Meet the new Zionists
The members of the Christian Coalition of America
are some of the most passionate defenders of Israel
in the United States. There's just one catch: they want
to convert all Jews to Christianity. Matthew Engel
reports on an unholy alliance
"They don't love the real Jewish
people," the author Gershom Gorenberg told the CBS
programme 60 Minutes. "They love us as characters in their
story, in their play, and that's not who we are. If you listen to the
drama that they are describing, essentially it's a five-act play in
which the Jews disappear in the fourth act."
Monday October 28, 2002
The Guardian
At first sight, the scene is very familiar: one that happens in
Washington DC and other major American cities all the time. On
the platform, an Israeli student is telling thousands of supporters
how the horrors of the year have only reinforced his people's
determination. "Despite the terror attacks, they'll never drive us
away out of our God-given land," he says.
This is greeted with whoops and hollers and waving of Israeli
flags and the blowing of the shofar, the Jewish ceremonial ram's
horn. Then comes the mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, who is
received even more rapturously. "God is with us. You are with
us." And there are more whoops and hollers and flag-waves and
shofar-blows.
This support is not offered with any ifs or buts either. The
placards round the hall insist that every inch of the Holy Land
should belong to Israel and that there should never be a
Palestinian state. These assertions are backed up by biblical
quotations. It could be a rally in Jerusalem for those Israelis who
think Ariel Sharon is a dangerous softie.
But something very strange is going on here. There are
thousands of people cheering for Israel in the huge Washington
Convention Centre. But not one of them appears to be Jewish, at
least not in the conventional sense. For this is the annual
gathering of a very non-Jewish organisation indeed: the Christian
Coalition of America.
And the strangest thing of all is not their support, which is a
novel and important development in American politics, but the
thinking that lies behind it - which is altogether more chilling to
Israel's traditional supporters than all the cheers and flags would
suggest. You might also describe it as downright weird.
In a country where weekly church attendance is about 20 times
the level it is in Britain (40% v 2%), the relationship between
religion and politics in the US is intense. And there is little doubt
that, last spring, when President Bush dithered and dallied over
his Middle East policy before finally coming down on Israel's
side, he was influenced not by the overrated Jewish vote, but by
the opinion of Christian "religious conservatives" - the
self-description of between 15 and 18% of the electorate. When
the president demanded that Israel withdraw its tanks from the
West Bank in April, the White House allegedly received 100,000
angry emails from Christian conservatives.
A decade ago, when the president's father was in the White
House, his eldest son's election-time job was to act as unofficial
ambassador to this group, offer assurances that they and the
administration were at one on such matters as abortion and
pornography and prayer in schools, the issues they like to group
together as "family values". US-Israel relations, which reached
rock bottom when George Bush Sr was president and the
obstreperous Yitzhak Shamir was Israeli prime minister, were
never an issue.
What's changed? Not the Book of Genesis, which is what
Michael Brown, the coalition's church liaison officer, quotes
when you ask him to explain the support for Israel. "And I will
make of thee a great nation," the Lord told Abraham, "And I will
bless them that bless thee and curse them that curse thee."
On the conference floor, however, the explanation has more to
do with the end of the world than the start of it. What has really
changed is the emergence of the doctrine known as
"dispensationalism", popularised in the novels of the Rev Tim
LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. LaHaye and Jenkins may not mean
much to you or to the readers of the New York Times Book
Review, but the ninth volume of their Left Behind series sold
three million hardback copies in the US last year, eclipsing John
Grisham.
Central to the theory - based on a reading of scripture Brown
would prefer not to discuss - is the Rapture, the second coming
of Christ, which will presage the end of the world. A happy
ending depends on the conversion of the Jews. And that, to cut
a long story very short, can only happen if the Jews are in
possession of all the lands given to them by God. In other
words, these Christians are supporting the Jews in order to
abolish them.
Oh yes, agreed Marion Pollard, a charming lady from Dallas who
was selling hand-painted Jerusalem crystal in the exhibition hall
at the conference. "God is the sovereign. He'll do what he
pleases. But based on the scripture, those are the guidelines."
She calls herself a fervent supporter of Israel, as does Lewis Hall
of North Carolina. "I believe they do have to accept the
Messiah." And if they don't? "I believe they will when they know
who He is. I believe that one day they are going to wake up. It
might take a third world war to do that."
Meanwhile, outside the hall was Leanne Cariker from Oklahoma,
carrying a placard saying "Just Say No! To A Palestinian State".
Her support of Israel is based on the same premise. "The Bible
says there is no way to worship God except through the son,"
she explains.
To add to the bizarreness of this scene, she was standing
opposite another group of demonstrators: anti-Zionist Hasidic
Jews from Brooklyn in long black coats, who oppose the state of
Israel based on their own reading of the Bible. Confused? You
should be. Poor Leanne Cariker was. "I'm not against them,"
she wailed. "I'm for them. I believe they're God's chosen people."
You might think these Christian activists represent the furthest
shores of American politico-religious wackiness. The politicians
don't think so. This conference began with a videotaped
benediction straight from the Oval office. Some of the most
influential republicans in Congress addressed the gathering
including - not once, but twice - Tom DeLay, who is hot favourite
to take over as majority leader of the House of Representatives
after the midterm elections on November 5, thus becoming
arguably the most powerful man on Capitol Hill.
