{"id":699192,"date":"2026-01-16T05:19:36","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T05:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/699192\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T05:19:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T05:19:36","slug":"united-states-is-not-a-fully-fascist-regime-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/699192\/","title":{"rendered":"United States is \u2018not a fully fascist regime. . . yet\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

JEFF SHARLET, the writer, journalist, and academic, has been chronicling the shift towards nationalism in conservative American Christianity since the 1990s. He is a New York Times bestselling author, and his eighth and most recent book<\/a>, The Undertow: Scenes from a slow civil war, journeys across the United States<\/a> in the time of Trump. It recounts the story as the writer embeds himself in the heart of the unravelling social contract \u2014 joining right-wing political rallies, approaching houses covered in threatening flags, and visiting far-Right and nationalist churches, all to engage with the people he finds there.<\/p>\n

The insurrection on 6 January and the shooting of the rioter Ashli Babbitt in 2021 triggered his journey and took him to the grass-roots of nationalist fervour. The book is a road-trip fever-dream \u2014 guns, conspiracy theories, threat and menace \u2014 much of which takes place in the churches themselves. These are overtly, proudly, right-wing churches: \u201cchurches just calling themselves war churches\u201d, he says, in a conversation during his time in London in November.<\/p>\n

During the trip, he explores the likelihood that America could face civil war again. What might have seemed initially a niche and even outlandish proposition has turned into viable reality for many he meets, some of whom regale him with plans for violence and retributive executions.<\/p>\n

The United States<\/a> at the moment is \u201cnot a fully fascist regime\u201d, he says, \u201cbecause it\u2019s not consolidated. It\u2019s still a fascist movement that controls government, and that\u2019s a distinction.\u201d The aim of the administration, though, he says, is to become \u201ca fully fascist regime\u201d. Alongside sweeping policy change at governmental level, he predicts that this would involve activity throughout the country in the form of locally organised militia groups and heavily armed citizens.<\/p>\n

At the heart of it all is Donald Trump<\/a>, whose first presidential term was made possible in large part by the fervent support of Evangelicals<\/a>. His second term continued with their favour (News, 7 May 25<\/a>). Now, Sharlet observes a growing emboldening among members of a more radicalised Christian Right, who see Trump as the messianic embodiment of endless fear-filled prophecies of violence and unseen enemies, God\u2019s chosen man for this time.<\/p>\n

In Undertow, Sharlet writes about a Trump rally that he attends: \u201cA preacher nobody knew took the podium and started crying, \u2018He\u2019s worthy! He\u2019s worthy!\u2019 The crowd knew he meant God and Trump and them all at the same time, and when the preacher shouted, \u2018Praise him!\u2019 they did. And when he finished his sermon \u2014 sharp with crime and heroin and missing children, prophecy and Trump and the father-nation \u2014 and said, \u2018His name is Jesus and he approves this message\u2019, they laughed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr Trump is \u201cthe second best speaker I\u2019ve ever seen\u201d, Sharlet says, of his time at the rallies. \u201cObama\u2019s best, but Trump is really good.\u201d His religion is real, too, he believes, though not pious: \u201cI don\u2019t think he\u2019s lying when he says he\u2019s talks a lot about worrying about where he\u2019s going when he dies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

SHARLET is the son of a Jewish<\/a> father and a Christian mother, and describes himself as a secular Jew. He has been writing about religion since he was a young man, despite not having a faith. (\u201cI wish I was a believer. I\u2019d love to be. Since 1998, I\u2019ve wanted to be an Episcopal priest.\u201d)<\/p>\n

AlamyPro-Trump protesters on the Capitol building in January 2021<\/p>\n

Finding himself welcomed into a secretive and yet highly influential Washington-based group, the Fellowship, in his twenties, he discovered plans to embed and support \u201cGod\u2019s chosen men\u201d in positions of political power. Tipped for high office, they were nurtured into high-profile careers to further conservative goals, and then forgiven when later scandals emerged.<\/p>\n

The organisation also involved itself in the affairs of other countries, including Romania and Uganda, discreetly influencing lawmakers to pursue conservative \u201cChristian\u201d policies such as Uganda\u2019s anti-LGBT<\/a> death-penalty law. It became the subject of his 2008 book The Family, and was adapted into a 2019 Netflix series<\/a> of the same name.<\/p>\n

Over the course of this century he has seen the stories he covered in religious reporting move to the centre of politics and society. Nationalism and the MAGA movement have pulled previously niche views into the mainstream, where they seem set to become embedded.<\/p>\n

He has noticed a change in the students to whom he teaches creative non-fiction at Dartmouth College<\/a> \u2014 \u201cthe way they were in 2017, and the way they are now. Trump has been part of their lives since they were eight. . . They have a different frame than anybody before then \u2014 sometimes you do authoritarianism, sometimes you don\u2019t. It\u2019s not out of bounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only real hope is that which is rooted in despair,\u201d he says, of how those who oppose the movement should respond; and he describes it as \u201ca very Christian sense of hope\u201d. He refers to the American philosopher and theologian Cornel West\u2019s framing of the \u201cLong Saturday\u201d \u2014 the Holy Saturday before Jesus\u2019s resurrection \u2014 as a metaphor for where the US now finds itself.<\/p>\n

