Why I Started Using Christian Fascism Instead of Christian Nationalism

During graduate school, Chris Hedges took ethics classes with James Luther Adams, an American theologian who spent time in Germany during Nazi reign and who worked alongside the “confessing-church” in resistance to Nazism. In American Fascists, Hedges writes about Adams, who was around 80 when Hedges took his course, telling his students that by the time they reached his age that they “would all be fighting ‘Christian fascism.’” After reading works such as Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, Elizabeth McRae’s Mothers of Massive Resistance, Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism, Candida Moss’ The Myth of Persecution, and countless other texts and listening to numerous podcasts, I’ve come to use the term Christian fascism to describe much of the rhetoric and positions of evangelical Christianity.

I did not come to using this term lightly. For the longest time, I stuck with Christian nationalism because Christian fascism carries with it a myriad of connotations that individuals don’t want to confront. As Americans, when we use the term fascism, we use it in relation to specific historical regimes and moments, notably Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany, two of the Axis nations during World War II. We view ourselves…