‘Would it not really be better to avoid these labyrinths and simply preach virtue?’
-Voltaire, from the "The Questions of Zapata"

"Armageddon" by David Gassaway (Click on picture to enlarge)

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At root, crucial political issues in America, foreign and domestic, are still planted in the competing grounds of either progress or the apocalypse.  Many Protestant Fundamentalists believe in, and fight hard for, an American “civilization” that must be religious with its policies dictated by biblical truth and prophecy, while for Progressives, ethics and policy are autonomous fields of inquiry -- free from dogma and myth and amenable to skepticism -- in which value judgments are tested by their consequences.  These progressive notions of political practice are predicated on the ideals of the Enlightenment.  Conversely, the Christian Right operates with convictions premised on a deep understanding of dogma, on a scriptural faith that inspires fiercely passionate political engagement and often immunizes them from opponents unwilling to engage religious beliefs.  But what if faith were not so secure, or outright misplaced -- if scripture led to inexorable conduct beyond the realm of the tolerable or sane? What if Progressives were to challenge these fundamentals for political and rhetorical advantage, poke around a bit to see how firm they really are?

Since their socio-political mobilization in the Seventies, the dogmatic influence of the Christian Right has rumbled throughout all levels of government and with it calls for doctrinal purity, theological education, and opposition to the extension of civil rights to all Americans.  Higher laws than the universal application of Enlightenment ideals hold sway for true Fundamentalists, and these commandments and legends are sacrosanct.  Given this oppositional context, Biblical (and even Koranic) critiques are essential to intellectual honesty and discursive clarity; Progressives should be willing to submit the claims of religion to critical scrutiny, particularly when these tenets intrude into public policies and conventional wisdom.  The defense that faith alone impels scriptural beliefs should not end debate on their origins, values, or practice.  In trying to return Progressives to the universalist roots of the Enlightenment, Thomas de Zengotita, in the January 2003 issue of Harper’s tackles some of the philosophic concerns raised by post-modern critiques and identity politics.  Zengotita asks, almost as an afterthought,

Indeed.  There are many ways of saying so in different venues with varying degrees of volume.  If Progressives are not yet ready to mount a full campaign, perhaps a bit of a primer would be useful, a small array of arguments to pose to those absolutists who posit one true Christianity with a requisite political course. A reconnoitering of Protestant Fundamentalism should start by taking its claims of religious literalism literally, and in so doing, uncover a structural fault, that theologians to televangelists have drowned out through the ages by distraction and discordant melodies, primarily to the tune of faith—a patch-all for obvious philological flaws—and by whistling when there are a few missing notes in the symphony of Christian dogma.

Religious absolutism squirms within the perceived constraints and counterweights of a pluralist society, attempting to maintain integrity in the face of integration. Fundamentalist leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed find it difficult to maintain their doctrinal purity within the political world of compromises and pragmatism.  Long-term engagement in domestic politics, as in the case of Ralph Reed, involves an evolution away from a strictly Fundamentalist stance and into the Republican Party, becoming more liaison than priest.  Dogmatic claims and apocalyptic assertions are integrally ill-suited to quotidian politics, and when Fundamentalists stray too close to these core tenets, they risk ridicule and even horror.  Falwell and Roberston’s sick and delusional analyses of the September 11^th disaster, though consistent with their theology and practice, had to be publicly repudiated for them to maintain even minimal credibility. [1]

