Sunday Edition

Back in the early 90s, my mother had a sticker that read "The Christian Right is Neither." Thoroughly confused, I asked her about it, and she said, "The Christian Right is neither Christian nor right." The older I get and the more I learn about the Christian Right, specifically the Zionists –i.e. those in the Christian Right who are obsessed with Rapture, the End of Days, and Israel—the more convinced I am that she was right: They're not Christians; they’re a f---ing crazy death cult that's going to start WW III.

I find the Christian Zionist (and by extension the political arm of the Christian Right) movement enormously troubling, especially as a religious person and baptized/confirmed Christian. It's as though someone stole my identity and is going around town kicking children in the back, punching old ladies in the gut, and crapping on faces of cancer patients.

Below is my initial attempt and figuring out what in heaven's name is going on. If I find out I am incorrect, I will update this, but for now this is the truth as I know it.

The people in your neighborhood
The USA is a religious country, to be sure, with over 80% of Americans never doubting the existence of (a) God. Though overwhelming Christian, Protestant specifically, we have our Catholics, Mormons, and non-Christians to boot. However, the Christian Right/Zionists and branches of the evangelical movement are worth particular attention, as the total number of evangelicals comprise about 1/3 of the American population. The majority of evangelicals are made up of African Americans, who tend to be the more liberal evangelicals, and white, southern conservatives. A 2003 report from Pew Research stated that nearly 50% of African Americans describe themselves as evangelicals and 28% of whites do.

Before I go any further, let me state unequivocally: being evangelical does not entail being a Christian Zionist, though being a Christian Zionist almost assuredly means being evangelical. The two terms should not be thought of as wholly interchangeable. Zionists and other evangelicals can differ drastically on their assumptions about Christianity and in their political/social agendas. The important thing to remember is that as the evangelical movement is growing so is the Christian Right and the Christian Zionist movements.

So why should we take the time to learn about these growing groups? Mainly because they have a great deal of political influence. They are overwhelmingly Republican, nearly 2-to-1 for the white evangelicals and have had the ear of D.C. and one of their own in the White House for eight years (i.e. George W. Bush). Furthermore, they are one of the fastest-growing religious voting blocks, increasing by 3% between the 2004 and 2008 elections while many other groups decreased. The Christian Right agenda has permeated all aspects of American life, leading some to compare its fundamentalist influence on the USA to that of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

While the Christian Right has influenced domestic policy (same-sex marriage rights, abortion rights, etc), it has distorted and warped foreign policy, in particular Middle Eastern policy, to suit its needs. With groups such as Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) joining forces and pressing policies that undermine peace efforts in the Middle East, we must attend to this segment, lest we walk blindly into WW III. And WW III is what Christian Zionists are hoping for. More precisely, they’re hoping for Armageddon. The Christian Zionist movement has its eyes set steadily on Israel usually at the expense of Palestinians. They are over three-times as likely to support Israeli aggression than moderate Americans, mostly because they see the state of Israel as necessary for the second coming of Christ.

However, they are not alone in their sentiments about Israel or their disdain for Palestine. Around 36% of Americans see the formation of Israel as a sign of the impending return of Jesus, and most Americans, regardless of political or religious affiliation, tend to lack support for Palestine or Palestinians, though one assumes this does not apply to Palestinian-Americans and the majority of Muslim-Americans. Charles E. Carlson recently wrote:

The Judeo-Christians remain the only political faction driven directly by religious beliefs that war and the support of the state of Israel is right, that distrust, even hatred, of Israel’s perceived enemy Islam, is a necessity and prophetic.

With this level of religious motivation to demonize one group and blindly support another plus the proliferation of weapons added to an extreme amount of political influence…indeed, Christian Zionists are worth our attention.

This they believe
Full disclosure: While I consider myself Christian, I debate the basic tenants of even mainstream Protestantism, so when I try to wrap my mind around the belief system of the Christian Zionists, I feel like I’m trapped in some psychic debate about characters from a demonic Dr. Suess story. I can barely recognize anything that I would define as Christian, save the use of certain names and references to scripture. It’s like they took my toothpaste, band-aids, and down comforter and made an A-bomb with them. I find it difficult to see how we could look at the same raw materials and come up with such radically different interpretations. That said, I will try to explain the differences between Zionist-bending evangelicals and your more mainstream evangelicals.

The first thing to keep in mind about Christianity (especially if you weren’t raised by a Christian theologian or aren’t one yourself) is that Christianity is based on this idea that human beings are fallen and that we broke our covenant with God. Jesus is seen as coming to address the rift between God and humanity and the status of the covenant. However, this is where things start to break down between Catholics/mainstream-Protestants and the Christian Right/Zionists.

