Where Are the Anti-Racists Now? Pt 1: The racist contradictions of Evangelical Zionism
I first encountered the startling revelation that Palestinians are indeed human yet treated like captured animals by the Israeli occupation after watching a documentary made by fellow Evangelical Christians. My then-wife and I imagined a friend’s upcoming stay as the perfect moment to commiserate on this expose as she lived in Palestine as an Evangelical. After all, she’s what we in the Born Again community typically refer to as a Prayer Warrior who has dedicated her life to a church that exists solely to pray and sing, non-stop, 24/7, and she came to the States to raise funds to continue this holy work in the Holy Land. Surely she is in commune with those who surround her; surely she knows the suffering of the saints; surely, she raises daily prayers on their behalf?
Indeed, residing in the West Bank, she is familiar with their suffering.
“It is really too bad, what they’re going through. Israel treats them horribly, they’re caged in, and their leaders are corrupt and no better,” she started, fortifying what I thought I knew before dropping an unexpected cluster bomb.
“But it’s what needs to happen so that Israel can rise and the prophecies can be fulfilled.”
These would-be prophecies speak of the end of the world that would commence with the disappearance of good Christian saints. In many of these Millenial Prophecies, the state of Israel takes a prominent position.
But I could not grasp my head around what could be so good about us as Christians if we not only allowed the suffering of God’s fellow image-bearers but bolstered their oppression. I came to realize that most Evangelicals do not see Palestinians as God’s image-bearers. Our teachings run contrary to that.
I want to clarify that Christian Zionism — particularly of the Evangelical bent — isn’t as much about the rapture or End-Times theology as it is about the contradictions of a God who could recognize one tribe of people over another based on blood. God’s favoritism works so that we can ignore the pleas, the history, the work, the oppression, and the subjugation of other groups — indigenous groups —even in the face of obvious genocide. To put it bluntly, Evangelical thought in regards to Israel and Palestine is at its core racism.
The theology that Palestine belongs to one people alone is inherently racist. It is the racist theology of a racist people who have read racism into their God. The idea that the inhabitants of the land don’t deserve to be there? Even more racist. Evangelical Zionism furthers this colonial racism by simply and fundamentally performing racism against Palestinians specifically and against Muslims and Arabs generally.
But, herein lies the rub that gives lie to the idea that anti-Israel sentiment is automatically antisemitic: Evangelical Zionism is also racist against Jewish people.
This aspect of Evangelical Zionism being antisemitic is baked into Evangelicalism but its roots go deep into Western/European Christianity.
European Christianity is the root, basis, and continuing mainstay of antisemitism[i] — it’s in the Western Christian’s reading of what we call the Old and New Testaments that a schism develops between two people of God. Evangelicals consider the Torah to be God’s older treaty with the Hebrew people, where God both promises that the entire world will be blessed through them and that God will continually deliver them out of slavery and occupation as long as they return to God. Yet, as God realized that his people were incapable of being faithful, he made a new covenant through the person of Jesus and the writings of his followers such as Peter and Paul. Especially Paul. This schism is a prominent framework that I and a billion Western Christians grew up with. We understood that Jesus came first of (from the lines of Adam and Noah and Abraham and Ruth and David) and to the Jewish people to save the Jewish people, but the Jewish people ultimately rejected Jesus and thus rejected God. So the Jilted Lover God sent the Salvation of Jesus to the Europeans.[ii]
In this image, God, the Jilted Lover, yet still loves His First Wife and must keep his promises. And since God promised First Wife a land of her own, a land overflowing with milk and honey, that land must come in the form of ethnic cleansing in ways similar to American and South African settler colonialism. Both White Supremacist Christian nations also saw themselves as favored by God over the savage natives who must be overcome by ‘civilization’ and violence.
The flip side of this Jilted-but-Faithful Lover is that, sadly for 95% of the world, the hurt Evangelical God is a jealous and petty mf. This God would not allow Jewish people into heaven but instead send them to hell with everyone else — unless they convert to Christianity. Born Again Christians can claim that they are not antisemitic because they believe that everyone faces the same fate if they don’t convert. The paradox herein, however, is that Evangelical theology is inherently genocidal — if Jewish or Muslim populations faced extinction now it is nothing compared to the unescapable eternity of hellfire. The mass extinction of faith groups, particularly adherents of Judaism, can’t be genocidal, because Evangelicals believe that Christianity is a superior version of Judaism.
This is how we Evangelical Christians tacitly understand and contribute to the Zionist occupation, not necessarily as a means to bring upon the End Times. In the most common communities of the Evangelical world, God’s calendar does not rely on his faithful. We believed God would come back anyway and any day to judge the living and the dead and to take his people home either through really expensive escalators or through Scotty-ian teleportation. No, indeed, it’s not to bring about the end of the world that we want perpetual war in Jesus’s homeland.
To be clear, the End-Times Fundamentalist Christians are the most vocal and ardent supporters of No-Questions-Asked Israel. Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel boasts being the largest pro-Israel lobby in the United States claiming over 10 million members and 50 pro-Israel events a month, according to their LinkedIn page.[iii] And while these numbers are no doubt greatly exaggerated and crunched (as we say in Chicago, “Vote early, vote often!”), they still represent a fraction of Evangelicals who ardently support Israel even as the occupation undergoes an internationally televised genocide of 2.4 million Gazan Palestinians.
No, indeed, mainstream Evangelicalism supports Zionism because, as I argue in a book forthcoming in 2060, Evangelicalism is a religion born of chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide — which is to say it is a religion of settler colonialism. It is replete with the fingerprints of slavers and Indian killers and its theology attempts to square the welcoming, beloved community and the liberation found in the holy texts with the capitalist realities of oppression and punishment. Evangelicalism recognizes Zionism as a fraternal religion — a form distinct from earlier roots of Judaism as Mormonism (another settler Christian sect) is from historic Christianity yet having similar signatures.
It is out of these contradictions that Evangelical Zionism exists as both sympathetic to the “Jewish state” and yet demeaning to Jewish people — being at once ideological and financial supporters of Israel and yet antisemitic in practice and form. If, as several states and media types argue, the settler colony of Israel is existentially tied to the Jewish identity and thus criticism of Israel is innately antisemitic, how does one reconcile this with monetary, military, and moral backing of Israel coming from such antisemites as US Evangelicals, Banderites, and alt-rightists like Donald Trump?
How do White Western Christians not find it ironic that their solution to their antisemitism and pogroms is to send Jewish people far away to conduct racist pogroms on Palestinians? Does this explain why most post-Evangelicals — particularly those who had been very vocal about being anti-racist and believing in the mattering of Black lives — I know have been silent about the very vocal genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli state?
Note: This is the first of a planned three-part series.
[i] More on this in a later volume.
[ii] Of course Jesus’s message spread to the Horn of Africa, Western Asia, and India without going through Europe but nobody ever accused Europeans of being knowledgeable about the rest of the world.
[iii] https://www.linkedin.com/company/christians-united-for-israel/
