Michael Steven Smith is a retired attorney and the founder and cohost of the radio show Law And Disorder. He has testified on the rights of Palestinians in the United States Congress and the United Nations. He’s the author or editor of several books, including Lawyers for the Left (OR Books, 2018) and Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA.

Zachary Sklar is best known as co-writer, with Oliver Stone, of the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the film JFK. He has edited numerous non-fiction books, including the number-one-bestselling On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison, Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer by Michael Ratner, Profits of War by Ari Ben-Menashe, and Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA by Ralph McGehee. He teaches screenwriting at the Harlem Dramatic Writing Workshop and is the author of a book of personal essays, The Work: A Jigsaw Memoir.

The Rise of Christian Fascism

Chris Hedges

This Christian movement engages in magical thinking. Hannah Arendt argues that this is a fundamental element of all totalitarianism. It preys on the despair and alienation and even rage of its adherents. It’s cultish. And Trump functions far more as a cult figure for his followers than as a political figure.

When you look at studies of fascism, like Robert Paxton's book, Anatomy of Fascism, or Fred Stearns’s, The Politics of Cultural Despair, they write about how fascism, as it rises, uses the familiar comforting symbols that are indigenous to the culture. So German fascism, which was grounded in Teutonic myths, didn't look like Italian fascism, which harkened back to ancient Rome. As Paxton wrote, when fascism comes to America, it will be with mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance and the Christian cross and the flag. That's precisely what has happened.

I spent two years on my book. I spent a lot of time with these people, which was the only way to fully understand them. I was always upfront about who I was and where I came from. What I found fascinating was that as soon as they knew that I was biblically literate, they never wanted to talk about the Bible with me. The reason is that they don't know the Bible. They know those sections of it that they've been fed to buttress their ideology, but they don't really know it at all.

All of these pastors who run successful megachurches are millionaires who own private jets and everything else. They are cult figures. They can't be challenged. They are in direct contact with God. And Trump just became that cult figure writ large––to the detriment of the mega pastors, because they transferred that localized authority to Trump.

Eighteen years ago, I saw it coming. I understood the danger of it. I didn't predict a Trump, but I certainly predicted or saw the rise of a demagogue out of this movement. And that's precisely what happened. Today, we should be more alarmed because these people are on the cusp of taking power. A second Trump administration won't look like the first. It'll be far more vindictive. Trump was mercurial, impulsive, and disorganized. That isn't going to happen this time.

I think my book is relevant today because it explains the pathology of the Christian right, why they do what they do. As a small example, I went to a Right to Life weekend in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. I know as a reporter for many years for the New York Times that you can't understand these movements unless you spend hours and hours on the ground talking to people who were involved in them.

So at this Right to Life weekend, there were about 400 women. At the beginning, the organizers asked for all the post-abortive sisters to stand, and almost the whole room stood. When I started doing interviews, it wasn't that they had an abortion––many of them had multiple abortions. The organizers would take these people off for weekends. They'd give them plastic dolls and tell them these are the children they've murdered and they have to dress the doll and bathe the doll and name the doll and at the end of the weekend, beg for forgiveness and vow to fight the culture of death, which is us.

They were using the manipulation of guilt and despair to essentially recruit people to fight against the secular humanist society. That is a window into the so-called right-to-life movement that you don't get if you don't spend time with them.

I also took a creationist seminar in Missouri. They were teaching teachers in “Christian schools” how to teach about the creation, which is supposedly literally true from the book of Genesis. The problem is that according to the Bible, the sun or light is not created until the fourth day. So do you spend the first four days in complete and utter darkness? The teacher said, “Well, tell the students that God created a temporary light.”

Well, that's not in the Bible. But it is in those kinds of details that you see the irrationality. The rapture, for example, is not in the Bible. When you put that ideology under a microscope, when you look at it with those kinds of details, you see how frighteningly irrational it is, and how it is really about the perpetuation of magical thinking.

