Christian Zionism this week in Jerusalem

This report from The Real News features Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen talk about Christian Zionism and Israel with particular reference to the US delegation to the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem this week. Trump’s Jerusalem Move Caters to Religious Extremists 05/16/2018

Max Blumenthal has taken some criticism for his position on "Russiagate" lately. I mention that only to say that some of the criticism I've seen seems aimed at wholly discrediting him as a reporter and analyst, a goal I certainly don't share. His commentary here on Christian Zionism is well-informed. His book Republican Gomorrah (2009) is a well-researched and insightful look at the Christian Right in the US.

In that book, he wrote about John Hagee, one of the two pastors Trump sent to Jerusalem for the Embassy opening:

Hagee is a Christian Zionist who preaches that the prophecies of the Book of Revelation will unfold as soon as the Jewish diaspora resettles in “Biblical Israel,” meaning all of Israel and the West Bank. A natural ally of Israel’s rightist Likud Party and the messianic Jewish settlers colonizing the West Bank, Hagee leveraged his millions to unite dozens of conservative mega-church congregations and some of the Christian Right’s most prominent figures— including the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, and Rod Parsley, a Pentecostal preacher with considerable sway in his home state of Ohio— under the banner of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the largest nationwide evangelical political organization dedicated to supporting Israel, or at least its most right-wing elements. Hagee said he would like to see CUFI become “the Christian version of AIPAC,” referring to the vaunted pro-Israel group rated second only to the National Rifle Association as the most effective lobby in Washington. The preacher tapped Republican Senator Arlen Specter’s former chief of staff, David Brog, as his Capitol Hill lobbyist and then proceeded to make inroads in influence.

Despite his pretensions to philosemitism, Hagee’s interest in Israel was motivated exclusively by his belief in End Times theology, a doctrine that celebrates natural disaster, war, and global pandemics as harbingers of Christ’s imminent return. According to Hagee’s reading of the Book of Revelation, the lodestar of End Times theology, when Jesus returns to Jerusalem, the Jews must convert to evangelical Christianity or suffer eternal torment in “an everlasting lake of fire.” And liberals had better seek cover as well. “As soon as Jesus sits on his throne he’s gonna rule the world with a rod of iron,” the portly Hagee boomed in a December 2007 jeremiad. “That means he’s gonna make the ACLU do what he wants them to. That means you’re not gonna have to ask if you can pray in public school. We will live by the law of God and no other law.”

Netanyahu, Biden and the Christian Right

Radical cleric John Hagee played a role in sabotaging Biden's peace effort in Israel

It turns out that there is a definite Christian Right connection to the amazing diplomatic snub that Benjamin Netanyahu's Israeli government gave to Joe Biden. Netanyahu had attended an event the day before Biden's scheduled arrival organized (formally, anyway) by the Rev. John Hagee, radical American cleric and Christian Zionist who really, really wants to see a war with Iran. These two articles report on the event, including video:

Netanyahu and Pastor Hagee’s Lovefest on Eve of Biden’s Arrival in Israel by Max Blumenthal 03.09.10

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and John Hagee Share Stage as Biden Arrives in Israel by Rachel Tabachnick Talk to Action 03/09/10

The video of Netanyahu at the event show him making an historically accurate and important point: Christian Zionism preceded Jewish Zionism.

Akiva Eldar describes the lack of evident seriousness in Biden's mission in U.S. gave Israel green light for East Jerusalem construction Haaretz 03/12/10:

In a sense, the uproar actually helped him: To wipe the spit off his face, Biden had to say it was only rain. Therefore, he lauded Netanyahu's assertion that actual construction in Ramat Shlomo would begin only in another several years.

Thus Israel essentially received an American green light for approving even more building plans in East Jerusalem.

Biden might not know it, but the Palestinians certainly remember that this is exactly how East Jerusalem's Har Homa neighborhood began: Then, too, Netanyahu persuaded the White House that construction would begin only in another several years. ...

And just in case anyone failed to realize how impartial a mediator the U.S. is, Biden said in his Tel Aviv speech that the U.S. has "no better friend" than Israel.

