Do Born Again Christians Have a Problem With Jews
from the mag
Why Don't Jews Like the Christians Who Like Them?
Liberalism can't abide conservative evangelicals.
Wintertime 2008
The Social Order
Politics and law
Albrecht Dürer's Revelation of St. John, 1498
Idue north the U.s., the two groups that most ardently back up Israel are Jews and evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. Jewish support is like shooting fish in a barrel to explicate, only why should sure Christians, most of them politically quite conservative, be and so devoted to State of israel? There is a second puzzle: despite their back up for a Jewish state, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are disliked by many Jews. And a third: a large fraction of African-Americans are hostile to State of israel and critical of Jews, nonetheless Jewish voters regard blacks as their natural allies.
The evidence about evangelical attitudes is articulate. In 2006, a Pew survey plant that evangelical Christians were more favorable toward Israel than the average American was—and much more sympathetic than either mainline Protestants or secularists. In another survey, evangelical Christians proved much likelier than Catholics, Protestants, or secular types to dorsum Israeli control of Jerusalem, endorse Israeli settlements on the West Depository financial institution, and take Israel's side in a Middle Eastern dispute. (Among every religious group, those who are nearly traditional are most supportive of Israel. The well-nigh orthodox Catholics and Protestants, for instance, support Israel more than than their modernist colleagues do.)
Evangelical Christians have a high opinion non but of the Jewish state just of Jews as people. That Jewish voters are overwhelmingly liberal doesn't seem to bother evangelicals, despite their ain conservative politics. All the same Jews don't return the favor: in 1 Pew survey, 42 percentage of Jewish respondents expressed hostility to evangelicals and fundamentalists. As two scholars from Baruch College have shown, a much smaller fraction—most 16 per centum—of the American public has similarly antagonistic feelings toward Christian fundamentalists.
The reason that conservative Christians—opposed to abortion and gay marriage and critical of political liberalism—tin feel kindly toward Jewish liberals and support Israel and then fervently is rooted in theology. One finds among fundamentalist Protestants a doctrine chosen dispensationalism. The dispensationalist outlook, which began in early-nineteenth-century England, sees human being history as a serial of 7 periods, or dispensations, in each of which God deals with man in a distinctive way. The commencement, before Adam's fall, was the era of innocence; the 2d, from Adam to Noah, the era of conscience; the 3rd, from Noah to Abraham, of government; the fourth, from Abraham to Moses, of patriarchy; the fifth, from Moses to Jesus, of Mosaic law; and the sixth, from Jesus until today, of grace. The seventh and final impunity, nonetheless to come, will be the Millennium, an earthly paradise.
For dispensationalists, the Jews are God's chosen people. For the Millennium to come up, they must be living in Israel, whose capital is Jerusalem; there, the Temple will rise again at the time of Armageddon. On the eve of that concluding battle, the Antichrist will appear—probably in the form of a seeming peacemaker. Fundamentalists differ over who the Antichrist will be (at one time he was thought to be Nero, at another time the papacy, and today a few have suggested the secretary-general of the United Nations), but dispensationalists agree that he will deceive the people, occupy the Temple, rule in the name of God, and ultimately exist defeated by the Messiah. Many dispensationalists believe that how a person treats Israel will greatly influence his eternal destiny.
Christian dispensationalists were early on Zionists and continue to back up Israel today, for information technology is there that they believe Christ volition render. In 1878, William Blackstone, a well-known dispensationalist and the author of Jesus Is Coming, wrote a document that argued for a Jewish state in Palestine. Information technology appeared in 1891, five years earlier Theodor Herzl called for a Jewish state and half dozen years earlier the first Zionist Congress. Blackstone got more than 400 dignitaries to sign his document, including the primary justice of the Supreme Court, the Speaker of the House, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and several other prominent Americans, well-nigh all of them Christians. After President Benjamin Harrison ignored the petition, Blackstone tried again in 1916 with President Woodrow Wilson, who was more than sympathetic—and who supported the British foreign government minister, Arthur Balfour, a devout Protestant, when in 1917 he issued his famous declaration calling for a Jewish home in Palestine.
