I don't usually post this way. But I think it's kind of depressing that eight of the ten most recent posts here is about the torture issue. I don't really want to be Torture News Central for AOL-J!
So I'm posting the link to the following story, and I'll expand this post to comment on it later. The Jesus Landing Pad by Rick Perlstein Village Voice 05/18/04. It's about the very direct influence of apocalyptic Protestants on the Bush Administration's Middle East policies. (Article via Atrios.)
Okay, here's the continuation. The Perlstein article actually focuses on a Pentacostal group. A few clarifications of terms may be in order. Pentacostals are a type of conservative Protestant Christians. They normally distinguish themselves from "fundamentalists," and vice versa. But Pentacostals and fundamentalists agree on much of their theology. It's just that the Pentacostals have some rituals the fundamentalists think are weird, notably "speaking in tongues" and "prophecy". Also the Pentacostals are into exorcism. Harvey Cox's Fire From Heaven is a good general description of the Pentacostal movement.
One of the things that fundamentalists and Pentacostals do share in common is a particular apocalyptic view, i.e., their notion of the End Times. The relevant basics are this: Jesus will return in a glorious Second Coming and put an end to the world and to history and time. But before that happens, certain biblical prophecies must be fulfilled. These prophecies are conceived as predictions of the future. And they are interpreted in a fairly imaginative way, as follows.
Israel has to assume the political boundaries that the Scriptures say it had in the days of David and Solomon's United Monarchy, circa 1000 BCE. That would include lots of land now controlled by Israel's neighbors. And all the Jews of the world will go to the reunited Israel.
An evil leader called the Antichrist will lead a massive war against Israel. Most of the Jews will be killed in the war. Eventually, the remainder will convert to being Christians, i.e., stop being Jews. Jews in the world will never be able to live in peace until that time, when they are all killed off or convert to Christianity.
Adherents of this view are sometimes called "Christian Zionists," the "Zionist" part being a reference to the Zionist movement which founded Israel, based on the notion that (in the secular version) the Jews of the world needed a homeland they controlled in order for Jews in the Diaspora (outside Israel) to have a refuge if persecution came.
You might think a Christian theological notion that assumed that God's grand design for history involved the slaughter of most of the Jews of the world, and the remaining few putting a total end to Judaism by all converting to Christianity, would be a very anti-Semitic view. And you would basically be right. This view is very much based on the traditional - for the Catholic Church "pre-Vatican II" - view of the Jewish religion as an empty remnant, a false religion that rejected Jesus as the true Messiah. It's also a ludicrous reading of biblical prophecy.
But in fact, the Christian Zionists find a lot in common with Jewish apocalyptics, who have some simlilar readings of what will happen in the end times, though without the Jesus part. And because of their attachment to the idea of restoring Israel to the boundaries of the United Monarchy, they also have a great deal of political agreements with the hardline goals of Ariel Sharon's Likud Party.
Now, there's a dark side of this weird political alliance. The Likud hardliners tend to oppose peace agreements with the Palestinians because they want Israel to take over that land. The "Christian Zionists" also oppose Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements because they believe it's God's will that "the Jews" will never be allowed to live in peace as long as they keep being Jews.
If that weren't weird enough, our legitimate President actually buys into this bizarro vision of history. Or at least he panders big-time to the Christian Right types who do. Which is where the article linked above comes in.
The problem with trying to make politics in our grubby little world on the basis of divinely ordained maps, is that it's one thing to argue over borders and pieces of land. You can cut a deal over that. But when you're trying to negotiate over competing visions of the will of the Almighty, that is quite a bit trickier. Meanwhile, the conflicts in the Holy Land are promoting more and more hatred and killing here in our poor material world.
And Christians and Jews aren't the only ones inspired to war and killing by divine visions and missions, of course. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon write in The Age of Sacred Terror (2002) of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda:
For all their technical abilities, their medical degrees, and their engineering training, these men live in a world of signs and portents. Much like characters in scriptures - especially those who are given glimpses of the end of time - they find truth revealed in dreams. In the December 13 [2001] video, which shows bin Laden surrounded by adoring followers, there is an extended discussion of dreams. A year before the attacks, he relates, a man named Abu al-Hasan al-Masri told bin Laden that he had a dream in which "'we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots.' ... He didn't know anything about the operation until he heard it on the radio. He said the game went on and we defeated them. That was a good omen for us." Someone off-camera mentions another man who knew nothing of the conspiracy and had a vision of a plane hitting a tall building. A Saudi sheikh on-camera says that he was in Kandahar [Afghanistan] when "a brother" told him about another dream in which ther appeared a tall building in America and someone teaching karate. "At that point," the master terrorist confesses, "I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dreams."
God save us from all of his true believers who are so sure they know what his will for the world is!
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