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The ‘Holy Storm’: ‘Clerical Fascism’

through the Lens of Modernism
a
Roger Griffin
a
Oxford Brookes University ,
Published online: 18 May 2007.

To cite this article: Roger Griffin (2007) The ‘Holy Storm’: ‘Clerical Fascism’ through the
Lens of Modernism , Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8:2, 213-227, DOI:
10.1080/14690760701321130

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 Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,
Vol. 8, No. 2, 213–227, June 2007

The ‘Holy Storm’: ‘Clerical Fascism’ through the Lens of

Modernism1

ROGER GRIFFIN
Oxford Brookes University
RogerGriffin
Totalitarian
1469-0764
Original
Taylor
8202007
rdgriffin@brookes.ac.uk
000002007
&Article
Francis
10.1080/14690760701321130
FTMP_A_232009.sgm
and (print)/1743-9647
Movements
FrancisLtd and Political
(online)Religions
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Revaluing a Debased Concept

It is nearly 30 years since, wielding the Occham principle more like a machete
than a razor, the American historian Gilbert Allardyce set himself the task, in his
article “What Fascism is Not: Thoughts on the Devaluation of a Concept”,2 of
rooting out the unsightly weed of ‘fascism’ as a generic term from the manicured
garden of the Human Sciences. The argument he marshalled on that occasion
seems curiously passé now that comparative fascist studies are thriving with a
luxuriance and degree of scholarly consensus unimaginable at the time.3
Undaunted by Allardyce’s failure to place an embargo on the term’s usage, this
article sets out to perform a similar operation – one that will hopefully prove to be
more of a surgical intervention than a hatchet job – on a closely related political
concept whose heuristic value threatens to evaporate altogether under hyperin-
flationary pressures; namely, ‘clerical fascism’.
Once this ‘cleaning up’ operation is complete, an attempt will be made to
enhance its explanatory potential by identifying two types of phenomena
covered by the term, the second of which, in particular, is best illuminated by
being located within the category of ‘political modernism’. The thrust of the
argument is that the use of the term ‘clerical fascism’ should be limited to the
peculiar forms of politics that arise when religious clerics and professional theo-
logians are drawn either into collusion with the secular ideology of fascism (an
occurrence particularly common in interwar Europe); or, more rarely, manage to
mix themselves a theologically illicit cocktail of deeply held religious beliefs
with a fascist commitment to saving the nation or race from decadence or
collapse.

The Hyperinflation of ‘Clerical Fascism’

‘Clerical fascism’ seems to have begun life, appropriately enough, in Italy, at a
critical point in the rise of fascism. Walter Laqueur claims to have found it first
mentioned in 1922, before the March on Rome, when ‘it referred to a group of
Catholic believers in Northern Italy who advocated a synthesis of Catholicism
and fascism’.4 It is to be noted that it thus originally designated some sort of
entente between two discrete, and – given the staunch anti-clericalism of many
squadristi at the time – conflicting, ideological causes, a relationship not of synthe-
sis (pace Laqueur) but of collusion. Even today in Italian historiography, the term
ISSN 1469-0764 Print/ISSN 1743-9647 Online/07/020213-15 © 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14690760701321130
 214 R. Griffin

generally retains this refreshingly tidy, specific, non-generic, meaning. Thus an

Italian Web Encyclopaedia defines ‘clerical fascism’ as:

a set of attitudes and movements of Catholics favourable to Fascism

which started to form in the crisis [of Italy] of 1919–1922. … Their inten-
tion to exert influence on Fascism from the wings through autonomous
movements soon proved illusory. Initially welcomed by Mussolini, once
the regime was established, the Clerical Fascists [i clericofascisti] were
largely marginalised, playing no significant part in the Church except for
a minor diplomatic role in the solution of the ‘Roman Question’ [i.e. in the
Lateran Pacts of 1929].5

However, once ‘fascism’ came to designate, in its generic form, any variant of
revolutionary nationalism seeking to save the nation from decline, it was
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almost inevitable that the semantic scope of ‘clerical fascism’ would also
expand dramatically. Already in the 1930s and early 1940s, a certain J. J.
Murphy – obviously a staunch critic of the spate of compromises between the
Catholic Church and far right regimes he was witnessing – wrote brief
pamphlets, not just on ‘clerical fascism’ in Italy, but in Austria as well. The slip-
page had clearly begun from being an expression restricted to describing the
elective affinity that could grow up between elements of the clergy and fanatics
of a secular form of revolutionary nationalism. The term now extended to
an entire authoritarian regime, one far less ‘totalitarian’ than Mussolini’s,
which legitimated itself by invoking Christian values, in this instance Engelbert
Dollfuss’s ‘Christian Social’ state. When Murphy then produced a pamphlet on
‘clerical fascism’ in Peronist Argentina – Juan Peròn himself claimed his socio-
political system was the embodiment of the Christian Church’s social teaching
– its analytical precision was even further degraded. It had now been press-
ganged into describing any authoritarian or military regime that had the broad
backing of conservative, anti-communist forces within any Christian confession,
or indeed any group merely claiming to embody Christian values. For good
measure, Murphy extended his pamphlet series to cover the contribution of the
Catholic Church to Hitler’s rise to power, and to the ‘Japanese–Vatican
Entente’.6
A surprising number of postwar historians have also lent their weight to the
blunting of ‘clerical fascism’ as an analytical tool. It has regularly been used, espe-
cially on the Left, to designate not just Christian Social Austria7 and Portugal’s
Estado Novo [’New State’] – created by Salazar partly under the influence of a
form of political Catholicism called ‘Lusitanian Integralism’ – but also Franco’s
Spain, despite the Generalissimo’s much more pragmatic approach to religion.8
Some experts have endeavoured to restrict its application to the more overtly
Catholicised form of regime adopted by Franquismo once the influence of the anti-
clerical Falange, fascism and Nazism had waned, and that of Opus Dei had
grown.9 However, this means deviating even further from ‘clerical fascism’s’
original connotations. Another symptom of the fuzziness (or sheer confusion)
now inherent in the term’s definitional contours is to be found in a 2005 article by
Muriel Fraser of the UK’s National Secular Society. In it, she attacks the readiness
of revisionist historians to idealise what the Catholic Church in Slovakia gained
by ensuring that their country became such a compliant puppet state under the
Nazis. It contains the following passage:
 The ‘Holy Storm’ 215

