Onward, Christian Zionists

Deep-rooted Christian tradition has put its mark on British, US policies in Mideast

By James Carroll  

from the Boston Globe

FUNDAMENTALISM IS the problem: that assertion defines the diagnostic mantra of Middle East conflict. The Jewish settlers’ “Bloc of the Faith’’ movement (Gush Emunim), with the agenda of restoring biblical Israel, is discussed as one instance of fundamentalism. Religious jihadists, aiming to re-establish the lost Caliphate of Islam, are discussed as another. Wacky Christians are sometimes spoken of, like the mentally unbalanced Australian who set fire to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in 1969.

But the word fundamentalism can obscure as much as it illuminates, especially in the way it seems to lump the sources of trouble on the extreme edge of belief. What if a decidedly mainstream tradition, rooted not in the Middle East but in Britain and America, is a historic key to the tangle that so far resists every effort at unknotting? Not wacky Christians, but the ordinary faithful. What if fundamentalism, in other words, is not the crime but the evidence — evidence of a destructive, yet widespread religious attitude that contributes to the political impasse that continues to stymie Palestinian and Israeli peace negotiators?

Christian Zionism is shorthand for the idea that the return of Jews to the Holy Land is a pre-requisite for the return of Jesus the Messiah, and the final redemption of the world. Believers who take this notion literally (and are understood, in that sense, to be fundamentalist) have been central players in the drama of Palestine for almost two centuries. A particular biblical verse seized the imagination of such Christians. (“O that the salvation Of Israel were come out of Zion! When God bringeth back the captivity of his people, Jacob shall rejoice and Israel shall be glad’’ — Psalm 56:6. St. Paul cited this verse in Romans 11:26, and Christians took it from there.)

This idea of Jewish return to Zion as the climax of salvation history has resonance dating to the Babylonian Captivity nearly six centuries before Christ. No surprise, perhaps, that the enthused religious “awakenings’’ of 19th century evangelical Protestants therefore jelled around the literal restoration of Jews to their traditional homeland. We saw in a previous column how Catholicism regarded such return of Jews as anathema, but the so-called “restorationist’’ Protestant concern for Jews was not truly friendly. Rather, the restored Jews were only to be instruments of the final triumph of Christianity. Jews again in Israel would be faced with the choice of conversion or damnation.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE