AIUI, the Supreme Court of Israel deems messianic Jews as Christians.
They definitely are. The idea is that they’re supposed to be Jewish converts to Christianity, which would make them Christians. But, in practice, they just seem to be Christians who add in more restrictions from the Torah. However, they seem to ignore the Talmud and any Midrashim, approaching the Torah entirely from a Christian perspective.
They seem more like offshoots of the Seventh Day Adventist types.
He is from this “temple”:
Temple New Jerusalem - What is Messianic Judaism?
We live on the outskirts of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. It’s the only part of town where we saw several Trump yard signs. Nowhere else.
There are Orthodox Jewish communities that have a large number of anti-vaxxers (I’m not saying that is all or even most, just some), alongside a general distrust of the government, so I’m not shocked.
Yes, and they’re darlings of the Pence crowd who want the Jews to be Christians but don’t actually want any Jewish people in their own churches so they slap a different label on them and say “you have to go sit over in those pews”.
Back when I worked in close proximity to the Moody Bible Insitute in Chicago I would run into those types who were so eager to make me Christian until they found out I was of Jewish descent, then it was “oh, you need to join that church”. I’d act all hurt and innocent and say “but I want to join YOUR church and sit with YOU on Sunday”. They’d tie themselves in knots trying to come up with a justification other than admitting they wanted to segregate Jews and didn’t consider a Jew converted to Christianity an actual Christian like anyone else who converted.
Bunch of bigots.
Wow, that is some hardcore religious bigotry. I’ve met some nutty fundamentalists in my time, but all of them seemed to consider that converts of any stripe were just as Christian as anybody else. (Didn’t necessarily mean that they wanted to worship with non-white Christians, of course.)
Oh, yeah, it got pretty intense sometimes.
Then there was the idiot husband of one of my coworkers who insisted on speaking to me in Hebrew. Because he honestly believed Jews were born knowing it. You know how there are people out there that leave Bible tracts where their coworkers could find them? I got entire Bibles in my inter-office mail. (NIV and King James, still have 'em both on my reference shelf). Mind you, our mutual employer was entirely secular, these people were all wannabe missionaries and they just would NOT shut it off.
I don’t suppose HR would have been inclined to be responsive to any complaints…
It was a small clinic, it’s hard to find people who will watch other people pee into bottles for drug testing for minimum wage, and yes, it was a constant HR battle.
I know a couple. One is my brother.
They’re both what I’d call areligious. That is, they’re not exactly atheists, they’re not believers. The question of whether or not there is a God just isn’t important to them.
They’re shrugnostics.
Or apatheists.
President Trump is quite popular amongst Orthodox Jews in New York City. I base this on my reading of A website that covers the community.
(I have given up the site as a new year resolution, but I highly recommend it to you.)
Sounds like me, going about my day as though there aren’t any deities. That strikes me as being an atheist. Or at least living as an atheist.
And I have the sense that going about [one’s] day as though there aren’t any deities is a not-too-inaccurate descriptor for the behaviors of a LARGE percentage of folks who DO self-identify as Christian.
I’d argue that it’s a bit different. Seems to me that an atheist does not believe that there is a god.
The people I’m describing, my brother included, are perfectly willing to admit that there might be a god. They just don’t care enough to really consider the question.
But I don’t know that the distinction is all that important.
You might be right, depending on what one means by “self-identify as Christian.” But that’s another thread.