Due eastvangelical and fundamentalist Christian preachers enthusiastically promote this pro-Israel vision. In a report of preachers in 19 denominations, political scientist James Guth of Furman University found that evangelicals were much likelier to back Israel in their sermons than mainline Protestants or Catholics were, a difference that persisted subsequently controlling for age, sex, party identification, and type of media used to reach congregations. Guth also showed that self-described evangelicals who attended church building regularly, and thus heard their ministers' sermons, were much more inclined to back up Israel than were believers who did not attend regularly.
Evangelical preachers are reinforced by pop Christian books. In 1970, Hal Lindsey published The Late Bully Planet Earth; in 1995, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins followed with Left Backside: A Novel of the Earth'due south Last Days, and went on to write 11 more volumes on the same theme. Lindsey tin can merits more 35 one thousand thousand sales, and the Left Backside books have sold sixty one thousand thousand. These bestsellers tell the dispensationalist story, discuss Armageddon, and argue for the protection of Jews and of Israel. Lindsey argues that, based on the book of Revelations and related biblical sources, "some fourth dimension in the future," in that location volition be "a seven-year period climaxed by the visible return of Jesus Christ" but that this will not happen until the Jewish people accept reestablished their nation in their ancient homeland.
Whatever one makes of his prediction, Lindsey is unambiguous near the importance of Israel to him—and, by extension, to his millions of readers. Reinforcing the preachers and writers are diverse pro-State of israel evangelical organizations, including Bridges for Peace, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, and the National Christian Leadership Conference for State of israel.
Mainstream Protestant groups, such equally the National Quango of Churches and the Centre East Council of Churches, have a very dissimilar mental attitude toward Israel. The NCC, for example, refused to support Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967, and immediately subsequently began to protestation victorious State of israel's expansion of its territory. From that point on, the NCC's positions ran closely with Arab opinion, urging American contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization, for example, and denouncing the Camp David Accords considering they supposedly ignored the Palestinians' national ambitions. In 2004, the Presbyterian Church decided to written report a proposal to divert its investments from firms doing business concern with Israel. Within a twelvemonth, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, and parts of the Methodist Church followed suit. As Paul Charles Merkley sums upwards in his book nigh Christian Zionism, mainline Protestant churches' "respectable leadership had backed away from Israel; all of her constant friends were seated below the salt."
Why practise mainline Protestant leaders oppose Israel? That question becomes harder to respond when one recalls that Israel is a democratic nation with vigorously independent courts that has not only survived fell attacks by its Arab neighbors but provided a prosperous home for the children of many Holocaust survivors. Every bit with any other nation, State of israel has pursued policies that i tin challenge. Some may criticize its management of the West Bank, for example, or its attacks on Hamas leaders. But these concerns are footling compared with Iran's appear want to wipe Israel off the map by using every weapon at its disposal, including (eventually) a nuclear one.
The reply, I think, is that many Christian liberals come across Israel as blocking the aspirations of the oppressed—who, they take decided, include the Palestinians. Never mind that the Palestinians support suicide bombers and rocket attacks against Israel; never mind that the Palestinians cannot form a competent government; never mind that they wish to occupy Israel "from the bounding main to the river." It is enough that they seem oppressed, fifty-fifty though much of the oppression is self-inflicted.
Afterward the Marxist claims about the proletariat proved false and capitalism was vindicated as the best way to attain economic affluence, leftists had to cease pretending that they could accomplish much with state-owned factories and national economic plans. As a upshot, the oppressed replaced the proletariat every bit the Left'southward object of affection. The enemy became, not capitalists, just successful nations.
That shift in focus has received encouragement from sure American academics, such as Noam Chomsky, and from the European press, including the BBC, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and Le Monde. All tend to denounce Israel in the virtually unrestrained terms. When Israeli ground forces sought to root out terrorists hiding in a Jenin refugee camp, they lost 23 soldiers and killed 52 Palestinians. Among other press critics, the British writer A. N. Wilson, uninterested in the facts, called the episode a "massacre" and a "genocide." The Left will always have its enemies; Israel has only replaced John D. Rockefeller at the acme of the list.
