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# What Fascism Actually Is (and Isn’t)
- URL: https://www.pietaspublica.com/what-fascism-actually-is/
- Published: 2026-09-05T19:46:32.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-06T01:05:54.000Z
- Author: Flavius Iustinus
- Tags: Essays, Series

*Essay II of* Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square

[Essay I](https://www.pietaspublica.com/christian-nationalism-vs-christian-patriotism/) said that Christian nationalism, in the use we mean, is not Mussolini, and is not religion used as a tool of a pagan state. That sentence will not survive contact with the present dictionary unless we do some work. “Fascist” now means, in ordinary talk, “a person who wants public life to have a moral shape I reject.” If that is the definition, then Moses is a fascist, and so is anyone who thinks the magistrate carries a sword for a reason. It is not the definition. Words that once named a particular modern tyranny are being used to make Psalm 2 sound like a putsch.

So we will do here what we did with the other slogan. We will say what the thing is. We will say what it is not. We will not let a smear do our thinking, and we will not borrow the thing’s habits and splash a verse on them.

The historian of record for that work, in this essay, is Stanley G. Payne, in *A History of Fascism, 1914–1945*. Payne’s point in writing a history rather than a rant was that the word had already begun to mean everything, and therefore nothing.\[1\] He would not let it. Neither will we.

## Payne’s definition

Payne’s one-sentence definition, from that book, is this: fascism is “a form of revolutionary ultranationalism for national rebirth that is based on a primarily vitalist philosophy, is structured on extreme elitism, mass mobilization, and the Führerprinzip, positively values violence as end as well as means and tends to normatize war and/or the military virtues.”\[2\]

That means, in ordinary English: a politics that wants to remake the nation from the ground up, not merely govern it; that treats life-force, will, and energy as the real engine of public life rather than God’s law or ordinary reason; that joins a self-appointed elite to a street crowd; that puts one leader above the law; that treats violence as a good in itself, not only as a last resort; and that talks about war as if it were healthy.

Read the pieces. *Revolutionary*, not conservative: it is not trying to keep what has been received. *Ultranationalism for rebirth*: the nation is not a people under providence. It is a project to be born again by politics. *Vitalist philosophy*: Payne means a creed in which “life,” will, and vitality matter more than commandment, nature, or argument. *Führerprinzip*: that is German for the leader-principle. It means the leader is not a magistrate under law. He is the law, or the will that stands above it. *Normatize war*: treat fighting as the normal, even the virtuous, condition of a people.

That is already enough to stop the cheap trick. A statute against murder is not revolutionary ultranationalism. A creational ordinance of marriage is not the Führerprinzip. A people who still think their children should be taught that some things are wrong have not decided that war is a virtue. If those things are fascism, then Payne wrote a very long book about the wrong century.

He also gave a working grid in this book, under three headings (Table I.1).\[3\] A 1980 study, *Fascism: Comparison and Definition*, had offered a working definition and a comparative taxonomy. This volume, Payne says, is not a revision of that book but a completely new study, meant to extend the framework.\[4\] This is the grid we will use.

*Ideology and goals.* An idealist, vitalist, voluntaristic philosophy, aimed at a new modern culture that is self-determined and, in Payne’s word, secular.\[5\] *Idealist* here does not mean “nice.” It means ideas and spirit, not matter, are treated as basic. *Voluntaristic* means the act of will is what makes the world, not a given order of nature or of Scripture. *Secular* means this new culture is not the church teaching the magistrate. It is a this-worldly project that will write its own meaning.

Then: a new nationalist authoritarian state, not based on traditional principles or models. That means a new kind of hard state, not a king, not a mere strongman, and not a Christian commonwealth with a limited sword.

Then: a new, highly regulated, multiclass economic structure, whether the pamphlets call it national corporatist, national socialist, or national syndicalist. That means the state would reorganize bosses, workers, and classes into bodies it supervises. *National corporatist* does not mean “friendly to corporations” in the American sense. It means trades and classes are bundled into official organs under the regime. *National syndicalist* means unions of a sort, but as instruments of the nation-state, not as independent labor. *Multiclass* means it will not preach Marxist class war. It will try to fuse the classes in a national machine.

Then: a positive evaluation of violence and war. The goal of empire, expansion, or a radical change in the nation’s place among the powers. That means it wants a new rank in the world, often by force, not a quiet people living under law.

*The fascist negations.* Anti-liberalism. Anti-communism. Anti-conservatism, though fascist groups were willing to make temporary alliances, most often with the right, in order to take power.\[6\] That means it is against parliamentary liberty, against Marxist revolution, and against the old conservative order as well, even when it borrows conservative allies to get into office.

*Style and organization.* Attempted mass mobilization, with politics militarized and a party militia as the goal.\[7\] That means it wants the crowd in the street, in uniform, as a political army, not voters quietly going to a poll. Heavy aesthetic structure: meetings, symbols, political liturgy, the emotional and mystical register. That means rallies, flags, songs, and ceremony doing the work of persuasion, as if politics were a public rite. Extreme stress on the masculine principle. Exaltation of youth, and of the conflict of generations, at least in the first seizure of power. A charismatic, personal style of command. That last is the Führerprinzip again: one man, felt as destiny, not an office under law.