Tags: christian+zionism, john hagee

Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism

Shalom Goldman writes about The Christian Roots of Zionism Religion Dispatches 10/10/10, in an excerpt from his book Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land (2009):

In the United States, The Fundamentals, a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 by conservative evangelical theologians, emphasized the necessity to believe in the literal truth of scripture. This helped reify the relationship between the Jews of the present and the Israelites of old. In the view of many in the Christian West, Palestine was understood to be "empty," and this emptiness should be filled by Jews, the descendants of the land’s ancient biblical inhabitants. The phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land" conveyed this view in a very concise and pithy manner. The idea was first promoted by Christians.

In 1853 Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper) wrote that Palestine was "a country without a nation" in search of "a nation without a country." He made this observation during the Crimean War, when the continued viability of the Ottoman Empire came into question. With the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, continued Turkish rule in Palestine came into question. In Shaftesbury’s view, first expressed two decades before the Crimean War, Christians needed to support a Jewish restoration so as to prepare the stage for the Second Coming. As Shaftesbury was a friend and relative of Henry John Temple Palmerston, the British foreign minister, his views had considerable weight. Palmerston opened a British consulate in Jerusalem in 1838. Two years later, Shaftesbury wrote that "Palmerston has already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people." A half century later, the phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land" was popularized by Anglo-Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill.

That series The Fundamentals was the basis of assigning the name Fundamentalists to the Christian Protestant religious trend that had begun forming around 1870 in the US. It's two primary theological hallmarks were their "dispensationalist" apocalyptic beliefs, which assumed that the Jews of the world would be regathered into ancient Israel, and a belief in the "inerrancy" of the Bible.

The American Fundamentalists' beliefs about the Last Days were heavily influenced by Irishman John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), an Anglican clergyman who split from the Church of Ireland to form a Protestant sect called the Plymouth Brethren. Their views about the ingathering of Jews to the Holy Land dovetailed with British imperial ambitions in the Middle East.

Yet another irony in the strange ideology of Christian Zionism.

Tags: christian zionism, john nelson darby

Christian Zionism

Rachel Tabachnick has a good article out on The New Christian Zionism and the Jews: A Love/Hate Relationship The Public Eye Winter 2009-10 edition. It contains a number of points she has made in articles at Talk2Action.org. She has a good analysis of how old-fashioned fundamentalist Christian anti-Semitism can not only co-exist with "support for Israel" and even makes a weird kind of extremist logical sense in doing so. She writes:

Camouflaged in love and an exuberant support for Israel, [Rev. John] Hagee and other Christian Zionists openly teach narratives that parallel the story lines of overt anti-Semitism in which Jews are portrayed not as ordinary people, but as superhuman or subhuman. With almost no challenge (and often endorsement) from Jewish leadership, Christian Zionists are stripping away the hard-won humanity of Jews with a broadcast capacity and international reach that overtly antisemitic organizations could never match. Their belief that they are saving Jews from themselves allows them to proceed with a sense of self-righteousness and to draw in millions of well-meaning people. History demonstrates that once this humanity has been stripped away, the door is opened for unconcealed hatred, fear, and even genocide of these perceived superhuman/subhuman beings.

Tags: christian right, christian zionism,radical right

Mainstreaming anti-Semitism

An infamous Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, in the 1920s: the Protocols are still a favorite text of anti-Semites around the world

As much as I've blogged about Christian Zionism, this particular angle hadn't occurred to me until I read it in Ruth's post at TalktoAction, Conspiracy as Prophecy 06/12/09:

A few weeks ago I spoke at an event sponsored by one of the local chapters of the American Jewish Committee and emphasized the growing dangers of New World Order Conspiracy theories. Included in my presentation were video clips and examples of the rapid mainstreaming of this conspiracy storyline. However, my presentation was not focused on white supremacist groups but Christian Zionist leaders who freely and openly disseminate this paranoid conspiracy to millions worldwide in the guise of end times prophecy.