The close alliance of Catholicism and Fascism [sic] was not unique to
Slovakia, of course. It was found in many other European countries, as
well: in pre-war Austria under Dollfuss, in Salazar’s Portugal, in Romania
under the Iron Guard [sic], in Pavelic’s Croatia, in Horthy’s Hungary, in
Vichy France and, of course, under Generalissimo Franco, who called
himself ‘Leader of Spain by the grace of God’. All of these, to varying
degrees, exemplified ‘clerical fascism’, that is to say, ‘fascist regimes in
which clergy played a leading role’.10

The inference must be drawn that, for Fraser, an entire fascist regime becomes
‘clerical’ if elements of the clergy supported it: alliance is equated with symbio-
sis. To further compound the confusion, Admiral Horthy’s regime in Hungary, in
contrast to the Arrow Cross movement, was not even fascist. Nor were either
dominated by the clergy, even if Ferenc Szálasi was careful to incorporate
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Catholicism into his vision of a ‘Hungarist’ national identity. When both ‘clerical’
and ‘fascism’ become this elastic, the binomial expression they form loses any
trace of heuristic rigour. Taking such texts at their face value, there would be no
reason to deny ‘clerical fascist’ status to any ultra-nationalist movement or ‘right-
wing’ authoritarian regime in which significant numbers of ostensibly devout
Christians – and not necessarily priests – played a conspicuous role. This would
include not only the Iron Guard,11 but also the National-Christian Defence
League (LANC), and the National Christian Party in interwar Romania, the
Christian National Socialist Movement, the Ossewabrandwag and the post-war
Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) in South Africa,12 and even the regime of
Getulio Vargas, who fostered an alliance between the Brazilian government and
the Catholic Church.
Some contemporary commentators are prepared to go still further and use
‘clerical fascism’ outside the context of the ‘fascist epoch’ (1918–1945) for a wide
spectrum of illiberal Christian politics, such as the ‘Catholic Integralism’ associ-
ated with the radical views of Archbishop Marcel Lefevre of France, or the
Christian Nationalism that played such a key role in Lebanon’s Civil War of
1975–1990. Like the conceptual equivalent of elasticised sofa covers, the term can
also be stretched to include various early twentieth-century right-wing move-
ments in Europe that took their inspiration from Charles Maurras’s Action
Française (even though Maurras himself was not a cleric, and possibly not even
a Christian),13 as well as products of the highly fecund habitat provided for reli-
gious and pseudo-religious politics by Christian Nationalism in the USA, such
as Christian Identity, the Church of the Creator14 and the Church of the Sons of
YHVH.15 Even the activities of Pat Buchanan have been linked to clerical
fascism.16

Deflating ‘Clerical Fascism’

One strategy for restoring to the expression ‘clerical fascism’ some much needed
specificity and rigour is to restate the obvious, namely that it is formed when the
concept ‘fascism’ – about which a tolerable (and, inevitably, in some quarters a
vigorously contested) academic consensus has emerged over the last decade – is
qualified by the ambiguous, though not intrinsically problematic, adjective ‘cleri-
cal’. If it is to be used binomially with sufficient definitional clarity to describe a
generic political phenomenon (genus) of which ‘clericofascismo’ under Mussolini
 216 R. Griffin

was only one local variant (a species) – and Allardyce would doubtless have been
reluctant to concede even this – then these two components need to be considered
separately.
In the present context, ‘generic fascism’, whose definition is a topic I have
addressed extensively elsewhere,17 is assumed to be a secular political ideology,
which – on a par with Bolshevism, though invoking overtly mythic, spiritual and
irrational forces bound up with the nation and race in its self-legitimation rather
than economic classes – pursues the goal of total revolution, the creation of a new
type of society and a new type of human being in a new historical era. At the
heart of its vision of the regenerative process lies the transformation not of capi-
talism into socialism, but of a fragmented, decadent society into a national
community, a project based on a syncretic world view breaking the mould of
conservative social hierarchy and traditional values. The fascist project is realis-
able within human time and through human agency. However, its frequent
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recourse to the language of redemption, sacrifice, faith and immortality, as well as

the powerful charismatic forces it whipped up in the interwar period in some
contexts when it operated as a political religion, encouraged the blurring of
distinctions between the secular and religious realms of human experience.
For its part, ‘clerical’ ultimately derives from the Greek translation of the Old
Testament which, in Deuteronomy 18:2, uses kleros to describe the ‘inheritance’ of
those who have nothing but their faith in the Lord. This gives rise to the late
Greek klerikos, and hence the Latin clericus, subsequently mutated to clergé in
French which retains to this day an exclusively religious meaning. In German,
Klerus is still used as a collective noun for the ecclesiastical class of Catholics as
distinct from the laity. Here, however, clericia, the Latin collective noun for schol-
arly priests, bequeathed the word Klerisei, appropriated into English as ‘clerisy’,
meaning the (secular) literati or intelligentsia. In French, the equivalent of this
term was the plural ‘les clercs’, immortalised in Julien Benda’s famous work of
1927, La trahison des clercs. It was translated into English as The Treason of the Intel-
lectuals because in English ‘clerk’ did not come to denote a member of the intelli-
gentsia. Instead, it acquired the less illustrious meaning of someone doing menial
tasks for high-ranking civil servants and bureaucrats or, especially in American
English, just low-grade administrative or customer service work in general,
whether in an office, bank, hotel, or convenience store.
I suggest that much of the ambiguity surrounding ‘clerical fascism’ can be
dispelled in one fell swoop if we, in somewhat picky, pernickety fashion, define
‘clerical’ as the adjectival form of ‘cleric’ in the ecclesiastical sense it has acquired
in standard English. This is consistent with the pronouncement of one of the most
popular reference works of the electronic age, which defines ‘clerical’ thus:

