Rick Warren, Facism & The Family

Brad A. Greenberg of the Jewish Journal comments on Jeff Sharlet’s new book, The Family, the incredibly influential organization behind the National Prayer Breakfast. Greenberg notes the following:

Sharlet describes the organization’s theology as built upon Jesus the strongman and revolutionary, not the savior and street preacher. What seems to trouble him most is how this organization and its friends, which include many members of Congress and foreign leaders, often those with less than stellar human-rights records, combine religion with capitalism, fundamentalism with power...

...Doug Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”: “Look at Hitler,” he said. “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, bin Laden.” The Family possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.

Hitler gets positive treatment by The Family’s leaders throughout the book; not praise for his atrocities but admiration for his ability to mobilize the masses. Sick indeed but not without precedent in American Christianity...

...Human problems, Buchman declared, require “a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Just as good, he added, would be a “God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.”

Greenberg describes his surprise when Sharlet links the facist-fond "right-wing nuts" of the past to the present day Christian Right:


That dream survives today. Not just in the political ambitions of Christian Right politicians, currently an embattled species, but even more so in the seemingly sanguine lifestyle fundamentalism preached by mega-pastors... Rick Warren, author of the mammoth-selling Purpose-Driven Life—and, as of April 2008, the official sponsor of Rwanda, which under his guidance has submitted to soul surgery on a national scale to become the world’s first “Purpose Driven Nation,” embracing Warren’s amiably-phrased mixture of obedience theology and Bible-based capitalism as an antidote to godlessness, whether that comes in form of genocide or socialism. Warren, despite his mild-mannered demeanor – or maybe because of it – doesn’t make distinctions. Either you’re with God, or you’re against Him.

The irony is that the agenda of this new lifestyle evangelicalism is more far-reaching than that of the traditional Christian Right: the Christian Right wanted a seat at the table; lifestyle evangelicalism wants to build the table. It wants to set the very terms in which we imagine what’s possible, and to that end it dispenses with terms that might scare off liberals. It’s big tent fundamentalism – everybody in.

But both men—and the new evangelicalism as a movement—continue to preach the merger of Christianity and capitalism pioneered three quarters of a century ago. On the surface, it’s self-help; scratch, and it’s revealed as a profoundly conservative ideology that conflates church and state, scripture and currency, faith and finance. There’s a sense in which Buchman’s vision of “God-controlled supernationalism” thrives today more surely than it ever did in the 1930s, a period of radical economic upheaval. Only, today we call it globalism...

...Certainly, I can agree with Sharlet that governments don’t work well when they are handed over to a dictator who claims to be doing the work of God; yes, God can use humans to further his kingdom on Earth, but humans have a mortal inclination to abusing power. King Henry VIII is an easy and clear example, as are a number of the popes of the Middle Ages. But this a critical—some would say cynical—way to look at Warren’s humanitarian efforts in Africa.

Editor's note: Jeff Sharlet nests his comments within the greater scope of his book which examines the clout of the American religious elite and political fundamentalism in the public square. This blog does not endorse political fundamentalism, rather Biblical fundamentalism.

See more on Warren's "cosmo- communitarian" PEACE plan and Christian Leader Pays For Speaking Out Against Rick Warren