Fascism Comes to USA Wrapped in Christianity

Fact Check: Sinclair Lewis Allegedly Said Fascism Would Come to America 'Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross.' We Hunted for the Source
Opinion by David Emery •
03/29/24

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When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. Snopes/Getty Images
When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. Snopes/Getty Images
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Claim:

Sinclair Lewis said "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

Rating:

Misattributed (About this rating?)

Internet memes purporting to quote a statement by 20th-century novelist Sinclair Lewis about fascism coming to America have circulated more or less continuously since the mid-2000s, even though there is no evidence he ever penned or uttered this statement: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

This example was posted to Facebook on March 12, 2024:

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Fact Check: Sinclair Lewis Allegedly Said Fascism Would Come to America 'Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross.' We Hunted for the Source
Fact Check: Sinclair Lewis Allegedly Said Fascism Would Come to America 'Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross.' We Hunted for the Source
© Provided by Snopes
(Facebook post)
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), produced such 20th-century classics as "Main Street," "Elmer Gantry," "Dodsworth," and "Babbit," also literally wrote the book on the fascist takeover of America. The premise of "It Can't Happen Here," published at a time (1935) when authoritarian regimes were flexing their muscles all across Europe and Americans had great difficulty imagining a Hitler or Mussolini coming to power in the Land of the Free, was that it can happen here.
In the novel, Lewis painted a vivid counterfactual portrait of a United States of America sliding into dictatorship, one that is still cited as a cautionary tale to this day. As The Paris Review noted on Nov. 16, 2016:

Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, is sold out everywhere online. If you're wondering why, here's the synopsis: "The main character, Buzz Windrip, appeals to voters with a mix of crass language and nativist ideology. Once elected, he solidifies his power by energizing his base against immigrants, people on welfare, and the liberal press."

However, nothing resembling the statement "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" appeared in that book, or indeed in anything else Lewis wrote during his lifetime.

And although it sounds like a sentiment Lewis would have agreed with, according to the website of the Sinclair Lewis Society there is no evidence he said it:

Here's our most asked question:

Q: Did Sinclair Lewis say, "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross"?

A: This quote sounds like something Sinclair Lewis might have said or written, but we've never been able to find this exact quote. Here are passages from two novels Lewis wrote that are similar to the quote attributed to him.

From It Can't Happen Here: "But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word 'Fascism' and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty."

From Gideon Planish: "I just wish people wouldn't quote Lincoln or the Bible, or hang out the flag or the cross, to cover up something that belongs more to the bank-book and the three golden balls."

There was also a play called Strangers in the late 1970s which had a similar quote, but no one, including one of Lewis's biographers, Richard Lingeman, has ever been able to locate the original citation.

The same quote has been erroneously attributed to Louisiana governor and U.S. senator Huey Long (1893-1935), who, ironically, was said by some to be a real-life model for Lewis's fascist leader in "It Can't Happen Here." A similar quote (probably spurious as well) attributed to Huey Long after his death was, "When fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-fascism."

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Though we have found passages by other authors that share certain words, phrases, and sentiments in common with the quote attributed to Lewis, we have not found an exact match anywhere. We came across this bit, for example, in coverage of a speech by one James Waterman Wise Jr. in the Feb. 5, 1936, edition of The Christian Century:

James Waterman Wise, Jr., in a recent address here before the liberal John Reed club said that Hearst and Coughlin are the two chief exponents of fascism in America. If fascism comes, he added, it will not be identified with any "shirt" movement, nor with an "insignia," but it will probably be "wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution."

And this observation appeared in John Thomas Flynn's "As We Go Marching," published in 1944:

But when fascism comes it will not be in the form of an anti-American movement or pro-Hitler bund, practicing disloyalty. Nor will it come in the form of a crusade against war. It will appear rather in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism; it will take some genuinely indigenous shape and color, and it will spread only because its leaders, who are not yet visible, will know how to locate the great springs of public opinion and desire and the streams of thought that flow from them and will know how to attract to their banners leaders who can command the support of the controlling minorities in American public life. The danger lies not so much in the would-be Fuhrers who may arise, but in the presence in our midst of certainly deeply running currents of hope and appetite and opinion. The war upon fascism must be begun there.