Was Jesus the fulfillment of prophecy? Did Jesus’s life and death mark the beginning of a new covenant? Are we in an age of progression in which God’s revelation is continually unfolding or is God’s promise currently being suspended? If you agree with the former and with the idea that we are age of a new covenant, you’re a “conventionalist.” If you believe we are not and that the old covenant still applies (at least to the Jews), then you’re a “dispensationalist.” The dispensationalist view holds that there are two aspects: the church and Israel. The latter is still subject to the old covenant, which they broke, and the former is, basically evangelical Christians. Because the old covenant still holds and the world is still being tested by God (and failing), dispensationalists look toward Israel for clues of God's intentions for the world. Conventionalists, as I understand them, believe God has already made God's intentions clear and that we were given our marching orders thousands of years ago.

So how does this relate to Israel? For those dispensationalist waiting for God's final test, the story goes like this:

The end of days is upon us. Soon there will be Rapture, during which the faithful Christians will ascend directly to heaven, where they will get new immortal bodies while the rest of the world burns for seven years until the end of human history. Rapture will come when Jesus returns, but he won’t just come unannounced. No-no, there will be signs, and there are necessary conditions, and this is where Israel comes in. As good Christians in waiting, Christian Zionists believe they should work towards achieving these conditions, and here's the game plan:

1. Establish a (purely) Jewish state in the biblical, Holy Land.
2. Reconstruct the Jewish temple. [This must be built on the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites of Muslims and the reported site of the former Jewish temple.]
3. Then, the Antichrist must desecrate the temple.
4. Horrible disasters, as detailed in the Book of Revelation, will ravage the planet.
5. Jesus will return, and any Jews that convert can ascend to heaven. [I assume everyone else goes to hell.]
   

Now, there are many steps to achieving these necessary conditions. Some are well on their way. Others are not. The war of 1948 helped to make a great deal of progress on (1). The 1967 war that won (or stole) Jerusalem for Israel got them closer to (2). However, Muslims still claim the Dome of the Rock as their own, thus standing in the way of the reconstruction of the temple. [If the reconstruction means Armageddon, I personally want Muslims to have full and exclusive rights to the Dome of the Rock.] And if this all wasn’t bizarre enough, in order to sanctify the reconstructed temple, a priest has to be purified using the ashes of a red heifer that has never been yoked. For this reason, American Christian Zionists were collecting donations to send red heifers to Israel. After the temple is rebuilt, the Jewish state and the Muslims must fight it out, and from what I gather, the Jews need to be slaughtered or convert. To ensure (3) and the ensuing wars, we've been very helpful by undermining the peace process thereby keeping the flames of hate between Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Jews smoldering enough to lead to war.

The Christian Zionist movement has a vested interest in avoiding peace in the Middle East and in establishing a purely Jewish state in Israel at the expense of all other groups, Muslims, Christians, etc. This end-of-days interest gives an ominous tone to Thomas Ice’s conjecture that

[It] is safe to say that there has not been a group of Christians who have cared more for the Jewish people and their destiny than dispensationalists in the 2,000-year history of the church. Previous to the rise of dispensationalism, Christians did not seem to be able to acknowledge that God had a future plan of glory for national Israel, without at the same time making the church subordinate to Judaism.

Of course they're concerned about the destiny of the Jewish people. Their ascension to heaven rests on the state of Israel and its ultimate destruction. And God's future plan of glory...it's going to be gory. Considering the dark implications of Christian Zionist support for Israel, perhaps Christian apathy for Israel/Jews would be preferable to this type of "care."

That lingering feeling of doom
As a Christian, I assumed we were supposed to put loving our neighbor before inciting war, and I assumed that God was present here and now, and not waiting for the burning of some red cow before taking action on Earth. But alas, Christian Zionist have co-opted the dialog and have changed the Middle East (Israel/Palestine in particular) into the theater of some self-directed play between good and evil to bring about the end of days on their timetable. Sadly, Palestinians and Israelis are suffering as is what I consider to be the soul of Christianity.

So how do we end this insanity? How can someone fight a world view that is so damaging and so devoid of logic, that has so much sway over the political reality of the US? How do we uproot a preposterous mandate that has permeated both major parties and the very core of US foreign policy? Good question. Stephen Zunes is probably at least partially right when he states:

It is unlikely that [American politicians] will change, however, until liberal-to-mainline churches mobilize their resources toward demanding justice as strongly as right-wing fundamentalists have mobilized their resources in support of repression.

I hate to think that peace in the Middle East rests solely in the hands of non-fundamentalist American Christians. We're not that good at organizing or fighting in my opinion, due to our penchant for person-and-private experiences of faith. But one thing is for sure, we've been out of the fray for too long. We've been too apathetic, lazy, or afraid of being called anti-semitic for too long. Perhaps it's time that we are the keepers of our all our sisters and brothers and stand up to our "Christian" siblings directly and remind them that just because they call themselves the "Christian Right" it doesn't mean that they're either.