A member of the clergy of a religion, especially one that has trained or

ordained priests, preachers, or other religious professionals. Its non-
culture-specific nature means it is often used to refer to the religious lead-
ership in Islam, where ‘priest’ is not accurate and where terms such as
‘imam’ are not widely understood.18

In terms of Emilio Gentile’s seminal work on political religion,19 the creation of an

extremist political ideology out of clerical thought and values represents a politi-
cisation of religion, while those cases where fascism incorporated clerical values
are symptomatic of the sacralisation of politics and its operation as a ‘political
 The ‘Holy Storm’ 217

religion’. No matter how much they collude, merge or come to resemble each
other outwardly, their initial ontological premises and metaphysical endgames
remain poles apart. They can thus readily become entwined but not easily synthe-
sised or fused – unless they are melded in a process of syncretisation and hybridis-
ation, a comparatively rare process to which we will return.
In the light of such considerations, ‘clerical fascism’ may thus be used as a
Weberian ideal type for a generic concept that refers to:

The ideology and political praxis of clerics and theologians who either
tactically support fascism as a movement or regime while maintaining a
critical distance from its totalising, revolutionary, and basically secular
objectives, or integrate elements of fascist values and policies into the way
they conceptualise their mission on earth as devout believers in a divinely
ordained world. As such, clerical fascism can never be a movement in its
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own right with a clerical leadership, independent ideology, and autono-

mous organisational structure, though it may operate as a discrete faction
or constituency within a fascist regime with which it enters a symbiotic
relationship.

What ‘Clerical Fascism’ is Not

If the ideal type of ‘clerical fascism’ we have now constructed is applied to
modern politics, numerous phenomena associated with it in the past fail the
membership test for what has now become a much more exclusive club. One such
group is made up of non-revolutionary ultra-nationalist movements with proactive
clerical support, such as the bulk of the Irish Blueshirts, the Romanian LANC and
regimes in Portugal, Spain, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Poland and Vichy France.
None of these had any scruples about imitating elements of fascism’s revolution-
ary rhetoric and style, but they remained at bottom modernising forms of conser-
vatism – what I have elsewhere termed ‘parafascism’20 – a force that sought to
reassert the hegemony of a traditional world view in a modern idiom. In the case
of several Catholic countries where authoritarianism encouraged or accommo-
dated widespread collusion by the clergy, the result might possibly be called
‘clerical parafascism’, though this would still only apply to the support for the
local variant of ultranationalist politics among the clergy, not the whole regime.
Other excluded categories consist of fascist movements transforming particu-
lar denominations of Christianity into indicators of national identity, or using
Christianity to rationalise racial hatred or anti-socialism, thereby subtly ‘nation-
alising’ Christian theology, such as the Spanish Falange, the Legion of the
Archangel Michael (Iron Guard) and the AWB; movements in which völkisch21
thought or occultist religiosity22 predominate; or ‘New Religions’ of the sort that
played a role in some ideological subcurrents within both Nazism as a move-
ment and under the Third Reich. All these should be rigorously dissociated from
established Christianity and its clerics on ideological and theological grounds. In
the case of the German Faith Movement, for example, only someone seduced by
Nazism would fail to recognise it as a defiantly anti-Christian form of racism23
when one of its ‘hymns’ announced triumphantly: ‘The time of the Cross has
gone now,/The Sun-wheel shall arise,/And so, with God, we shall be free at
last/And give our people their honour back’.24 However, here again, any genu-
ine seminary-trained priests who became caught up in perpetuating such overtly
 218 R. Griffin

pagan travesties of Christianity as devout Nazis would de facto constitute indi-

vidual examples of clerical fascists.

The Preconditions for ‘Clerical Fascism’

So far our conceptual spring-cleaning has resulted in several boxes of superflu-
ous concepts and phenomena being carted away from the overflowing lumber
room of comparative studies in this area. As a result, ‘clerical fascism’ emerges as
a leaner, less ubiquitous, but still important, phenomenon. Every country in
which the Church was a dominant force in national life and that hosted an indig-
enous fascist movement or became incorporated into the Nazis’ New European
Order between 1918 and 1945 created an environment in which ‘clerical fascism’
could play a role in determining events, and in some cases (for example, Croatia,
Slovakia, Vichy France, Romania, Hungary, and Belgium) made a significant
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contribution to furthering Nazi ends, including the implementation of the Final

Solution. In practice, the socio-political space available for ‘clerical fascism’ to
play a role in any movement or regime before the war was conditioned by the
stance adopted towards organised religion by the national permutation of
fascism in question. This could assume two basic forms, only the second of which
created a hospitable habitat for it to thrive.
The first and most unpropitious habitat for fostering the active collaboration
of a section of the clergy was created by variants of fascism like the British
Union of Fascists, which pursued a scientistic, overtly modernising and techno-
cratically advanced vision of the reborn nation. To take another example, even
after the Concordat between fascism and the Vatican, Giovanni Gentile contin-
ued to promote a neo-Hegelian theory of the ethical state as an alternative to
Christian society, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Church. No less antagonis-
tic to ‘clerical fascism’ were the völkisch variants of Nazism. In these cases the
ultra-nationalism or racism that fascism posited as the foundation of the new
order tended to assume the guise of a secular, historicising political religion,
even if the rituals it inspired were saturated with the topoi of Christian religious
symbolism and ritual or enacted an elaborate pagan travesty of it. Emilio Gentile
has analysed the lengths to which fascism went to sacralise the state under
Mussolini,25 while Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch has shown how extensively the
Nazis’ ideology and ritual were structured by the Christian world view, but still
remained a political religion rather than a form of religious nationalism or politi-
cised religion.26 Certainly Oswald Mosley’s BUF would have aspired to emulate
Nazism’s power as a political religion if it had ever ruled Britain. However, it
would have done so with much less Christian baggage than either fascism or
Nazism, since Anglicanism remained extremely marginalised as an active ingre-
dient of mainstream BUF ideology.
Such a highly secularised form of fascism can only mobilise the support of ‘cler-
ics’ who, in contrast with the majority of their fellow clergy, go out of their way to
adapt their religious beliefs in order to legitimise their support of fascism,
producing convoluted arguments for Christianity’s compatibility with fascism
with endorsement neither from the Church hierarchy nor from the fascist leader-
ship.27 Nevertheless, as the histories of both fascism and Nazism show, fascism
could be tolerated by the bulk of the Church-going public, a connivance actively
wooed and manipulated by Mussolini and Hitler. However, the passive support
for fascism by practising believers is not the same as the active collaboration of
 The ‘Holy Storm’ 219

