This semester I’ve been teaching a graduate seminar on Christianity and fascism. We’re reading texts mostly from 1922-1945 (the years of “fascism proper”) that, even though written by a variety of authors who agree on little else, nonetheless hint at a broadly similar argument. The argument is that fascism is better understood not as a strictly political movement, but as a religious movement, and specifically as a Christian movement.
These authors knew how Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany could be outright hostile towards Christianity. But that occasional hostility, they argued, was surface-level and late-coming. Fascism as a political movement made sense to its followers because it followed a much deeper and broader theological logic—theology’s way of thinking about power, sovereignty, community, sacrifice, history—that already made sense to the people of Western Europe. If theology provided the logic of fascist politics, these authors warned, then a merely military or political defeat wouldn’t be enough. You had to attack that underlying theological logic so that fascist politics would no longer make sense. Otherwise, it would only be a matter of time before something like fascism took hold again. Theology was the terrain on which the struggle against fascism had to be waged.
I had intended the seminar to be historical, to stay in that twentieth-century moment of “fascism proper,” but a seminar room isn’t a sterile lab, and the world has its way of getting in. My students, after all, mostly didn’t sign up for the class out of a passion for interwar intellectual history. They came to my class because they were worried and confused by the political catastrophe all around them, and they were hoping last century’s antifascists might be able to give them some clarity. I was right there with them. Week after week, outside the classroom, some line was crossed that probably cannot be uncrossed—masked thugs deputized by the state to snatch people off the street, the war machine assembled off the coast of Venezuela for a hemispheric war of conquest, the idea of a lifetime presidency tossed out as a joke and repeated again and again until it suddenly isn’t. Every week, we read authors trying to make sense of dying democracies, societies living for nothing but war, the erosion of every freedom one by one. Maybe these authors had the answers?