But why practice so many Jewish groups and voters abominate their Christian evangelical allies? To answer that question carefully, we would demand data that distinguish among Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and secular Jews. It is quite possible that Orthodox Jews welcome evangelical support while Reform and secular ones oppose it, but I could detect no data on which to base a firm conclusion. Nigh Jews are political liberals, devoted to the Autonomous Party and liberal causes generally. As Milton Himmelfarb once put it, "Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans." Such voting habits are non hard to explain in a population that historically includes victims of bigotry, oppression, and mass murder. By contrast, evangelicals tend to be conservatives to whom politics seems less of import than their dispensationalist beliefs.
That liberal politics trumps other considerations—including worries about anti-Semitism—for many American Jews becomes clearer in calorie-free of other data. The well-nigh anti-Semitic grouping in America is African-Americans. This wasn't always the example. Many early black leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Bunche, were quite supportive of American Jews. Du Bois even criticized Bunche for being "comparatively pro-Zionist." The NAACP endorsed the creation of State of israel in 1948, and the Jewish state received continued support from Paul Robeson, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr. But by the fourth dimension of the 1967 war, much of that leadership had left the scene. Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, James Forman, Malcolm X, and Shirley Du Bois (widow of W. East. B. Du Bois) were critical of Israel. At a New Left convention in the tardily 1960s, black delegates insisted on passing a resolution condemning the "imperialist Zionist state of war." Nowadays, according to several polls, near one-third of U.South. blacks have very anti-Semitic attitudes, and this hasn't inverse since at least 1964, when the start such poll was conducted. And it has been African-American leaders, not white evangelicals, who take made anti-Semitic remarks well-nigh conspicuously. Everyone recalls Jesse Jackson'southward reference to New York every bit "Hymietown," to say zero of Louis Farrakhan, a great gentleman of Hitler, who has chosen Jews "bloodsuckers."
Yet African-American voters are liberals, and then ofttimes get a pass from their Jewish allies. To Jews, blacks are friends and evangelicals enemies, whatever their respective dispositions toward Jews and Israel.
But another reason, deeper than Jewish and evangelical differences over abortion, school prayer, and gay matrimony, may underlie Jewish dislike of Christian fundamentalists. Though evangelical Protestants are supportive of Israel and tolerant of Jews, in the eyes of their liberal critics they are hostile to the essential elements of a autonomous regime. They believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and worry virtually the decay of morality; they must wish, therefore, to impose a conservative moral code, alter the management of the country so that it conforms to God'due south will, crave public schools to teach Christian beliefs, and shell the rights of minorities.
Christian Smith, a folklore professor at the Academy of North Carolina, analyzed four surveys of self-identified evangelicals and plant that, while they do think that America was founded as a Christian nation and fear that the country has lost its moral bearings, these views are nearly exactly the aforementioned as those held by non-evangelical Americans. Evangelicals, like other Americans, oppose having public schools teach Christian values, oppose having public schoolhouse teachers atomic number 82 students in vocal prayers, and oppose a constitutional amendment declaring the country a Christian nation. Evangelicals deny that there is 1 correct Christian view on most political issues, deny that Jews must answer for allegedly killing Christ, deny that laws protecting free spoken communication go too far, and reject the idea that whites should be able to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods. They overwhelmingly agree that Jews and Christians share the same values and tin can live together in harmony. Evangelicals strongly oppose abortion and gay marriage, only in virtually every other respect are like other Americans.
Whatsoever the reason for Jewish distrust of evangelicals, it may be a loftier toll to pay when Israel'southward future, its very existence, is in question. One-half of all Protestants in the country describe themselves as evangelical, or built-in-again, Christians, making up about ane-quarter of all Americans (though they constitute just sixteen percent of white Christian voters in the Northeast). Jews, by contrast, brand up less than 2 percentage of the U.S. population, and that per centum will shrink: every bit many as half of all Jews marry not-Jews. When it comes to helping secure State of israel'southward survival, the tiny Jewish minority in America should not reject the help offered by a group that is ten times larger and whose views on the central propositions of a democratic gild are much like everybody else's. No expert can come from repeating the 1926 assertion of H. 50. Mencken that fundamentalist Christians are "yokels" and "morons."
from the magazine
The Printing at War
The patriot reporter is passé.
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Source: https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-don%E2%80%99t-jews-christians-who-them-13068.html
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