American Fascists, by Chris Hedges

Right turn for the armies of the Lord

Nowhere does the Bible mention Rapture, an idea beloved of fundamentalist Christians, who usually like to base their enthusiasms in perversely literal interpretations of the Good Book. They believe that one day, without warning, those who have been "born again" in the Lord will be raptured up to Heaven, leaving the rest of us, of other creeds and none, behind to suffer seven years of chaos and pain during "the Tribulation". In films and books made by the Christian Right in America, less-than-perfect parents are portrayed weeping and wailing as their spotless children are raptured up to Paradise, while airline passengers who have failed to heed God's message are left to their fate when their born-again captain is beamed up by the Great Sky Pilot.

The temptation is simply to laugh at the absurdity of it all. This is religion inspired by Star Trek. Yet the antics of the Christian Right, as Pulitzer Prize-winner and New York Times journalist Chris Hedges argues in American Fascists, are anything but a laughing matter. The statistics that litter his polemical account are enough to stop you ever wanting to cross the Atlantic again. There are the 45 per cent of Americans who believe that the Genesis account of God making the world in seven days is how it happened. Or the 30 per cent of US schools with sex education programmes that teach only about the need to abstain until you marry - a favourite mantra of the Christian Right, inflicted on youngsters with the help of $1bn. funding from the Bush administration.

We have been familiar since the days of Ronald Reagan with accounts of the political influence of stalwarts of the Christian Right like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Hedges gives us an update on a new generation of fundamentalists who find Robertson, Falwell et al a bit too moderate for their liking. Hedges' subject is the Dominionists, who aim not just for personal salvation (and the personal fortunes many leading fundamentalists have acquired thanks to coast-to-coast TV shows) but also political power over God's dominion, the earth. They have taken traditional fundamentalism and laced it with a heavy dose of American patriotism. The cocktail, poisonous to any outsider, is their own muddled response to September 11, and what they perceive as the looming threat to the American way of life.

While they remain a splinter group of the Christian Right, they are, Hedges reports, firmly embedded in American life, with six national television networks, 2,000 religious radio stations and prominent supporters on Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court and at the head of major US multinationals. Much of American Fascists is taken up with Hedges' eye-witness accounts of their gatherings where a form of brain-washing is performed as disempowered women are told to subjugate themselves to their husbands, robot-like men instructed to be more macho in imitation of a muscular Christ, and the rest of the world - especially gays, scientists, Catholics and Muslims - demonised as the anti-Christ.

Everything that is wrong with the world can be laid at their door, or else seen as a sign from God. So global warming is not the result of human folly but rather a message that the End is Nigh. The natural constituency of the Dominionists, Hedges shows, are people marginalised and confused by secular society, seeking a simple answer into which to escape from the complexities, compromises and moral ambiguities of modern life.

It is a profoundly disturbing and depressing picture, but also, because of its structure as a series of articles from the front line, somewhat patchy. I kept waiting for Hedges to follow up his hints and asides and examine whether the Bush administration is hand-in-glove with these Dominionists in seeking to create a theocratic state every bit as intolerant as that preached by the President of Iran. But he never quite gets to the question his own text begs.

And I was confused by his dogmatic insistence on drawing parallels between these new standard-bearers of the Christian Right and German Nazis. It felt more like a device adopted by someone who felt that his arguments could not make enough impact unless he armed himself with the emotive word "fascist". The recent return of the Democrats to control of Congress suggests that Hedges' dire warning that the Dominionists might seize power is overblown. Yet the central dilemma he highlights - how does a tolerant, democratic society handle an intolerant, introspective religious minority in its midst - remains a pressing one on both sides of the Atlantic.

Peter Stanford's biography of Lord Longford, 'The Outcast's Outcast', is published by Sutton