clerics that is the hallmark of ‘clerical fascism’. Nor does the fact that a fascist
movement or regime seeks Church approval – or at least the acquiescence of
professed Christians – mean that it has a ‘clerical fascist’ core itself.
The second relationship that can occur between fascism and the clergy has
already been touched on earlier. It arises when a form of fascism, or a significant
faction or constituency within it, deliberately incorporates selected elements of
the theology of an established religion, such as Catholicism, Protestantism, or the
Orthodox Church, thereby surreptitiously historicising and politicising it.28 Such
a conjunction of theoretically incompatible world-views fosters pockets of active
collusion between both fascists and clerics in insidiously ‘temporalising’ the tradi-
tional religious narrative, and in the interwar period induced some Church clerics
to doctor its ‘soteriological’ content and function so that by implication Christ’s
sacrifice could not guarantee redemption and immortality without being under-
pinned by fervent nationalism.
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A valuable case study in this scavenging process of appropriation has been

provided by Radu Ioanid’s analysis of the relationship between the Iron Guard
and Romanian Orthodoxy. He contends that:

Despite its pronounced orthodox character, legionary mysticism did not

mean the total assimilation of orthodox theology by a fascist political
movement, but on the contrary an attempt at subordinating and trans-
forming that theology into a political instrument.29

The ethos in the early years of the Third Reich encouraged countless practising
Christians to persuade themselves that a profound compatibility existed between
their religious beliefs and Nazism,30 and that Hitler’s dictatorship offered a total
solution not just to the political crisis of Weimar, but its spiritual one as well. It is
a bleak episode in ecclesiastical history which illustrates the importance of ‘cogni-
tive dissonance’ in conditioning beliefs and perceptions in times of crisis.31 Before
such a fundamental betrayal of theological principles is attributed to the impact of
living in a Terror State, it is important to note that collusion between Nazism and
Christianity started well before the Seizure of Power. Thus it was that one
German pastor recalled how Hitler’s election to Chancellor unleashed a tide of
optimism among church-goers: ‘a great optimism that national renewal would
bring with it an inner, moral revitalisation’ as if ‘the wing of a great turn of fate
[were] fluttering above [them].’32 When Christian clergymen – and some of the
theologians who helped train them – also mistook the beat of vulture’s wings for
the doves of Divine Providence, it produced many specifically Nazi permutations
of ‘clerical fascism’ in the lives of Germans with a religious vocation.

‘Collusive’ and ‘Syncretic’ Clerical Fascism

A more nuanced picture of the internal ideological dynamics at work in the
apparent conversion of German clerics to Nazism emerges when we focus on the
ambiguities of the two terms ‘confluence’ and ‘synthesis’, which it is important
not to use interchangeably in discussion of the relationship between theology and
politics in the context of ‘clerical fascism’. We propose to tease the two terms
apart, giving them contrasting connotations in order to further clarify our own
ideal type of the term which presents ‘clerical fascism’ as a combination of two
potentially conflicting ideological components.
 220 R. Griffin

We have already argued that it is the general ethos of spiritual and moral
renewal created by fascism that encouraged some religious clerics to enter an inti-
mate relationship with it in the interwar period. By probing into this relationship
further, it soon becomes evident that the ‘clerical fascism’ that results can assume
not one, but two distinct forms. One results when clerics convince themselves that
it is in the best interests of the Church to promote the national form of fascism (or,
in the case of Nazi puppet states, to collaborate with the invader). This means
blinding themselves to the secular, elitist nature of the fascist revolution, whether
blatant or covert, against the status quo, a revolution carried out within historical
time through human agency, which makes it the ultimate enemy of genuine
Christianity. Such self-deception can arise when the cleric convinces himself that
the two ‘faiths’ share enough common enemies – communism, materialism, anar-
chy, Judaism, individualism, alleged social and moral decadence – to make
collaboration fruitful. The result is a confluence, a ‘flowing together’, of two sepa-
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rate ideological currents. The corresponding relationship is then one of ‘collu-

sion’, in which, as the etymology of the term highlights, each party or faction joins
in the other’s ‘game’ for its own, partially compatible, but in the last resort
conflicting ends.
It was solely this collusive relationship that was denoted by the original expres-
sions ‘clerical fascism’ and ‘clerical fascists’ in the early years of Italian fascism. In
the ‘fascist epoch’ (1918–1945) untold numbers of Catholics, Protestants and
Orthodox believers in the most crisis-torn parts of Europe were lured into
supporting the politics of ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism by the spectre of
Bolshevism and anarchy, seduced by the fatally flawed logic that ‘my enemy’s
enemy is my friend’. Such regimes as Mussolini’s Italy, Hlinka’s Slovakia,
Pavelic´’s Croatia and Pétain’s France provide many individual examples of a
acu
e][t

fully fledged ‘clerical fascism’ in the sense of extensive collaboration with fascism
by clerics bent on safeguarding what they saw as the best interests of the Church
during a time of profound crisis.
However, the entente between clerics and fascists assumes a quite different
form, one generally neglected by scholars, when, instead of confluence, a genuine
identification and synthesis occurs in the deepest recesses of a cleric’s mind
between theological beliefs and fascist sympathies. The result is a clerical variant of
fascism in which the vision of a cleansing national revolution is expressed and
rationalised in a seemingly homogenised, unified Christian discourse. For exam-
ple, the pro-fascist fervour of the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Schuster, pointed
to a profound, albeit subliminal, amalgamation in his totalising world view,
between the regime’s secular ultra-nationalism and the teachings of his religious
faith.33 This synthesising, syncretic mode of ‘clerical fascism’ is a less pragmatic,
more psychologically complex phenomenon than the collusive variety which
gave rise to the relatively unproblematic episodes of Catholic priests prepared to
become fellow-travellers of fascism under Mussolini as the least of the triad of
contemporary evils: liberalism, Bolshevism or authoritarian nationalism.
The distinction we are attempting to draw here between ‘syncretic’ (strong) and
merely ‘collusive’ (weak) ‘clerical fascism’ can be illustrated by a concrete example
taken from Christianity’s contorted relationship with Nazism. The degree to which
the Vatican ever proactively supported either the fascist or Nazi regimes under
Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII is still energetically contested,34 as is the degree to
which Hitler and some of the top Nazi leaders retained elements of the Christian
faith. However, there is no doubt that some elements within the Protestant,
 The ‘Holy Storm’ 221

