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.
