Saturday, August 31, 2019

Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Politics of Christian Zionism

   By Rudy Barnes, Jr.,

Christian Zionism is a variant of Christianity that  anticipates the second coming of Jesus once the Jewish temple is restored in Jerusalem.  It is prominent among Trump’s evangelical supporters who consider him chosen by God to be their president.  Trump has affirmed that he is the chosen one, and echoed a sycophant, Wayne Allen Root: “The Jewish people in Israel love him...like he is the second coming of God...but American Jews don’t know him or like him.”

Most Jews (7 out of 10) are Democrats, and Trump has accused them of being disloyal:  “In my opinion, you vote for a Democrat, you’re being very disloyal to Jewish people, and you’re being very disloyal to Israel.”  Trump’s condemnation of Jews for disloyalty has caused a storm of protest among Jews, who consider it an insult to confuse being Jewish with loyalty to Israel.

Many evangelicals who support Trump are Christian Zionists, including Secretary of State Pompeo.  They support Israel’s Netanyahu and ultra-orthodox Jews who are committed to restore the Jewish temple on the temple mount where the Dome of the Rock mosque is now located.   Such an apocalyptic event would have catastrophic consequences.

Jerusalem is a holy city for Jews, Christians and Muslims, and a crucible of religious conflict.  Muslims, like Christians, believe that Jesus will return at the end times. Orthodox Jews, like Christian Zionists, want to see the third temple rebuilt; but unlike Jews, Christian Zionists believe that Jews will be converted to Christianity with the second coming of Jesus.

There are many variations of Christian Zionism with its apocalyptic dispensationalism and second coming; and America has a megalomaniacal president and secretary of state who are exploiting the politics of Christian Zionism and its anti-Semitic implications.  Most Jews resent Christian proselytizing and don’t seek to restore the temple with its blood sacrifice.

Trump’s embrace of Christian Zionism is likely a matter of political expediency.  He has accepted those variations of Christianity that support him and rejected those that oppose him.  Trump’s alliance with Israel’s Netanyahu and America’s Christian Zionists is popular among his supporters, but it portends religious and political violence that could hasten the end times.

Jesus is relevant to Christianity in politics, even without a second coming.  His altruistic teachings are summarized in the greatest commandment to love God and to love our neighbors of other races and religions as we love ourselves.  It’s a common word of faith and politics for Jews, Christians and Muslims, and it promotes interfaith reconciliation rather than division.

Trump’s divisive moral standards are the antithesis of those taught by Jesus.  Jesus was a Jew whose teachings were altruistic and universal. He never promoted any one religion over others--not even his own.  Christian Zionists believe they are God’s chosen people and that their religion is the one true faith. They have sacrificed Jesus on the altar of partisan politics.   

Christian Zionism fosters anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.  It supports the destruction of the Dome of the Rock mosque on the temple mount in Jerusalem to restore the third temple.  That apocalyptic event would supposedly usher in the second coming of Jesus and confirm the triumphalism of Christianity over Judaism and Islam.

The political alliance of Christian Zionism with the Third Temple Movement in Israel is a toxic combination of exclusivist religion and nationalism that threatens global peace; and both Trump and Netanyahu have exploited it to promote their political demagoguery.  Unless it is countered with more universalist Christian and Jewish beliefs and a politics of reconciliation, America and Israel could precipitate the end times. If that happens, it will not be God’s will.


Notes:

On Christian Zionism, see Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_universalism.

