Category: Christian Zionism

“You Muslims must die!”

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Six year old Wadea Al-Fayoume was busy playing in his Chicago apartment, when the landlord barged in, raging “you Palestinians don’t deserve to live.” He then proceeded to kill the young boy – stabbing him 26 times. Writing for Religion News Service, Omar Suleiman asked “for what crime did Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old in Chicago, die?”  Despite his saying that every Palestinian child is as worthy of a soul as any child around the world, one commenter had the “biblical” answer: “Wow, what do say, Omar, to the Israeli children who were beheaded or burned or kidnapped by your colleagues in Palestine?”

So much hate. So much misguided thinking that more hate will solve it.

At Wadea’s funeral, several Chicago rabbis received permission to stand with the boy’s community as they mourned this loss. “I can’t say that it was simple to be there’, said one. His family and synagogue have relatives suffering in Israel.  They knew some of the 1,300 Israelis killed thus far. “My entire community is in deep pain”.  And yet, there he stood, showing support for another heartbroken family, weeping along with hundreds of Islamic mourners.

“We bear a simple message for our neighbors. You are not alone,” the rabbi said.: Misery, it is said, loves company. It needs the comfort of company. From ones, who in their own hurt, have room in their own hearts bear up others’ pain, too. His was a simple – but risky – gesture born out of shalom. “At the end of the day, we’re all human beings,” he said. “At the end of the day, we have to find a way for our children to live together in peace.”

The killer and the rabbi: Which of the two did what his Father wanted?

N.B.- No Christians were moved to do likewise.

Return of the Christian Super Hawks

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Another war, another letter from Christian war hawk Richard Land. You may recall his 2002 open letter to President Bush stating his “Bible-believing”  scholarly imprimatur – grounded in scriptural authority. Sanctioning unilateral war against Iraq “fell well within the time-honored criteria of just-war theory.” The letter, co-signed by a bevy of right-wing, neo-fundamentalist leaders, granted the Bush government a theological dispensation to inflict divine punishment. “The question is not if God is on our side, but if we are on God’s side,” Richard Land was quoted as saying about the Iraq invasion. “Then, with a wink of the eye, Land added, ‘But I think God is on our side in this one.’”[i] Gott Mit Uns!

But as firstly envisioned within Catholic public theology, Just War was the last resort. Not a shallow checklist before launch; not a divine set of minimums to bless waging it. Evangelical misuse of  Just War theory conceals its double-speak behind lofty philosophical presuppositions.  Influential pastor Jack Hibbs speaks for many evangelicals when he declares it is unchristian to demand that Israel’s response to the attacks from Hamas be “proportional.”  To our shame, we really don’t mean what we say.

Any war becomes entangled in a moral morass once the tit-for-tat shooting starts. By then, its too late to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules. Especially concerning the inevitably targeted civilians and noncombatant casualties.  Even from those whose motives are spiritually clean, where going to war could not possibly have been anything else but pure. As any military commander can tell you, even the best of plans go out the window when combat begins. Truth, as we are often reminded, is the first casualty. Some 500 people died in the October 17th aerial attack that hit al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Each side blames the other. Whether by mistake (like the Mukaradeeb wedding massacre), or deliberately (like My Lai) innocent people are just as dead, whether Just War – or just a war. 

Theologian Walter Wink had this to say: “ Declaring a war ‘just’ is simply a ruse to rid ourselves of guilt… If we have killed, it is a sin, and only God can forgive us, not a propaganda apparatus that declares our dirty wars “just.” In fomenting war and political objectives, Christians have lost our orientation by doing the will of the demonic enemy within ourselves.”  As Walt Kelly’s Pogo says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us”.  

But we are seeking answers to the wrong question. We need to ask how to achieve the shalom of Just Peace, rather than tidying up messes caused by all our presumptive “just” wars. Even King David was barred by God from building the Temple because he “shed so much blood on the earth before Me”. (1 Chronicles 22:8). Despite doing what he thought was the Lord’s will, he was far from sinless in the process. We, proud and rebellious people that we are, often find ourselves in the same need for confession and forgiveness.

