By Michael Medved, COMMENTARY — May 2012
Many Jewish voters this November will find themselves at a crossroads: Will they accept their deep disappointment with Barack Obama and vote for his reelection, or will they overcome their own discomfort with Christian evangelicals and vote for the Republican candidate? The irrepressible argument about the appropriate relationship between the Jewish community and Christian conservatives has returned with a vengeance, forcing a fresh response to a fundamental question: Should Jews view our born-again fellow citizens as natural allies or inevitable adversaries?
Unfortunately, the familiar grounds of this debate rely for the most part on inaccurate assumptions and proceed inexorably to illogical conclusions.
Advocates of cooperation and coalition-building—call them Collaborationists—cite Christian evangelicals as an indispensable source of support for Israel, without whom U.S. policy in the Middle East could easily tilt toward the Palestinians and Arab nations more generally. According to the Collaborationist argument, Jews and evangelicals should ignore profound differences in their core values and put aside sharp disagreements on American domestic issues in order to make common cause against the existential threat of Islamofascism.
Meanwhile, skeptics who seek to maintain the traditional Jewish wariness toward fervent Christian believers—let’s designate them Rejectionists—insist that the ardent evangelical embrace of the Zionist project only encourages the most intransigent and fanatical elements in Israel, thereby undermining chances for a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians. The doubters, moreover, question the theological sources of Christian Zionism, insisting that sunny proclamations of brotherhood actually mask dark intentions of mass conversion, married to apocalyptic visions that inevitably include the unappetizing prospect of large nuclear explosions in the vicinity of Jerusalem. As if that weren’t enough, Christian conservatives (or, in the preferred locution of their leftist critics, “the American Taliban”) stand accused by the Rejectionists of seeking to impose the sort of ruthless theocratic rule that would make life intolerable for all religious minorities.
The clashing narratives of both friends and foes of the tentative Jewish-evangelical alliance require considerable correction, or at least corrective context.
Collaborationists make their first mistake in assuming that conservative Christians’ support for Israel separates them significantly from their non-evangelical neighbors. David Frum examined public opinion surveys in 2000 and 2004 from the Annenberg Foundation, American National Election studies, and the National Jewish Democratic Council, and he found a “surprisingly small gap in the attitudes [toward Israel] of evangelical Christians as compared [with] other non-Jews.” His conclusion: “Yes, Evangelicals are a little more positive. But only a little.”
Given the overwhelming support for Israel by the public at large, that’s hardly surprising; in fact, Gallup’s most recent survey on the subject (February 2011) showed sympathy for the Jewish state at a “near record-high….All major U.S. population subgroups show greater sympathy for the Israelis than for the Palestinians.” The biggest differences in attitudes toward Israel involved political rather than religious orientation: 80 percent of Republicans backed Israel over the Palestinians, compared with 57 percent of both Democrats and Independents.
Wide-ranging American identification with Israel’s struggle against Islamist terrorism (notably more intense, according to the polls, since the terrorist attacks of September 11) works against Collaborationist claims that evangelical support is so indispensable that American Jews must subordinate their disagreements on core principles in order to maintain an alliance of necessity.
The much larger problem with this line of thought is that the supposedly fundamental splits on basic core values between Jews and Christians do not actually exist. In which areas, exactly, can committed Jews identify irreconcilable differences with serious Christians when it comes to most significant questions of morals, ethics, and righteous behavior? Does anyone suppose that our Baptist neighbors cherish the centrality of the family less passionately than we do, or display a weaker commitment to acts of compassion for the poor, or express a more feeble determination to repair a broken world in the tradition of tikkun olam? Anyone who honestly believes that born-again believers neglect their obligation to “love your neighbor as yourself” hasn’t visited their churches and schools and service organizations to witness the prodigious acts of loving kindness that sometimes put our communal efforts to shame. Aside from such impressionistic evidence, there’s a wealth of data in Arthur C. Brooks’s indispensable 2006 book, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, which shows that evangelicals honor the great Jewish tradition of tzedakah at least as well as we do.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Christian conservatives share the common attitudes of the Upper West Side on explosive social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, or gun control, but it would be difficult to claim that those purportedly enlightened approaches are somehow inherently and authentically Jewish. Talmudic law may take a slightly less restrictive view of abortion (particularly when preserving the life of the mother) than do some of the more unbending Christian interpretations, but long-standing Jewish religious tradition still lines up with National Right to Life far more closely than it does with Planned Parenthood.
When it comes to same-sex marriage, leaders of Reform Judaism (and, increasingly, Conservative Judaism as well) may insist that conscience impels their support, but this ethical position derives from a contemporary liberal worldview more than any scriptural outlook that counts as Biblical or Rabbinic. Concerning gun rights, the majority of Jews (who reliably align with the Democratic Party) may believe there’s something disturbingly goyishe about the Second Amendment and the NRA, but our normally voluble sages were eerily silent over the centuries on defining an authentic Jewish position on private ownership of firearms.
Yet those sages most certainly spoke out on the dignity of commerce and the value of wealth creation. And that is worth remembering at a time when the free-market convictions of conservative Christians are likewise held to be in opposition to basic Jewish values. In point of fact, business ethics are one of the principal concerns of Jewish law from the Torah onward, shaping a culture known for millennia for its enterprise and industry in the marketplace.
This heritage may come as news to Jewish activists, graduate students, and museum curators, for whom the romance of ancient Jewish tradition almost exclusively involves bearded immigrant agitators, labor organizers, and embattled leftist intellectuals. But there is no denying that the history of Jewish radicalism in Europe and the United States played out over the course of only 250 years—a brief (if colorful) interlude in a historical panorama of honorable, unstoppable money-making that goes back at least 10 times as far.
In terms of the distinctly American experience, the role of socialist ideals and institutions has been vastly exaggerated in the popular imagination, obscuring the dominant impact of business on the rise of the Jewish population into the middle class (and beyond) within two generations of Ellis Island. Even in the heyday of leftist, Yiddish-speaking New York, Jews aspired to bourgeois respectability far more than they longed to establish an American Workers’ Paradise. In 1904, Eugene Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate and drew an impressive 3 percent of the national popular vote, but he failed badly in his efforts to carry Jewish New York. In the famous Eighth Assembly District of the Lower East Side, Democrat Alton B. Parker crushed Socialist Debs by nearly 3 to 1, but the “all-American” Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, beat them both and easily swept the neighborhood. After World War II, the ability of millions of Jewish Americans to move to the suburbs (and, ultimately, to provide Ivy League educations for their kids) owed little to Marxist pamphleteers, union bosses, or New Deal bureaucrats and everything to the dynamism of small business.
The long-standing, undeniable connection between Jewish-American progress and the free-market system means that Jews in no way betray their own past by accepting (or, better yet, embracing) the pro-business attitudes of conservative Christians. Like the Puritans in both England and Massachusetts that they claim as inspiration, today’s evangelicals feel unembarrassed by making money and tend to see the process of getting rich as a sign of God’s blessing rather than proof of Satanic corruption. Many privileged, prosperous American Jews may never share the limited-government, free-market inclinations of evangelicals, but it’s absurd to view such attitudes as alien to the Jewish experience.
Contrary to the Collaborationist paradigm, working together for Israel won’t force Jews and Christian conservatives to set aside the values that keep them apart; it’s far more likely that making common cause for Israel will lead them to recognize the shared values that should bring them together.