That would suggest that a resurrection of sorts will follow. \u201cNo fascism has lasted,\u201d he agrees, and, although he is \u201cresistant to the idea of inevitability\u201d, he now believes \u201cwe are in, and going to go through, fascism, and not quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is keen that the present time should not be wasted. \u201cThe temptation for a lot of people is to say, \u2018Well, it\u2019s coming,\u2019\u201d he says. He mentions \u201cnetworks of local people resisting ICE [United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in their community setting. This is not anywhere near enough . . . but every minute this doesn\u2019t get here is time to organise and build.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything\u2019s going faster, but everything\u2019s going slower . . . and, I think, we should appreciate and hold on to all of that slowness.\u201d If for no other reason, \u201cwe\u2019re a nuclear power. There\u2019s never been a civil war in a nuclear power.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

WHEN he is asked what could be learned about standing against similar movements in the UK, and what the Church could do, his advice is to \u201chold the line\u201d responsively, avoiding the \u201cbinary of either \u2018We\u2019re moving forward,\u2019 or breaking and running\u201d. Being physically present matters: \u201cYour body\u2019s in the street; that\u2019s your witness. That\u2019s the great thing about Christianity that us secular people don\u2019t get. That\u2019s the part about Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says that \u201cGlobal fascism is a surge and abstraction,\u201d and the Church\u2019s part could be \u201cto counter abstraction\u201d. Trumpism is \u201ca weird move\u201d, he observes, \u201cbecause it takes fleshiness. Trump rallies are a turn toward the body in a way that had been absent in American politics. And so that\u2019s why a lot of people are there. There\u2019s lots of joy. People underestimate that.\u201d<\/p>\n

How do you counter that? Embodiment. \u201cA soup kitchen is not abstraction. . . A space where people come with their bodies. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s specific to Christianity. Christianity has incarnation; they have the body. But any religion that has a gathering says \u2018These ideas are true, but the way we know they\u2019re true is because we bring our smelly bodies. We all sit in a stuffy room together for a while.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Religion can also offer symbolism, and the power of imagery to change minds. He recalls being invited several years ago to attend \u201ca special service at a Black church. They had invited the white DA [prosecutor] of a county north of Miami. A serial killer had killed a soloist in their church choir. He had been caught, was going on trial, and what they wanted was to persuade the DA to seek the death penalty.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey all wore red. The big number was \u2018The power of the blood\u2019. What blew me away was they were not deaf to what they were asking. They wanted the electric chair: power in the blood they got. The double meaning, the red, was for the blood they wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also remembers meeting Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of the Roman Catholic<\/a> social activist Dorothy Day: \u201cShe\u2019s in her old age, lives a very, very modest life. She\u2019d been arrested for breaking into a nuclear-submarine base and pouring red paint, in a kind of demonstration. Plenty of are people going out and putting their bodies on the line, but it\u2019s mostly symbolic. That\u2019s what Dorothy Day was doing, and that\u2019s what Martha Hennessy, her granddaughter, is doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether or not these kinds of symbolic actions can make a material difference, he believes that they matter. \u201cI think it\u2019s probably the only thing you can really do, and it\u2019s very important, and it holds that thread. It\u2019s a placeholder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Embodiment \u2014 and \u201cthrowing paint\u201d \u2014 can take different forms. Of the Bishop of Washington, DC, the Rt Revd Mariann Edgar Budde \u2014 who challenged President Trump at a service marking his inauguration (News, 24 January<\/a>) and used her sermon to appeal to him to show mercy to migrants, children, and LGBTQ+ people (Features, 5 September 2025<\/a>), Sharlet says \u201cThat was beautiful. That was \u2018throwing paint on things\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury<\/a>, he suggests that \u201cmaybe just the very simple biological fact of her female body in that space is a kind of witness.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for his own spiritual practice, he says, \u201cThe dodge I always use on that is the writing is the practice; but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a dodge, actually.\u201d In terms of what restores balance after being exposed to stories steeped in violence and despair, he says, \u201cI am figuring that out new at this point in my life; I have often lost that balance.\u201d<\/p>\n

His kind of writing requires perspective after the fact, to acknowledge \u201cWhat happened to me is not as bad as what I witnessed, but it\u2019s something, and I think that\u2019s the spiritual practice, and recognising that you are taking in stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although he now regards himself as healthy, he suffered a heart attack at the age of 44, in unexpected, though perhaps prescient, circumstances: \u201cI was watching the second [Trump] debate in the hospital, and they\u2019re pumping drugs in me. . . I am literally watching my blood pressure as this goes, and it would be better not to witness it; but the second best prize is to get to witness it, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Undertow: Scenes from a slow civil war by Jeff Sharlet is published by W. W. Norton & Co. at \u00a314.99 (Church Times Bookshop \u00a313.49<\/a>); 978-1-324-07451-9.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JEFF SHARLET, the writer, journalist, and academic, has been chronicling the shift towards nationalism in conservative American Christianity…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":699193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-699192","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-united-states","9":"tag-us","10":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115903094062324415","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}