Two things in that grid should be heard by Christians with particular care. First, the culture fascism wanted was a *new* one, and Payne calls it secular. It was not the church teaching the magistrate that he is under God. It was a modern project of national rebirth that would make its own meaning. “Do not have other gods besides me” (Ex 20:3) is not a plank in that platform. It is the judgment on it. Second, fascism is anti-conservative. It will wear the costumes of the past. It will make alliances with the right. It is not the conservation of what has been received. It is a revolution that uses the past as a quarry for myth.

## Italy as the type, Germany as the cousin

The word has a birthplace. Mussolini’s movement in Italy gave it a name: the *fasci*, the bundle of rods, a borrowed Roman image of gathered force. Italian Fascism is the type-case because it named itself, took a state, and exhibited first the characteristics Payne treats as a new type.\[8\] *Type-case* means the example you measure the others by. Payne’s word for the religious move is not a Christian magistrate under God. It is a new “civic religion” of the movement and of the state, meant to bind the nation in a new common faith and to “displace preceding structures of belief,” with supernatural religion put in a secondary role, or none at all.\[9\] *Civic religion* means a this-worldly faith in the movement and the state, meant to do the work churches do, without confessing the God of the churches. Payne also calls the frame *immanent*. That means everything that matters is inside this world. No judgment from outside. No first commandment. A Lateran treaty—the 1929 settlement with the Vatican—is not a magistrate under God. It was a legal peace, not a confession that the prince is under Christ. Payne records that Fascist leaders came to treat Catholicism as Italian rather than true, and that Mussolini put the Roman part above the Catholic creed, so the church would sit inside a “religion of Italy,” with Fascism on top.\[10\] That is a post-Christian project. It is not Psalm 2.

National Socialism is not “Italian fascism in German.” Payne will not let us flatten them. It shared the revolutionary claim, the leader-cult, the mass mobilization, the militarization of politics, and the contempt for a limited magistrate. It added a racial mythology that treated blood as destiny, and it put that mythology to work in law, in war, and in murder. Payne notes that in some specific ways Nazism paralleled Russian communism more nearly than Italian Fascism did.\[11\] That is not the lazy thesis that “left and right are the same.” It is a historian’s warning that a racial revolution plus a total party-state is its own horror, not a synonym you can use whenever you need a louder word than “nationalist.”

What the two share, for our purposes, is the thing Payne named: revolutionary ultranationalism for rebirth, the leader-principle, violence as a good, the nation or the party standing in the place where God belongs. What they do not share with Christian political theology is the confession that the magistrate is *under* God. “Let everyone submit to the governing authorities, since there is no authority except from God” (Rom 13:1). The authority is real. It is instituted. It is not original. The moment a ruler talks as if he were the source of right and wrong, he has left Romans 13 and entered a different liturgy.

Religion, in both cousins, was not confessed. It was used. Where the churches would bless the regime, they were useful. Where they would not, they were a problem to be managed. The German Christian movement is the warning Essay VI will take up at more length. For now it is enough to say that a church which exists to baptize the regime’s will has ceased to be a church in any sense the apostles would recognize. “We must obey God rather than people” (Acts 5:29) is not a footnote for private life. It is what you say when the magistrate forgets he is a servant.

## Payne’s other two families

Payne’s most useful move, for cutting false cousins, is that he will not treat every hard nationalist politics as fascism. He sets out three faces of authoritarian nationalism: fascist, radical right, and conservative authoritarian right.\[12\] To lump them as “the right,” he says, is a mistake.

Those last two need ordinary English. *Authoritarian* just means a hard, unaccountable rule. That is not yet fascism. *Conservative authoritarian right* means people who wanted a tougher version of the old order: hierarchy, often the old church, often the old army, as little legal rupture as they could manage. They were not trying to create Payne’s new secular culture of national rebirth. *Radical right* means people who wanted to smash the liberal system more completely than the conservatives did, but who still hung on to old elites, monarchism, or church corporatism, and who did not make fascism’s cross-class rebirth cult their engine. They could be more violent than the conservatives and still not be the fascist type.

They could share enemies. They could make alliances. They were not the same thing. Franco’s Spain is not Mussolini’s Italy just because an internet insult needs a short word.\[13\] We can judge a hard regime as hard without emptying the word that names a particular revolutionary claim.

That sorting is how a Christian can keep his head. Authoritarian is not the same word as fascist. Nationalism, in the ordinary sense that nations are real and may seek their own good, is not fascism. [Essay I](https://www.pietaspublica.com/christian-nationalism-vs-christian-patriotism/) already distinguished the ordered love of a people from the claim that this people and their magistrate stand under Christ. Neither of those is the Führerprinzip. If “nationalist” and “fascist” are made synonyms, then every people in recorded history was waiting for 1922 to find out what they were, and Payne wasted his career.

