with certain denominations. He rallied his crusaders with the battle cry “The
Church is in danger!” But sometimes Thomas professed extreme religious
subjectivism, and went so far as to state that the time of denominations was
over. He seemed to look toward some future religious Integration, to be con-
summated by alternative Future I – a totalitarian state.
Religious and Political Sects
Adorno considered it to be possible, that the vestiges of religious authority,
and love, and feelings, on which Thomas relied, were due to the essentially
sectarian character of religion in America, in contrast to the established
Churches in Germany, which were more or less state institutions: the Roman
Catholic, Lutheran and United Churches. American sects, so Adorno argued,
were closer to the individual’s personal beliefs, emotions and traditional par-
ticularities. Therefore, they had a stronger hold over the individual than they
did in Germany. According to Adorno, the organizational hold of the sect
over the family, where the authoritarian personality was shaped, and its
appeal to tradition, was much stronger than in Germany, where at least the
Protestant Church had been reduced for centuries to a kind of social func-
tion (Adorno 1997; Küng 1994). For Adorno, the fascist agitator had to reckon
with the presence of sectarian substance within the individual, secularized
though the form may be; a fascist agitator could not simply oppose this sec-
tarian substance. He had to try to lead it into the channels of his own secu-
lar political purposes. However, Adorno estimated this was not too difficult.
This was so, because some of the more radical sects had developed within
their womb certain traces of repressiveness and even – under the name of
apocalyptic trends – destructiveness (Adorno 1997; Fromm 1973; Marcuse
1984; 1970; 1995). Thus, they showed a more real affinity to fascism, than the
big European denominations ever did. Moreover, so Adorno argued, the
nucleus of all fascist movements was always somewhat like a sect: with all
the features of intolerance, exclusiveness, and particularism. For Adorno, this
deep-rooted similarity between the political and the religious sect, upon which
fascist propaganda in the USA fed, pointed in the direction of alternative
Futures I and II (Adorno 1979; 1997).
Positivism, Fascism, Neo-Conservativism
Like a flash of lightening Reverend Pat Robertson’s recent statement con-
cerning the assassination of the head of a foreign, sovereign state made vis-
94 • Rudolf J. Siebert