Gluttons In The Land Of Milk And Honey

Christianity In The Age Of Trump 

Christianity has long cast itself as a religion of love, forgiveness of sins and salvation through the Christian messiah. Sunday sermons that once preached hellfire and damnation have over time turned to the message of Jesus to try and win back the souls that have left pews empty across the country. Yet the true nature of the Christian has not changed in America. Through the deeds of the faithful the hollowness of their religion has been laid bare for all to see. It is impossible to believe in a god that said “let them come onto me" when speaking of children and the needy when the Christian majority in America voted for children in cages and detention centers where women and mothers are coerced into sterilization programs or forced against their will. It is hard to imagine the god that healed a diseased man that was lowered through the roof just to be in the same room as him when Christians today have voted time and time again against healthcare for the masses because of their rigid belief in individualism and self reliance while living in a country that gobbles up the world’s resources. It is impossible to see the love of their Christ, who supposedly died for all mankind, when the Christian majority in America cannot be brought to reconcile the sins their country perpetrated against Black, Latino, Asian and Indigenous Americans from the very day of its founding; so much so that even the slogan “Black Lives Matter” terrifies Christian America while they sing Sunday school songs that include the lyrics “red, yellow, black and white… they are precious in His sight.”

Galatians 3:28 states: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

In a truly Christ like view of the world there is no place for “American exceptionalism” because there is nothing unique, special or blessed about the nation itself. There is no mandate from god that America should prosper nor that its people should be separate from the world around it. The god of Abraham did not set a “hedge of protection” around the United States and bring it from a handful of colonies to a superpower. History records a country rising from land purged of its Indigenous inhabitants through a series of unholy wars and genocidal acts. It shows a country in which the slave and the poor masses were put to work for the swine that considered themselves too intelligent to get their hands dirty or bleed for the treasure they collected from the sweat of the enslaved and the bodies of the lower class sent to die for “god and country". It shows a long line of men, all from the same skin tone, ruling over families through claims that only they stood between the masses and anarchy, that only they could right the ship and sail the people to prosperity, while women and Blacks were denied any equality for the majority of the country’s existence. It shows a country that lied about its founding so that it could conquer the Philippines through the use of genocide, concentration camps and race based rule. It shows a country that holds territories as inferior properties, deprived of equal rights even to this day, while still claiming that some green tinted statue and a pile of documents from long dead men make America Great, that all men are created equal in the land of the not brave enough to accept reality.

So even if Christians today in America could accept that there is no room in their Christ's message for the rabid nationalism, the myths of greatness and a fake image of a new chosen people, there still is more ways than just this in which Christians defy their god and ignore the hypocrisy in their perverted interpretation of Jesus.

In 1st Timothy Christians are implored to provide for the needy, the desperate and the forsaken. To ignore the needs of the people is to be “worse than the unbeliever” according to their text. While America remains one of the wealthiest countries on earth, it has massive under class that remains at and often below the poverty line. This coupled with the needs of the asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants shows how best the wealth of the privileged of the world should be spent according the god of the Christians. Yet the government is so frequently put upon by “believers" in politician’s clothes to cut funding and block access for the poor. For a god that fed a multitude with a few pieces of bread and a few fish, Christians seem to imagine their god, who they claim has blessed America, is out of miracles nowadays. At the very least He seems incapable of breaking the hearts of stone His reverends, pastors and priests have installed in the hearts of His flock. If even for a moment the love their Jesus could be seen, you would hope it could at least be shown in this one area of stopping their fellow man from enduring needless suffering.

