Well, the question then is, who exactly are you talking about? Because my grandparents would certainly have been called “Christian Right” by the left. And they watched Billy Graham and other televangelists, and their relatives in the states attended Baptist churches with the same message.
I suspect that the people you are talking about make up a small fraction of the ‘Christian RIght’. I’ve been in Baptist services, Monnonits services, Catholic services, Episcopalian services, ‘free’ church services of many demoninations, etc. I’ve attended bible study in pretty fundamentalist baptist churches.
I have NEVER heard the ‘we need the Jews to get to heaven’ argument from anyone in person. I’ve only ever heard it on the internet as a belief assigned to fundamentalist Christians, typically by athiests or the left.
I’m sure some Christians believe that. Maybe some entire sects. But it’s not the dominant belief among Christians who support Israel, IMO. THey support Israel because they feel affinity for the country and for the Jewish people.
Oh, that’s a new one on me. I belonged to a Pentecostal church as a tween, and they were always going on about God’s chosen people, but I didn’t get that they were allowed to go to heaven, and I didn’t meet a single Jewish person until my freshman year of college when I had a Jewish roommate.
Anti-Semitism is just one of those things that always had me scratching my head. I grew up in a very racist rural area, so I was used to hearing anti-Black racism, and I feel like I understand why people are racist against Black people (such as having to rationalize enslaving and oppressing them) but I never really encountered virulent anti-Semitism until later in life, and when I learn that Jewish people have been oppressed all over the globe, it just boggles my mind. For example I was listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast and there’s a fascinating episode about the Jews who tried to take revenge for the Holocaust (the bastards here being very clearly established as the Nazis.) The host said that after escaping the Holocaust, Jews would return to their homes only to be killed on their doorsteps by their neighbors, who plundered their houses and stole their possessions. It’s like people all over the world were just waiting for someone to say it’s okay to kill Jews without consequence. Even in the US, it took some effort to get people to say, “Hey, that’s going too far.”
I just don’t know how to even conceptualize that as a non-Jewish person. It must be a very big psychological weight to grapple with. Talk about collective trauma.
It may be a numerically small faction, Sam, but you may understand if Jewish people find it terrifying that it may be a loud faction in the middle of the rise of unashamed “Christian Nationalists” in our far right.
Saying “well, none of the Christians I know are like that” just means you hang around a better quality of Christian.
Speaking from some unpleasant personal experience, the respect and support the various Christian sects that support Jews as a “blessed” people tends to be very transactional.
The support is entirely conditional on you endorsing their unspoken dominance, their socio-political POV, and accepting a “blessed but still somehow less” status. If you, as a not-so-random example, support, say, a liberal political agenda, then you’re not a “good” Jew, you’re a pharisee - some no-goodnik who while a Jew wants to persecute “good Christian people.” (see our thread on the use of that language if you care too for that matter).
Granted, it’s not all of those various sects of Christianity, but probably far more than I want to consider without a large helping of booze. Some of them in my own extended in-laws for that matter.
Yeah it’s weird, for sure. I mean, Jews themselves don’t believe in Heaven as such, and certainly not the Christian Heaven. Perhaps the message wasn’t quite that literal - I was young back then. I was an athiest by the time I was a mid-teen. It might have been that Jews were ‘blessed’ or that God had his own plan for the Jews. But I do know they were exempt from needing to accept Jesus in order to be ‘saved’.
And I agree - anti-Semitism is completely alien to me. I get racists who base it on observable characteristics which they take as a sign that you are not of their tribe and therefore to be treated with suspicion or hostility or are inferior. But anti-semitism? I do not grok. One theory I’ve heard is that hatred of the Jews goes back to religious proscriptions against usury in other religions that forced them to go to the Jews to borrow money, leading to resentment, but I don’t know if that itself is an anti-semitic story about Jews and the love of money or something. I can’t tell because anti-semitism is just clicks and buzzes to me. None of it makes a lick of sense.
How is it terrifying to know that some people are on your side for a stupid reason? At least they are on your side. I think they’re probably a little nore terrified of the people calling for genocide and making excuses for the slaughter of 1200 innocent Jews or chasing them into school libraries in America.