Talia Lavin has described the contradictions in Christian Zionism, with its support for Israel and anti-Semitic attitudes toward Jews:  “Nearly 300 years after the construction of the Touro Synagogue, the president of the United States, in between heckling Denmark and venting his ire at the “Fake News LameStream Media,” took time this week to make extremely clear that American Jews owe their allegiance to another country. On Tuesday, President Trump announced that the three-quarters of American Jews who routinely vote for the Democratic Party either have “a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” The next morning, the president approvingly quoted an appearance on the right-wing One America News Network by Newsmax radio host and virulently racist conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root. “The Jewish people in Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel,” the president tweeted about himself, quoting Root. “They love him like he is the second coming of God … but American Jews don’t know him or like him. They don’t even know what they’re doing or saying anymore.”  A few hours later, pressed to clarify his initial comments about American Jews’ “disloyalty,” Trump clarified: “In my opinion, you vote for a Democrat, you’re being very disloyal to Jewish people, and you’re being very disloyal to Israel.”
“...Christian Zionism — specifically, the millenarian eschatology that has gained significant popularity on the evangelical right in recent decades — is a potent force in U.S. domestic and foreign policy. The strongest supporters of an uncritical, anti-Palestinian foreign policy are white evangelical Christians — the most politically mobilized segment of the president’s base. Their support for Israel is grounded in the Book of Revelation, which dictates that Israel must be “restored” to the Jews before the Jews convert en masse, redeeming themselves for having once rejected Jesus. This redemption comes in fire, and at the cost of complete erasure of any distinct Jewish identity; it is a hallmark of the end of history, a time of tribulation that will exterminate the faithless.”
“...Among the many adherents of the Christian Zionist worldview, which seeks to steer Jews as pawns toward a future mass conversion, is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Pompeo, a fervent evangelical, has openly discussed his longing for the Rapture; speaking to a reporter from the Christian Broadcasting Network in March, he said it was possible that Trump had been sent by God to protect Israel from the Iranian threat, adding that he believed “the Lord is at work here.” That interview took place in Jerusalem, where Trump had just relocated the American embassy. The move was celebrated most vigorously among evangelicals; after all, Jerusalem is a key location in the particular prophecy to which they hew.”
Lavin, a Jew, concludes:  “Within the context of Christian Zionism, American Jews are relatively irrelevant, byproducts of a history whose end is the movement’s ultimate goal. As such, it makes sense to lambaste our intransigence — we are inconvenient, insisting on our own distinct identity, refusing to be blank-faced pawns maneuvering toward the Rapture. Our loyalty to America is both incidental and surely facetious; if all of history, if the very word of God itself, has dictated that we must converge in Israel to be converted to the love of Christ….  American Jews are what Jews always have been to a certain strain of Christians who see us only as biblical abstractions, tools to be utilized and discarded as their God commands: inconvenient, stubborn, willful, selfishly insisting that we exist. But we do exist. And we will go on existing, arguing with each other all the way, as we have for centuries in this strange golden land we call home.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/22/trump-sees-all-us-jews-israelis-because-his-christian-zionist-allies-do-too/?wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1.  See also, Yair Rosenberg on how Trump keeps pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes. But he thinks he’s praising Jews, at

On restoring the Third Temple in Jerusalem, see Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Temple.  

Whitney Webb has described how the Third Temple Movement has evolved from a fringe group of zealots to a more mainstream and little understood alliance with Christian Zionism over the past few years by rebranding extremist theology as “civil rights.”  “the Temple Activist movement is now more mainstream than ever before and its effort to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam, has advanced with great rapidity since the year began and has picked up precipitously in recent weeks. Yet this new face of the Temple Activist movement — one that claims that its quest is to wrest control of the holy site from Jordanian and Palestinian custody in the name of “equal rights” for Israeli Jews — obfuscates the troubling origins of this once-fringe yet now normalized campaign.  Beginning in earnest after the Six Day War in 1967, the Temple Activist movement within Israel was largely formed by two groups of people...known for their penchant for massacring Palestinian civilians for political gain, who either became religious messianists following Israel’s 1967 victory or remained secular and felt that salvation for Israeli Jews necessitated the miltiary conquest of Palestine and the destruction of its mosques and churches — particularly the site of Al-Aqsa mosque, often referred to as either the Temple Mount or Haram El-Sharif (Arabic for “the Noble Sanctuary”).  The modern “friendly” face of the Temple Activist movement...hides the extremist and largely secular origins of this quasi-religious movement that...is ultimately colonial (i.e., Zionist) in nature and uses religious imagery and appeals “to excuse their occupation and to try to portray this [the occupation of Palestine] as a religious conflict. ...The Temple Activist movement’s extremist origins and increasing normalization in Israeli society parallels the rise of Israel’s political far-right, particularly of the Likud Party — whose roots, much like those of the Temple Activist movment, trace back to secular Zionist paramilitaries like Irgun.
Miko Peled, Israeli author and human-rights activist, described this trend as “the resurgence of the ‘good old days’ when young zealots were the forefront of the Zionist project.” Peled pointed out that these zealots, young and old, are the cutting edge of Zionist ideologues and they do the ‘dirty work.’ Now they do not seem so radical any more and soon the state will come in full force.”
“There is a significant degree of overlap between the dominant parties of Israeli politics today and the Temple Activist movement, with a majority of current Israeli government ministers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, and a large and influential lobby of lawmakers in Israel’s Knesset openly supporting the Israeli government takeover of Al-Aqsa mosque and its destruction and replacement with a Third Temple.”
Webb concludes: “Support for the Third Temple within Israeli society is now “‘greater than at any time in the past.’  Yet none of this would be possible without strong support from the United States government, where powerful politicians and individuals – particularly within the Trump administration – share the vision of the Temple Activists, although many of them, being Christian Zionists, do so for radically different reasons. The combination of strong support for using political force as a driver of eschatology — among certain groups, whether of Christians or Jews — has increasingly become a common denominator between U.S. and Israeli politics in recent years, one that has colored the foreign policy of both countries.
However, far from a benign influence, the end-times prophecies that are motivating these influential individuals are stocked with future events that portend untold suffering, mass loss of life and cataclysmic wars. Given that both Christians and Jews that favor this interpretation of the end-times believe that active steps must be taken to usher in these apocalyptic scenarios by those with the capacity to do so — e.g., politicians, political donors and so on — it makes understanding this often overlooked aspect lurking behind current Israeli and U.S. foreign policy both a critical and urgent task.”  See https://www.mintpressnews.com/third-temple-activist-movement-israel-theocracy-civil-rights/260142/.
    
