary are not unhealthy messages by themselves. "Revolt against the modern world not because it is modern but because it is evil" says one; perhaps you might substitute "insofar as it is evil," but otherwise this is a traditional message for every age. The second one features a knight wearing Crusader livery, and says "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." That's a healthy message. 


10 comments:

  1. I'm not sure what ideology the good professor thinks is not founded on teaching the young at least something. Somehow this becomes an evil method when it's something he doesn't like. This is unclear thinking. The message can be good and the method bad, or vice versa.

    And so with any number of good things that can be put to bad use: cooperation, beauty, intelligence, strength, discipline...is there, in fact, something that cannot be put to bad use? In Lewis's The Great Divorce, whole scenes are devoted to illustrating how even love can go awry and become poisoned.

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  2. In the absence of her definition of fascism, I have to assume the author just means "things I don't like so you should be afraid of."

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  3. It's plainly a deliberate attempt to conflate Christian "nationalism" (I'm not even sure that's a correct label) with "Christo-fascism". Has there ever been a "Christo-fascist" state of any significance in the modern era? Or any era- the earlier authoritarian states that were Christian weren't fascistic.

    It's classic leftist projection of themselves onto their enemies ideas.

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  4. I think they'd argue that Trump's America constituted one, although Trump himself is hardly a model of Christian piety (which is fine; it takes all kinds to make a world, they say). They might argue that the Jim Crow South was; and I can kind of see that argument. The Klan had adopted and perverted traditionally Christian forms (the robes were meant to evoke the Crusader livery, for example, and a lot of the rhetoric was about protecting the decency of Christian (i.e. white) women). They appear in the public mind mostly as nightriders and terrorists, but in fact they were often the leading people of the community -- mayors and sheriffs, backed by their wives and women's social clubs. They were definitely a perversion of Christianity, but they prayed and went to church.

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  5. Anonymous10:15 AM

    Grim, I've just pointed a high-traffic audience to your "Social Harmony" post from several years back:

    https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2004/06/social-harmony.html

    The inbound link is here:

    https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1544679510674587648

    Thanks again for your many writings over the years.

    -Piercello

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  6. Several years! It's been almost two decades since I wrote that. Thanks for the warning.

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  7. I dunno. What makes a state fascist? Although clearly racist, the Jim Crow South still had a democratic form of government. I don't hear arguments that apartheid South Africa was fascist, so I don't think that kind of truly systemic racism is enough to make a nation fascist. Otherwise, the term fascist would be redundant and we'd just say it was a racist nation.

    Just for a baseline definition, I looked at the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on fascism.

    In brief, they say fascism is difficult to define. Some common characteristics include:
    1. capitalizing on "economic anxieties by shifting the blame away from government or market forces. Jews, immigrants, leftists, and other groups became useful scapegoats. Redirecting popular anger toward these people would, in theory, rid a country of its ailments."
    2. "To unify a country, fascist movements propagated extreme nationalism that often went hand in hand with militarism and racial purity. The prosperity of a nation depended on a unified polity that put the group’s welfare above the individual’s. A strong, vigilant military was considered necessary to defend these group interests. And for some fascists “the group” was defined not by territorial boundaries but by racial identity."
    3. Frequently attacked liberalism for allegedly sowing disunity and moral degeneracy. While they initially claimed to be democratic to gain legitimacy, they resorted to totalitarianism in practice.

    Since WWII, neofascists are "frequently xenophobic, ultranationalist, militaristic, and illiberal" and many "placed enormous importance on slowing or stemming immigration" and "rebranded themselves as democratic to appeal to a world that had grown rapidly disillusioned with totalitarian regimes."

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  8. On Christian fascism specifically, Britannica's article says:

    "Most fascist movements portrayed themselves as defenders of Christianity and the traditional Christian family against atheists and amoral humanists. This was true of Catholic fascist movements in Poland, Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. In Romania, Codreanu said he wanted to model his life after the crucified Christ of the Orthodox church, and his Legion of the Archangel Michael, a forerunner of the Iron Guard, officially called for 'faith in God' and 'love for each other.'

    "In France, Valois, Taittinger, Renaud, Bucard, and La Rocque were all Catholics, and Doriot, previously an atheist, appealed to Catholic sentiments after he became a fascist. Although Maurras was an agnostic, he defended the Catholic church as a pillar of social order, and there were many Catholics among his followers. The fascist intellectual Robert Brasillach described the Spanish Civil War as a conflict between Catholic fascism and atheistic Marxism. Drieu La Rochelle rejected liberal Catholicism but praised the 'virile, male Catholicism' of the Middle Ages and the 'warrior Christianity of the Crusades.'"

    However, the two actual nations everyone regards as fascist, WWII Germany and Italy, actually went against Christianity in many ways.

    "Although fascists in Germany and Italy also posed as protectors of the church, their ideologies contained many elements that conflicted with traditional Christian beliefs, and their policies were sometimes opposed by church leaders. The Nazis criticized the Christian ideals of meekness and guilt on the grounds that they repressed the violent instincts necessary to prevent inferior races from dominating Aryans. Martin Bormann, the second most powerful official in the Nazi Party after 1941, argued that Nazi and Christian beliefs were 'incompatible,' primarily because the essential elements of Christianity were 'taken over from Judaism.' Bormann’s views were shared by Hitler, who ultimately wished to replace Christianity with a racist form of warrior paganism. Although Hitler was cautious about dangerously alienating Christians during World War II, he sometimes permitted Nazi officials to put pressure on Protestant and Catholic parents to remove their children from religious classes and to register them for ideological instruction instead. In the Nazi schools charged with training Germany’s future elite, Christian prayers were replaced with Teutonic rituals and sun-worship ceremonies."

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  9. “… the Jim Crow South still had a democratic form of government.”

    They certainly maintained the accidents of a democratic form of government. There were elections. Some of them were hotly contested elections where approved members of the Party — there was only one — controlled different factions and decided to compete that way.

    But to be a candidate at all you had to be acceptable to the Party; and in many places, to the shadow government represented by the Klan. Large parts of the citizenry was effectively disenfranchised and kept from effectively organizing by terrorist violence.

    It’s hard to claim there was much of the essence of a democratic form of government there.

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  10. Well, sounds like it would qualify, then, or at least be close.

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