Good news, bad news.

Gay people are no longer the most reviled group in America. We’re the second most. That’s the good news.

The Gold in the Hate Olympics goes to the atheists.

According to a recent CNN\Gallup poll, the type of person that most parents (46%) would not want their children to grow up to be are those who do not bow down to that great American thunder-hurler who dwells where the eagles soar.

Coming somewhat tardily in for the Silver (at 26%) are those of us who, as the college kids now say, have seen Dorothy — as in “Gay? Man, that guy’s so gay, he’s seen Dorothy.” (This comes as music to the wizen ears of those of us brought up on movies who wonder if our rich allusions to say, Karen Black fall on Xbox-sodden minds.) It will be only a matter of time before “godless atheist” replaces “faggot” on the playground as the slur du jour .

Did I mention, that was the good news? (Storm clouds gather over an American crossroads, above, in John Rogers Cox’s moody Gray and Gold.)

The bad news is: start packing your bags. Many readers will now part company with this writer and say that he is overstating the case. Really?

Is it still so wildly unthinkable, still just runaway hysteria to imagine that we may not get to live out our lives in the country of our birth? Or that it is best to keep a bag packed, a gun handy, and most of your assets in jewels for quick conversion to foreign currency should the need come to make for the border on some dark and stormy night when, as the Rolling Stones once put it (an allusion everybody gets), “the whip comes down” — a song that begins with the chill Cassandrine warning: “I was gay in New York but a fag in L.A.”

Alarmist? You should be alarmed.

“Watch what they do the homosexuals,” warns Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times staffer, in his new book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

The current attack on gay rights, he argues, will be the first turning point in a subtle, under-the-radar advance by politically well connected evangelical groups toward a totalitarian theocracy.

To stress the urgency of his analysis, Hedges cites the unprecedented number of Christian right operatives at the highest level of government, rewriting — and often blatantly falsifying — history, science and government aid programs to suit a Biblical agenda. (At left, melancholy at 6pm in Edward Hopper’s Gas.)

Hedges, who holds a masters degree in theology from Harvard, has long covered the religiously inspired culture war in this country. He spoke recently at a Washington D.C. bookstore (to be rebroadcast this Sunday, February 11, on C-SPAN2 Book TV) and what he had to say may set your hair on end.

“Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the ‘Christian fascists.’” he began, reading a long passage from his book.

The warning given to me twenty-five years ago came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at 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.

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 of the blindness caused by intellectual snobbism. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in patriotism and the pages of the Bible.

Adams was not a man to use the word “fascist” lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground … He was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States …

He saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian church and the Nazi party. Similarities that he said would in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crises see American fascists under the guise of religion rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about “dialog” and “inclusiveness” that made them ineffectual and impotent.

Liberals, he said, did not understand the allure and power of evil, nor the cold reality of how the world worked. The current handwringing by Democrats with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them as demonic and Satanic, would not have surprised Adams…

Hedges makes the hard — and frankly disturbing — argument that there is a limit to reasonable tolerance — and free speech. The tolerance of intolerance — particularly that brand of intolerance that advocates hatred, if not outright destruction, of opposing groups — is more than dangerous, it threatens to destroy the very atmosphere that allows any sort of tolerance to exist. He argues that tolerance of intolerance is prompted by a misplaced sense of fair play.

Adams finally told us to watch closely what the Christian right did to homosexuals. He had seen how the Nazis had used “values” to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Thousand of volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a bonfire.

Adams said that homosexuals would be the first “deviants” singled out by the Christian right. We would be the next. (Above, a tattered American flag flies over a beach house on Fire Island in Robert Mapplethorpe’s American Flag 1977.)

The ban on same-sex marriages passed by 11 states was part of this march towards our door. A 1996 federal law already defined marriage as between a man and a woman. All of the states with these ballot measures, with the exception of Oregon, had outlawed same-sex marriages as did 27 other states. The bans, however, had to be passed believers were told, to thwart activists judges who wanted to overturn them. The Christian family — even the nation — was under threat. The bans served to widen the splits tearing apart our country. The attacks on homosexuals handed to the foot soldiers of the Christian right an easy target. It gave them a taste of victory, it made them feel empowered — but it is ominous for gays, and for us.”