For Rejectionists, any talk of such cooperation on behalf of Israel or other causes amounts to a betrayal of the very essence of Jewish identity—providing aid and comfort to a potentially lethal enemy of the pluralism that allows unpopular religious minorities to thrive in the United States. For a half century, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League has been warning of evangelical efforts to “Christianize America”—as if the nation hadn’t already been thoroughly “Christianized” since its founding (by patriots almost entirely Christian)—and suggesting that emphasis on that proud religious heritage amounts to “defamation” of someone else. Alan Dershowitz, one of Israel’s most effective and impassioned defenders in public debate, wrote a 2007 book called Blasphemy: How the Religious Right Is Hijacking Our Declaration of Independence. Note the possessive adjective “our” in the subtitle—as though the “religious right” represents some outside force attempting to swipe a treasure that belongs to us, and to which they hold no legitimate claim.
While accusing born-again Christians of stealing items of our national heritage, Rejectionists also charge them with supporting Israel for the most dangerous imaginable reason: a sense of religious imperative. This indictment rests upon the highly questionable assumption that allies who join your cause out of political calculation count as more reliable and honorable than those who defend your interests because they believe God commanded them to do so.
Nevertheless, skeptics explain their well-developed fear of Christian Zionism by citing the apocalyptic visions occasionally promoted by some of its leading advocates—prominent among them Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel, the most important Christian Zionist group. It’s only natural to feel uncomfortable with impassioned exhortations to speed the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its Temple in order to hasten the imminent vaporization of Zion (and the rest of the world) as part of an especially gruesome series of end-times expectations.
But the Armageddon element has been vastly overplayed as an explanatory factor in the deep, broad evangelical support for Israel. In fact, American Christians endorsed Jewish return to the Holy Land long before the development of Theodor Herzl’s modern Zionist movement—or the birth of nuclear weapons. In his fascinating 2007 book Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, Michael B. Oren (now Israel’s ambassador to the United States) sketches vivid portraits of Christian dreamers and doers who committed themselves to restoring the Jews to their ancestral home more than a century before the reborn Israel joined the family of nations. In 1844, Warder Cresson became America’s official consul in Jerusalem; he held the stalwart conviction that God had created the United States specifically to facilitate the restoration of a Jewish homeland and that the American eagle would “overshadow the land with its wings” in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.
In the same year, an influential Biblical scholar and professor at New York University authored The Valley of Vision; or, the Dry Bones of Israel Revived. In that book, George Bush (a very distant relation to the two future presidents of that name) called for “elevating” the Jewish people “to a rank of honorable repute among the nations of the earth” through “the literal return of the Jews to the land of their fathers.” Bush, meanwhile, took a decidedly dim view of the many celebrated preachers and teachers among his Christian contemporaries who anticipated Christ’s “second coming” as imminent or predictable—he denounced their calculations as “one of the most baseless of all the extravaganzas of prophetic hallucination.”
For critics of evangelical involvement with Israel, the obsession with Biblical prophecy in any form counts as not only distasteful but dangerous, serving to encourage the most intransigent segments of the settler movement and other right-wing forces in the Israeli polity. Zev Chafets, who spent 33 years in politics and journalism in Jerusalem (including service as chief press spokesman for Prime Minister Menachem Begin) sets the record straight in his 2007 book A Match Made in Heaven. “The evangelical-Israeli alliance is not a pact between Christian and Israeli religious nuts,” he writes. “It is a well-established relationship between the leaders of evangelical American Christianity and mainstream Israel. Every prime minister since Begin has relied on the support of the Christian right.” Chafets goes on to point out that Ehud Barak, the last prime minister from the Labor Party, authorizes his name to appear as part of the faculty at Pat Robertson’s Regent University, in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
One of the reasons for this close working relationship between evangelical activists and Israeli leaders of every stripe involves the key difference between Christian Zionists and their American Jewish counterparts: Christian conservatives feel no compulsion to tell Israelis how to run their country. Unlike leaders of major Jewish organizations, the born-again brigades provide the elected leaders of Israel with virtually unconditional support, even when they may harbor deep doubts about certain policies. In 2005, Ehud Olmert (then deputy prime minister) arranged an off-the-record meeting with skeptical leaders of the conservative Christian community in order to make the case for the then pending “disengagement” from Gaza. The participants not only provided a respectful reception for Olmert’s message but even suggested a kosher caterer for the extended meeting—a gesture that the visiting Israeli dismissed as unnecessary.
It’s not only the leadership class in Jerusalem that embraces the alliance with evangelicals but also ordinary citizens of all religious and political perspectives. “The dislike and contempt for evangelical Christians that is so integral to American Jewish cultural and political thinking is almost wholly absent in Israel,” writes Chafets. “The average Israeli—even the average anticlerical secular Israeli like me—appreciates evangelical support.”
American Rejectionists naturally respond that it’s easy for people in Tel Aviv to pocket tourist dollars and relish warm sentiments from Christian conservatives because they face scant personal jeopardy from evangelical schemes to impose rigid theocratic rule on the United States. To highlight the purported dangers facing the Jewish community and other non-Christians in America, alarmists (such as journalist Michelle Goldberg in her 2006 book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism) focus breathlessly on colorful, crackpot, fringe operations to suggest that their radical views characterize all or most of the nation’s 50 million evangelicals.
Fortunately, the hysteria over looming theocracy has receded significantly since George W. Bush went home to Texas. We hear far less today of bold, secularist Paul Reveres riding through the countryside to warn the populace, “The Christians are coming! The Christians are coming!” The obvious problem with the demonization of evangelicals is that their agenda involves no radical transformation of the long-standing status quo or any decisive break with American tradition. In high-profile battles over public expressions of religiosity, it’s almost always the antireligious who seek to eliminate some faith-friendly legacy from prior generations—removing Ten Commandments memorials from police stations, blocking student-led prayers before football games, or making sure that Christmas decorations give no hint as to the New Testament origins of the winter festival.
For those who fear the dreaded Christian right, the most legitimate nightmares involve a chilling return to the 1950s, with tough legal restrictions on abortion, nonsectarian prayers in public schools, universal acceptance of the death penalty, no government sponsorship for same-sex marriage, cultural disapproval of out-of-wedlock birth, and less graphic sex, violence, and language in popular entertainment. Twenty-first century sophisticates may shudder at the recollection of such horrors, but they hardly characterize an alien, dystopian dictatorship. Nothing in the mainstream evangelical agenda seeks to refashion America in a way that would make it unrecognizable to someone with memories (or knowledge) of pre-1960s society. If we accept the claim that Christian conservatives aim to impose an un-American theocracy, then that means accepting the idea that Dwight Eisenhower presided over an un-American theocracy.
The decades since Ike’s retirement certainly brought dramatic advancement for the cause of secularism, but it’s far less clear that all the changes served to advance the cause of Judaism. The intermarriage rate, for instance, generally seen as a crucial indicator of communal coherence and vitality, skyrocketed from 10 percent a half century ago to a current estimate of half of all Jews who marry. In part, this reflects a welcome reduction in anti-Semitic attitudes; as the late Irving Kristol famously quipped: “The biggest problem with Christians used to be that they wanted to kill our children. Now it’s that they want to marry them.” But in addition to the decline of bigotry, the surge in intermarriage also stems from an increase in secularism in both the Jewish and Christian communities. Two unaffiliated, agnostic young people from contrasting religious backgrounds will be far more likely to commit their lives to each another than would, say, a Sabbath-observing, kosher-keeping modern Orthodox Jew and a church-going, Bible-studying, born-again Christian.
Religiously committed people on both sides are more apt to require conversion as a precondition of making a life together, which raises another visceral fear on the part of those who decry Judeo-evangelical cooperation: Christian conservatives will use any partnerships with Jewish organizations or individuals as a means to satisfy their “Great Commission” to win increased acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Savior. For suspicious Jewish Americans, the apparent attraction that evangelicals feel toward Jews is actually the attraction of predator to prey. “Sure, they look at us fondly,” says one of my good friends, who lives in Manhattan and works on network TV. “The same way Michael Moore looks fondly at a cheeseburger.”
