- Banned
- #1
"The problem is a Protestant one, going right back to sixteenth-century Reformation. From Martin Luther onwards, many Protestants have eagerly been awaiting an imminent end to the world, the return of Christ in glory. Reading the Bible, it’s easy to link this to the idea that a necessary precondition for Christ to return is that his ancient people the Jews convert to the Christian faith; and so many Protestants have sought the right conditions for that to happen. It was one of the reasons that the Puritan statesman Oliver Cromwell agreed to the readmission of the Jews to England in the 1650s, after more than three centuries of expulsion; so the English could convert them. But by the nineteenth century there was a further thought: the Jews must return to their Promised Land of Israel. In 1846 there was founded a worldwide Evangelical Alliance. One of its main concerns was to return Jews to Palestine and convert them there; German and British Evangelicals even backed the setting-up of a new Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem to provide for the conversion (the first bishop was indeed a converted Jewish rabbi). This was an unprecedentedly practical attempt to hasten on the Last Days, that recurrent Protestant preoccupation. The Evangelical Alliance found many other battles to fight as new threats to the Evangelical world-view repeatedly emerged, but its first close association with Jerusalem projects was a precocious sign that international Evangelical Protestantism was going to link itself to the fate of the land of Palestine, even before many Jews began to share that concern.
American Evangelicals made common cause with the Jewish community in the United States, and they seemed to care little if at all for the opinions or the sufferings of their fellow-Christians in the ancient Churches of the Middle East.
Fast-forward to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. For some years after that, American relations with Israeli governments were dominated by power politics. They were not even particularly warm, especially at the time of the 1956 crisis in which the Israelis aligned themselves militarily with the British and French around Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. When the decisive American swing towards an alliance with Israel came in 1962, it was still motivated by power politics, and was not associated with Republicans but with President John F. Kennedy’s liberal Democratic Administration, which was furious at the aggressive policies adopted by President Nasser of Egypt. At that stage, of course, American politicians were not generally keeping a worried eye on Evangelical political opinion. When in the 1980s they did, they discovered a large constituency emphatically in favour of Israel, precisely for reasons related to the apocalypse. It was the same longing to bring on the Last Days which back in the 1840s had enthused the newly-founded Evangelical Alliance and the promoters of the Jerusalem Bishopric. That consideration routed the widespread contrary impulse in American Protestant circles to anti-Semitism, historically seen at its worst in the racism of the Ku Klux Klan.
Why Won t the West Defend Middle Eastern Christians - The Daily Beast
American Evangelicals made common cause with the Jewish community in the United States, and they seemed to care little if at all for the opinions or the sufferings of their fellow-Christians in the ancient Churches of the Middle East.
Fast-forward to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. For some years after that, American relations with Israeli governments were dominated by power politics. They were not even particularly warm, especially at the time of the 1956 crisis in which the Israelis aligned themselves militarily with the British and French around Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. When the decisive American swing towards an alliance with Israel came in 1962, it was still motivated by power politics, and was not associated with Republicans but with President John F. Kennedy’s liberal Democratic Administration, which was furious at the aggressive policies adopted by President Nasser of Egypt. At that stage, of course, American politicians were not generally keeping a worried eye on Evangelical political opinion. When in the 1980s they did, they discovered a large constituency emphatically in favour of Israel, precisely for reasons related to the apocalypse. It was the same longing to bring on the Last Days which back in the 1840s had enthused the newly-founded Evangelical Alliance and the promoters of the Jerusalem Bishopric. That consideration routed the widespread contrary impulse in American Protestant circles to anti-Semitism, historically seen at its worst in the racism of the Ku Klux Klan.
Why Won t the West Defend Middle Eastern Christians - The Daily Beast