Anderson Cooper took a dig at Ivanka Trump after her father’s remarks on Jewish Democrats.  See  https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2019/08/22/anderson-cooper-jabs-ivanka-trump-over-presidents-remarks-jewish-people/2082031001/.


Related commentary:
On the future of a church that has lost its moral compass and the end times:
(2/8/15): Promoting Religion Through Evangelism: Bringing Light or Darkness?
(2/15/15): Is Religion Good or Evil?
(4/5/15): Seeing the Resurrection in a New Light
(4/19/15): Jesus: A Prophet, God’s Only Son, or the Logoshttp://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2015/04/jesus-prophet-god-only-son-or-logos.html
(10/4/15): Faith and Religion: The Same but Different
(7/9/16): Back to the Future: Race, Religion, Rights and a Politics of Reconciliation
(8/5/16): How Religion Can Bridge Our Political and Cultural Divide http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2016/08/how-religion-can-bridge-our-political.html
(9/17/16): A Moral Revival to Restore Legitimacy to Our Politics
(9/24/16): The Evolution of Religion and Politics from Oppression to Freedom
(11/5/16): Religion, Liberty and Justice at Home and Abroad
(12/31/16): E Pluribus Unum, Religion and a Politics of Reconciliation
(1/7/17): Religion and Reason as Sources of Political Legitimacy, and Why They Matter
(1/21/17): Religion and Reason Redux: Religion Is Ridiculous
(1/28/17): Saving America from the Church
(3/18/17): Moral Ambiguity in Religion and Politics
(4/15/17): Easter and the Christian Paradox
(4/22/17): The Relevance of Jesus and the Irrelevance of the Church in Today’s World
(4/29/17): A Wesleyan Alternative for an Irrelevant Church
(6/24/17): The Evolution of Religion, Politics and Law: Back to the Future?
(7/1/17): Religion, Moral Authority and Conflicting Concepts of Legitimacy
(7/15/17): Religion and Progressive Politics
(7/22/17): Hell No! 
(8/12/17): The Universalist Teachings of Jesus as a Remedy for Religious Exclusivism  
(10/7/17): A 21st Century Reformation to Restore Reason to American Civil Religion http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2017/10/a-21st-century-reformation-to-restore.html.
(12/23/17): If Democracy Survives the Trump Era, Can the Church Survive Democracy? http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2017/12/if-democracy-survives-trump-era-can.html.
(3/3/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on America’s Holy War
(3/17/18): Jefferson’s Jesus and Moral Standards in Religion and Politics
(3/31/18): Altruism: The Missing Ingredient in American Christianity and Democracy
(4/7/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Need for a Moral Reformation
(4/28/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Virtues and Vices of Christian Morality
(5/5/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on Nostalgia as an Obstacle to Progress
(5/12/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on Christianity and Making America Great Again
(7/14/18): Musings on Why Christians Should Put Moral Standards Over Mystical Beliefs
(8/4/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on Religious Problems and Solutions in Politics
(8/11/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on Changing Morality in Religion and Politics
(9/1/18): Musings on the American Civil Religion and Christianity at a Crossroads
(9/29/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Resurrection of Christian Universalism
(10/6/18): Musings on Moral Universalism in Religion and Politics http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2018/10/musings-on-moral-universalism-in.html.
(11/3/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist: Has God Blessed Us or Damned Us?
(11/10/18): Musings on the End Times: God’s Rapture or Satan’s Rupture?
(12/1/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Mystical Logos
(12/15/18): Musings on the Great Commission and Religious and Political Tribalism
(12/22/18): Musings on Faith and Works: The Unity of All Believers and The Last Judgment
(2/9/19): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Hypocrisy of American Christianity
(3/2/19): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on a Post-Christian America
(3/9/19): Musings on the Degradation of Democracy in a Post-Christian America
(3/16/19): Musings on the Evolution of Christian Exclusivism to Universalism
(3/23/19): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on Thinking Outside the Box
(5/4/19): Musings on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
(5/11/19): Musings on the Relevance of Jefferson’s Jesus in the 21st Century
(5/18/19): Outsiders Versus Insiders in Religion, Legitimacy and Politics
(5/25/19): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Divinity and Moral Teachings of Jesus
(6/8/19): The Moral Failure of the Church to Promote Altruism in Politics 
(6/15/19): Back to the Future: A 21st Century Pentecost for the Church
(6/22/19): The Universal Family of God: Where Inclusivity Trumps Exclusivity
(7/6/19): Musings on Democrats, Busing and Racism: It’s Deja Vu All Over Again
(7/13/19): Musings on Sovereignty and Conflicting Loyalties to God and Country 
(8/3/19): Musings on the Dismal Future of  the Church and Democracy in America
(8/10/19): Musings on Christian Nationalism: A Plague on the Church and Democracy