Oh? A fascinating 2009 paper by Tom W. Smith of the American Jewish Committee highlighted “Religious Switching Among American Jews” based on 26 surveys by the National Opinion Research Center between 1972 and 2006. The numbers showed that those identified as Jewish at birth were slightly more likely to remain Jewish than born Catholics were to remain Catholic (76.3 percent to 72.6 percent), and slightly less likely than born Protestants (80.8 percent) to keep their religious affiliation. But when it comes to the destination of the religious switchers leaving their faith community, Jews stood out, with the overwhelming majority of departures (59.6 percent) to the religious affiliation known as “none,” rather than to any other organized religion. Less than half of 1 percent of the Jews in the survey altered their religious identity to join a Protestant denomination commonly counted as “evangelical” (such as Southern Baptist).
What’s more, the “gains” to the Jewish population through conversion into the faith (9.1 percent) actually made up a bigger portion of the current community than the percentage of converts among either Protestants or Catholics. And although departing Jews shifted mostly to the unaffiliated/atheist/agnostic categories, the great bulk of those converting to Judaism came from one of the recognized Christian denominations (71.5 percent). In other words, Jews gain far more from Christians becoming Jews than we lose from Jews becoming Christians—with an especially insignificant loss to Christian evangelicals. The interaction with the unaffiliated or the disengaged—the 15 percent of contemporary Americans who affirm no religious commitment at all—shows an opposite impact on Jewish numbers, with losses to Jews four times greater than gains.
As these figures strongly suggest, rampaging secularism represents a far greater threat to Jewish identity than does intensifying Christianity. As Dov Fischer, a California rabbi, trenchantly observed some three decades ago, we have less to fear from “Jews for Jesus” than we do from “Jews for Nothing.”1 This means that Jewish leadership made a disastrously bad bet some 50 years ago when it aligned the community with ardent secularists and militant separationists in pushing for a less distinctively Christian America, as if moving the nation in that direction would facilitate greater Jewish pride and affirmation. The fatuous illogic of this approach becomes apparent at the end of every year with the public agonizing over the “December Dilemma.”
Most Jewish leaders seek two clearly contradictory goals—agitating for the treatment of Christmas as a purely secular celebration at the same time that they try to discourage their fellow Jews from abandoning their distinctive identity and embracing Christmas traditions. It’s far easier to install a Christmas tree (or “Hanukkah Bush”) in a Jewish home if that seasonal symbol has been denuded of all religious meaning. As a celebration of the Resurrection, Easter has been far harder to secularize than Christmas, so, not surprisingly, relatively few Jews feel impelled to give up their Passover seders in order to attend sunrise services or Easter egg hunts. In fact, no one worries over an “April dilemma,” because all serious Christians observe the inescapably religious commemorations of Holy Week and Easter, and even nonserious Jews find their way to festive meals with matzo, wine, and bitter herbs.
Contrary to popular belief, religious vitality isn’t a zero-sum game: A more vibrant and engaged Christian community in no way undermines Jewish commitment. By raising significant religious questions within the society at large, conservative Christians urge Americans of all ancestries and outlooks to conduct their own explorations. If your Jewish family lives in a community where the great majority of your neighbors attend church on Sunday, you are probably more—not less—likely to consider venturing into synagogue on Saturday. In his 2006 book A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed, Mark Pinsky, religion reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, described how the Christian community he covered as a reporter led him to stronger identification with his own religious heritage. Even though he describes himself as a “Daily Show Democrat, voting for the furthest left candidate on the ballot,” he found that his interaction with deeply religious Christians (particularly the late Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ) led him to deeper involvement in his local Reform temple and to his wife’s conversion to Judaism after 24 years of marriage. “It’s made me a more committed Jew,” he told the New Jersey Jewish News.
If conservative Christians raise serious issues of faith and morality in the public square, and normalize activities such as communal worship and Bible study, they will strengthen rather than suppress the healthy impulse of unaffiliated Jews to reconnect with their own traditions. Vivid memories of church-based Jew hatred in Europe led too many American Jews to the mistaken assumption that we would benefit from a society that dismissed religious enthusiasm and in which faith in general played a less potent role. For Rejectionists, the continued commitment to this demonstrably dysfunctional assumption has produced the instinctive allergy to any alignment with evangelicals.
Nearly all Jews feel an urgent impulse to connect in some way with the values of our revered forebears, and for the assimilated and irreligious this instinct produces a powerful urge to reassert the two cherished family traditions that still remain: distrusting Christianity and voting Democratic. Both ancestral imperatives serve to make any cooperation with fervently religious Christians feel like the worst sort of apostasy. On the other hand, Jews who practice Judaism in some form can find better ways to honor their memories of Bubbe and Zayde. In that sense, working with evangelicals facilitates greater Jewish religiosity, and greater religiosity facilitates comfortable collaboration with evangelicals.
Collaborationists who have put their ideas into practice universally suggest that associating with Christian conservatives has made them more Jewish, not less. In that context, it’s no longer necessary to promote the idea that Jewish Americans must overcome their horror at Christian influence for the sake of Israel’s security. The stronger argument insists that evangelical Christians deserve our friendship and cooperation because they aren’t just good for Israel; they’re good for America.
And even more unexpectedly, they’re good for American Jews.
Footnotes
1 Recent publicity for so-called Messianic Jewish congregations only intensifies these concerns, with members attempting to combine traditional practices (particularly involving the profligate deployment of prayer shawls and shofars) with worship of “Yeshua HaMashiach” (Jesus the Messiah). The claims for growth in this movement are laughably inflated: One promoter of “Messianic Music” named Joel Chernoff has declared that “Jewish population studies in the U.S. estimates [sic] between one to two million Messianic Jews in the U.S. alone.” It’s tough to cite more accurate figures with any assurance, but no one with real-life involvement in today’s Jewish community actually believes 1 out of every 3 American Jews identifies himself as a follower of Jesus. Boasts of rapid growth, moreover, obscure the dirty little secret of most Messianic congregations: Many if not most of their members were born Christian with no Jewish ancestry but felt drawn to the sect due to the appeal of ancient rituals Jesus himself might have recognized.
@ BlandOatmeal:
By the way, Yam, let me anticipate one of your arguments, to save time. I said,
after saying the Judaism is a “faith-based” religion. There is no contradiction here. The point I was making, what that people who believe the BIBLE almost all support Israel; that had nothing to do with whether they call themselves Christians, Jews or Schmoos. “Judaism”, meanwhile, is definitely a faith-based religion, as I noted above. The fact that the Hareidi kid in “The Chosen” felt no moral qualms about wanting to kill his “Apikoros” Jewish neighbor certainly revealed a lack of faith in Biblical principles; but it showed an intense faith in the instruction of his rabbi and of Jewish tradition. “Faith” is not something you “think might be true”. It is what you TAKE FOR GRANTED as REALITY.
Shalom shalom. Have fun 🙂
@ yamit82:
Baloney. Judaism is based on BELIEF in a national revelation at Sinai; and what YOU call Judaism, which is actually MAKE-believe Judaism, is PRETENDING to believe in a national revelation at Sinai. How can Jews who don’t even believe in the existence of God, believe that this non-existent God revealed Himself to the Jewish nation?
I said that people who BELIEVE the Bible are almost all pro-Israel, and you countered that the “Religious” are often anti-Israel. Who the hell said the religious believe the Bible? Read “The Chosen”, by Chaim Potok, if you haven’t already. Hareidi Judaism is cultural schtick — it has nothing to do with faith in the BIBLE.