Catholic and Orthodox clergy in various parts of Europe gave active support to the
Nazi occupation of their country, even to the point of conniving with, or in some
instances actively participating in, the extermination programme. This occurred
principally in Germany,35 France,36 in the Baltic region37 and in the Balkans, where
a minority of Catholic clergy – some of them high-ranking dignitaries – played a
proactive role in governing the Nazi fiefdom, the Independent State of Croatia, and
were directly involved in episodes of systematic genocide carried out against Jews,
Gypsies and Serbs.38 There is also abundant documentation that elements in the
Vatican secretly connived in helping Nazi and Ustasha war criminals escape justice
after the war.39
Yet, there is little to suggest that such collaboration involved Christian clergy
making the considerable intellectual effort required to fascistise their own theo-
logical beliefs to the point of creating an actual hybrid between Nazism and
Christianity. Rather, they tailored and edited their religious beliefs to defend
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their support of fascism and racism, while keeping them distinct from the ideol-
ogy promulgated by the party itself, whether fascist, Nazi, Ustashan or their
local permutation. In particular, they managed to retain the other-worldly soteri-
ology of Christianity, along with its distinctive creed and liturgy. It was when
Christian belief was twisted to sanction mass murder that collusive ‘clerical
fascism’ assumed its most devastating and morally repugnant forms as a politi-
cal ideology.
However, the response of the Deutsche Christen [German Christians] – the
faction of Protestants led by Ludwig Müller – to the rise of Nazism went beyond
tactical collaboration by encouraging Germans to work towards the Führer both as
patriotic Germans and as fervent Christians. The more radical German Christians
proposed to Nazify Lutheranism by removing the Old Testament from the Bible,
so as to purge Christianity of its Jewish contamination. Their emblem, a combina-
tion of the Cross and the Swastika, epitomises the degree to which they
consciously sought to weld into a single alloy the alien metals of Nazism and
Christianity. This was no simple collaboration or collusion, but an attempted
synthesis between clericalism and fascism carried out with such theological
earnestness that it makes it possible to talk of the wholesale hybridisation of the
two.40
A vivid testimony to the complex psychological and intellectual process
involved in the perversion of an established religion into the warrant for racial
persecution and imperialism has been bequeathed by Emanuel Hirsch. A devout
Protestant much influenced by Søren Kierkegaard, Hirsch was professor of
‘systematic theology’ at Göttingen University from 1936 to 1945. In the years
1930–1933 he had undertaken an in-depth investigation of the spiritual crisis of
contemporary Germany ‘from a philosophical and theological perspective’.41
Certain passages in the resulting work, published in the second year of Hitler’s
dictatorship, express the extraordinary degree to which in the deepest recesses of
his mind he melded the Nazis’ pagan belief in the imminent rebirth of the Volk
through the renewal of its Aryan heritage and ‘blood’ with the Christian faith in
redemption through the sanctity and blood of Jesus.
Hirsch discerned a new collective ‘will’ emerging in Germany powerful enough
to banish the sense of dissolution and catastrophe prevailing in the last years of
the Weimar Republic. He was adamant that this was not a rational, progressive
process occurring from within human history. Rather it was ‘a holy storm that has
come over us and grasped’ the entire people.42 As a result, the encounter with God
 222 R. Griffin

was now mediated directly ‘through Volk and fatherland’, implicitly dispensing
with Christ’s intercession.43 Unlike Martin Heidegger or Ernst Jünger, who, by
1936, had both withdrawn into ‘inner emigration’, the unfolding realities under
the new regime seemed to have only intensified Hirsch’s missionary zeal to fuse
the Nazi and the Christian faith into a new whole, and to use his prestige as a
university professor to further the dissemination of the Nazi New Testament. In a
dense theological discourse, his publications continued to preach the fundamental
identity of the traditional Christian religious congregation [Gemeinde] with the
new Nazi national community [Volksgemeinschaft]. Thus, on the eve of the war
Hirsch, could declare in all sincerity that:

There exists between German Volkstum [ethnic nationhood] and Christian

belief absolutely no division or contradiction to make it difficult as a
German to be a Christian, or as a Christian a German. Faith and love are
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created to be the deepest sustaining basis for a life in freedom and

honour, as is appropriate to our community ethos.44

The Role of Modernism in ‘Clerical Fascism’

One clue to explaining this extraordinary example of religious ‘betrayal’, not by
an intellectual clerk but a highly studious and scholarly cleric, is to be found in the
research of social anthropologists into ‘revitalisation movements’. These sudden
flare-ups of charismatic, culture-constituent energy have arisen sporadically
throughout human history, either to regenerate a society that has entered a
profound crisis or to create a new community out of the collapse of the old. In
their pioneering research into this phenomenon, both Victor Turner45 and Edgar
Wallace46 emphasise that a key factor in the success of such a movement is the
elaboration of a new ideology culled syncretically from a variety of sources
through what Wallace describes as a ‘mazeway resynthesis’. In this process,
disparate ideological components are ‘ludically recombined’ into a new world
view (mazeway), which offers those disaffected with the old order not just a diag-
nosis of the contemporary crisis, but the imminent prospect of its resolution in a
reborn society.
A similar process of combining disparate elements into new aesthetic, social or
political values or ideologies may be seen as one of the defining features of
‘modernism’. This term is still associated by cultural historians mainly with
formal experimentation and innovations in avant-garde art and thought in late-
nineteenth and early twentieth-century century Europe. Nevertheless, its conno-
tations can be extended to refer to myriad initiatives for change and renewal that
express a profound reaction against the increasingly secularising, disenchanting,
disembedding impact of the western, and increasingly globalised forces of
modernisation.47 Seen in the context of a generalised revolt against existing
modernity, modernism quickly acquires an enlarged (‘maximalist’) semantic
scope which makes it applicable to a vast array of heterogeneous attempts carried
out in the aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, social, scientific, technological and polit-
ical spheres of the Europeanised world, especially in the period 1880–1950, to
renew the sense of transcendence and sacrality so seriously eroded by the impact
of secularisation and disenchantment.
This use of the term has much in common with the way in The Politics of Time
the Marxist intellectual Peter Osborne applies modernism to any projects in art,
 The ‘Holy Storm’ 223