Sources:
Close, Kerry.   "Sinclair Lewis Novel 'It Can't Happen Here' Sells Out Online."    Time.   16 November 2016.

Flynn, John Thomas.   As We Go Marching.    Auburn, AL:   Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 1944.    ISBN 9781610164979.

Lewis, Sinclair.   It Can't Happen Here.    New York: Doubleday, 1935.

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Harris, Malcom.   "It Really Can Happen Here: The Novel That Foreshadowed Donald Trump's Authoritarian Appeal.    Salon.   29 September 2015.

The Christian Century, Volume 53.   "Speakers Draw Dark Picture of Future."    Chicago: Christian Century Company, 1936

The Sinclair Lewis Society.   "Here's Our Most Asked Question."    2012.

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‘Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism's War on Democracy' Review: A Scary Look at the Potential Soldiers of A Second Trump Reign
Opinion by Owen Gleiberman
04/03/24
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‘Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism's War on Democracy' Review: A Scary Look at the Potential Soldiers of A Second Trump Reign
‘Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism's War on Democracy' Review: A Scary Look at the Potential Soldiers of A Second Trump Reign
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“Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s War on Democracy” is the scariest film I've seen in a long time. It's a documentary that explores the rise of Christian Nationalism, and much of what it shows you, about the mutation of the Christian Right into a movement that has openly abandoned any loyalty to democracy, has been covered in the mass media in recent years. But the film's directors, Stephen Ujlajki and Christopher Jacob Jones, go deep into the roots of this movement, and what's new and disquieting is how the current presidential race changes everything. Viewed against the looming possibility of Donald Trump's re-election (a scenario that most liberals I know believe is unlikely; I think they may be seriously deluded), the rise of Christian Nationalism takes on a whole new meaning.
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In 2017, Trump, once he took the reins of power, was constrained - by the other branches of government, and by the rule of law. He didn't become the explicitly, committedly anti-democratic figure he is now until the 2020 election, when his declaration that he was actually the winner, and that Joe Biden had stolen the election, became the new cornerstone of his ideology. In the intervening period, Trump has been setting himself up to rule the United States as an authoritarian leader, and that meshes perfectly with the goals of Christian Nationalism, a movement that's built around the dream of transforming America into a theocracy: a Christian nation ruled by a higher power than the Constitution - that is, by the will of God, as interpreted by his white Christian followers.

The Christian Nationalist movement was the driving force behind the January 6 insurrection, and what we saw there was a preview of their ideals and methods: a frothing hostility toward the U.S. government, coupled with the willingness to use violence. Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today, talks about how the new wave of Christianity is “a church growth movement, but for angry people. A sense of theatrical anger feels, to some, like depth of conviction.” Yet even on Jan. 6, these “rebels,” participating in their own form of action-movie cosplay, were, like Trump himself, at least somewhat constrained. What “Bad Faith” captures is that Christian Nationalists now have the potential to be the shock troops in a second and far more threatening Trump presidency.

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The alliance between Trump and Christian Nationalism is a profound one. Progressives tend to be focused, to the point of obsession, on the hypocrisy of the alliance - the idea that men and women who are supposedly devoted to the teachings of Jesus Christ could rally behind a sinner and law-breaker like Trump, who seems the incarnation of everything they should be against. The documentary fills in their longstanding justification: that Trump is seen as a modern-day version of King Cyrus, a pagan who God used as a tool to help the people. According to this mode of opportunistic logic, Trump doesn't need to be a pious Christian; his very recklessness makes him part of a grander design. The Christian Nationalists view Trump much as his disgruntled base of working-class nihilist supporters have always viewed him - as a kind of holy wrecking ball.   

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But, of course, that's just the rationalization. “Bad Faith” captures the intricacy with which Trump, like certain Republicans before him, has struck a deal with the Christian Right that benefits both parties. In exchange for their support in 2016, he agreed to back a slate of judicial appointees to their liking, and to come over to their side on abortion. Trump's victory in 2016, like Reagan's in 1980, was sealed by the support of the Christian Right. But what he's promising them this time is the very destruction of the American system that they have long sought.   

