The stunning and ominous rise of anti-Semitism in the United States cannot be disputed, but it can be resisted. It is especially the duty of true Christians to participate in the suppression through education of the ancient evil. It is the special duty of Christian institutions – churches, colleges, publishing houses and more – to do their part to make this sin once again an obvious source of shame and to help heal those who suffer from it and, where sin cannot be cured, to push it back by shaming and shunning it into the deepest shadows where it belongs.
Christianity did not invent anti-Semitism. It existed before Christ and the empires of the ancient world would target the Jews for many reasons. But once Christianity emerged and dominated Europe, anti-Semitism spread alongside and within much of the church.
Some, but not enough, of the Church have always spoken out against anti-Semitism and today’s costumed version – anti-Zionism – and continue to do so. Saint John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict have been the most visible and outspoken opponents of anti-Semitism within the Catholic Church in my lifetime, but many others have noted true Christianity’s clear, persistent hostility to the sin of hatred, embedded in hatred of Jews or their country.
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When Colorado Christian University—originally founded in 1914 as Denver Bible College, but now a thriving university in Lakewood, Colorado—invited me to a day of teaching, parties, and lectures, I chose as my topic the reasons why Americans of all faiths, or none at all, should support Israel. I added the obvious in these comments: it is sinful for Christians to hate Jews or Israel.
That’s hardly a lightning bolt, even for those who are “somewhat churchy.” But. I especially wanted to emphasize that America is an ally of Israel for non-theological reasons – reasons that Christians should be familiar with. It’s bad writing to reproduce speeches and brand them in columns, but here in abbreviated form is the argument I made.
First, in a dangerous world, even the dominant superpower – the United States – needs allies, especially now that the People’s Republic of China is making efforts to gain an equal position in the military and intelligence spheres, as well as in the economic sphere.
The State of Israel is objectively the most important ally of the United States. It is a nuclear power. It is the equal of any army in the world in its ability to strike far and hard and dominate its region. It is an intelligence superpower and an engine of technological excellence and ever-greater breakthroughs. If a country had to choose one strong ally not named the United States, it would choose Israel.
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Israel is also a reliable and fully integrated military ally. Israel takes what the United States makes and improves it, as was the case with the F-35 fighter. Sometimes it takes the rudiments of a technology to develop and deploy it at scale, as with Iron Dome and soon Iron Beam. This progress will return to America as the Golden Dome and the Golden Beam. I wish Israel would get into shipbuilding on a large scale, but we have allies in South Korea and Japan who are doing just that.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Israel shares America’s founding values of individual liberty and democratic government. Israel is as politically difficult as the US, but freedom of speech is as robust there as it is here. Human rights are just as respected there as here. It is a ‘Western nation’ in every sense, despite having had to fight for its existence since the modern founding of the state in 1948.
I also quickly reminded the audience that, as a matter of American law, whether constitutional, statutory, or treaty-based, the United States recognizes Israel as a nation-state with all the rights and responsibilities of a nation-state.
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“Zionism” – the term originated in the late 19th century movement to restore the Jewish homeland to the ancestral lands of the Jews – is not some ideological outlier but very much a historical movement that culminated in the United Nations’ recognition of Israel as a nation-state through actions by both that body’s General Assembly and Security Council. The United States participated in that process and voted for it. While theology may underlie some Americans’ support for Israel, for most Americans the belief in the rule of law is the best and lasting argument for supporting Israel, because American law has pledged to respect the Israeli nation.
After Hamas’s invasion of Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, and the massacre and kidnapping that followed, one would have predicted the death of much of anti-Semitism in the West, so terrible was the brutality of that day and so vicious and hideous the unmasked face of Jew-hatred.
Instead, and to the horror of many, Israel’s just war to retrieve its prisoners and destroy Hamas’s threat to the state led not only to more attacks on the country of Hezbollah based in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the “head of the snake” in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also to a geyser of Jew-hatred in the United States.
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What was marginal and a marginalized, weird, cult-like and conspiratorial belief system suddenly went mainstream and apparently became a much bigger phenomenon than most Americans thought possible (or at least that world seemed in the funhouse mirrors of the web). Anti-Semitism and the subset of the old evil called anti-Zionism is still an outlier in American public opinion, but the damage this abhorrent ideology has done to the collective American psyche after 10/7 is significant Because those possessed by this abhorrent hatred feel free to express it in public.
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So it is long past time for Americans, and especially mainstream Christian Americans, to raise the theological arguments against anti-Semitism – it is indeed a serious sin for Catholics, a “mortal sin” – and just as important, if not more so, the secular arguments of pro-Zionism, as briefly outlined above.
America needs a healthy polity, free from all racial and religious hatred, and it needs allies as strong and reliable as Israel. These two arguments cannot be made often enough in too many places, but both should be made especially within and within any institution that identifies itself as “Christian.” I thank Colorado Christian University for giving me the opportunity to do this.
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