@ BlandOatmeal:
There are many non G-d believing Jews who support and love Israel even those who live in Israel. There are many atheist Jews who are still connected to Jewish traditions Jewish culture,traditions, people and are very Israel centered. There are very religious Jews who do not recognize or support the State of Israel and there are may many bible and (Christians god) believing Christians who are anti Israel and antisemitic. Your statement does not hold water in that respect. There is some 2.3 billion self described Christians in the world and by all accounts most are anti Israel and even anti Jewish as are Muslims who like Christians believe in (Muslim god) and some form of the Jewish bible.
Judaism is not a faith based religion. Judaism is based on A national Revelation at Sinai.
Oat like most gentiles and especially Christians you are projecting your beliefs and frames of reference on us. It’s not up to you to define us it’s the Jews who define themselves. Judaism is the only religion in the annals of history that makes the best of all claims—that everyone heard G-d speak. No other religion claims the experience of national revelation. Why?
The author of the Torah predicts that there will never be another claim of national revelation throughout history!
Out of 15,000 known religions in recorded history, why is Judaism the only one that claims national revelation, the best of all claims? Why do all other religions base themselves on the inherently weak assertion of personal revelation? They would have to be faith based unlike Judaism.
The Torah’s claim is that the entire people (3 million)heard G-d speak at Mount Sinai, experiencing national revelation. G-d did not just appear to Moses in a private rendezvous; He appeared to everyone, some 3 million people. This claim is mentioned many times in the Torah.
The Fastest Growing Religion In America Is Islam
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/the-fastest-growing-religion-in-america-is-islam
Do you know what the fastest growing religion in America is? It isn’t Christianity. According to the latest U.S. Religion Census that was just released on May 1, 2012, the fastest growing religion in America is Islam. The data for the census was compiled by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, and the results were released by the Association of Religion Data Archives. From the year 2000 to the year 2010, the census found that the number of Muslims living inside the United States increased by about 1 million to 2.6 million – a stunning increase of 66.7 percent. That is an astounding rate of growth. Meanwhile, most Christian denominations had rates of growth that were far below the overall rate of population growth in the United States, and some Christian denominations actually lost members. Sadly, when Barack Obama once said that “we are no longer a Christian nation” he wasn’t too far off the mark. Christianity is rapidly losing influence and other religions such as Islam are rapidly gaining members and building new places of worship. As other major religions such as Islam continue to grow in the United States, it is inevitable that this will reshape America in many different ways in the years ahead.
BlandOatmeal Said:
How Will The Shocking Decline Of Christianity In America Affect The Future Of This Nation?
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/how-will-the-shocking-decline-of-christianity-in-america-affect-the-future-of-this-nation
@ yamit82:
Yamit,
I think you would LIKE the Jews to become a nation; but they are not. The Jews live in many nations, and form a significant majority or minority (depending on how you define “Jews”) only in Israel. Christians for a substantial majority or minority in many more nations. Israel is officially a “Jewish and Democratic” nation; but that’s something of a fiction. It’s obvious what the STANDARD of Jewishness is in Israel: It’s the ultra-Orthodox, who constitute the vast majority of the Orthodox; yet in PRACTICE, the vast majority of people who used to carry “Jewish” identity cards are not Jewish; they live the same lifestyle as secular people all over the world.
Notice that I’ve avoided the word “faith”, since you think (I should say, you “believe”, according to your “faith system”) that this is a Christian invention. It is no such thing. “Believing” Christians believe that the Bible is the word of God. Since you’re not part of a “faith” community, maybe you don’t believe this; though from all you’ve said on Israpundit, I believe (There I go again!) your Judaism is as faith-based as that of any “born-again” believer.
Judaism IS a religion, and it IS faith-based. Jews are not Jews because their mothers are Jewish — not in any practical sense, that is. You think there’s value in calling some people “Jews”, when they don’t even believe in a god (other than themselves), much less the God of the Bible. That might pad your population figures of the “Jewish nation”, but it has no reality. The reality is that so-called Jews who do not BELIEVE the Bible are, just about to the man/woman, ENEMIES of Israel; and Christians, Mormons or whoever who BELIEVE the Bible are almost all friends of Israel.
This is a NATION with substance; the other “nations” of the world are fleeting constructs, power bases for warlords. The USA is the most powerful “nation” on earth. Where was it 500 years ago? Where was the “Nation” of “Israel” 500 years ago? 500 years ago, the Mamelukes and Mughals were great “nations”. Where are they now? But I assure you, Christendom and believing Jews are as strong and united today as they have ever been; because they are not led by earthly monarchs; they are ruled by God. Prime Ministers come and go. Nations come and go. Rabbies, rebbes, popes and bishops come and go, along with anti-popes, emperors and pretenders.
You may BELIEVE what you want; but the PEOPLE of God are a reality that will never go away; and they know who they are.
@ WVDeerhunter:
Interesting, How and where did he reveal that?
I never categorized you, we just met. I hope you are not really a deer hunter (poor Bambi). 🙂
@ yamit
As G-d has revealed, we are singular! I am not familiar Medved’s background or his motives, which now seem rather shady on the surface. Nor did I pick thru his article with a fine toothed comb, but I did find his article refreshing if only in the fact that all evangelicals/conservative Christians/Christians/Christian Right/Protestant/main stream churches are not lumped together into one grossly unfair characterization.
Christian’s opinions on this subject are as widely varied as the stars, but as for myself, I hate being categorized (especially into your group of so called Christians who have an “insidious agenda towards Jews” 😉 ). I have no doubt that such an agenda exists in some circles, but I want no part of them and condemn their actions.
@ WVDeerhunter:
Nice to meet you: singular or plural (based on the photo)? It’s really not off topic because the article is offensive to some of us and the author is of questionable repute and that was what I sought to inject with my first comment where I tied him to lapin who I consider a Jewish enemy and not what he projects to the uninformed; so I tried to inform and Arison picked up on it and I responded with agreement and some correction.
You will find here that many times off topic discussions are far more interesting than the original topic.
I’m looking forward to your future comments.
@ Arison:
Arison, I think Lapin was sucking up to the Christians after all he has a financial interest in doing so. He knows where his bread is buttered. On the other hand you could be correct. I can’t know but Jews should be warned off that creep and anyone associated with him. Re: the IFCJ, I tend to credit Rabbi Eckstein with honest motivations and misplaced trust and a lot of naivety.
@yamit – No harm intended, please. I just wonder at someone who has such knowledge on a wide range of topics…you are obviously well read. I think you proved my point though (“many” and not “one” nation.) Thanks for the exegesis. Christians of course are not part of that covenant, but that discussion is off topic and for someone more learned than myself, e.g. author of Hebrews.
@ WVDeerhunter:
You are correct it means many nations Hamon Goyim goy is singular.
Arison was correct and Lapin is incorrect when he called Christianity a nation. Christianity is a faith based religion found among many nations races and cultures but it is not a nation. I cannot find any place in the Torah where G-d told Avraham Avinu that He would make him the father of a great religion. The promise was always positioned as nationhood. Four-hundred thirty years after that promise was made to the great patriarch, his descendants stood at Mt Sinai and HaShem told the people they would be a nation of priests.
Judaism is not a religion
Are Jews a Religion or Nation?
@ Arison:
Eight sons: Genesis 16:1-15 talks of Hagar, Sarai’s Egyptian servant, having Ishmael – the firstborn son of Abram; then it mentions Isaac – the son of Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 17:5, 17:19-21, Gen. ch.21). In Genesis 25:1 we hear of Keturah (Abraham married her after the death of Sarah) having 6 sons for Abraham. These were Zimram, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah.