The most chilling aspect of “Bad Faith” is that, in tracing the roots of the Christian Right, the movie colors in how the dream of theocracy has been the movement's underlying motivation from almost the start. In 1980, when the so-called Moral Majority came into existence, its leader, Jerry Falwell, got all the attention. (A corrupt quirk of the movement is that as televangelists like Falwell, Pat Robertson, and, later on, Joel Osteen became rich and famous, their wealth was presented as evidence that God had chosen them to lead.) But Falwell, despite the headlines he grabbed, wasn't the visionary organizer of the Moral Majority.

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That was Paul Weyrich, the owlish conservative religious activist who founded the hugely influential Council for National Policy, which spearheaded the structural fusion of Christianity and right-wing politics. He's the one who went to Falwell and Robertson and collated their lists of supporters into a Christian political machine that could become larger than the sum of its parts. The machine encompassed a network of 72,000 preachers, it employed sophisticated methods of micro-targeting, and its impetus was to transform Evangelical Christianity into a movement that was fundamentally political. The G.O.P. became “God's own party,” and the election of Reagan was the Evangelicals' first victory. We see a clip of Reagan saying how he plans to “make America great again,” which is the tip of the iceberg of how much the Trump playbook got from him.

Weyrich was a kind of Steve Bannon figure, the ideological bomb-thrower behind the scenes. He wrote a manifesto that calls for the destruction of the government, with tactics that include guerrilla warfare. From the start, he stoked the idea of a culture war, and maybe a civil war, for what the future of America would be, with the battle cry echoing through his manifesto (“Our strategy will be to bleed this culture dry,” “Make no mistake about it: We are talking about Christianizing America,” “We will weaken and destroy the existing institutions”). But 15 years ago, all of that sounded like crackpot raving. It's now the cutting edge of the mainstream Republican Party.

Randall Ballmer, the Ivy League historian of American religion who wrote the book “Bad Faith,” is interviewed in the documentary, and he makes a fascinating point: that there's a mythology that the Christian Right was first galvanized, in 1973, by Roe v. Wade - but that, in fact, that's not true. Jerry Falwell didn't deliver his first anti-abortion sermon until 1978. According to Ballmer, the moment that galvanized the Christian Right was the 1971 lower-court ruling on school desegregation that held that any institution that engages in racial discrimination or segregation is not, by definition, a charitable institution, and therefore has no claim to tax-exempt status.

This had an incendiary effect. Churches like Jerry Falwell's were not integrated and didn't want to be; yet they also wanted their tax-exempt status. It was this law that touched off the anti-government underpinnings of the Christian Right, much as the sieges of Ruby Ridge and Waco became the seeds of the alt-right. And it sealed the notion that Christian Nationalism and White Nationalism were joined at the hip, a union that went back to the historical fusion of the two in the Ku Klux Klan's brand of Christian terrorism.

“Bad Faith” makes a powerful case that Christian Nationalism is built on a lie: the shibboleth that America was originally established as a “Christian nation.” It's true to say that the Founders drew on the moral traditions of Judeo-Christian culture. Yet the freedom of religion in the First Amendment was put there precisely as a guard against religious tyranny. It was, at the time, a radical idea: that the people would determine how - and what God - they wanted to worship. In truth, Christian Nationalism undermines not only the freedoms enshrined by the Constitution but the very concept of free will that's at the heart of Christian theology. You can't choose to be a follower of Christ if that belief is imposed on you.

Yet that's the society that Christian Nationalists want. According to the film, those who are either members of this movement or in sympathy with it constitute nearly a third of all Americans. If that's true, it's a daunting number. Yet even as the Christian Nationalists speak as true believers, they represent a politics of money and corruption. It was in the Reagan era that Paul Weyrich first struck a deal with oil and gas billionaires like the Koch brothers. In exchange for their support, his movement would make the case for eliminating corporate taxes and regulations. That fits right into the Trump agenda, which has always been a mix of corporate tax breaks, demagogic rabble-rousing, and de-regulation. If the Christian Nationalists prove to be instrumental in sweeping Trump back into office, he will owe them big time. How convenient that their goals are now perfectly in sync: to treat democracy itself as the threat that must be controlled and destroyed. What we're seeing is a deal with the devil, though in this case it’s hard to say whether the most dangerous entity is Trump himself or the fire-breathing Christian totalitarianism he's in bed with.