What Rick Warren, a founder of modern advertising, and the dirtiest word in politics don’t have in common. Adapted from The Family, by Jeff Sharlet, and excerpted here from CounterPunch.

“There is a book in the store windows in London and New York,” Frank Buchman, evangelist of the upper class, told an assembly at the Metropolitan Opera House in November of 1935. “The title is It Can’t Happen Here. Some of you who read the very important words of the Secretary of State, ‘Our own country urgently needs a moral and spiritual awakening,’ may have said the same thing, ‘It can’t happen here.’”

In 1935, Buchman was at the height of his powers, a small, well-nourished and well-tailored man of no natural distinction who nonetheless found himself touring the world in the company of kings and queens and bright, young, rosy-cheeked lads from Oxford and Cambridge and Princeton. True, Buchman was banned from Princeton, where as a Lutheran minister he had stalked students he thought eligible for “soul surgery,” as he would come to call his variation on the born-again procedure; and Oxford University was contemplating legal measures to stop him from using its name for his movement. He was then calling his followers the “Oxford Group,” having discarded “First Century Christian Fellowship” as perhaps boastful, not to mention inaccurate when applied to Buchman’s hundreds of thousands of 20th century devotees.

“Moral Re-Armament,” coined by Buchman as Europe entered World War II, was the name that eventually stuck. Not quite an organization—there were no dues or membership rolls—but less democratic in spirit than a social movement, Moral Re-Armament deployed its military metaphors through Buchman’s never-ending lecture tour, propaganda campaigns, and the spiritual warfare practiced by his disciples in service of an ideology “Not Left, Not Right, but Straight,” in the words of one of Buchman’s hagiographers. Moral Re-Armament’s aims were so broadly utopian as to be meaningless, but in practice it served distinctly conservative purposes: the preservation of caste. “There is tremendous power,” preached Buchman, “in a minority guided by God.” In a sympathetic portrait published by The New York World-Telegram, Buchman named names. “But think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to the control of God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man, God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem.” He thought the process had already started: “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism,” he told the reporter.

Before the war, when men such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh openly admired Hitler, it was still safe to name the style of government to which these words pointed: Human problems, Buchman declared, require “a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Just as good, he added, would be a “God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.”

Buchman had taken the stage that evening in 1935 to tell Manhattan’s wealthiest that it could happen here, and that it should. “Think of nations changed,” he told his audience, urging them to imagine “soul surgery” on a national scale, or something even grander: “God-controlled supernationalism.”

That dream survives today. Not just in the political ambitions of Christian Right politicians, currently an embattled species, but even more so in the seemingly sanguine lifestyle fundamentalism preached by mega-pastors such as Joel Osteen (author of Become a Better You), whose very name is trademarked, and Rick Warren, author of the mammoth-sellingPurpose-Driven Life — and, as of April 2008, the official sponsor of Rwanda, which under his guidance has submitted to soul surgery on a national scale to become the world’s first “Purpose Driven Nation,” embracing Warren’s amiably-phrased mixture of obedience theology and Bible-based capitalism as an antidote to godlessness, whether that comes in form of genocide or socialism. Warren, despite his mild-mannered demeanor – or maybe because of it – doesn’t make distinctions. Either you’re with God, or you’re against Him.

And yet, Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and the business-friendly fundamentalism of the post-Christian Right era don’t set off liberal alarms the way the pulpit pounders such as John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson do. The irony is that the agenda of this new lifestyle evangelicalism is more far-reaching than that of the traditional Christian Right: the Christian Right wanted a seat at the table; lifestyle evangelicalism wants to build the table. It wants to set the very terms in which we imagine what’s possible, and to that end it dispenses with terms that might scare off liberals. It’s big tent fundamentalism — everybody in.

But the ultimate goals remain the same. True, Osteen steers clear of abortion for the most part, and Warren, every bit as opposed to homosexuality as Jerry Falwell was, prefers to talk about AIDS relief. But both men — and the new evangelicalism as a movement — continue to preach the merger of Christianity and capitalism pioneered three quarters of a century ago. On the surface, it’s self-help; scratch, and it’s revealed as a profoundly conservative ideology that conflates church and state, scripture and currency, faith and finance. There’s a sense in which Buchman’s vision of “God-controlled supernationalism” thrives today more surely than it ever did in the 1930s, a period of radical economic upheaval. Only, today we call it globalism.

Christ and capital, married deep in the heart of the world’s most militarily powerful empire in history: To many liberals and leftists, that sounds like creeping fascism. But look around; it’s not. We don’t live in a fascist age. The triumph of Buchman’s vision, the age of purpose-driven empire, these days of war abroad and becoming a better you at home, are not a throwback to the Hitlerian passions of the 1930s. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there may be nothing new under the sun, but there is surely more than one kind of reactionary politics. American fundamentalism doesn’t revere individual violence, as fascism did, even as it provides pious underpinnings for imperial violence on a massive scale. American fundamentalism cares little for blood or soil; its ambitions are literally universal. American fundamentalism doesn’t depend on a Gestapo – under the sign of the cross as a symbol not of suffering but of power, every believer becomes an informer on him or herself. Censorship becomes a function of the soul, not of the state; pastors needn’t bother with banning speech that it is never spoken.

To understand the uneasy echoes of the last century’s most hateful ideology in contemporary American fundamentalism – and why today’s conservative faith is milder in rhetoric and more literally totalitarian – we must exhume an unlikely pair of “thinkers”: Buchman, and an advertising man named Bruce Barton, two of the most influential hucksters of the early 20th century…

Adapted from The Family, the new book by Revealer editor Jeff Sharlet. CONTINUE READING AT COUNTERPUNCH. Or buy the book.