philosophy, social thought and politics which specifically ‘affirm the temporality
of the new’ in the face of the erosion of meaning and transcendence under west-
ern modernity.48 The logic of his argument leads him to a conclusion that flies in
the face of much traditional Marxist thinking, namely he treats fascism as an
example of future-oriented, revolutionary politics on a par with Bolshevism.
Despite the profound differences between the two ideologies, Osborne portrays
both as avant-garde phenomena ‘by virtue of their explicit political identification with
radically new futures’ (my emphasis). The inference Osborne draws from this anal-
ysis is striking in both its simplicity and its radicalness: ‘contrary to received
opinion … fascism is neither a relic nor an archaism, but a form of political
modernism’.49
The hypothesis that emerges from this line of argument is consistent with the
widespread perceptions and presentiments encountered at all levels of European-
ised society from the 1880s onwards that the West had entered a permanent state of
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moral decay, crisis, and transition. The resulting mood of ‘decadence’, interpreted
in a thousand nuanced ways, called forth countless instinctive attempts at ‘maze-
way resynthesis’ to achieve closure and enter a new age. These took place in
spheres as apparently unrelated as occultism, architecture, biopolitics, body
culture, social hygiene, sexual mores and vegetarianism, spawning a vast variety
of disparate schemes and projects whose common utopian goal was to resolve the
acute ambivalence, liminality and anomie of the age and usher in a visionary new
order, or at least a renewed sense of personal nomos. It was the prevalence of this
modernist cultural climate that subliminally predisposed millions of ‘ordinary’
human beings to sacrifice themselves for the renewal of history in the First World
War, causing ‘war fever’ to break out in several combatant countries. Where soci-
eties underwent severe crisis or – as in the case of the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian
empires during their collapse, or in European states under Nazi occupation – it
could also lead broad swathes of the population to respond with enthusiasm and
even fanaticism to some of the most radical, totalising, and potentially devastating
solutions offered by visionary political leaders, something impossible outside the
context of a generalised ‘sense-making crisis’. (The partial resolution of Europe’s
nomic crisis after 1945 with the advent of the Cold War helps explain why the revo-
lutionary intensity of its modernist climate abated after 1945.)
From this perspective, Hirsch’s passionately intellectual synthesis of Nazism
with Christianity may be taken at face value as an idiosyncratic ‘solution’ to the
intense spiritual and moral crisis of Weimar Germany. It constituted the ‘maze-
way’ which he hoped would lead his fellow countrymen and women into a new
age of transcendent spirituality and community. At the same time, Hirsch’s thor-
ough Nazification of Christianity was symptomatic of a generalised longing for
rebirth and a new temporality among Germans provoked by the real and imagi-
nary traumas following its defeat in the Great War. The palingenetic climate of
cultural despair that resulted was intensified further by the effects of the Wall
Street Crash to become a pandemic of anomie. This generated countervailing long-
ings for salvation in every social stratum – hence the strikingly trans-class nature
of support for Nazism as a movement. In the deepening climate of socio-political
modernism that ensued after 1929, millions of ‘modern’ German citizens in every
social milieu found themselves driven by an urgent need to take refuge from the
mounting chaos under the new nomos and cosmological sky offered by Nazism,
or to use Hitler’s own term, a Weltanschauung. It was the collective projection of
hopes for a new beginning onto the Bewegung [movement] orchestrated by Adolf
 224 R. Griffin

Hitler that made him, almost overnight, the centre of a leader cult and political
religion after 1929.50
It is thus no coincidence that Hirsch’s own diagnosis of the contemporary crisis
– and the key to his self-delusion that Nazism had not just a providential but a
Christian mission to fulfil – underlines the need not just for political but for meta-
physical principles of order to be renewed so that the mounting anarchy could
finally be banished from society. The Spiritual Condition of the Age, published in
1935, presents the Third Reich as reintroducing the three primordial precondi-
tions to a society’s viability without which he claimed it was doomed to disinte-
grate from within: Horos, or ‘uncrossable boundaries’; Nomos, the ordering
principle in life and thought; and Logos, the animating value-system and ethos of
communal existence. It is the unique form assumed by this trinity of ordering
principles that defines the individual destiny of every historical people. Hirsch
convinced himself that this divine matrix could not have been restored in its
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archetypal German form if the Nazi revolution had not intervened to save the
nation from total collapse and the threat of Bolshevism. In the theological system
he concocted out of an intensely personal act of ‘ludic recombination’, the Third
Reich and God’s Reich had become coterminous: the mission of Jesus Christ on
Earth was now being fulfilled through the intercession of Adolf Hitler.