Sin. None of us are immune from its deceitful and predictable end in death. Not individuals, not nations – Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of war. But he also blessed the peacemakers. They will be called children of God. (Matthew 5:9). And yet, the naysayers dismiss Just Peace as “simply inappropriate to the realm of political life…  At the risk of oversimplification, their argument is that the condition of perfect peace and justice denoted by the term shalom can be brought about today and through human action”.  

Bible nay-sayers are war-mongers who search for scriptural “nails” on which to hang a war, contradicting what the Bible intends. Christians are those who promote God’s peace.. To become peacemakers, we must begin with ourselves. We are commissioned to teach the nations “to obey everything I have commanded you”. We are to pray “Thy will be done”, not ours. We are commissioned to inject the empires of politics with the new order of shalom inaugurated by the One of Peace.  The power of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:8) enables us to live out Jesus’ teachings on love and compassion, and achieve what otherwise seems humanly impossible.  

What can poor little me do???? Many individual small ways add up as we live out His mission of love .During my weekly grocery shop this week, my clerk was a displaced Ukrainian.  The woman behind me in line wore a hijab. I made it a point to say I was praying heart-broken prayers for each. Peace, said Mother Theresa, begins with a smile..That’s a start. Shalom begins with you and I:

Let there be peace on earth

And let it begin with me

Let There Be Peace on Earth

The peace that was meant to be

… With God as our Father

Brothers all are we

Let me walk with my brother

In perfect harmony.

… Let peace begin with me

Let this be the moment now.

Pray For The Peace Of Jerusalem

~ phroneticchristian ~ 1 Comment

Let us pray earnestly for the safety and peace for the people of Israel, entreats John Hagee. “I certainly am praying for the people, the Israelis”, declares Franklin Graham. “I’m not praying for their enemies. I pray that God will give them victory over their enemies.”  Sorry, no prayers for the innocent Palestinians caught in the crossfire.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Christians are to be Jesus-centered peacemakers. He commanded us to:

•              Go and be reconciled (Matthew 5:24).

•              To first take the log out of our own eye (Matthew 7:5 NRS).

•              To forgive those who sin against us (Luke 17:3-4).

•              To love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:39).

•              And to love our enemy (Matthew 5:44).

The ruthless, bloody Hamas incursion is something no Christ follower can condone.  I abhor it, and believe Israel has a right to defend itself, no question. Murderous, and totally immoral , there are no apologia for Hamas’s atrocities. Yet, unquestioning loyalty to Israel – right or wrong – is a defining element of many evangelicals’ religious and political identities. I happen to fall on the more irenic side. Contrary to John Hagee, I don’t think the attack was entirely unprovoked. “Therefore, this must be said once again—we told you so. Ongoing oppression and injustice explode at unexpected times and places”, writes Amira Hass in Haaretz.

“Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war”, as Orwell famously wrote.  It’s not as if the Palestinians are not the only “bad guys” here. Peace negotiations have repeatedly come and gone – high points full of hope: including Camp David, Oslo, Annapolis. At the end of the day, neither side trusted the other to carry through. There were no “winners”.  Each is a recalcitrant loser who will not concede defeat. “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace”. (Jeremiah 6:14).

October 7th already represents the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Revenge is on the mind of Israel now. “The brutality of the surprise attack unites Israel around one goal: Crush Hamas”, reads a typical headline. “Every member of Hamas is a dead man,” Netanyahu said. Now is not the time cooler heads will prevail, where the blood lust of revenge easily outweigh sensibility and moral proportionality. It’s an emotional battle cry globally in conflicts that lead to horrific pain and desolation. “We are not going to stop until we capture the last remaining terrorist (gang member),” says the Salvadoran President of his country’s turmoil. Think of the sieges of Bakhmut and Sarajevo. And Vietnam: “We have to destroy the village to save it”.

Gaza’s situation was already dire before Hamas’s assault. And with Gaza now under siege, the Israeli energy minister has stated that no “electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter” until all hostages were freed. The Gazan population of 2 million has no food, no water, no electricity, no medical care, no shelter. Winter is coming – but no humanitarian help. Megapastor Robert Jeffress helpfully suggests that the biblical response (echoing word-for word Gen. Curt Lemay’s famous threat to North Vietnam)  is to bomb Hamas back into the stone age.. The collective punishment is only starting, with Israel planning a full scale ground invasion. Sitting ducks, Gazans have nowhere to escape, nowhere to live. The demographics of Gaza disclose that 65% of the population is under 25 years of age. There are almost 200,000 males in the 15–24 bracket. I worry about the life expectancy of innocent young men in that most vulnerable category.  And the children (on both sides). Especiallly Arab Christians, given Hamas perfidy in using innocents as human shields.

