Real Change News | Christian Zionists’ Biblical bloodlust

October 29, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 47

Rev. Rich Lang

Christian Zionists’ Biblical bloodlust

by: Rev. Rich Lang

Like it? Share it!

At the center of Christian Zionism is the conviction that contemporary Israel is identical with Biblical Israel, with whom God gave an offer of land that would be in its possession forever. Politically, this has meant that there is a growing Christian militarism that justifies all of Israel’s national policies of expansion, including its apartheid policies directed at Palestinians. It is the Christian Zionist theology that is most intimately associated with advancing war against Iran, as well as teaching that we are living at the end of history.

Christian Zionists have, in effect, a death wish for our nation as well as planet earth. What brings a Christian Zionist joy is the thirst for the cleansing of the land of Israel, because when that happens, Jesus will return as a warrior seething in rage to exterminate all the unclean, unwashed sinners that refuse to convert others in his name.

Such savagery is now a commonplace in much of media Christianity. Long gone are the days when Jesus disarmed his followers, associated with the poor and outcast, and defended those caught in moral embarrassments. Today Jesus is muscular and mean, ready not merely for a fight but for annihilation.

At the heart of much of the religious right’s culture war against all things Obama, whether healthcare reform or international diplomacy, is a growing resentment against all things pluralist, all things scientific, all things ambiguous, and all things complex. The right wants a simple world of obedience and conformity. And they have no qualms against taking over the political realm by hook, crook or flat out force. After all, they affirm a God who is quite willing to order the extermination of all those who fail to live by God’s rules. They affirm a God who is quite willing to torture eternally the reprobate who refuse to acknowledge that Jesus has saved them from their sins.

At the heart of all this is the notion that the Bible is a supernatural communication dropped from heaven to earth. Rather than understand it as a historical testimony of a changing interpretation of who God is and how God acts in the history of first the Jews and then, within the New Testament, in the life of the church, Christian Zionists pervert metaphor into historical literalism; they attempt to embody the Bible as a manual of arms that, if followed, will eradicate evil from the land.

Such bloodlust is the source of much of the violence that is pushing up all across this country. It is the chickens coming home to roost from America’s original sin: the refusal to confess and atone for the European invasion and extermination of native peoples. An invasion and extermination justified by the belief that America was itself a New Israel, true Israel, a light to the nations. An invasion and extermination duplicated by contemporary Israel against Palestinians.

----