American Fundamentalists’ foreign policy adventures in Central America during the 1980s extend from the same beliefs and are equally noxious, but less well known. While Catholic priests and nuns bravely and even fatally protested the near genocidal policies of Central American regimes in the 70s and 80s, Fundamentalist Christian groups in America allied themselves with dictators in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, providing public relations advice and missionary aid. [2]    These crusades were launched to stem the perceived threat of communism, expand a domestic power base, and exert influence among converted military elites.  In a prime example, General Rios Montt , the bloody Guatemalan dictator, was won over to Pentecostalism by the Fundamentalist church, Gospel Outreach, interviewed by Pat Robertson in 1982 for the televangelist’s “700 Club,” and quickly promised aid and missionaries.  Gospel outreach pastors coordinated with the Reagan State Department to supply the Montt junta with humanitarian supplies and public relations promotions to counter its international reputation as a leading human rights abuser.  Entire villages were annihilated, and tens of thousands indigenous peoples massacred by counter-insurgency troops (many trained in Ft. Benning, Georgia) while Rios Montt’s American backers defended the “scorched earth” campaign in terms of religious struggle.  In one interview, a Gospel Outreach pastor justified the massacres thus:

In Guatemala and Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, the Reagan-era foreign policy of “Low Intensity Conflict,” an Orwellian euphemism for proxy guerilla warfare and death squads, was serviced and advanced by militant elements of the Christian Right.  With their “charitable” non-governmental organizations, Christian Right groups were permitted to violate the Neutrality Act, the Foreign Agent’s Registration act, and in some cases, their own tax-exempt status in order to expedite administration policy objectives.  Able to advocate at home and abroad, coordinate policy with adherents within the administration and even lend logistic support, Christian Right groups functioned as both agenda-setters and foreign policy assets for the Central American horrorshow. (Cuddling up to dictatorships in Africa even brought financial gain for Roberston. In addition to evangelizing, the good pastor managed to established a diamond mining concession with Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Zaire and a gold mining concession with Charles Taylor of Liberia. [4] )

Christian Fundamentalist support for Central American regimes was primarily an extension of anti-Communist ideals; advocacy for hardline Zionism however, runs closer to the core tenets of theological faith. As currently proposed by President Bush, a Middle East peace plan hinges on the removal of Jewish settlements in territory occupied by Israel since the 1967 War, a long-contentious proposal now reluctantly acceded to by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. For Fundamentalists like Falwell, the only Gentile to be awarded the Jabotinsky medal for the defense of Zionism, the Palestinian-held West Bank is an integral part of Israel, and “not one inch” of settlement territory can be surrendered for peace. [5] On this issue, Protestant Fundamentalists can not retract, retreat, or negotiate, for their variant of Zionism combines apocalyptic hopes with a conviction in the preordained mass conversion of Jews to Christianity (after two-thirds of them have perished), and (as explained below) the very justification for the divergence of Christianity as a religion suitable for Gentiles. Christian Zionists hold that the only Israelis who are really obeying God are those armed settlers who refuse to leave occupied territory, and Fundamentalist churches such as Precept Ministries of Chatanooga Tennessee organize pilgrimages to these settlements as if they were holy sites. [6] When delusions of Armageddon threaten a viable peace plan for a conflict that has cost so much, Progressives must directly challenge fundamentalist policy and attack its theological underpinnings.

So why does the Christian Right engage in these apocalyptic escapades? How has faith and fundamentalism segued from vicious anti-communism and anti-Semitism to Zionism?  Why is Pat Robertson, whose 1991 book The New World Order railed against a conspiracy of masons, Hollywood, John Lennon, and Jewish bankers, now joining his compatriot Jerry Falwell in Zionism? What of the Jews?  How did the Jewish Messiah end up the Christian Messiah and the recalcitrance of God’s Chosen People reduced to a theological conundrum?  Can it be that a fissure within the New Testament and the early Christianities over this vital slippage replays itself throughout history?