Shortly after the Bosnian war, I worked in international development. One inflection point involved the city of Mostar. On  side live the Muslims, the other is Catholic. It is split down the middle by the Neretva river, which for ages had been the city sewer. An international agency proposed a new waste treatment facility.  The quarrelling parties insisted there must be one for each side. They walked away without agreement. There was so much hate they didn’t want even their shit to mix. Another poignant story I overheard in Bosnia: God appeared to a one-eyed Serb, offering to grant him one wish. The condition was, that God would grant his Muslim enemy a double portion. The man thought about it a while, and then said, “take my other eye out”. Religio-ethnic conflict is the most difficult to resolve; intractable because it is holy. Each party is adamant that God is on their side. Both would prefer harming themselves than allow a blessing to their enemy.

What should Christians do? We must do what Jesus did. Christians need to be walking in Jesus’ sandals, and align our loves with the divine love. Jesus himself is our peace (Ephesians 2:13-14). That commits us to put aside war-mongering over against peacemaking in Jesus’ name. We should uphold the sanctity of all human life.- both Israeli and Palestinian – as bearers of God’s image, . “Accepting compassion and offering aid to the Palestinians in Gaza is morally imperative.” I like how Ilhan Omer put it: “Peace and justice will not come from the barrel of a gun. And that targeting an entire civilian population will only sow more discord and perpetuate the cycle of violence. The political solution to this horror, as ever, is a negotiated peace—with Israelis and Palestinians enjoying equal rights and security guarantees.” Otherwise, we surrender Christian morality to right-wing theocratic thugs like Pastor Greg Locke, who calls for Israel to “make the Gaza Strip a parking lot”.

The average Christian’s helplessness to alter these circumstances should breed a deeper sense of dependence on God to intervene. We need prayers of repentance and supplication. Our prayers should “extend beyond the immediate cessation of hostilities to encompass a broader and more enduring aspiration that both Israelis and Palestinians may come to embrace Christ as their Lord and Savior.” That all will “know that this man really is the Savior of the world”. (John 4:42).

Too Big To Fail

~ phroneticchristian ~ 1 Comment

“I think everyone should be upset about this and, again, Joe Biden is off the rails,” spouted Christian spite-witch Marjorie Taylor Greene. Biden should be impeached after the decision to forgive student loans, she huffed. Her outrage reflects the attitude of many evangelicals: “It seems outrageous to me that any President has the power or authority to cancel legal contracts with the stroke of a pen,” a representative commenter replied to a Christian Post article.

In contrast, evangelicals didn’t complain about the CARES Act PPP, the SBA-guaranteed small business loan program.. In fact, some 50% of churches with more than 200 members applied for a “loan”, with “evangelical leaders tied to President Donald Trump and megachurches tied to scandals pulling in some of the largest payouts”. COVID-19 was a financial bonanza for evangelicals. And they all knew it, replete with secret phone calls from the White House, being “walked through how to obtain emergency funding from the government. Participants in the calls prayed together and thanked officials for ‘blessing’ them with the opportunity to receive millions in taxpayer dollars, even without being tax-exempt or meeting requirements necessary for non-religious organizations.”

Joyce Meyer Ministries, was approved for a $5 million to $10 million loan; Robert Jeffress’ First Baptist Dallas, a loan between $2 million and $5 million; Willow Creek church, between $5 million and $10 million. Despite the intent of PPP to save jobs, the church decided instead to keep the money and cut 92 staff positions. James Dobson’s Family Institute was forgiven $668,549. Mike Bickel of IHOP got $2.5 million. The Crouch dynasty Trinity Broadcasting helped itself to $3.3 million. The American Family Association, a designated hate group, managed to pull $2 million. Steve Furtick wangled $3.6 million, even though his church ended 2019 with a cash surplus of $26 million. Jimmy Swaggart got $2.6 million. Even convicted felon Jim Bakker got into the act, receiving some $400K. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s all exposed – some 400 evangelical ministries and churches – and in the open on the Trinity Foundation website. What happens afterwards – what they do with the money – is locked behind IRS rules protecting churches from transparency in some very opaque finances.

