“We’ve Got an American Jesus:” Songs Against Christian Fascism

When I came of age in the 1990s, Nirvana served as my entry point into music. I gravitated towards the Seattle sound, and when Rancid and Green Day broke through in 1994, I added the punk scene to my rotation. One band I always steered clear of , though, was Bad Religion. Seeing their logo of a cross with a line struck through it, like a no-smoking sign, turned me off because, as an evangelical, the logo felt sacrilegious. However, off of the success of their song “21st Century (Digital Boy)”, I picked up their 1994 album Stranger Than Fiction, but that was as far as I would go. If I had, at that time, scrounged around in their discography, I would have come away, at a much earlier stage of my life, seeing the rise of Christian fascism within American society.

One year before Stranger Than Fiction debuted, Bad Religion released Recipe for Hate, an album with numerous songs addressing Christian fascism. Two of those songs, “American Jesus” and “Don’t Pray on Me,” have become part of my regular rotation, each highlighting the ways that, as James Luther Adams noted, fascists “found a mask for fascism in patriotism and the pages of the bible.” The Moral Majority and those of its ilk crafted themselves as patriotic and concerned with religious and personal freedom, all of which served as a veneer to lure people in and to usher in Christian…