A Christian magistrate is not a Duce. The sword in Romans 13 is for the one who does wrong. It is not a means of regenerating souls. Forced conversion is an error. So is the opposite error, which pretends that because the church must not coerce faith, the magistrate must pretend that good and evil are private tastes. Neither error is fascism. One is a confusion of the keys with the sword. The other is a confusion of liberty of conscience with a lawless city.

None of that is “wanting the laws of the land to track the moral law of God in their civil use.” None of it is Westminster. God “hath ordained civil magistrates to be under Him over the people, for His own glory and the public good” (WCF 23.1). The church’s government is “distinct from the civil magistrate” (WCF 30.1). The magistrate may not take the keys, the Word, or the sacraments (WCF 23.3). That is limited office. Fascism, on Payne’s account, is the refusal of limited office in the name of rebirth.

## The cheap trick, and the cheaper one

The cheap trick, named in [Essay I](https://www.pietaspublica.com/christian-nationalism-vs-christian-patriotism/), is to call every moral law fascism. On that usage, Payne’s book is unnecessary. You do not need 1914–1945\. You only need a disagreement. The aim is not history. The aim is to make the moral law sound like a blackshirt. A smear is not an argument here either.

The other abuse is not the smear. It is the imitation. There is a way of wanting “Christian order” that copies Payne’s marks and then looks for a verse. The leader becomes a test of faith. The nation becomes an idol. The church becomes a precinct. Violence becomes a good in itself. [Essay I](https://www.pietaspublica.com/christian-nationalism-vs-christian-patriotism/) called that a cheaper trick than the smear, because it hands the smear its evidence.

We can name the errors without doing the smear’s work for it. Blood treated as covenant is an error. The nation treated as the church is an error. The magistrate treated as a fourth member of the Trinity is an error. Forced conversion is an error. Those are not the claim this series is defending. Opponents will try to make them the whole of Christian nationalism, so that anyone who still believes Psalm 2 has to spend the rest of the argument apologizing. We will not do that. We will also not pretend that the errors are imaginary. Idolatry of the nation is still idolatry. “Do not make an idol for yourself” (Ex 20:4) does not contain an exception for flags.

The Reformed answer is not to flee the magistrate. It is to put him back in his place. He is under God. He has a sword. He does not have the keys. He may not demand the worship that belongs to God, and the church may not give it to him in exchange for protection. Two kingdoms, not two lords. Calvin did not invent Jefferson. He was not teaching modern church-state separation. He was teaching that no creature, including the prince, is God.

## Under Christ, the state is not a god

Christian patriotism loves a people. Christian nationalism, in the use we own, adds that this people and their magistrate stand under Christ. Fascism, in Payne’s use, adds a different confession: revolutionary rebirth, the leader-principle, violence as a good, a new culture that will not share the world with the first commandment.\[14\] The first two can travel together. The third cannot travel with either of them.

A free conscience is not a lawless city. A limited magistrate is not a weak one. A nation under providence is not a nation that has become an idol. “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance and the ends of the earth your possession” (Ps 2:8). He will have them. He does not need a Duce to collect the rent, and he will not share his glory with one.

Later essays will take up the claim that America was never a Christian nation, particular peoples and ordered loves, the myth of neutrality, the state’s habit of co-opting religion, and how to argue these things without losing the gospel. This second piece has one burden: keep the word. Fascism is a real evil with a real shape. Payne mapped it. It is not every moral statute. It is not the confession that Christ is Lord. If the present age cannot tell those apart, that is not a reason to stop using the words. It is a reason to define them, and then to go on.

## Notes

1. Stanley G. Payne, *A History of Fascism, 1914–1945* (UCL Press, 1995; Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003), 3–4.
2. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 14\. One-sentence definition, quoted in the body.
3. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 6–7, Table I.1 at p. 7.
4. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, xiii. The 1980 book was a working definition and comparative taxonomy; this volume “does not constitute a revision of the earlier book but is a completely new study” meant “to extend the framework.”
5. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 8–11, unpacking Table I.1, heading A.
6. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 11–12\. Heading B.
7. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 12–14\. Heading C.
8. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 7.
9. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 9\. “Civic religion”; post-Christian, postreligious, secular, immanent frame. Quoted phrases in the Italy paragraph are from this page.
10. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 216\. Catholicism respected as Italian rather than true; Mussolini put the Roman part above the Catholic creed; the church to be taken into a “religion of Italy,” with Fascism predominating.
11. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 210–11\. “in some specific ways National Socialism paralleled Russian communism…”
12. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 15–19, Table I.2 at p. 15, “Three Faces of Authoritarian Nationalism.” Payne warns against lumping fascist groups with “the right” as if that erased the differences (p. 16).
13. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 18.
14. Payne, *A History of Fascism*, 14.

Scripture is CSB. Confession cites are WCF chapter.section.

*Scripture quotations are from the Christian Standard Bible®, copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers.*