Funny how all these good Christian folks, greedily sucking at the government tit, had no second thought about helping themselves to hard-earned public taxpayer money. And many of them ran some very impressive balance sheets. Along with stashed personal wealth galore. Like the late multi-millionaire and anti-vaccine televangelist Marcus Lamb’s Daystar Network, which took $3.9-million, and turned it around to buy him a multimillion corporate jet. It took an outcry generated by an investigative journalist for Lamb to cough the PPP funds back up. Not like they suffered to meet payroll like struggling mom-and-pop small businesses. Or, the black-owned businesses, which received a paltry 1.9% of loans.  The design was politically maneuvered as a set-up to reward loyal Trump soldiers for their godly obesisance.

And so we return to Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose own business had loans worth $183,504 forgiven. “At the stroke of the pen”, her government indebtedness was expunged. No hypocrisy there, nosiree bob. And these are shofar-blowing zealots for the Lord who adore the Old Testament, reveling in God’s command to murder all the gays.  Yet none of these ram’s horn blowing capitalists ever mention the Israelite Year of Jubilee, which came every 50th year, being a year full of releasing people from their debts, releasing all slaves, and returning property to who owned it (Leviticus 25:1-13).

The hypocrisy is palpable. It should outrage any American taxpayer. Especially a Christian, who disagrees with financially supporting a church or ministry “too big to fail” he/she otherwise shuns as heretical or sham. Meanwhile, thousands of former college students are struggling through an uneasy job market, inflation, and tuition loan repayments. One only needs point to the bait-and-switch Trump University, where “the billionaire had made enough money for himself. Now, he would put his famous brain to work for the little guy“. God cares for the little guy. For glutinous Trump and Taylor Greene, the little guy just gets in the way of the trough. Jesus instead says the little guy is too small to fail my love.

Let’s blow a shofar for student loan forgiveness! 

The Problem With Judaism: All The Good Jews Live In Israel

~ phroneticchristian ~ 2 Comments

I recall my mother-in-law, a refined Mississippi lady, announced with some surprise that a Jewish family had moved onto their cul-de-sac. Like many evangelicals, I doubt she had ever known a single Jew before. To meet a real live Israeli is an even rarer occurrence within this religiously-sheltered movement. To know one, they say, is to love them. But Jews don’t go to a megachurch, so evangelicals don’t know any. Except on television. But they claim to love the Jewish people – or at least, love Israel.

It’s cool to be a Jew — if you’re also an evangelical Christian, writes Sam Kestenbaum. Messianic Jews are a popular item on Christian television these days, keeping a semblance of halacha, while their audiences of elderly goyim blow shofars like party favors. Some “rabbis” are ekhte yidn that now claim Jesus Christ as Mashiach; they make millions off their new tribe of philo-Semitic goyim. “We’re in the Middle East because of Israel,” Trump said – a calculation in large part aimed at Christian Zionists “reached by televangelists and megachurch pastors preaching the End Times” – and who outnumber Jewish Zionists. His cabinet has been overflowing with evangelicals who are also staunch Christian Zionists, including Mike (“my-Christian-faith-compels-me-to-cherish-the-state-of-Israel”) Pence, Mike Pompeo, Nikki (“The-days-of-Israel-bashing-are-over”) Haley, and Rick “I’m-more-Jewish-than-you-think-I-am” Perry.

All these professions of undying love derive from biblical eschatology and the pivotal role of Israel they read into in the end times. The most popular apocalyptic stream in American evangelicalism today is premillennial dispensationalism, a cultic form of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) “rediscovered” a century-and-a-half ago. Going through all its twists and turns is more tedious than Wagner’s Ring Cycle. For those interested, you could go to Dallas Theological Seminary and sit through three insufferable years of it. Suffice it to say, God made two covenants with Abraham: to give Israel as an everlasting possession, and to bless all peoples on earth through him. God’s primary concern is keeping his word through their ultimate fulfillment in the triumphant return of Christ. This present Gentile-ruled age will conclude in increasingly severe judgments, and world catastrophes. Before it gets to Israel-hating countries tossing atomic bombs like water balloons, true Christians will be surreptiously “raptured” to Heaven. Left-behinders – made famous through Christian pulp fiction dreck – endure a Superpower Death Match in which three invading armies ravage Israel, and leave a third of mankind dead. It foresees the conversion of global Jewry, which will inaugurate the Second Coming.

