Anti-Religious Purposes
According to Adorno, the fascist propaganda in the America of the 1930s and
1940s, by secularizing Christian motives, perverted a great many of them
blasphemously into their very opposite (Adorno 1997e). Adorno was mainly
concerned with precisely this process of the fascist perversion of Christianity
and religion in general. Adorno tried to bring out the contradiction between
the religious stimuli applied by Thomas or by Coughlin or any other clerico-
fascist, and their ultimate aims. Their true purposes were not only profane,
but also outright anti-religious. In Adorno’s view, Thomas, the shrewd mass-
psychologist, knew very well why he talked religion: he had to reckon with
the existence of religious feelings within his audience. If the groups, so Adorno
argued, which he specifically addressed, were shown unambiguously that
his aims plainly contradicted the Christian ideals which he professed to
uphold, these religious feelings might express themselves in the opposite
direction, just as they did in Germany after the Nazis had shown their hand:
e.g., in the Confessing Church and its Barmen Declaration (Furfey 1966).
Nothing hurts and damages Christianity, and religion in general, more in a
secular world, than such neo-conservative or neo-liberal perversion of its fun-
damental motives, as e.g., collected in the so-called Sermon on the Mount
(Furfey 1966). Hitler had always called himself the most conservative of all
revolutionaries (Rauschning 1940; Stoddard 1940; Machtan 2001; Haffner 2001;
Kershaw 2001; Rosenbaum 1999). This notion of conservative revolutionary,
or, better still, counter-revolutionary, had been older than Hitler and survived
him up into the present American political scene.
Totalitarianism
According to Adorno, the use of religion for fascist purposes and the per-
version of religion into an instrument of hate-propaganda, through provid-
ing the principle appeal, the trademark of Thomas, was by no means a unique
phenomenon (Adorno 1997:86–87). Adorno knew of innumerable spiritual
trends within the American and European civil society of the 1930s and 1940s,
which pointed towards the establishment of alternative Future I – some sort
of a totalitarian society and state and regime (Adorno 1997; Kohn 1961;
Marcuse 1964; Stone and Weaver 1998; Baldwin 2001; Goldhagen 2002; Furfey
1966; Paassen and Wise 1934; Brenner 1983; 2002; Flechtheim 1971; Kertzer
2001; Valentin 1936; Rissmann 2001). For Adorno, there could be little doubt,
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 91