This November the Christ of the American Church goes on the ballot with every Christian that turns out to vote. While neither candidate is a messiah, one is a clear devil. To vote for a man who readily stirs up violent racists, encourages attacks on minorities and immigrants (in defiance of Christ's message on how to care for the sojourner/alien), talks gleefully about sexual violence against women, and places himself as an idol to be followed blindly is to look up at the cross on your church and pretend that the god you claim died for your sins did so in vain. For there is nothing left in the religious rightwing of America that reflects even a single word of the Jesus your church pamphlets tell others about. And in the end, hollow words from evangelicals fall on deaf ears once anyone else sees how Christians behave from Sunday afternoon to Saturday night. We can see the message of you Jesus, even agree with it, but never feel compelled to embrace the god of a people so heartless and hedonistic as American Christians appear today.

We Don't Need Saviors

We Don't Need Saviors

The American rightwing has frequently come to the defense of Jews after repeated shootings in American synagogues. The Evangelical conservatives see it as a part of their sacred duty to stand by Jewish people right up until the return of Jesus. And it is that savior complex, with all its opportunistic tendencies, that drives the conservative side of the debate on what is and what isn't antisemitic.

So what is antisemitism and what is not antisemitic? That question is very complex and yet can be readily answered in a way that keeps the conversation within guardrails. Antisemitism is the professed hatred, mistrust of Jewish people. It manifest in conspiracy theories of Jewish people holding disproportionate power, influence within society as well as darker myths of Jewish people conspiring for domination of the destruction of select other groups of people. It can also be as passive as any other form of racial discrimination in which assigned characteristics that are meant to otherize Jews and deem Jewish people as untrustworthy or unworthy of being considered equals. These are straightforward ways to define antisemitism that can, when reasonably applied to daily life, help Americans identify when somebody is displaying antisemitism. But even then this does not weed out the more insidious ways in which antisemitism has been baked into American society, as well as much of European and Middle Eastern societies, with influences ranging from religion to cultural differences. 

In America the discussion on antisemitism is often far less concerned with the wellbeing of Jewish people as individuals, which runs counter to the American culture of individualism, but rather often aims to collectivize Jewish people in a manner that makes Jews easy to pigeonhole. This lends itself to more nefarious forms of antisemitism. The stripping of a Jewish person's individual identity and affixing a perceived view of Israel, for better or worse, is antisemitic. And this is where the savior complex mentioned above comes into play. 

When Meghan McCain, with whatever good intentions she believes she might have, stands atop Jewish peoples' shoulders and speaks over us as she "defends" us - this is that savior complex. She routinely replaces our identity as American Jews with that of being members of a collective that is identified only by Israel. Israel being a nation means that it has citizens of its own, some of which happen to be Jewish, and obviously as American Jews, we are not part of it. But the Christian view that all Jews must be part of Israel, especially when approaching that final book, has been driven deep into the Christian American mindset. It forms a barrier that keeps American Jews from fully being part of American society and absolute equals in every single way that Christian Americans naturally see themselves as. It denies the same level of participation in the conversation by American Jews by leaning heavily on the notion that at some level we can't be as dedicated to the country we belong to because of the insinuation that we are also loyal to a country we do not belong to. The duel loyalty trope is ironically one that McCain has accused Rep. Omar of making, yet this savior complex that McCain so often engages in is founded on the belief that we, as Jews, do not truly belong to America.

While Christians in America have plenty other antisemitic stumbling blocks to work past, such as the routine deicide charges, the savior complex that conservative Christians so often exhibit is one that needs addressed. American Jews need true allies and support during times like these, as attacks on our communities increase in frequency and levels of violence. But we don't need saved. We don't need to be looked at as an opportunity to get on that pro-Israel Evangelical soapbox. We need people to simply recognize that antisemitism has deep roots in America and the only way to stop these attacks is to address each and every spring from which these roots are fed. It should be seen as the sacred duty of anyone who believes in Jesus to look at themselves, at their own communities first and reflect on how they themselves might very well be contributing to the hatred of any other people, be it Jews or immigrants or Muslims. 

Several of the following posts will be addressing antisemitism and how it works. These will discuss what distinctions should be made between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, why Ilhan Omar is not the antisemitic hate preacher the Republicans are casting her as and the need for all extremists who peddle antisemitic views to be taken on without relent.