Neo-fascism and religion

Neo-fascism and religion refers to debates about the relationships between neo-fascism and various religions.

Some scholars, using the term neo-fascism in its narrow sense, consider certain contemporary religious movements and groups to represent forms of clerical or theocratic neofascism, including Christian Identity in the United States; some militant forms of politicized Islamic fundamentalism; State Shinto as a political cult in Imperial Japan and some neopagan religions advocating white supremacism.

Terminology and history
The term fascism was first used in Italy during the 1920s, and it eventually expanded its meaning to refer to a variety of political movements that are based on authoritarian nationalism, seek to purify the nation of foreign influences that are deemed to be causing degeneration, and promote the rule of individuals they consider to be innately superior while persecuting people deemed innately inferior. The term neo-fascism is used to describe fascist movements active after World War II.

Modern colloquial usage of the word sometimes extends the definition of the terms fascism and neo-fascism to refer to any totalitarian worldview, regardless of its religious ideology. Although the assertion that religious fundamentalists and militants are fascists can often be understood as a hyperbole, some scholars have used the term when discussing certain religious movements.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, authoritarian ideals saw a resurgence in the context of political upheavals across Eurasia, typically anti-aristocratic socio-political revolutions. The ethnic-rooted conflicts of World War I and World War II arose from the political circumstances brought about by internal societal battles, usually between left-wing revolutionaries and right-wing traditionalists.

In addition to the authoritarian political model, most scholars classify fascism as an extreme right ideology, along with ethnic-populist movements that call for increased traditionalism. In the context of civil conflicts, the demand for increased traditionalism typically promotes ethnocentrism, and in extreme cases this ethnic unity resulted in the persecution of those not within the chosen ethnic group. Religion has often been an aspect of ethnicity, whose moral foundation and message may grow corrupted by the societal acceptance of convergence between political and religious populism.

Between the two world wars, there were three forms of fascism: Italian economic corporatism; German racial nationalist Nazism; and clerical fascist movements such as the Romanian Iron Guard, the Spanish National Catholicism and the Croatian Ustashi.

Controversies over linking fascism and religion
Since WWII, neofascists have reinterpreted fascist ideology and strategy in various ways to fit new circumstances.

In the context of social conflict in which religious figures and institutions come under partisan influence, religion often becomes a political tool by which principled authority is replaced by authoritarian violence. Early fascism was a mixture of syndicalist notions with Hegelian or idealistic theories of the state. Both early and later fascists viewed the state as an organic entity rather than as an institution to protect collective and individual rights. Fascists often defined themselves in opposition to laissez-faire capitalism, Marxism, and democracy.

During World War II, Karl Popper described fascism as different from Hegelianism, which was bound to a specific "traditional religious form" (Lutheran Christianity in Frederick William's Prussia). Popper suggests that in fascism, religion is usually replaced by a form of evolutionist materialism: "Thus the formula of the fascist brew is in all countries the same: Hegel plus a dash of nineteenth-century materialism (especially Darwinism in the somewhat crude form given to it by Haeckel)."

He argues that as a consequence of the popularity of Marxism in the first half of the 20th century, traditional fascism is not endorsing any specific religion. He wrote that while Marxism is seen as atheistic, fascism is not necessarily atheistic: "...fascism has not much use for an open appeal to the supernatural. Not that it is necessarily atheistic or lacking in mystical or religious elements. But the spread of agnosticism through Marxism led to a situation in which no political creed aiming at popularity among the working class could bind itself to any of the traditional religious forms."

Later scholarship took several different approaches. Roger Griffin argues that Fascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the 'people' into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth which inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence.

This concept of fascism as palingenesis is complementary with the idea of James Rhodes that fascism is a form of apocalyptic millenarianism — and with the work of Emilio Gentile, who argues that fascism is a form of "political religion" that involves the "sacralization of politics."

Roger Eatwell sees a complex relationship between fascism and religion, noting that "Religions…involve some form of belief in a supernatural being(s). However, this misses a point that all modern ideologies exhibit dimensions of religions." Eatwell questions "liberal historiography's demonization of fascism as an un-intellectual creed...." According to Eatwell:


 * "A more fruitful way of distinguishing between ideology and religion is to adapt Søren Kierkegaard's view that the essence of a religion is not the persuasion of the truth of the doctrine, but a leap of faith to accept a view which is inherently absurd.... Fascism’s essential syncretism meant that it was possible to find forms, which overtly married ideology and religion – for example, in the Iron Guard, or among a limited number of Italian and German clerics (though most failed to see the radicalism at the core of fascism). Moreover, there were aspects of fascism, which were absurd – especially the belief of some Nazis that there was an international Jewish conspiracy against Germany, which encouraged a belief in apocalyptic holy war against the Jew. However, most fascists were not driven by such affective sentiments. Indeed, there is nothing absurd about the core ideology of generic fascism namely the quest to forge a holistic nation and create a radical syncretic Third Way state." "Reflections on Fascism and Religion".

Christianity in the United States
The linking of Christianity with fascism or neo-fascism has generated debate among scholars and in the media; and some consider it offensive to Christians. Stanley Kurtz called comparisons of the Christian Right with fascism an ill-advised attack on conservative Christians:"The most disturbing part of the Harper’s cover story (the one by Chris Hedges) was the attempt to link Christian conservatives with Hitler and fascism. Once we acknowledge the similarity between conservative Christians and fascists, Hedges appears to suggest, we can confront Christian evil by setting aside 'the old polite rules of democracy.'"

Some Christian organizations believe that the Christian Right has become fascist. Rich Lang of the Trinity United Methodist Church of Seattle gave a sermon titled "George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism", in which he said, "I want to flesh out the ideology of the Christian Fascism that Mr. Bush articulates. It is a form of Christianity that is the mirror opposite of what Jesus embodied."

