istic thinking of the masses as a kind of intellectual process. By producing in
their speeches the vagueness of a thinking process confined to mere associ-
ations, Thomas and Coughlin provided a good intellectual conscience for
those people who could not think. They cunningly substituted a paranoic
scheme concerning Jews, Bolshevists, terrorists, etc., for a rational process.
According to Adorno, Thomas was thoroughly acquainted with the Hitler
techniques through his affiliations with Detheradge, Henry Allen, and Mrs.
Fry (Adorno 1997). Thomas knew everything about the manipulation of his
own ego for propagandist purposes and had skillfully adapted the Hitlerian
technique of revelation and confession to the American scene of the 1930s
and to the emotional needs of the group to which he addressed himself: the
middle-aged and elderly, lower-middle-class people with a strong funda-
mentalist or sectarian religious background. In the perspective of the critical
theory of religion, all these techniques, devices and tricks of the 1930s and
1940s are far from being over, but continue to be used today in American
religious as well as secular mass media, e.g., in Pat Robertson’s program or
in Fox News, except that now not only communists, but also Muslims are
identified and demonized as the arch-enemies of the American way of life.
Religion as a Racket
For Horkheimer and Adorno, rackets ruled civil, industrial or late capitalist
society (Hegel 1986g; Adorno 1979). According to Adorno, the clerico-fascist
Thomas’ racket was religion (Adorno 1997:85–86). For Thomas, religion pro-
vided the characteristic color of his speeches. Religion gave Thomas the trade-
mark, by which he could be distinguished from his religious and secular
competitors. As Protestant minister, Thomas could appear as an expert pro-
moting the specific interests of a particular group. The basic idea of Thomas’
whole framework was to appeal to people of orthodox and even bigoted reli-
gious leanings, mainly Protestant fundamentalists, and to transform their reli-
gious zeal into conservative political partisanship and subservience: from
religious to political fundamentalism. For Adorno, it was this transformation
rather than the more or less obsolescent religious doctrines of Thomas from
the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation, which made it worth-
while to consider his theological manipulations (Küng 1994; Adorno 1997:85–86).
Adorno remembered that, in the Germany of the 1930s, religion had played
but a minor role in fascist propaganda (Adorno 1997:85–86; Adorno 1997:85–86;
Stone and Wiever 1998; Siebert 1993; Matheson 1981). At any rate, Adorno
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 89