Evangelising for Israel

I read today that according to Pew, 82% white evangelical Christians in the US believe that Israel was given to the Jews by God. Whereas only 40% of Jews subscribe to this view.

While this may not surprise us, it is an astounding statistic. All the more astounding for how true it rings.

After all to be Christian is to believe that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, and also to believe that the Jews stand in rejection of him.

To be Evangelical is to believe in an individual duty to preach Jesus to the unconverted.

Apparently, in America, Jewish people have an exemption from evangelism. I can think of a good few people who might want to feign a Jewish background as a result.

This represents a remarkable shift. Jews were routinely persecuted in Europe for several hundred years. Anti Semitism did not stop at the Atlantic's eastern shore, but crossed to the new world. Significant Americans, and significant numbers of ordinary Americans were casually or actively anti Semitic well into the 1970s. The Ku Klux Klan, that barometer of old school racism, peddled hatred of Jews just as easily as hatred of blacks.

But something has changed. If an organisation representing the worst of the extreme right was to be founded today, very likely it would be talking about 'Judeo Christian heritage'. For the right, Jews are no longer part of 'them', rather they are now part of 'us'.

So a Republican candidate, to win the presidential nomination, must seriously love Israel. The question is, will that help them win the election? Like so many hot issues for Republicans in general, and evangelicals in particular, saying what the primary voters want to hear means saying things that ordinary voters think sound insane.

Democracy is a wonderful thing. Grass roots movements like the tea party are amongst the most democratic of all movements. But they are not mainstream. If Republicans don't find a way to get more mainstream candidates past the committed base of Evangelicals, not only will elections be hard to win, but winning them will have consequences. These consequences will be bad news for the Republicans. Governing (if only in part) in the interests of another nation cannot end well. And it must have less than ideal consequences for the US, too. But worst of all, the alliance between the Republican right and Israel is really an alliance between the Republican right and the Israeli right. It isn't even to the benefit of all Israeli Jews.

It seems to me that most educated Americans must know all this. But the train is hurtling down the track and the brakes have failed. No one knows how to stop it.