The Bible further in Genesis 25:6 states that Abraham had children by his concubines whom he gave gifts but does not indicate how many nor does it name them. Keturah was not a concubine; she was his wife. When G-d promised that Abraham would be the father of many nations we assume that Isaac (Jewish) and Ishmael (Arab) were the only nations produced directly from Abraham but that is not true.
Jews and the Arabs are the only two covenant people.
@ WVDeerhunter:
My comment to Arison was blocked, It should answer both you and Arison.
Explain pls your objections with specifics.
I do sleep. Do you?
.
We know that Abraham ad at least 8 sons. How many he had with concubines the Torah is silent on them except to say he gave them gifts.
Genesis 16:1-15 talks of Hagar, Sarai’s Egyptian servant, having Ishmael – the firstborn son of Abram; then it mentions Isaac – the son of Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 17:5, 17:19-21, Gen. ch.21). In Genesis 25:1 we hear of Keturah (Abraham married her after the death of Sarah) having 6 sons for Abraham. These were Zimram, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah.
The Bible further in Genesis 25:6 states that Abraham had children by his concubines whom he gave gifts but does not indicate how many nor does it name them. Keturah was not a concubine; she was his wife. Eight known children. When G_d promised that Abraham would be the father of many nations we assume that Isaac (Jewish) and Ishmael (Arab) were the only nations produced directly from Abraham but that is not true.
I cannot find any place in the Torah where G-d told Avraham Avinu that He would make him the father of a great religion. The promise was always positioned as nationhood. Four-hundred thirty years after that promise was made to the great patriarch, his descendants stood at Mt Sinai and HaShem told the people they would be a nation of priests. Jews are a people or nation and Christianity is a religion Judaism is much more than a religion it is a religio nation
Arison I think Lapin was sucking up to the Christians after all he has a financial interest in doing so. He knows whee his bread is buttered. On the other hand you could be correct. I can’t know but Jews should be warned off that creep and anyone associated with him. Re: the IFCJ:: I tend to credit Rabbi Eckstein with honest motivations and misplaced trust and a lot of naivety.
I believe Ted has a pretty firm grasp of the average Christian’s mentality. However, some of the tripe in this forum really strikes me as offensive. It truly is a shame that all Christians must be forced into a category.
@ arison – In the Christian Bible, Genesis 17: hamon goy = many nations. Am I incorrect here? Please educate me (sincerely).
@catarin and arison – I am certainly glad that you won’t be sitting in the judgement seat on reckoning day!
@yamit – Do you ever sleep? 🙂
@ C.R.:
I am so glad someone spoke up with the correction! Mitt Romney could be as dangerous (but I don’t think so) as the incumbant. Mormon doctrine reads like a science fiction comic book and the eschatology they hope to bring about with Romney is still a globalist takeover…everything is religious now…No, Romney is not a Christian and all Christians are not anti-Israel and not all Christians who support Israel are Zionist either…many are genuinely praying for the good of the people and the Prime Minister and for G-D to keep them safe, even in the worst case senario…the L-RD is able!
Yamit, it’s my belief Lapin is a Messianic.
http://keliata.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/did-rabbi-daniel-lapin-really-say-that.html
Rabbi Daniel Lapin is now apparently producing television programs for the xtian television network TCT. Further, he was on TCT Tuesday promoting his book Tower of Power about the Tower of Babel.
On the TCT program Rejoice, he described Avraham thusly to the xtian host as “The father of many great nations, Christianity and Judaism.”
Huh? What? Come again?
Religious fusion and confusion. I thought Avraham was the father of great nation singular not plural? Avraham as the father of Christianity? Is THAT what he said???
Ellen from Jewish Israel watched the segment on the TCT website via streaming video on demand. The screen was split–Rabbi Lapin and his wife on one side of the screen and on the other side of the screen an ad for a xtian book about Jesus called King James Games. Odd to say the very least.
On top of that, Lapin is permitting the xtian network to offer his book to viewers for a donation of $50. A voice over for the book indicates that the proceeds would go to TCT to help spread the gospel of Jesus Christ around the world. Rabbi Lapin is donating his book to spread the gospel. Seeing as his book sells for about $24, I imagine half of the proceeds go to him, half to TCT. Or possibly entirely to TCT? That’s the impression I got from the pastor hosting the show.
Add to the mix the new International Fellowship of Christian and jews (IFCJ) commercials. The paid commercials air ONLY on xtian television so every single dollar donated to the organization goes to fund missionary xtian television.
yamit82 Said:
Right on the mark Yamit. The Christian right who support Israel are anti semitic. The Koch brothers are actively supporting the rise of nazism in the US, and exploiting the discontent amongst the people. They are part of the 1% but point a finger at the Jooos. Just like the Iraq war, which was bankrolled and led by the oil tsars, but when it went wrong, they blamed the neocons in the Republican party, and picked on the Jewish ones, Wolfowtiz, Perle, as if the war could have gone ahead without Dick Cheney leading the pack. Scapegoats.
Nazi America – The Rise of the Koch BrothersMARCH 31, 2012
http://open.salon.com/blog/newfort/2012/03/31/nazi_america_-_the_rise_of_the_koch_brothers
@ Am I the only sane one here?:
Medved is a partner and self described disciple of Lapin. Their common message is to move Jews closer to Christians. In doing so they have crossed all halachic red lines. They describe themselves as orthodox Jews, not me. I know Lapin much more than Medved and I claim he is a charlatan and con artist totally unethical as a man and even more so as an “orthodox Jewish rabbi”.
There is not a single sentence in what medved wrote above that I or most concerned or observant Jews will agree with. Medved is promoting backhanded assimilation and stamping as Kosher those very things that aren’t. He ignores all of the negative data about the Christian right in America, their insidious agenda towards Jews and combines promotion of that element with the Political message of Capitalism and the Republican Party. Now if as I suspect certain extreme right wing billionaires are supporting even dictating the message, than Jews should be aware.
Every commenter here on Israpundit except a small few have decried the influence of Soros on the Democrats and Obama yet when the equivalent of Soros on the right is made known it is ignored by the same critics of Soros. Every time information and data is supplied in this forum about the inroads of Christian missionaries here in Israel and abroad and the danger to the Jewish people it is belittled and or ignored because of the pro Israel message they project.
Losing Judaism in the Pursuit of Commonality
Warning to the Jews from an EX Missionary;
Read the essays in the above two links. Personally, I am to the right of both authors.
Yamit82, so what’s your point? So Lapin represents a form of Judaism that finds common cause with traditional Christianity for the welfare of JudeoChristian societal health. AGain, what’s your point? or do you have a point?
Right you are and their Christianity falls within the realm of “Hey Dude, Christ was a real zen master” who was just another teacher in the tradition of Buddha, Muhammed and all those other “moral teachers.”
The challenge this election will be to get Jews, who by their nature are self-loathing through their encouragement of validity of Palestinian terrorism, as well as Evangelical Christians, who believe Mormonism is a cult, to both their collective heads out of their arses to prevent Obama from another 4 years of destruction of our republic.
fr/@ Laura:
Wasn’t talking about socialism. I was talking corporatism another name for fascism. Get this through your head there is no such animal as free markets. “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Mussolini
Everything is fixed. Corporations own the politicians and get rewarded by favorable legislation. All of th markets are either fixed or manipulated. Bernie Madoff admitted this in public from prison but he isn’t the only one. America owes over 100 trillion dollars. The Federal Reserve since 2008 has printed and given to their friends interest free loans with you money to financial and corporate entities around he world with no accountability to congress or ay public oversight.
When a country has 1% of it’s population oning and controlling 60% of all the wealth not income but wealth and 20% own over 80% of all wealth in America than it’s obvious that the game is fixed. Even Banana republics don’t have such a disparity of wealth between rich and poor. it’s not like most earned their money by the seat of their brows. Most was inherited or invested in manipulated markets.
