Sunday, March 19, 2023

The Politics of Christian Zionism

Here is a new movie on Christian Zionism:
If one wonders how nickels, dimes, and dollars collected in hundreds of churches across America shape the political decisions in the U.S. Congress and the State of Israel, director Maya Zinshtein’s film, ‘Til Kingdom Come, is required viewing.

A tour de force, her documentary—the culmination of three and a half years of research, relationship-building, and artistic film-making—exposes the peculiar bond between Christian Zionists, whose Biblical account of the last days calls for the death of two-thirds of the Jewish population, and Jewish colonists in the West Bank who welcome the Christians’ financial gifts and political influence but reject their theology.

Director Zinshtein takes the viewer inside the Binghamtown Baptist Church in rural Kentucky, where the Rev. Boyd Bingham, a third-generation pastor, preaches to his congregation beneath a Star of David imposed upon the cross in the front of the sanctuary, declaring, “We are the people that put Donald Trump in power.”

In a classroom where children have collected their loose change for Israel in buckets, Bingham tells them, “The Jews, they are better than us, all of us. You need to accept that… Every good thing we know, all the things we love about the Bible, they were given to us of the Jewish nation, Israel, their people, the Jews.”

This is baffling. If there is one group that Jews hate more than any other, it is evangelical Christians. Jews hate evangelical Christians more than they hate Moslems.

And yet these Christians raise money for Israel, and Jews gladly accept it.

No, none of the things we love about the Bible were given to us of the Jewish nation. The Bible teaches us that Christianity is a rejection of Judaism.

2 comments:

CFT said...

Roger,
the Old Testament is pretty much the Hebrew bible. The Ten Commandments contained there in is the foundation of ALL western civilization's common law, as is the idea of guilt and innocence by way of the individual. The New Testament is a very redacted (by way of Constantine) version of the many collected sayings of Jesus mixed in with much later added apocrypha (Revelations is speculated to be from around the time of Nostradamus), it doesn't even remotely belong among the other texts historically, while something like the reconstructed Gospel of Thomas probably does.

You should also be mindful of who you are talking about when you say 'Jews'. Reformed Judaism is much like the Unitarians, they love the artistic and cultural/historical trappings of faith without much required belief in God and any hardship in the discipline of observing said faith. Orthodox Jews (observant) actually do have some respect for many aspects of Christianity. Jesus was considered a practicing Jew of his times, he was seen as and spoken as such, though he did have problems with the temple being used as a financial instrument, and the hierarchical spiritual gateway keeping of both priesthoods (Sadducees and the Pharisees) he was not a 'Christian' by any stretch of the imagination, any more than Socrates or Aristotle though he treated as such by many.

Roger said...

Jesus was a Christian, not a Jew. Yes, Christians use the Old Testament as historical background, but that is about all Judaism and Christianity have in common.