Some leftists and libertarians use the term Christian fascism or Christofascism to describe what some see as an emerging proto-fascism and possible theocracy in the United States. Advocates of this view include Carl Davidson, who has written an essay, "Globalization, Theocracy and the New Fascism: Taking the Right's Rise to Power Seriously."

More extreme than the Christian Right are two movements where there is more scholarly support for charges of neo-fascism: Christian Identity and Christian Reconstructionism. There are versions of the Christian Identity movement that adopt openly neo-Nazi ideologies. Some scholars consider Christian Reconstructionism to be a quasi-fascist movement because it is explicitly opposed to religious liberty and human rights. Berlet and Lyons have written that the movement is a "new form of clerical fascist politics." Author Karen Armstrong sees a potential for fascism in Christian Reconstructionism, and claims that the system of dominion envisaged by Christian Reconstructionist theologians R. J. Rushdoony and Gary North is totalitarian: "There is no room for any other view or policy, no democratic tolerance for rival parties, no individual freedom."

Islam
The contemporary religious movements in Islam that have been compared to fascism include Islamic terrorism and Wahhabism.

In 2001, Christopher Hitchens opined, "[T]he bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state." Robert S. Wistrich has described Islamic fascism as adopting a totalitarian mindset, a hatred of the West, fanatical extremism, repression of women, loathing of Jews, a firm belief in conspiracy theories, and dreams of global hegemony.

In late 2005, President George W. Bush and other high United States government officials began to use the terms Islamo-fascism or Islamic fascism, and they suggested that opposing militant Islamic terrorism was similar to opposing the Nazis during World War II. This created a storm of controversy as supporters and opponents debated these contentions and the term Islamofascism.

Some writers claim that certain strands of Wahhabi or Salafi Islam display some of the signifiers of fascism or totalitarianism.

J. Sakai has suggested that some middle class Islamists have formed groups that can be called fascist.

Academic Roger Griffin believes that the word fascist is being stretched too far when applied to "so-called fundamentalist or terrorist forms of traditional religion (i.e. scripture or sacred text based with a strong sense of orthodoxy or orthodoxies rooted in traditional institutions and teachings)." However, he concedes that the United States has seen the emergence of hybrids of political religion and fascism in such phenomena as the Nation of Islam and Christian Identity, and that Bin Laden's al Qaeda network may represent such a hybrid. He is unhappy with the term clerical fascism, and says that "in this case we are rather dealing with a variety of 'fascistized clericalism.'"

Author Malise Ruthven, a Scottish writer and historian who focuses his work on religion and Islamic affairs, opposes redefining Islamism as `Islamofascism`, but finds the resemblances between the two ideologies "compelling," both embracing spirituality and rejecting reason. He compares Islamism first to Marxism but then draws a stronger comparison with fascism.

... the fascist parallels go deeper than the Marxist ones. In his explicit hostility to reason (alluded to in the reference to Ahmad ibn Hanbal's struggle against the Mu'tazilite doctrine of the `created` Quran) it is not Marx, grandchild of the Enlightenment, but Nietzsche, an anti-rationalist like the anti-Mu'tazilite al-Ash'ari, whom `Azzam echoes. The attachment to the lost lands of Palestine, Bukhara and Spain (unlike a rational and humane concern for Palestinian rights) is, like Mussolini's evocations of Ancient Rome, nostalgic in its irredentism, its `obliteration of history from politics` The invocation of religion is consistent with the way fascism and Nazism used mythical modes of thought to mobilize unconscious or psychic forces in the pursuit of power, a task made easier in a population sanctified by a millennium of Islamic religious programming. Georges Sorel, sometimes seen as the intellectual father of fascism, declared that `use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism.` Mussolini, to whom Sorel in his later years lent his support, saw fascism as `a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raise him to conscious membership of a spiritual society`. In the same line of thinking Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue, stressed the other-worldly, spiritual aspect of Hitler's racial theories: `The life of a race does not represent a logically-developed philosophy nor even the unfolding of a pattern according to natural law, but rather the development of a mystical synthesis, an activity of soul, which cannot be explained rationally.`

Hindu nationalism
Indian Marxist Prabhat Patnaik has written that the Hindutva movement as it has emerged is "classically fascist in class support, methods and programme" Patnaik bases this argument on the following "ingredients" of classical fascism present in Hindutva: the attempt to create a unified homogeneous majority under the concept of "the Hindus"; a sense of grievance against past injustice; a sense of cultural superiority; an interpretation of history according to this sense of grievance and superiority; a rejection of rational arguments against this interpretation; and an appeal to the majority based on race and masculinity.

Some scholars contend that the traditional meaning of the term fascism does not apply to Hindutva groups, and may hinder an analysis of their activities. Academics Chetan Bhatt and Parita Mukta reject the identification of Hindutva with fascism, because of Hindutva's embrace of cultural rather than racial nationalism, because of its "distinctively Indian" character, and because of "the RSS's disavowal of the seizure of state power in preference for long-term cultural labour in civil society". They instead describe Hindutva as a form of "revolutionary conservatism" or "ethnic absolutism".

Paganism and esoteric religions
Some white supremacist or neo-Nazi supporters also adhere to Germanic neopaganism or Odinism ideologies, but as a minority inside the Germanic Neo-Pagan, Odinist and Asatru movements,. Examples of groups in which fascism and Paganism intersect include the White Order of Thule. Another example was the Wotanism of David Lane, who promoted WOTAN  as an acronym for the "Will Of The Aryan Nations".

Examples in Europe include the Belgian Werkgroep Traditie and the German Deutsche Heidnische Front and Artgemeinschaft. The Ausar Auset Society is a Kemetic neopagan group advocating Black supremacy.