Inferences for the Comparative Study of ‘Clerical Fascism’

A number of conclusions can be drawn from this line of analysis. First, academics
will only exacerbate the taxonomic confusion at present reigning in the study of
‘clerical fascism’ as long as they remain reluctant to specify the conceptual frame-
work within which they approach the topic. Without formulating an ideal type –
or at least providing a working definition – of what is meant by the term, the liter-
ature on this subject is bound to be a growing tangle of case-studies where like is
rarely being compared with like. It is a situation that makes it extremely difficult
to embark on a fruitful ‘nomothetic’ quest for general patterns in this area.
Second, our own investigation suggests that it would be advisable for most of
the extraneous semantic connotations the term has acquired within Anglophone
political science and historiography to be drastically pruned away, so as to return
the concept to its original, highly delimited meaning. In other words, ‘clerical
fascism’ should strictu sensu characterise professional clerics of an established reli-
gion, including interpreters of theological doctrine, who enter either a collabora-
tive or symbiotic relationship with fascism, a revolutionary, secular variant of
ultranationalism bent on the total rebirth of society through human agency. As
such, ‘clerical fascism’ should never be used to characterise a political movement
or regime in its entirety, since it can at most be a faction within fascism, and may
refer to no more than a highly personal and atypical response to it by an individ-
ual cleric such as Emanuel Hirsch. Applying it to contemporary politicised reli-
gions such as Hindutva, Christian Identity or Islamism51 only fuels the ‘Babel
effect’ that still envelopes the term.
Third, it is important that ‘clerical’ is not allowed to decay into an adjective
loosely describing the politics of any practising Christian. In particular, it should
remain carefully cordoned off from the realm of the secular intelligentsia [’les
clercs’], no matter how keen they are to solve the spiritual crisis of modernity.52 It
is also important that, even when clerics and theologians proactively support
fascism, or when a fascist movement seeks to gain their support by making a
 The ‘Holy Storm’ 225

national religion the mainstay of its ideology of national rebirth, the secular, anti-
Christian core of fascism’s ideology is not lost from view in the ensuing muddy-
ing of the waters.
Fourth, my own research underlines the need for multi- or trans-disciplinarity
when studying ‘clerical fascism’. It suggests, for example, that social and political
scientists keen to explore the historical dynamics of ‘clerical fascism’ could
usefully draw more extensively on theological expertise when making judgements
about the compatibility of certain political positions with Christianity in its vari-
ous denominations. It is easy to get the impression that for some secular minds
anything that involves mobilizing myths and unfashionable meta-narratives falls
into a cavernous wheelie bin designated for ‘religion’, which leads to some partic-
ularly perverse judgements of the compatibility of fascism and Christianity.
Scholars should also be encouraged to take advantage of readily accessible areas
of expertise within specialist areas contiguous with religion, such as millenarian
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studies, social psychology and cultural anthropology. As this article has stressed,
my own particular line of enquiry also highlights the value of exploring the rele-
vance to understanding ‘clerical fascism’ of research into both modernity and
modernism.
Used judiciously, insights from these various disciplines may prove invaluable
to deepen our insight into the way disparate ideological elements can be rapidly
syncretised into a homogeneous and fanatical ‘world view’ that in extreme
circumstances can find a resonance with broad sectors of the public, and may
even become the mobilising myth of a mass movement. In applying such perspec-
tives outside the sphere of European politics, the distinction between collusive
and synthetic forms of ‘clerical fascism’ might help researchers understand better
the complex dynamics at work when clerics reject or promote the contemporary
rise of a politicised religion such as Islamism with differing degrees of intensity.53
It is particularly by using the lens of a ‘maximalist’ concept of modernism to
explore patterns of similarity and contrast between fascism, ‘clerical fascism’ and
politicized religions such as Islamism that human scientists of all cultures may
find it easier to come to grips conceptually with cultural forces stemming from
religion in both its traditional and more recent political forms whose virulent
power to change the course of history – like those of nationalism, Bolshevism and
fascism, before them – seems to have taken much of the West’s academic commu-
nity by surprise. One can only speculate about how, reincarnated 70 years on,
Walter Benjamin would have reacted to finding the Angel of History no longer
flung backwards by the ‘storm of progress’ as he depicted it in 1930s Germany
when writing Theses on the Philosophy of History. Instead, this creature finds itself
buffeted violently to and fro between the fierce, desiccating trade winds of
modernity and repeated outbreaks of ‘holy storms’, whose human vectors have
undertaken the mission to ensure that the Fukuyamian ‘end of history’, and
hence the shattering of their closed cosmological world, remains indefinitely
postponed.

Notes
1. This article is based on a keynote address presented at the conference “‘Clerical Fascism’ in
Interwar Europe”, held at Oxford Brookes University in April 2006. My thanks go to the organis-
ers Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda for providing the incentive to write it.
2. Gilbert Allardyce, “What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept”, The American
Historical Review, 84/2 (1979), pp.367–88.
 226 R. Griffin

3. See, for example, the review article covering five recent books on fascist studies by António Costa
Pinto, “Back to European Fascism”, Contemporary European History, 15/1 (2006), pp.103–15.
4. Walter Laqueur, “The Origins of Fascism: Islamic Fascism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism”, New
York OUP Blog, at: http://blog.oup.com/oupblog/2006/10/the_use_of_the_.html (last accessed
6 December 2006).
5. See http://www.sapere.it/tca/MainApp?srvc=vr&url=/7/6786_1 (last accessed 6 December
2006).
6. Murphy’s pamphlets are accessible in the Aleck Kringlock Pamphlet Collection held at
Iowa University, see: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/speccoll/MSC/ToMsc200/MsC182/MsC182
_kringlock.html (last accessed 6 December 2006).
7. For example, Erik Loewy, Freedom and Community: The Ethics of Interdependence (New York: New
York State University Press, 1993), p.xxiii; and Anton Pelinka and Ruth Wodak, The Haider
Phenomenon (New York: Transaction, 2001), p.111.
8. For instance, an article in Socialist Worker of 19 November 1977 entitled “Spain’s Long Night of
Fascism” claims that ‘Spain suffered under its own form of military–clerical fascism which,
especially in its early years, was just as brutal as Hitler’s or Mussolini’s regimes’. See Socialist
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Worker online at: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=7774 (last accessed