While conceding that “fascist” is a heavily loaded term with historical connotations, Hedges argues that it accurately defines the Christian Right which shares such signal features as the cult of militarism, the war against intellectualism, and an obsession with violence as a way to cleanse the world. Hedges wallops home the evidence for his contentions, citing some jarring developments in Ohio:

Two decades later,… the power brokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the Executive branch, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the courts. The movement has seized control of the Republican Party and holds a majority of seats in 36% of all Republican state committees…

The movement is making a huge push to seize control of key states, including Ohio, where a group called Patriot Pastors have adopted as their symbol the cross superimposed on the American flag. When I attended a rally of Patriot Pastors in Dayton, a chorus sang militant hymns and patriotic songs while the crowd watched pictures of the war in Iraq. They must maintain the fiction of the separation of church and state, dodging their intent to build a theocratic Christian government, while at the same time sending out a stream of coded reassurances to their radical base.

The movement has signed on dozens of cities and numerous states, such as Ohio, to a movement that will build people of what they call “high character.” Ohio is now a state of “character”: The state has put funding and resources aside to train citizens and leaders on how to be “people of character.” And potential candidates can fill out forms that declare they are “persons of character” and their names are posted on the website.

But woven into the 20 point list, … one which deftly askews all religious terminology, is a blueprint for an authoritarian state. One where questioning power is unpatriotic and only those with “high character” as rigidly defined by Christians in the radical Christian right have the right to lead and be heard. Individualism, the right to privacy, the belief that other political viewpoints and moral systems have value are all attacked as disruptive to social cohesion…

President Bush must further these objectives, including the march to turn education and social welfare over to these churches with his faith-based initiative, which has handed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to these organizations, as well as chip away at the wall between church and state with his judicial appointments, if he does not want to face a revolt within his core constituency.

“The Christian right has no religious legitimacy,” Hedges summed up as the reading came to an end. “They are, as the Rev. William Sloane Coffin said, ‘not Biblical literalists as they claim but selective literalists choosing bits and pieces of the Bible that conform to their ideology and bigotry, and ignoring, distorting or making up the rest.’

“The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslems, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as nominal Christians and those they brand with the curse of secular humanist is an attack on all of us. On our values, our religious freedom, and our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.” (Above, a glowingly spiritual evocation of America’s bounty and promise in Thomas Hart Benton’s Wheat.)

In the Q&A that followed, one person wondered how Hedges became so interested in gay issues, the unspoken suggestion being that perhaps Hedges was gay himself.

This turned out not to be the case — but the story didn’t stop there. Hedges father was an activist Presbyterian minister from upstate New York, concerned with the classic liberal issues of the poor and social inequities: “My father took an early stand in the town in support of the civil-rights movement,” related Hedges, “a position that was highly unpopular in rural, white enclaves where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most hated men in America. A veteran of World War II, he opposed the Vietnam War, telling me when I was about 12 that if the war was still being waged when I was 18, he would go to prison with me.”

When the pastor learned his brother was gay, he became active in the gay movement, another maverick move for the time.

Because of his gay brother, Hedges said, “my father had a real sensitivity to the pain of being a gay man in America in the 1950’s and 60’s. I went to Colgate University. There was no gay and lesbian organization, and when my father found this out, he brought the gay speakers to my campus — this was in the 1970’s. This led to students confiding to my father that they were too uncomfortable coming out of the closet to found a gay and lesbian organization on the campus, so he took me to lunch and told me, though I wasn’t gay, I would have to found it.

“I used to walk into the dining hall and the guy would take my card for breakfast, lunch or dinner and check it off and hand it back to me and go “faggot.” I made it my undergraduate mission to seduce his girlfriend.”

The most provocative moment in the Q&A came when Hedges was asked to explain the appeal of the radical Christian right. “It is a movement of despair,” he asserted, noting that it is particularly potent in the depressed areas of the Middle and Southwest, where people have seen their jobs shipped overseas and been progressively disenfranchised.

“You go to some of the former manufacturing centers, as I have over the last few years, in places like Ohio, and the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. The disintegration of community has brought with it all the social ills: the disintegration of family, addictions, domestic abuse, schools that no longer function, coupled with the removal of any kind of meaningful federal assistance.” This, he contends, makes people in large numbers susceptible to magical thinking where a Jesus will heal all wounds and avenge all slights.

“Part of the rage these people feel with critics,” he said, “comes from this fear of being pushed back in the reality-based world in which they could not cope, the world they yearn to be destroyed. And that’s essentially what this obsession with apocalyptic violence is. It’s about destroying the world that betrayed them, along with all of the people that betrayed them.”

Nightcharm salutes Chris Hedges and hopes his book is read as widely as possible. (Above, the alarm is sounded throughout a sleeping hamlet in Grant Wood’s The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.)

To learn more about Chris Hedges

Buy American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
Read the first chapter
Watch the C-SPAN2 Book TV broadcast