The teleological slide from anti-Semitism to Zionism starts atop the alleged messianic prophecies about Jesus' birth, the most famous being his immaculate conception. The gospels of Matthew (1:18-25) and Luke (1:26-35) both claim that Jesus was born of a virgin, but only Matthew (1:23) appeals to the Hebrew scriptures as an explanation for why this should be relevant and not just creepy. The infamous, oft mistranslated verse, Isaiah 7:14, reads: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call his name Immanuel.” [7]

Whenever they felt safe to do so, Jewish scholars have ribbed Christian theologians over the many problems with this passage. As Hebraic speakers have noted, the Hebrew word translated as “virgin” in this verse is “almah,” which is more accurately translated simply as “young woman.” The Hebrew word “bethulah” means “virgin.” In the Book of Isaiah, “bethulah” appears four times, [8] so its author(s) were certainly cognizant of the word. In the New American Standard translation of the Bible, all other appearances of “almah” are translated as “girl,” “maid,” or “maiden,” a rather tidy example of cognitive dissonance (viz: Genesis 24:43, Exodus 2:8, Psalms 68:25, Proverbs 30:19, Song of Solomon 1:3, 6:8). The claimed messianic fulfillment inserts a biologically impossible condition never mentioned in the original prophecy. [9] Nowhere in the Old Testament is there any mention of virgin births and many theologians and anthropologists have traced the myth to Greek paganism.

But what were the Jews expecting from their Messiah?  The Messiah, according to Isaiah and Ezekiel, will return the Jews to the Holy Land of Israel, liberate them from their oppressors, sit upon the throne of David, and rebuild the Temple of Solomon. “All government shall be on his shoulders (Isaiah 9:6).” The purpose of the Messiah—a political, military, and spiritual leader—is to bring about the day when all Jews will observe the Torah and teach all humankind of its truths. Nowhere in the Torah does it state that the Messiah will abolish it. The Torah is eternal.  For his part, Jesus was born into a holy land already inhabited by the Jews, died leaving them under the Roman sword, and sought during his life to throw out most of the Torah, reducing its over 600 commandments to a mere ten. [10]

Or did he? Initially, in Matthew 5:17-20 Jesus announced that he did not come to destroy the laws of Moses but to fulfill them, and that until the end of the world the commandments should not be altered by “one jot or one tittle.” However, the nature and mission of Jesus radically changes by the Gospel of John, [11] which even Renaissance thinkers thought the product not of a Hebrew but of a Greek Platonist. No observant Jew familiar with Torah, argued Voltaire from the distance of the Enlightenment, would so crudely contradict its foundational message. [12]

So what were the Jews to do with this new message espoused by Jesus?  As always, turn to the Torah, specifically Deuteronomy 13:1-5, which warns of the occasional prophet or “dreamer of dreams” that might want to lead the Jews astray. [13]   If such a shyster does arrive and attempt to lead them away from the commandments then “ that prophet, that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death.”  So they did, on advice of scripture.  The Jews who condemned Christ took their religious documents literally.  They were, in their own fashion, Fundamentalists, defending their sacred text against a rebel who preached its irrelevance and declared himself a demigod.

Criticism based on blatant contradictions and obvious mistranslations between the Old and New Testaments are far from novel.  Early European Renaissance writers received from Islamic scholars like Averroes and Avicenna not only Greek philosophy that Europe had lost in the Dark Ages, but well-argued attacks on Christian dogma.  Luther and Erasmus knew of the mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14 and Luther struggled to dismiss it through tedious chronologies of messianic genealogy.   Both men hoped to right the spinning top of a New Testament that teetered and slewed between the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophy, praying that it had enough centripetal force to overcome the occasional wobble.

These wobbles were highlighted with the late 18^th Century rise of “Higher Criticism” in Germany, an academic discipline that applied the new techniques of literary analysis, archaeology, and comparative linguistics to the Bible. By 1900, the great German Church historian, Adolf von Harnack, argued that Jesus began a reform movement within the Jewish prophetic tradition, was crucified for it, and for the next 150 years early Christians mucked about the Mediterranean living in expectation that the apocalypse was nigh. [14] Modern biblical studies show that throughout the early Jesus Movement a battle erupted over and between the cult’s distinct Jewish roots and its painful transition to a Gentile religion within the Greco-Roman world, a process that fragments the movement into competing gospels and Christianities. [15] These philological and philosophical disagreements are apparent within the four gospels and the epistles of Paul, and reoccur as a terrifying fissure for adherents up to present fundamentalism.

