First let me say I defer in all things relating to Fascism — and most else — to Michael Ledeen who established himself early in his career as a real scholar of Italian Fascism.

Second, I think Michael summed up the problem with Buchanan’s Christo-Fascism point nicely. But, if I may add a few points. Mussolini began his career as a passionate hater of Christianity. He famously dared God to strike him dead in the next five minutes (he lived) at a lecture. As a young man, he wrote a saucy novel called The Cardinal’s Mistress and was often called before the authorities for one blasphemous act or another. But he was no rationalist. Mussolini was more than a little superstitious. As for Italian Fascism’s relationship with the Catholic Church, it was a matter of pure pragmatism and nothing more.

That said, I think it’s a little too neat to say that Fascism was “secular.” Fascism and Nazism alike — their significant differences notwithstanding — were both what Eric Voegelin called “political religions.” Mussolini himself repeated again and again that “Fascism is a religion,” as did many of the ideologues around him (See, for example, Emilio Gentile’s The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy). The Nazis, too, were in the business of creating a “counter-Church” of the State (See Michael Burleigh’s outstanding The Third Reich). More than a few Nazi ideologues saw their mission as one of destroying Christianity or “Germanizing” it to the point of nationalistic paganism.

The problem with “Islamo-Fascism,” as many have noted, is that — historically — Fascism is at war with traditional religion, while the Islamists believe that they are loyal to the true tenets of their faith. Wahhabism looks a bit more like some of the crazier iconoclastic Protestant cults of the early reformation than Fascism proper, if you ask me. But, Islamism more generically speaking, does have a lot of the earmarks of some fascist movements (including the adaptation and perversion of Marxist theory — Bin Laden’s version of the Crusades is very Ivy League Marxist).

Also, I think one needs to see Islamic-Fascism as a perversion of earlier Arab nationalism(s) — which looked a lot more fascistic in the conventional sense (every regime in the region uses the Palestinians as their Sudeten Germans, for example). Personally, if I was deciding these things, I’d call it “Bin Ladenism.” That would account for all the contradictions, provide a rhetorical space for Arabs and Muslims to condemn it (Muslim leaders aren’t going to use the phrase “Islamic Fascism” and “Jihadism” has positive connotations). We used Marxism and Leninism pretty efficiently for a long time and Bin Laden’s ideology is pretty well spelled out, why not do the same with him?