Apple America most successful company produces nothing in America all of their production is in Asia and they pay taxes on profits there as well.
They employ some 4000 people in America. Not only have many of Americas richest corporations not pay any taxes they get subsidies and produce even more off shore. Free markets are an Urban myth . What do you expect, that the American worker compete with labor in China and the third world? Most of the jobs lost in the last ten years are gone for good. In many cases technology has replaced the American worker and others outsourced to India and other countries. Romney lauds the success of Staples who pay for most employees minimum wages but staples put tens of thousands of small businesses and many mom and pop stores out of business and I doubt there was any net job growth. My best friend had the original Army and Navy store he inherited from his father and grandfather. He couldn’t compete with Foot Locker after over a hundred years he closed sold the building to Mike Tysons manager moved to Mexico, built a beautiful home, has cheap full time help and is living like a lord along with tens of thousands of other Americans and Canadians. NAFTA is free markets? By the way the Chinese are opening their first American banks have gained oil leases in Texas and Oaklahoma The Germans own the NYSE and almost all of the publishing companies in America and have invested heavily in American agricultural land millions of acres. 2 years ago MacDonalds advertised nationwide a job fair for 60000 jobs over a million applied. Americans must know something because they are buying 2 million guns a month with ammo.
@ Catarin:
Huh? Never mind…
@ yamit82:
Hi, Yam. I’ve had only two encounters with Seventh Day Adventists. My first encounter was in 1973, when I visited one of their churches. I was thoroughly bored. The next encounter was in the 1990s, when my friend used to have Saturday Night potlucks/ Bible studies in his barn and around a campfire. An Adventist family used to come regularly. They were vegetarian and we were omnivorous, but we used to seamlessly eat foods that met our various proclivities. In retrospect, I guess that meant the 7th Day folks had to bring more food; because we could eat theirs and they couldn’t eat ours. They were just friendly, genuinely nice folks.
When the Christian Right became interested in meddling in the beliefs of other Americans, I forsook them. How dare they try to force their beliefs on others in our political system? They refuse to mind their own business. There was a time when it was common in America to form your beliefs and not usually be harassed by anyone, unless you belonged to the KKK or some other nut group whose beliefs threatened America.
Among their ranks, there usually is no respect for others, they blindly follow what their leaders say, which over the past decades have been unChristian in nature. If Jesus came back, I believe he would say, What the hell is this? Plus they don’t follow Jesus’ teachings. They are Christians in name only. They don’t attempt to follow the Golden Rule and many believe that Jesus would like only them. Hahaha. When you throw in the Catholic Church’s admonition to go out and win souls for Christianity, I don’t believe Jesus spoke those words. He was a Jew and I believe he would never turn his back on his people, and his teachings were Jewish teachings, except for all the things the early Catholics made up.
Out of the three Abrahamic religions, only the Jews have lived their lives with dignity, while many Christians and Muslims go overboard and beat the hell out of other people. Sorry, I will never vote for people like this. I want them to secede, choose some Southern states for their own country, and leave the rest of us alone.
@ C.R.:
C. R., YOU might think so, but the Mormons consider themselves very much Christian. In fact, they consider themselves THE TRUE Christians, as far as I know, just as the Catholics and Protestants do. As one of THE TRUE Jews, I imagine you understand what I’m talking about. For the record, Mormons receive TaNaKh as the inspired Word of God, without revision. Catholics, Protestants and Jews do likewise. On top of that truly wonderful cake, all four add a ton of “frosting” that tastes awful.
I need to find my ballot, so I can vote for Ron Paul in the primary. Then I plan to vote for Romney. He’s running against… against what? a Christian? I’m sorry — I guess I’m just not religious enough. I don’t care about whether or not he’s a Christian. He’s a Democrat, and that’s enough for me to vote against him.
@ Irving Weisdorf:
@ Irving Weisdorf:
Irving,
You said everything in Post #14 so succinctly, I was amazed.It seems that you’ve described the world from your point of view, which in many respects was the antithesis of my own: What appears mysterious to you is quite plain to me, and visa versa; so let’s compare notes:
I was raised Catholic, by a prenuptial agreement between my parents, so I imagine that “2000 year old history” is my own. There was absolutely no antipathy to Jews in my history, as far back as I can trace it, so we obviously come from two different worlds. My mother’s side were Slovenians, descended from Galician Jews who intermarried with local Catholics; so it’s hard to imagine antipathy in that setting; and my father’s side have been in America since the 1600s, when the ancestors of today’s Jews lived mostly in Poland. Jews simply were not part of the family narrative, though my family were intensely Christian. There was some intense animosity at that time, but it was mostly Quaker vs. Congregationalist and, in England, Bible-believing Christians vs. a king who thought of himself as something of a god. My Dutch ancestors were also very religious, though that’s just a way of saying they were very freedom-loving and opposed to the Spanish Catholics who were persecuting them. Before around 1600, neither you nor I can really speak about our “history”; because common people like you and I didn’t HAVE a history then: We were part of the Third Estate; we didn’t count.
Those were the facts on the ground, among the people who would eventually engender me. I didn’t know those people, and my family didn’t talk about them. We talked even less about the Jews, which is to say, not at all. We lived in a Judenrein Polish/German neighborhood: any rivalry I knew of was between those two nationalities, and it was always in good humor. More violent was our rivalry with the Blacks from the other side of town, who toted knives when they came into our world at football games. Not your world, I guess.
Irving, are you being real here? What the hell did either your people or mine know about those things? Yamit has already confessed where his anti-Christianity comes from. It doesn’t come from anything that happened 2000 years ago; it comes from the Irish kids on the block who beat him up when he was young. I had to deal with bullies too; but they were Christians like me, so religion never came into the matter. In fact, they were both Catholic and Protestant: Bullies are ecumenical.
I’ll tell you about what I knew of things that happened 2000 years ago. I used to listen to the “Gospel” in church. I say that in ‘quotes’, because what we actually heard were little snippets, no longer than a few verses long, which conveyed some moral lesson. These were repeated in a three-year cycle. That’s all the Bible I heard as a child, apart from learning the Ten Commandments in Catechism class. It was the only part of the Mass that was in English, and I enjoyed hearing the “Gospel” more than all the other bell-ringing, incense-censing, sit-stand-kneel ritual.
Did those gospel fragments talk about Jews? No, Irving — until a few years ago, when I attended synagogue for a while, and when I started learning Judaism on the internet through the pleasant 😉 presentation of people like Yamit82, I had no idea about you people. I thought Jews were people like our family doctors, who didn’t look or sound significantly different from Pollacks and Germans. What the gospels talked about were not Jews at all, though the WORD “Jew” was mentioned very occasionally in passing: Jesus was a Jew, the disciples were Jews, everyone seemed to be either Jewish or Roman. There were some really nasty pieces of work in the gospels, called PHARISEES and SADDUCEES, etc.; and I knew nothing about who they were nor what the minutiae of their doctrines were. All I knew, was that they were nasty: They were always finding fault, and trying to trip people up with their words. They were like Yamit82, but I had never met anyone like Yamit82.
That’s how I had Jesus presented to me. He was “Jewish”, but that didn’t mean anything to me; it was like saying he was “Polish”. He was a “good” Jew, and the religious leaders of his time were the “bad” Jews. He talked about how those nasty Pharisees (sit) were completely caught up (stand) in outward appearances (kneel); and He, meanwhile (bells ring) was more concerned with a personal relationship with God (Children stand up and queue to receive communion. I had to sit and not go, because my mother had told me the night before that I was a sinner).
I think I’ve talked so much, I’m likely to get b o t t e d, so I’ll stop here.