During his life, according to the first three gospels, Jesus evidently took being the Jewish Messiah quite seriously and ordered his followers to preach only to the Jews, the “lost sheep of Israel,” not the Gentiles (Matthew 10:5-7); and when the prophecies about the military and political restoration of Israel did not come to pass in Jesus lifetime, the gospels of Matthew (4) and Mark (13:30) stalled for time, saying that all of them would be fulfilled within one generation of Jesus’s death. Into this time of uncertainty and anticipation comes a new apostle, Paul.  A Jewish tax collector who worked for the Romans, Paul was well versed in Greek and converted to Christianity along the road to Damascus.  Paul argues voraciously against Jesus’ remaining disciples (mainly Peter and James) about the salvific nature of the Messiah and who the audience is for his redemption and suffering.  The original apostles wish to keep the nascent movement Jewish, and bring converts into the rituals and traditions of the Torah, but Paul, in the fierce debates in Antioch, breaks with the initial followers of Christ and brings his own disciple, Titus, a Gentile, into the Christian fold. Non-Jews are worthy of salvation, according to Paul, because of his own revelation which proclaimed his mission to preach to them and on account of the messianic prophecies of Isaiah, in which the Messiah acts as a light to the Gentiles. Paul believes the prophesied messianic age arrived with Jesus, and that a brief window of opportunity exists for bringing the Gentiles into the elect status alongside the people of Israel. Paul weaves together an apocalyptic message of what the coming kingdom of God is about to be, predicated on the inclusion of the gentiles.  The Gentiles are saved only near the end of the world. 

But what of the Jews, can they be so glibly dismissed in Christian theology?  How could messianic promises made to them suddenly become irrelevant?  Shouldn’t their rejection of Jesus prove he’s not the Messiah?  Paul, with a zealot’s disdain for his former beliefs, preached that God has hardened the hearts of the Jews against Jesus, just as he hardened the heart of Pharoah against the Jews. In Paul’s letters to the Romans the target audience for Christian faith jumps.  No longer does the covenant of God revolve on promises made to his Chosen People, for ironically the very things they were commanded to do have become their impediments. [16] “But Israel . . . follows the law of righteousness hath not obtained [salvation], because they sought it not by faith but as it were works of law, for they stumbled on that stumbling stone. . .  I say then that they stumbled that they should fall?  God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation has come to the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy.” [17]

Just as God sacrificed his only begotten son (sort of, since he was immortal and omniscient), he has sacrificed his chosen people as well, to make them jealous of Christian salvation.  Ultimately, Christian dogma tells us from passages in Romans and Revelation, Israel will be saved when Christ comes again.  Paul writes in Romans that “time has grown short;” the Jews will be saved soon, and he goes so far as to console the congregants in Thessaloniaka when some of their members die before the imminent apocalypse.  When the prophecies of impending doom didn’t happen, the early church—now essentially a religious commonwealth within the Roman empire—had to turn elsewhere for sustenance, and following Paul’s lead gets thoroughly entangled with Greek philosophy. [18]   Says Adolf von Harnack, “The Christian Church and its doctrine were developed within the Roman World and Greek culture [19] in opposition to the Jewish Church.”