"Are you tired of all this, are you?" he yelled to the audience.
"Nooooooo!" they roared back. "Not when you're standing up for
Jews and Jesus, that's for sure," he replied.
Jews habitually do not stand up for Jesus (although this
conference did have a sprinkling of Messianic Jews, who do just
that). But most Jewish leaders have opted to shrug, accept the
Christians' support and let them whistle for their conversions.
That certainly goes for Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister,
reportedly greeted "like a rock star" by Christian evangelicals in
Jerusalem last month. More thoughtful leaders are at least
concerned.
"I'm going to take the support because Israel needs it," said
Rabbi Jerome Epstein, vice-president of the US's conservative
(in this context middle-of-the-road) Jewish organisation, the
United Synagogue. "Their theology is in a different world. We
can cope with it. If I convince them not to support Israel, are
they going to give up their attempt to convert Jews? No."
Not everyone accepts this. "They don't love the real Jewish
people," the author Gershom Gorenberg told the CBS
programme 60 Minutes. "They love us as characters in their
story, in their play, and that's not who we are. If you listen to the
drama that they are describing, essentially it's a five-act play in
which the Jews disappear in the fourth act."
This is not something speakers at the rally are anxious to
emphasise. DeLay was followed by Pat Robertson, the
coalition's founder, sometime presidential candidate and the very
personification of the successful American TV evangelist:
blow-dried hair, stick-on smile, expensive suit, honeyed voice
and certainty of tone.
Robertson prefers to dwell on Arab plans to drive Israel into the
sea and the iniquity of Yasser Arafat and "his gang of thugs".
But he also cites the stories of Joshua and David to prove
Israel's ownership of Jerusalem "long before anyone had heard of
Mohammed".
Robertson has now retired from the coalition, leaving it in the
hands of Roberta Combs, a grandmother from South Carolina
who has the longest and most scarlet fingernails I have ever
seen. She scratches them across the table when she wants to
make a point. In an interview, her most vigorous point is in
support of Bush. "I think he's a great president. I think he's a
caring person. First of all, he's a Christian, which I identify with.
He's pro-family, he's pro-life, he's a friend of mine."
Combs is not in the Robertson league as a communicator. And
when I shift the conversation round to Israel, she discovers an
urgent need to attend to her toddler grandson, leaving me with
her aide Michael Brown. The prevailing view is that the coalition,
a powerful voice in the early 90s, is not the force it was.
This is partly held to be due to her failings, and partly to the
rhetorical excesses of Robertson and his ally Jerry Falwell,
leader of the Moral Majority, especially in September last year
when Falwell, on Robertson's TV show, blamed the attacks on,
among others, "the pagans and the abortionists and the
feminists and the gays and the lesbians".
The other week Falwell called Mohammed a terrorist, which
might have accounted for his unexplained non-appearance at the
conference. But even the coalition's most tireless opponent does
not sense any kind of victory. Rev Barry Lynn, himself an
ordained minister and head of the pressure group Americans
United for Separation of Church and State, likes to start his
speeches by saying: "The good news is that the Christian
Coalition is fundamentally collapsing. The bad news is that the
people who ran it are all in the government." Whenever he goes
over to the department of justice, he keeps running into Pat
Robertson's old lawyers.
The linkage between the Christian right and the Republican party
is getting ever stronger, especially in the electorally crucial
states of the south and west. And Lynn is alarmed at the
prospects for the midterm elections. The Republicans are quite
likely to regain control of the Senate, removing the roadblock
that currently stops the president appointing conservative judges
("impartial judges", according to most Republicans; "rabid
rightwingers," according to their opponents) to lower courts and,
when the expected vacancies arise, to the supreme court. This
will give the right, and most particularly the religious right,
unprecedented influence over all three branches of government in
Washington.
"Karl Rove [Bush's political guru] has said publicly you cannot
alienate your base. You cannot alienate that 18% of religious
conservatives. You don't mess with these people," says Lynn.
"They want you to be just as they are. And Bush is just as they
are. He may waffle on one or two issues, such as stem-cell
research. But fundamentally he comes down on their side."
In the short term this might not alter American life all that much.
It might take a generation for the Supreme Court to roll back the
restrictions that, for instance, forbid prayer in school. The
abortion debate is for the moment dormant. Neither the
churches nor the government show any sign of imposing
teenage sexual abstinence any time soon. Not before, say, the
conversion of the Jews.
One of the points Robertson likes to emphasise is to reject
accusations that the coalition's support of Israel is a "Johnny
come lately experience". "We've been with them through thick
and thin," he says. This is a point made by several of his
supporters, one of whom presses on me a little booklet with
quotes from Christian theologians on the subject. He especially
recommends the one from Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century
puritan divine. "The Jews in all their dispersions shall cast away
their old infidelity," said Edwards, "and shall have their hearts
wonderfully changed, and abhor themselves for their past
unbelief and obstinacy. They shall flow together to the blessed
Jesus."
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