5 December 2006).
9. Thus, in his attack on the canonisation of Escriva de Balaguer, founder of Opus Dei, Jesus Ynfante
complained that: ‘He had Madrid under his control, starting with the dictator. Under Franco
the clerical fascism of Opus Dei won out over the true fascism of the Falange’. Quoted by Giles
Tremlett in The Guardian of 5 October 2002 at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/
0,3604,804978,00.html (last accessed 6 December 2006).
10. Muriel Fraser, “Why Slovakia?”, National Secular Society, 27 November 2005, at: http://www.secu-
larism.org.uk/whyslovakia.html#six (last accessed 6 December 2006).
11. See Leonard Weinberg and Ami Pedhazur, eds, Religious Fundamentalism and Religious Extremism
(London: Frank Cass, 2004).
12. The AWB’s logo is made up of three 7s, representing the forces of Good arranged to evoke both the
Nazi Swastika and the triumph over the Beast whose number according to the Book of Revelations
is 666. This is an apt symbol for the appropriation and perversion of Christianity, rather than for the
politicisation of a genuine form of Christianity.
13. See Leonidas Donskis, Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism and Social Criticism in Twentieth-
Century Lithuania (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005).
14. See, for example, http://www.publiceye.org/frontpage/911/clerical-911.html#Clerical%20
Fascism (last accessed 6 December 2006).
15. See http://www.churchofthesonsofyhvh.org/ (last accessed at 11 December 2006).
16. See Chip Berlet “Pat Buchanan and Fascism” at: http://www.niskor.org/ftp.cgi/people/b/
buchanan.pat/ftp.py?people/b/buchanan.pat//berlet-on-buchanan (last accessed 9 December
2006).
17. See my introduction to Cyprian Blamires, with Paul Jackson, ed., World Fascism: A Historical
Encyclopedia (New York: Clio, 2006). A more sustained account of fascism as a form of political
modernism is to be found in my forthcoming Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under
Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave, 2007), ch. 6.
18. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleric (last accessed 11 November 2006).
19. Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
20. On ‘parafascism’, see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991), ch. 5.
21. Jost Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkisch Utopias and National Socialism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1992).
22. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1985).
23. The best account of Jakob Hauer’s neo-pagan movement – eventually absorbed into Nazism –
revealing its fundamentally anti-Christian nature, is Karla Poewe’s excellent New Religions and the
Nazis (London: Routledge, 2005).
24. See the web article on the Swastika and the Nazis at: http://www.intelinet.org/swastika/
swasti07.htm (last accessed 5 January 2007).
25. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralisation of Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Harvard University Press,
1996).
26. Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische Religion des National-Sozialismus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
1998). For extensive documentation of how profoundly hostile Nazism remained to core Christian
values see The Journal of Contemporary History, 41/1 (2007), which contains five scholarly articles
devoted to a detailed critique of Richard Steigmann-Gall’s thesis in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions
 The ‘Holy Storm’ 227

of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) that mainstream Nazism repre-
sented a genuine form of ‘positive Christianity’.
27. For an example of this phenomenon taken from British fascism, see the account of the Reverend
Nye’s prolific contribution to the BUF newspaper Action in Michael Spurr, ‘“Living the Blackshirt
Life’: Culture, Community and the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940”, Contemporary European
History, 12/3 (2003), p.319.
28. This fate could theoretically befall not just Christianised nations under modernity, but any
established religion if modernisation has proceeded to a point where an essentially secular
regime adapts a national religion to sacralise the state. For a fascinating case study in a non-
Christian milieu producing phenomena akin to European ‘clerical fascism’, see Walter Skya,
Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2007).
29. Radu Ioanid, “The Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard”, Totalitarian Movements and
Political Religions, 5/3 (2004), p.419 (my emphasis).
30. On the insidious appropriation of Christianity by Nazism, see Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics, and
Ideology in the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2004).
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31. See Christopher Burris, Eddie Harmon-Jones and Ryan Tarpley, “’By Faith Alone’: Religious
Agitation and Cognitive Dissonance”, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 19 (1997), pp.17–31.
32. Cited in Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936, Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p.432.
33. The zealous collaboration of Schuster with Fascism was one of the many topics dealt with in Avro
Manhattan’s famous exposé of clerical fascism – in the original sense – published shortly after the
war, The Vatican in World Politics (New York: Horizon Press, 1949).
34. For a strongly anti-Papal (and much challenged) account of Hitler’s relationship with Eugenio
Pacelli, see John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999).
35. Robert Eriksen and Susannah Heschel, Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1999).
36. W. D. Hall, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France (Oxford: Berg, 1995).
37. Dov Levin, “On the Relations between the Baltic Peoples and their Jewish Neighbors Before,
During, and After World War II”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5/1 (1990), pp.53–66.
38. Menachem Shelah, “The Catholic Church in Croatia: The Vatican and the Murder of The Croatian
Jews”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 4/3 (1989), pp.323–339.
39. See Mark Aarons, John Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis and The Swiss Banks (New
York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).
40. See Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
41. Emanuel Hirsch, Die gegenwärtige geistige Lage im Spiegel philosophischer und theologischer Besinnung
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934).
42. Ibid., pp.29–30, cited in Robert Eriksen, Theologians under Hitler (New Haven: Yale, 1985), p.152.
43. Ibid., pp.161–2, cited in Eriksen (note 42), p.162.
44. Emanuel Hirsch, Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity] (Weimar, 1939), p.155,
cited in Eriksen (note 42), p.166. See also Eriksen, Heschel (note 35) chs 2 and 4.
45. Victor and Edith Turner, “Religious Celebrations”, in Victor Turner, ed., Celebration: Studies in
Festivity and Ritual (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982).
46. Robert Grumet, ed., Anthony Wallace: Revitalization and Mazeways, Essays on Cultural Change,
Volume 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
47. This thesis, and its development in what follows, is explored at considerable length in Modernism
and Fascism (note 17).
48. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso, 1995), p.164.
49. Ibid., p.166 (original emphasis).
50. For empirical corroboration of this line of interpretation see Ian Kershaw (note 32).
51. The outstanding example of a text that equates Islamism with ‘clerical fascism’ is Walter Laqueur,
Fascism: Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
52. One sustained example of this taxonomic confusion in this area is Meera Nanda’s Prophets Facing
Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2003). This fascinating analysis of politicised Hinduism, Hindutva, purports to
be a study of ‘clerical fascism’, but her subject turns out to be a stratum of Hindu intelligentsia (i.e.
‘les clercs’) who have become involved in the dissemination of a form of right-wing populism
which lacks the revolutionary and secular orientation of fascism.
53. It should have become abundantly clear just how obfuscating the neologism ‘Islamofascism’ really
is, and how perverse its use in neo-Bushian discourse.