Shalom shalom 🙂
@ Irving Weisdorf:I like your view. It has been expressed in two other ways that are also helpful.
I will, however, be reading Kuhn’s book. Thanks for the reference.
1. Poetic truth. Shelby Steele, Narrative of Perpetual Palesinian Victimhood. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2586/palestinian-victimhood-narrative
Poetic truths like that [narrative] are marvelous because no facts and no reason can ever penetrate. Supporters of Israel are up against a poetic truth. We keep hitting it with all the facts. We keep hitting it with obvious logic and reason. And we are so obvious and conspicuously right that we assume it is going to have an impact and it never does.
Likely this poetic truth was created by the Soviet dezinformatsia for the purpose of diguising jihad or religiously motivated murder, as killing in the course of liberation of a people from cruelty and oppression. . See: Brand, Soviet Russia, the Creators of the PLO and the Palestinian People. http://www.think-israel.org/brand.russiatheenemy.html It has been very effective in achieving its purpose.
2. Fiction dignified by alleged experts. “In fact, the ideas advanced by Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappe, the vanguard of the “new historians,” were nothing new. An anti-narrative of Zionism, counterposed to the Zionist (and Israeli) narrative of Zionism, had existed since the very inception of the Zionist movement. Opponents of the movement, Jewish and non-Jewish, had created an entire literature explaining what was foul in Zionism and why Zionism was destined to fail, and later why the state of Israel was an illegitimate and unjust construct that had to be resisted. The Soviet propaganda machine excelled in developing this anti-narrative, and in proliferating it. Arab propaganda also did its work. And at the margins of the Israeli left, there had always been groups and currents that doubted the right of Israel to exist and stressed the wrongs that were perpetrated against the Arabs. Yet those heretical elements remained marginal in Israeli politics and culture, and failed to gain wide public support. The advent of the “new historians” changed all that. These views now gained a certain legitimacy, since they appeared in the context of a debate between ostensibly objective scholars.” Anita Shapira, “The Past is Not a Foreign Country. http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses01/rrtw/Shapira.htm
@ kim:
Back to your padded cell.
I have read the comments above. And see where they would think what they think. Some I agree, some I do not. I have learned that it is better to believe G-d than man. Hearts are deceitful, who should know it? G-d speaking ! I believe G-d made it clear in Genesis 12 on how if we do not love Israel and support Her and the Jewish people, we are cursed. It iven states that those who have NO for or against HER is still cursed. For me, How can anyone not love Israel and the Jews who have blessed the whole world and still does despite the hate..Hitler a Jew who’s family converted to Islam. Hitler a Jew to become a mad man…Obama born in Kenya , his mom a Jew and he is black, Jew and muslim. As for the TRUE church who loves Israel, who would die for HER and the Jews has the truth. Not to forget the last days so to speak just before Messiah comes how the church would be full of apostasy. That is why we need to read scripture for ourselves as false teachers are all over and have made church a business. they say G-d but their hearts are far from him and made the word of G-d of none effect. We all choose who we will serve, but also to remember all that is going on in the world is straight out of G-d’s word. As for me, I will stand and support Israel forever, they are my heart and G-ds heart. Doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, it is what G-d has said. And as for the enemies of G-d and of Israel, the history tells of how thousands were killed by G-d’s wrath for trying to destroy Israel. G-d doesn’t change, no shadow of turning.As for me and my house, I will serve the G-d of Israel..a choice by all. Nothing in this world surprised me as it is wrttien long ago and is more up to date than the lying media. One thing for sure is when the nations attack , G-d Himself will roar thru Zion and destroy them. My faith is in G-d not man. G-d bless Israel and the Jewish people..and when Messiah comes, they will say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the L-rd and all Israel will be saved…Shalom
My comment got lost in the ether.
@ yamit82:
The stealing is being done by the federal government. Socialism is theft. Socialism creates mass poverty while the very few rulers enrich themselves. Socialists are crooks and thieves. I cannot understand, despite proof of the catastrophic failure of socialism, that it still is defended by so many. I hope the Republicans actually stay true to their purported free market ideology and limited government.
WE ALL know, that the “New Testament” is the founding document of Jew hatred and that Adolf Hitler did not grew up as an racist ideologist, but as a Christian Jew hater, who later in his life adapted his racist madness…
@ yamit82:
Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ ***I S*** the MOST perverted antisemitic bullshit ever put on the screen…and dirty Mel is a rabid Jew hater…so who ever comes to his defense is like him…
As for Mormons, I have a good friend who asks “how can I possibly vote for a man who believes that stuff?” I can only say that I do have business relationships with some Mormons and nothing remotely anti-Semitic is ever heard from that camp. Personally, I have no trouble with a person’s beliefs, only with their actions.
We shouldn’t dismiss everything someone says because of things said or done by his associates.
I think it is no wonder that Jews are skeptical of befriendment by Christians, given the 2000 year old history of Christian antipathy to Jews. This had a lot to do with the early Jewish rejection of Jesus, when all Christians were still Jewish, and the persistent survival of Jews and Judaism, despite Christianity professing to supersede Judaism as part of the New Covenant, after becoming the official religion of Rome. This anti-Semitism continued throughout the rise of Protestantism, with some of the greatest anti-Semites rising from that camp.
Evangelical Christians didn’t exist back then, and I don’t know enough about them to venture a guess about their bona fides in relation to their stance on Israel. But an analysis suggests it is genuine and that we would do well to embrace it, even if cautiously for the moment. Here is why:
The cleft between the Christian Right and the Democratic Party makes a lot of sense because the Democratic Party is both post-religious and post-nationalist. By that I mean that in general, they have no use for either religion or nationalism, though they sometimes pay lip-service to both.
And American Jews? Remembering their grandparents concern about Christianity as it played out in Europe and early America, the rejection of religion by the state and in public life was and is a good thing. For the Jewish left, who are irreligious in any case, the Democratic Party is the ideal home. Similarly for the Jewish middle! Both also are largely post-nationalist. Perfect, as well, for the Reform Movement whose thesis of Tikun Olam at the expense of their own nation is an old tradition.
Incidentally, Barak Obama is the perfect candidate for these Jews – not quite Christian, not quite Muslim, ½ black, ½ white, with an anti-nationalist, anti-American point of view – the ultimate poster boy of the 1960’s.
Now if we look at the points of contention between the Christian Right and the Democrats, and then at the points of affinity between the Christian Right and State of Israel, we find they are one and the same. The Christian Right believes in religion playing a major role in public life, and they believe in America and its exceptionalism. Israel is similarly an amalgam of these two strong beliefs –a nation state with its own destiny and expectation of exceptionalism, founded on Judeo-Christian values despite its being secular. Christian Evangelicals may just be a very good ally after all.
To read more about “post-nationalism” which I think is a huge factor in what is going on in American and European politics, I’d recommend an article by Yoram Hazony that can be found at http://tinyurl.com/23xytc7 & http://tinyurl.com/26e4yk7, it’s long and even arduous at points, but very enlightening.
I have found the Christian evangelicals I have met to be reliable pro-Zionists and nice people. I haven’t met many, but that is typical of the few I have met.
@ yamit82:
Yamit,
I wish anything that you said here were shocking. As it is, I expect a similar scenario, no matter which party wins; and I don’t expect a 20-year reign by the Democrats; I expect a seven-year dictatorship — expect, but don’t eagerly anticipate.
