The "Dangerous Christians" Theme of the American Left

One of the ways the chronic haters on the American Left excuse their love-affair with the hate-filled Islamics is by a claim that Christians are a much greater danger to America than are Muslims. That is pretty hilarious to anybody who knows anything about the history of America. Christians were much more influential in the past so America today is a product of all that Christian "damage".

An example of the strange Leftist theory is a book called "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" by Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for the New York Times. That he learnt his trade with the NYT is rather what one would expect in the circumstances. The NYT is after all famous for printing "all the news that's fit to slant".

There is a surprisingly balanced review of the book by a history professor here. Although apparently somewhat sympathetic to the book, the reviewer knows enough history to point out major ways in which the book goes off the rails. The reviewer notes, for instance:

"Thus, Hedges concludes, the United States today faces an internal threat analogous to that posed by the Nazis in Weimar Germany

Christians as Nazis is just too much for the reviewer, however. He goes on to make a number of points in reply, with the following excerpt being very much to the point:

"Nevertheless, Hedges concludes that the Christian right "should no longer be tolerated," because it "would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible." What does he think should be done? He endorses the view that "any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law," and therefore we should treat "incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal." Thus he rejects the 1st Amendment protections for freedom of speech and religion, and court rulings that permit prosecution for speech only if there is an imminent threat to particular individuals.

Hedges advocates passage of federal hate-crimes legislation prohibiting intolerance, but he doesn't really explain how it would work. Many countries do prohibit "hate speech." Holocaust denial, for example, is a crime in Germany, Austria and several other European countries. But does this mean that Hedges favors prosecuting Christian fundamentalists for declaring, for example, that abortion providers are murderers or that secular humanists are agents of Satan? He doesn't say.

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