The press is focusing on the manifestations of hatred by white supremacist groups as opposed to the narrative through which they teach their hateful obsession with Jews. This "New World Order" narrative, as well as the process through which this narrative is transmitted to others, is an important part of understanding the growing epidemic of paranoid conspiracy theories. The narrative is not just about indulging in hatred of "the other" but a cohesive storyline about the battle between good and evil in society. This narrative can be disseminated in religious or secular versions, and can be told in an anti-Semitic or "philo-Semitic" millennial frame. But the basic storyline of world control by an interconnected and demonic cabal remains the same. Understanding this narrative can help to explain a question that numerous commentators posed this week, as they wondered why the election of our first African American president could bring about an increase in anti-Semitic violence. [my emphasis]

It's an open secret among those familiar with Christian Zionism as it's usually understood in the US today that the concept is based on a fundamentally anti-Jewish understanding of the Christian Scriptures. Not to mention highly imaginative interpretations of the same, even though Christian Zionists tend to hold to some variety of literalist interpretation of the Bible.

This is another way in which ideas now considered mainstream within the Republican Party encourage the most crackpot ideas among the violent fringe. An intense focus on apocalyptic thinking almost inevitably leads to fanaticism. And Christian Zionism is based on essentially fanatical assumptions, at least in the form which has become dominant within the Christian Right in the US.

Ruth writes:

While it may sound counterintuitive that Christian Zionists would embrace the same basic narrative as overtly anti-Semitic white supremacist groups, the storylines are indeed parallel and sometimes almost identical. Both anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic versions of the narrative are increasingly being marketed side by side and even from the same organizations. One compelling example is The Prophecy Club where people claiming to be Christian Zionists, some even pictured in tallitot, market their products on the same website and participate in the same speaking tours as known anti-Semitic writers. These include Fritz Springmeier, author of the 13 Bloodlines of the Illuminati, and Texe Marrs. All of it is marketed as prophecy. The Prophecy Club is the original source of many hundreds of online videos about the New World Order conspiracy theory, some of it quite virulently anti-Semitic.

One of the posts I made that focused in particular on this theme of Christian Zionism and the New World Order was Pat's Paranoia - And Bigotry 07/15/05.

Tags: anti-semitism, christian right, christian zionism, radical right

And the Huckery jus' keeps on a' comin'

The Huck: Y'all are gonna live by God's law when I'm President - my version of it, anyway (and women will be required to stand two paces behind) - but, hey, I've got a great laxative joke for you

It seems to be Huck Friday at Salon today. Joe Conason weighs in with Holy Constitution! 01/18/08. He recounts the Huck's declaration that he wanted to change the Constitution to conform to "the word of the living God" as Huck hears those words when it comes to abortion and gay marriage. Conason continues:

He later denied that he meant to suggest that God wants him in the White House. But his deliberate reference this week to conforming the law to "God's standards" sounds uncomfortably like the ideology sometimes known as "Christian dominionism" or "Christian reconstructionism," which declares that America, indeed every nation on earth, is meant to be governed by biblical law.

The looniest dominionists publicly insist that a pious government would inflict Old Testament punishments, including death, on blasphemers, pornographers, homosexuals, adulterers and even disobedient children. They constantly talk about their duty to institute biblical rule in the United States.

As a Southern Baptist preacher, does Huckabee accept that bizarre interpretation of Christian ethics? The answer is that he probably doesn't (or is too shrewd to say so if he does). But the clues to Huckabee's affinity for religious extremism have been lying in plain sight for a long time.

He cites some examples from Kids Who Kill (1998), the Huck's book co-authored with the hardline Christian Reconstructionist George Grant. And also describes the Huck's affinity for Christian dominionist Bill Gothard:

As governor, he also promoted the faith-based programs of a reconstructionist minister named Bill Gothard -- and even boasted that he had gone through Gothard's "basic program" himself. More reputable evangelicals consider Gothard to be a cultish fringe character, but he has built an enormous empire, which depends on funding from local and state governments to bring his authoritarian version of the Gospel to prisoners, police officers and welfare recipients, among others. He experienced a moment of unwelcome notoriety recently, when the Denver Post revealed that Matthew Murray, the 24-year-old gunman who killed four people at two Christian centers in Colorado in December, had been subjected as a teenager to Gothard's superstrict "home-schooling" programs. (my emphasis)

And the Huck's supporter Dr. Steven Hotze may be even scarier!