What irritates evangelicals is that Jews don’t seem in as quite a hurry to see the world get incinerated as they are. “Jews Welcome Evangelical Love, Money and Influence for Israel. But Call Our Christianity ‘Poison’”, Michael Brown, a converted Jew, writes. I suppose it’s a normal reaction from anybody that feels used as a pawn, not loved as a person. Or share their joy in a divinely-ordained destiny that edges the world towards conflagration. There’s a bit of “just wait and see; I told you so” conceit when the preacher’s offer of salvation is rejected. How can the Jews frustrate [our interpretation of] God’s will?,” Brown asks. “I suspect that, consciously or not, end-times believers crave apocalypse”, writes Dina Nayeri. “They want a leader who will return them to the past, or barring that, hurry it along to its end.”

“All they are interested in is their interpretation of Biblical prophecies.” A millenarian cult and the trust of influential U.S. officials in politicized prophecy results in foreign policy towards Israel being de-Judaizasied. Even today, Christian broadcast networks have 24/7 cameras at the Mount of Olives trained to bring live feed when Jesus touches down. To the dispensationalist mind, hastening the apocalypse (immanentizing the eschaton) is good for Christians, regardless how bad it gets for everyone else. “Many of them relish the second coming because for them it means eternal life in heaven,” a professor of religious studies said. “There is a palpable danger that people in high position who subscribe to these beliefs will be readier to take us into a conflict that brings on Armageddon.” Like he was casually planning another golf round, President Trump threw out the idea of a bombing campaign against Iran. He was warned down by advisors that a major conflict would erupt with unpredictable consequences. Sort of a last-minute foreign policy option to thank incoming President Biden for a rigged election by gifting him a toxic and even deadly diplomatic crisis.

Being pro-Israel does not translate into being pro-Jewish, however. Despite professions of undying love for Israel, anti-Semitic beliefs seem to be growing among evangelicals. It’s never been far below the thin veneer of Christian refinement. “A lot of the Jews are great friends of mine,” Billy Graham commented to Richard Nixon during a 1972 White House meeting. “They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.” Good Jews live in Israel. But not here. American Jews are overwhelmingly devoted to the Democratic Party and espouse liberal ideals. According to Trump, Jews who vote Democratic show ‘great disloyalty’. He tells them, he loves “their” country – but apparently they do not love “ours”. And “some very fine people” were neo-Nazis at Charlottesville.

Overt anti-Semitism is growing among evangelicals – a movement which sometimes overlaps with the far-right. One major influence is Q-Anon, which with demonic baby-eaters and a global Satan-worshipping conspiracy run by Jewish billionaires is a revision of that odious book of libels, The  Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A Christian broadcaster claimed George Soros was paying $50 an hour to go protest and riot. (He heard it authoritatively from a friend who heard it from another friend.) Ginni Thomas, evangelical wife of a Supreme Court justice, spins the conspiracy theory that George Soros is the evil mastermind behind the Democratic Party.

“That’s the way the Jews work,” says nutball end-times evangelist Rick Wiles. “They are deceivers, they plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda.” Wiles received White House press credentials. Not once, but again even having called Trump’s impeachment a “Jew coup”.  The chief banker funding the satanic sedition against President Trump is George Soros, he maintains. Once relegated to the lunatic fringe, fascist crackpots are now the most influential evangelical voices. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example: U.S. Representative-elect and committed Christian. Also a Q-Anon believer who wrote that Zionist supremacists were flooding Europe with migrants to wipe out the white population – the so-called “Great Replacement Conspiracy”.

“‘Respectable’ conservative evangelicalism has always been a fig leaf,” writes David French. The darker of its impulses are rising to the top. Trump – along with his motley crew of religious courtesans – will leave the White House soon, but the odor will linger like a twenty-dollar hooker’s. Christian anti-Semitism is only getting started. To my Jewish friends, be wary and remember Elie Wiesel’s words:

I’ve got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He’s the only one who’s kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.[1]

[1] Wiesel, Elie, Night (New York: Hill and Wang) 2006, 81.