Michael Steven Smith is a retired attorney and the founder and cohost of the radio show Law And Disorder. He has testified on the rights of Palestinians in the United States Congress and the United Nations. He’s the author or editor of several books, including Lawyers for the Left (OR Books, 2018) and Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA.

Zachary Sklar is best known as co-writer, with Oliver Stone, of the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the film JFK. He has edited numerous non-fiction books, including the number-one-bestselling On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison, Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer by Michael Ratner, Profits of War by Ari Ben-Menashe, and Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA by Ralph McGehee. He teaches screenwriting at the Harlem Dramatic Writing Workshop and is the author of a book of personal essays, The Work: A Jigsaw Memoir.

The Rise of Christian Fascism

Chris Hedges

This Christian movement engages in magical thinking. Hannah Arendt argues that this is a fundamental element of all totalitarianism. It preys on the despair and alienation and even rage of its adherents. It’s cultish. And Trump functions far more as a cult figure for his followers than as a political figure.

When you look at studies of fascism, like Robert Paxton's book, Anatomy of Fascism, or Fred Stearns’s, The Politics of Cultural Despair, they write about how fascism, as it rises, uses the familiar comforting symbols that are indigenous to the culture. So German fascism, which was grounded in Teutonic myths, didn't look like Italian fascism, which harkened back to ancient Rome. As Paxton wrote, when fascism comes to America, it will be with mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance and the Christian cross and the flag. That's precisely what has happened.

I spent two years on my book. I spent a lot of time with these people, which was the only way to fully understand them. I was always upfront about who I was and where I came from. What I found fascinating was that as soon as they knew that I was biblically literate, they never wanted to talk about the Bible with me. The reason is that they don't know the Bible. They know those sections of it that they've been fed to buttress their ideology, but they don't really know it at all.

All of these pastors who run successful megachurches are millionaires who own private jets and everything else. They are cult figures. They can't be challenged. They are in direct contact with God. And Trump just became that cult figure writ large––to the detriment of the mega pastors, because they transferred that localized authority to Trump.

Eighteen years ago, I saw it coming. I understood the danger of it. I didn't predict a Trump, but I certainly predicted or saw the rise of a demagogue out of this movement. And that's precisely what happened. Today, we should be more alarmed because these people are on the cusp of taking power. A second Trump administration won't look like the first. It'll be far more vindictive. Trump was mercurial, impulsive, and disorganized. That isn't going to happen this time.

I think my book is relevant today because it explains the pathology of the Christian right, why they do what they do. As a small example, I went to a Right to Life weekend in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. I know as a reporter for many years for the New York Times that you can't understand these movements unless you spend hours and hours on the ground talking to people who were involved in them.

So at this Right to Life weekend, there were about 400 women. At the beginning, the organizers asked for all the post-abortive sisters to stand, and almost the whole room stood. When I started doing interviews, it wasn't that they had an abortion––many of them had multiple abortions. The organizers would take these people off for weekends. They'd give them plastic dolls and tell them these are the children they've murdered and they have to dress the doll and bathe the doll and name the doll and at the end of the weekend, beg for forgiveness and vow to fight the culture of death, which is us.

They were using the manipulation of guilt and despair to essentially recruit people to fight against the secular humanist society. That is a window into the so-called right-to-life movement that you don't get if you don't spend time with them.

I also took a creationist seminar in Missouri. They were teaching teachers in “Christian schools” how to teach about the creation, which is supposedly literally true from the book of Genesis. The problem is that according to the Bible, the sun or light is not created until the fourth day. So do you spend the first four days in complete and utter darkness? The teacher said, “Well, tell the students that God created a temporary light.”

Well, that's not in the Bible. But it is in those kinds of details that you see the irrationality. The rapture, for example, is not in the Bible. When you put that ideology under a microscope, when you look at it with those kinds of details, you see how frighteningly irrational it is, and how it is really about the perpetuation of magical thinking.