We
have witnessed a great deal of conservative madness over the past five
years, since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States.
Some of us during the intervening years have wondered where it would
end. I was one of those
who early on began to compare the Religious Right and the Tea Party to the Nazis.
It was not a careless or spiteful comparison, but one based on the
evidence of their rhetoric and avowed goals. There is a reason I made
the above map resemble the Nazi flag.
It
is no accident that the Nazi cry of Germany for the Germans is echoed
by the Republican cry of America for Americans. Once upon a time there
were “real” Germans and our own time brought us “real” Americans – the
obvious consequence of such claims being that everybody else was an
interloper, inferior – the “other.” With a single utterance, people like
Sarah Palin, like Hitler before her, was able to delegitimize half of
the population. The “other” become parasites attacking the health of the
country. This is a claim made by both Nazis
and the Religious Right.
Of course, that horrified progressives, to say such horrible things.
Godwin’s Law was, of course, invoked (we need a law about the invocation
of Godwin’s Law – seriously). But a comparison should not be shied away
from because it seems extreme. As I have argued repeatedly both
here and
elsewhere,
the comparison holds water. If somebody acts like a Nazi, we should
certainly be able to point out that they are acting like a Nazi.
Which brings us to first Kansas, a state which was
driven to the brink of Nazification by Republicans, and then, perhaps in horror of what it had almost done,
backed away, and then to Arizona, which is now our first state to embrace Nazism. Sure,
S.B. 1062 is not a law until Gov. Jan Brewer signs it, and
she says she needs more time, but who, really, needs more time to decide whether or not to oppose Nazism? Other than Ted Nugent, that is.
Many of us saw this coming. We were laughed at. We warned people what
the Religious Right wanted, what it intended. As with the Nazi Party in
its early days, far too many people did not take the forces of
oppression seriously. This tendency to deny unpleasant realities, even
while they are occurring, is frustrating to say the least. It is
dangerous at the worst: People will not fight back against something
they cannot bring themselves to believe.
Believe it. People used to talk about Nazi Germany in disbelief even
after the fact. How could it happen? It could happen very easily. It had
happened before in human history and there was no reason to believe it
would not happen again. And again. It could happen here, too, if we are
not vigilant. In state after Republican state, we are seeing what
amounts to state-sanctioned violence against the other, from Stand Your
Ground laws to Arizona’s S.B. 1062.
The one constant is intolerant conservative Christianity, the driving
force of oppression dating all the way back to the dawn of the
movement. When conservative Christianity achieved a dominant position in
the Roman Empire, the first thing it did was produce the Theodosian
Code,
which I have warned of here on previous occasions.
The Theodosian Code was, like S.B. 1062, a tool of oppression, a
collection of laws passed by the emperor Constantine and his successors,
“was presented to the empire as a Christmas present in 438.”[1]
The attitude of conservative Christians toward the “Other,” one of,
if you can’t convince them, force them, is embraced today by Republican
lawmakers. Bishop Caesarius of Arles told his sixth century flock to
admonish unbelievers “harshly,” to chide them “severely,” and if this
failed, to strike them, to pull their hair, even to forcibly restrain
them. In this he was following the advice of John Chrysostom, a Saint,
who advised “rebuke” by way of punching the unbeliever: “Smite him on
the face; strike his mouth; sanctify thy hand with the blow.”[2]
As Sabine MacCormack observes of the infamous Book 16, “In the
Theodosian Code…we can document the incorporation of sins into the
purview of the criminal code; and as a result, the range of actions
surveyed by the law and changed and expanded.”[3] In other words, Book
16 “articulates for the first time in a Roman law code, what religion
and what religious practices ‘are to be done and what are to be
avoided’; and what was ‘the True Religion.’”[4]
By the 450s, a generation after the publication of the Code,
MacMullen argues that the “legal system became wholly an instrument of
persecution.”[5] Look at the violence we see today and argue that we are
not far from the Theodosian, or in more modern terms, Nazi precipice.
As MacMullen makes clear, witnessing did not end with harsh words, or
even with fists:
Government too, at the urging of the bishops weighed in
with threats, and more than threats, of fines, confiscation, exile,
imprisonment, flogging, torture, beheading, and crucifixion. What more
could be imagined? Nothing. The extremes of conceivable pressure were
brought to bear. Thus, over the course of many centuries, compliance was
eventually secured and the empire made Christian in truth.[6]
Substitute America for empire, and you have the dominionist dream for
our country and our time. From the top down, the deck was stacked
against the other, whoever they might be, from Jews to Pagans and even
to other Christians. There are good reasons you don’t see Gnostic
churches today on your street corner. Nor more than Christians and then
Nazis would abide a synagogue, will conservative Christians abide
temples and mosques. Jews and gays were targets of Theodosian
Christianity before they were targets of Nazism and finally, of the
Religious Right.
The antecedents of the Religious Right’s war on tolerance are
ancient. Nazism is ultimately but a way stop on that road, a product
itself of all that came before, and the most recent example we have of
what happens when intolerance is legislated into law – as is in danger
of happening in America today.