I just finished Jerusalem, the Biography which touches on this issue. My understanding is that Christian Zionists are pro-Israel as a precondition to bring about the apocalypse, which itself depends on Jewish control of Jerusalem and the construction of a third temple over top of the dome of the rock. As an American Jew, I certainly am not planning to vote Republican to align myself with an ideology I don’t believe in, but given that I don’t see a future where Israel allows such a temple to be built, and were one to be built I don’t believe that any apocalypse will occur (in the theological sense; there certainly would be an unprecedented political and military conflict), I struggle to see these evangelicals as threatening to me as a Jew. I’ll certainly continue to oppose their politics and vote Democratic in opposition to their restrictions on civil liberties and disregard for environmental policy, but I don’t see them as a block that is currently dangerous to me as a whole. The radicals are, but the same is true for all groups.
Huh. I’ve never met quite that variation in real life.
I have met a bunch who want Jews to accept Jesus as their savior, but then call those people “Messianic Jews” rather than “Christians”. Had a husband-and-wife who promoted that viewpoint, always trying to get me to say the magic words, but when I asked about attending their church Oh, no no no - you need to attend a group of messianic Jews. It was very much a matter they wanted the brownie points for converting me but in no would I be permitted to actually join their church, I’d have to go sit over there with those people. They said it was because Jews were “special”. I told them separate but equal was bullshit.
Because they are NOT on our side. In their minds we exist as set-dressing and a per-condition for their End Times, during which are supposed to be obliterated - either by being attacked by our enemies or because we all become good Christians in the end or we all go to hell and burn for eternity.
It’s frightening because they clearly are willing to throw anything or anyone under the bus if doing so aligns with their mythos. Nor are we given agency of our own - as Jews we’re fated to suffer and die in accordance with prophecy and nothing we can do will change that. Hence the distinction between Jews that convert to Christianity and everyone else who converts - Jews can’t be allowed to melt into the mass of Christians, they have to exist separately so the End Times can play out.
Not so different from MAGA needing the Republican party, right up until they don’t, and showing exactly how little they care for them. I expect JUST as much loyalty from the Apoc-Christians as I do from MAGA.
I’m just explaining the attitude of the communities of faith I was involved with. I’m not speaking for anyone else.
But I don’t understand how you can be ‘terrified’ of someone who supports you and will defend you, but only because they think you need to be around for the rapture. I would be more terrified of the people who think I need to be killed in order to bring about the second coming of the messiah.
The same way one might be terrified of a group that believes you are the chosen one who must be protected from space aliens. In a nutshell, people with batshit beliefs can be scary.
What? I’m familiar with plenty of Baptists. Not a one of them holds to that idea. The usual idea I heard growing up was Jews were the Chosen People, but they abdicated it when they rejected Christ, so now it’s the Christians who are the Chosen.
A tangent that really isn’t: As a young woman I was once stalked by a saleswoman as I moved through a clothing store, presumably because I didn’t look upscale enough to be shopping there. It was unpleasant, embarrassing, and humiliating, and I left without buying anything.
But I’m white and middle-class and that’s only happened to me once, unlike black and brown folks who have to endure that sort of automatic suspicion all the frikkin time, and good golly how it must wear on their souls! Just one taste of it and decades later I still find it disturbing to recall. I try and fail to imagine how folks – blacks, Jews, anyone who isn’t securely a member of the in-group they live among – who have to live every day with such othering maintain their sanity and equilibrium.
I don’t get the anti-semitism either, but it is certainly out there. My great WTF moment came when I worked at the global bank UBS in Tokyo. One of my first mentor’s was the head economist, and his spouse was Jewish.
At some point, I was talking with an Australian colleague, and mentioned that in passing. He said something to the effect: “She looks like a kike.”
WTF? Where did that come from out of nowhere in a global investment bank from a University educated, smart, driven, switched on guy.
That was the moment I came to realize that my Jewish friends were not paranoid, because there really are people out to get them.
I grew up with Presbyterian Missionary parents and father that went on to be a minister the rest of his life. I was never exposed to anything about Jewish people being the chosen or any such BS. Certainly knew about the divergence of the old and new testament, but that was about it.
I’ve worked and lived outside of the United States for over twenty years total now. I’ve found that plenty of American bigots have zero filter when they’re abroad, especially those working abroad. They rejoice in the fact they can say that nonsense with zero repercussion to their careers.