Within this slippery dogmatic slope slides a lot of anti-Semitism. The great literary critic Walter Benjamin, after finishing Harnack’s “History of Dogma,” concludes in a letter to his friend Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem that much of the early Christian anger towards the Jews must have its roots in this theological hijacking of the Old Testament. Benjamin wrote: “This was, of course, originally done in the hope of wrestling the Old Testament from the Jews, and without an awareness of historical consequences, since people lived in anticipation of the imminent end.  Because of this, universal and historical enmity of Christians against Judaism had to be created.” [20]  

Benjamin is on to something quite profound here, and we can trace the unease, the dogmatic wrestlings of Paul and the ultimate rage of Protestantism over Jewish intransigence to the life of Luther.  Luther, early in his career, lambasted the Catholic prosecution of the Jews, saying that they were the blood relations of Christ and he held out hope for mass Jewish conversions to Christianity through Christian kindness (in his “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew”).  Since he, Luther, had cleansed Christianity of all the Catholic mumbo jumbo and papal groveling, the Jews could now accept the true gospel of Protestant faith.   And when they didn’t, Luther set off on a thunderous rage and published “On The Jews and Their Lies” where he recommended what should be done to them: Their synagogues should be burned down, their houses razed and destroyed, their books taken from them, their money seized and instruments of labor handed to them so that they may honestly work.  Luther stormed: “For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat.” Luther’s denunciations and solutions read like a blueprint for the racialist horrors of Kristallnacht. 

Enlightenment thinkers, prizing reason over dogma and working among the safety of multiple Christianities could afford to be less dogmatic, but were still far from kind to the Jews.  Voltaire evinced no appreciation for the depths of mythic truth, for the sublime poetry or the ambiguities of interpretation of the Talmud.  For him, the Old Testament was a collection of strident laws and sun-addled prophecies of an ancient tribe of bellicose goatherds, containing such barbarity and ignorance that Enlightenment thinkers must explain away how such repellent stories could be the basis of a civilization that prided itself on competitive rationalism.  Voltaire notes in his essay “Homily on the Interpretation of the Old Testament” that mankind, from the empyrean heights of Enlightenment science, has made tremendous advances in astronomy, physics, and biology since the days of the benighted Hebrews and concludes that God, in the Old Testament, was simply condescending to his chosen people: “We must remember,” he writes, “that, in speaking thus to the Jews, God deigned to accommodate himself to their intelligence, which was still very crude.” He cautions, “The Jewish people were stiff of neck and hard of understanding.  It was necessary to give coarse food to a coarse people, which could find sustenance only in such food.  It seems that this first chapter of Genesis was an allegory presented to them by the Holy Spirit, to be interpreted some day by those whom God would fill with light.”  The Old Testament then, was composed of simple allegories for a simple folk.  The new metaphysics of science and philosophy could still be interpreted through the New Testament, but only through our favorite, most lucid passages. 

So too with modern fundamentalism, as trenchantly illustrated by Karen Armstrong in her The Battle for God, [21] in which she diagnoses a reactionary pathology in the attempt to fuse the syncretic—mythos with logos.   There is a place for myth in our society to describe the deeper, more primal realities of human experience and the pysche: the conventionally incomprehensible subjects of rape and redemption, massacres and madness, hallucinations and the holy, derangement and the divine.  Armstrong cautions that what myth has to say of these forces beyond reason we should regard as a form of truth, but they are not rational. Myths of a messianic age in which salvation and immanent destruction are hopelessly condensed and entangled do not hold up well to reason or political practice.  Ancient Christian tradition loosely based from Isaiah, Romans, and the deranged visions from the Book of Revelation hold that Jews in the end times will be converted, en masse, before the return of Christ, and with the founding of Israel in 1948, many Protestant sects, already prone to apocalyptic fantasies, eagerly awaited the return of the Messiah.  In the interim they must defend the Jewish state and proselytize among the stubborn.  They love the Jews for what they will be, but revile them for what they are. Faith and linguistic legerdemain alone will not prop up the rickety structure of prophecy and promise, and so the apocalypse must be advocated for, ever present, even implemented.  The New Testament, taken as a constituent whole built atop a mistranslated Old Testament, stripped of gnostic mysticism and interpreted literally points only in one direction: Armageddon. Progressives, in engaging Fundamentalists over ethics or politics, must never hesitate to point this out and question the suitability of such a worldview in forming policy.