Years before he became a Republican Party activist, Hotze played a role in the Coalition on Revival, one of the early organizations promoting reconstructionist thought among evangelicals. The coalition's 1986 "manifesto for the Christian church" urged believers to accept the Bible as "the final measurement and depository of certain fundamental facts of reality and basic principles that God wants all mankind to know in the sphere of law, government, economics, business, education, arts and communication, medicine, psychology, and science. All theories and practices of these spheres of life are only true, right, and realistic to the degree that they agree with the Bible."

He doesn't just confine himself to saving souls and eliminating freedom of religion. According to this report, he promotes fraudulent medicine, as well: Doctor Nice by Craig Malisow Houston Press 07/21/05. Another fine Christian white man who can help rid our country of the plague of science. If the Huck becomes President, maybe he could appoint Hotze to be the Surgeon General, or to head the National Institutes of Health.

Also at Salon, Alex Koppelman and Vincent Rossmeier also take a look at Huckabee's radical religious friends 01/18/08. The also discuss George Grant and Steven Hotze, as well as Huck associates Michael Farris, Janet Folger, James Kennedy (died 2007), James Robison, Rick Scarborough, and Don Wildmon. Boy, hidy, if you think the neocons are bad, wait until the Huck's theocrats start running foreign and domestic policy!

Folger organized the Values Voter Presidential Debate in 2007, which memorably featured (with her encouragement), a choir singing, "Why Should God Bless America?"



And there's Mike Huckabee hearts Israel by Mike Madden 01/18/08 on how the Huck aligns with the "Christian Zionists" who want the most belligerent policies by the US and Israel to hurry up the end of the world when they expect most of the Jews in the world will be slaughtered and the rest will convert to Christianity, i.e., stop being Jews. Madden writes, "Huckabee's posturing on foreign policy boils down to two things: Get tough on terrorists, and stand strong with Israel."

Then there's the Huck's nativism, ethical challenges and support for plutocracy (despite the "populist" rhetoric and Gomer Pyle style): The real Mike Huckabee stands up by Max Brantley, Arkansas Blog 01/17/08.

Tags: authoritarianism, bill gothard, christian dominionism, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christian zionism, christianism, george grant, joe conason, mike huckabee, steven hotze

The Christian Right and Israel

Probably the most important influence on Middle East policy in the Republican Party at this point is the Christian Right.

This article from the Israeli paper Ha'aretz has some good factual information about that particular political trend. It reports on a visit of Israeli Tourism Minister Benny Elon to a Christian Right conference in Memphis. Elon is so hardline that he thinks that Ariel Sharon is way too willing to compromise for peace. And that's exactly the kind of hardline Israeli policy this group of Protestant Christians supports.

These "Christian Zionists," as they are sometimes called, back pretty much the most extreme of the hardliners in Israel. And they are deeply suspicious of any Israeli government that actually tries to make peace. The Ha'aretz piece gives this glimpse at their theology:

The ideological basis for the cooperation between evangelical Christians and the settlers is the Christians' belief that the entire Holy Land has been given to the Jewish people and that only the return of the Jews to the Holy Land will enable the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Although the vision of the Second Coming also includes the idea that the Jews - those who will survive, that is - will begin to believe in Christ, that aspect of the vision is not mentioned at present.

The theology behind this starts from the traditional Christian view that the Jews collectively rejected Jesus, who was their Messiah. They then say that as a result, it is God's will that "the Jews" will never be allowed to live in peace as Jews. As the end of the world approaches - a good thing in this viewpoint - all the Jews of the world will be concentrated in Israel. Most of them will be killed in a cataclismic war. The ones who survive will convert to Christianity, i.e., stop being Jews.

With all the ecumenical goodwill I can muster for my fellow Christians of that viewpoint, I still can't see how a theology that says God doesn't want Jews to live in peace as Jews, and has foreordained that most Jews of the world will be killed off, is anything at its core but the ugliest of traditional Christian theology and anti-Jewish attitudes. So they cheer only for an endless state of war in the Middle East.

This is pro-Israel and "philo-Semitic" only in the narrowest of ways.

Tags: authoritarianism, anti-semitism, christian right, christian zionism, israel