On Christian universalism:
(12/8/14): Religion and Reason
(1/4/15): Religion and New Beginnings: Salvation and Reconciliation in the Family of God http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2015/01/religion-and-new-beginnings-salvation.html
(2/8/15): Promoting Religion Through Evangelism: Bringing Light or Darkness?
(2/15/15): Is Religion Good or Evil?
(4/5/15): Seeing the Resurrection in a New Light
(4/19/15): Jesus: A Prophet, God’s Only Son, or the Logoshttp://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2015/04/jesus-prophet-god-only-son-or-logos.html
(1/2/16): God in Three Concepts
(1/21/17): Religion and Reason Redux: Religion Is Ridiculous
(1/28/17): Saving America from the Church
(4/22/17): The Relevance of Jesus and the Irrelevance of the Church in Today’s World
(8/5/17): Does Religion Seek to Reconcile and Redeem or to Divide and Conquer?
(8/12/17): The Universalist Teachings of Jesus as a Remedy for Religious Exclusivism  
(9/29/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Resurrection of Christian Universalism
(10/6/18): Musings on Moral Universalism in Religion and Politics http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2018/10/musings-on-moral-universalism-in.html.
(10/13/18): Musings on a Common Word of Faith and Politics for Christians and Muslims
(11/3/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist: Has God Blessed Us or Damned Us?
(12/1/18): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Mystical Logos
(12/15/18): Musings on the Great Commission and Religious and Political Tribalism
(12/22/18): Musings on Faith and Works: The Unity of All Believers and The Last Judgment
(3/2/19): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on a Post-Christian America
(3/9/19): Musings on the Degradation of Democracy in a Post-Christian America
(3/16/19): Musings on the Evolution of Christian Exclusivism to Universalism
(4/20/19): Musings on the Resurrection of Altruistic Morality in Dying Democracies
(5/11/19): Musings on the Relevance of Jefferson’s Jesus in the 21st Century
(5/25/19): Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Divinity and Moral Teachings of Jesus
(6/8/19): The Moral Failure of the Church to Promote Altruism in Politics 
(6/15/19): Back to the Future: A 21st Century Pentecost for the Church
(6/22/19): The Universal Family of God: Where Inclusivity Trumps Exclusivity
(6/29/19): Musings on a Politics of Reconciliation: An Impossible Dream?
(7/20/19): Musings on Diversity in Democracy: Who Are Our Neighbors? 
#245 (8/3/19): Musings on the Dismal Future of  the Church and Democracy in America