It’s foolish, I think, to expect the government to turn around the economy. The very best it could do, is set up a guillotine to publicly execute Geithner, Bernanke and the rest of the Fed heads and privileged class before they all escape to Saudi Arabia, Russia or wherever they have a haven set up. Just the derivatives game is such an incredible crime against the poor, heaven demands rich blood to flow. Then Animal Farm will kick in, and the book of Revelation, which you mock repeatedly, will play itself out to the letter. EVERY scenario will lead to this: Nobody has an “exit strategy”. (There will be no “r a p ture”)
Meanwhile, God know those who trust in Him, and laughs at the mockers. I will vote for any party that acknowledges Him, and protects His people, or seems to.
@ BlandOatmeal:
There’ a couple of Holy Rollers I hear in Mississippi and 3 or 4 in Utah who aren’t part of the ‘Mormon Cult.’ Personally I like 7th day Adventists. 😛
I am a proud conservative(politically and Judaically) Jew who works with and lives among many other “jews”. I must say, they hold no Jewish ideals as well as no American one’s either. Their liberal progressiveness is their sole religion. They would vote for Hitler over a Republican. I also belong to and attend many Patriotic organizations where I am the only Jew among many Christians. I thank G-D for these people. They are rock-solid in their love of America and of Israel.Liberal “jews” are a lost cause. Having grown up in a predominantly Jewish area, I can see why. They never went to Hebrew School, their parents never instilled in them a love of country or any semblance of history and pride in their heritage. It’s as if after all the oppression and death in Europe, it was never mentioned again. All they cared about was having things, fancy homes, fancy cars, fancy everything. I surely was raised very differently, with a clear love and appreciation of America and undying support of Israel. As a Jew, I am truly disgusted with liberal “jews” and I proudly stand with my Christian friends.
@ Marianne:
If I were a democrat and I’m not I would welcome a Republican victory in November…If the Republican stay true to their ideology the following will happen.
A- more deregulation a code word to allow the crooks to steal more and impoverish the rest.
B- Severe budget cuts across the board meaning a reduction in SS, Medicare entitlements, the governments contributions to medicaid, welfare and all entitlements including food stamps. Reduction in government workforce. Reduction in foreign aid, education, government guaranteed mortgages,and many military projects.
C- They will reduce corporate taxes and gradually increase payroll taxes. Interest rates could go as high as 6% from 0% today.
The top 20% will not only maintain their wealth it will increase the poor will be hurt by reduction or elimination of services and higher costs for necessities like food and shelter and utilities but these programs will all but kill the American middle class and unemployment will increase from it’s current real level if 17-20% to 30-35%.
The American Federal government is the largest employer and largest single consumer entity in America. Just the number of automobiles they purchase per year good keep a single producer in business with a good profit. Inflation will kick in in double figures in 2013 which is a hidden tax mostly effecting the middle income groups who live almost paycheck to paycheck and are heavily in debt. Along with Federal and State and local public employee layoffs they will add considerably to reduced government revenues and increased entitlements.
America will enter into an inflationary and deflationary cycle known as stagflation. In the past America had a robust manufacturing base that always were the instruments of economic turnaround. Most of that base is gone today and there are no savings by the public to plow back into the economy as was the case in the past down cycles. Look for more and even massive foreclosures credit card defaults bankruptcies well above the norm but including some of Americas biggest and leading financial and lending institutions.
Civil unrest is sure to erupt with massive repression on the part of the governments. By the time the next elections role around the Republicans will be so hated that the democrats could enjoy the next 20 years in power. For a democrat it could be a profitable tradeoff, lose 4 years gain 20.
Voting Republican does not make one a Christian. There are atheists who vote Republican.
But voting democrat will make you an eventual target for destruction. .. probably sooner than you think.
Who the hell are these “Evangelical Christians” I keep hearing about. If I’m reading it correctly, it’s a catch-all for non-Jewish, non-Arab, non-Pagan, non-Atheist, non-Black Republicans; and is identical with the term “Neocon”. Am I correct?
Conservative Christian support for Israel for Israel is enthusiastic. I have found it much more enthusiastic than the support from liberal Jews. Unfortunately, the mainline Protestant denominations tend to become suckers for divestment, boycotts, etc.
The Repubican platform will be determined by Evangelical Christians.
One must view medved article in the context of Lapin his partner and mentor.
Medved became an outspoken defender of Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ (2004), which had been criticized as antisemitic by many prominent Jewish groups. After Gibson’s DUI arrest in July 2006, Medved wrote that he felt “betrayed” by Gibson’s antisemitic outburst and urged Gibson to seek “reconciliation” with the Jewish community. Reconciliation should follow Mel’s Malibu meltdown
Medved co-founded Pacific Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue in Venice, California, with his friend and teacher, Rabbi Daniel Lapin. For fifteen years, Medved served as president of PJC, which states that its mission is outreach to unaffiliated and disconnected Jews. In his book Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life, he states that his commitment to religion led to his conservative political outlook. He is a baal teshuva (returnee to pre-denominational Judaism).
Daniel Lapin
Lapin, together with conservative columnist Michael Medved, founded the Pacific Jewish Center, a synagogue in Venice, California, which viewed itself as functioning as part of the recent Baal teshuva movement, encouraging Conservative and Reform Jews to adopt and return to a more observant, traditional Judaism.
Actors Barbra Streisand and Richard Dreyfuss participated in that religious community and synagogue. Lapin’s teachings are also aligned with Modern Orthodox Judaism, in that while he promotes observant Judaism, he is strongly in favor of observant Jews having interaction with other faith communities (in his view, mostly conservative and observant Christian communities) and broader political action outside of Judaism.
Lapin has spoken against the secularization of Christmas, saying that “We see obsequious regard for faiths like Judaism and even Islam, while Christianity is treated with contempt”. He is opposed to replacing the “Merry Christmas” greeting with “Happy Holidays”, saying instead “Let us all go out of our way to wish our many wonderful Christian friends a very merry Christmas… Nationwide, Christmas Nativity scenes are banned from city halls and shopping malls but Chanukah menorahs are permitted.”
Lapin has said that “The 700 Club is one of my big all-time favorites.”
Relationship with Jack Abramoff
Lapin worked for the mellon organization// Richard Mellon Scaife who owned the radio stations he Broadcast from the mid nineties. The mellons are extreme right wing and very antisemitic who support most of the right wing radical and fundamentalist Christian groups. They control billions and operate in the shadows out of the public view.
What does Christianity have to do with Mitt Romney? Mitt Romney is not a Christian–DUH! Mitt Romney is no more of a Christian than Ted Belman is.
Since G.W. Bush was also mentioned–he also was neither a Christian nor conservative and no friend of Israel and like Mitt Romney he is a Marxist globalist–G.W. Bush just used the Christian label to gain votes and support–unfortunately gullible and foolish Christians bought the lie–hook, line and sinker!
Its very telling that some [the minority] believe that it is a right and a necessity for a women to be able to murder her unborn children–when the US supreme court unconstitutionally “legalized” the mass genocide of abortion–the USA was doomed and this action has led to where the USA is now.
What the Marxist David Frum from the Marxist Anneberg Foundation and the Marxist National Jewish Democratic Council has to say about Christian support is irrelevant–and should not be considered accurate.
http://sojo.net/blogs/2011/12/09/how-evangelicals-are-learning-be-pro-palestine-pro-israel-pro-peace-pro-justice-and
More and more evangelicals are paying attention to the Palestinian Church and its testimony and ministry in the midst of the conflict; the writings of Elias Chacour, Naim Ateek, Mitri Raheb, and Alex Awad are good examples, along with the non-violent peace activities and advocacy by Palestinian Christian organizations. There are also the writings of many Western evangelicals who are sympathetic to Palestinians, and new documentaries that offer a different perspective, such as With God on Our Side and Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.
moot point. The new generation of Evangelicals are left wing, radically so. Anti Israel too. Their readings of the Bible fall into the mainline Protestant Churches