Watching the first part of AlJazerra’s documentary on pro-Zionist Evangelical Christianity in the USA (‘Praying for Armageddon‘) on youtube makes for some truly chilling viewing.
As a Christian I stand with Palestine, in stark contrast to the Evangelicals in the above video. These Evangelical folks are so unhinged that they are supporting genocide without any clear ideas about a hermeneutic process. They pick up a document from two thousand years ago and think they can just read it literally. What they call ‘bible study’ has no historical basis in actual academic study of Christian hagiography whatsoever, it is purely the application of apocalypse-cult political propaganda.
For all their talk of discernment these people don’t have any criteria for distinguishing between good, bad or mediocre qualities of information. It’s like they wouldn’t know how to distinguish between say, a conspiracy theory video on youtube or netflix and a solid piece of investigative journalism in a documentary. In rejecting all institutions they have rejected the critical methodology that goes with them. They probably watched the original The Omen series of movies in the early 1980s and thought ‘you know, there’s a lot of truth in this’. It’s pathetic really.
An ancient collection of symbolic stories, poems and songs inspired by the Holy Spirit does not authorise current political decisions. Only critical analysis and ethical reflection based on present circumstances can justify any political decision. The holy scriptures were inspired, written at the time that they were needed: needed to be written and needed to be read. They were a blessed gift, saying what needed to be said so that those reading them would hear what they needed to hear in order to live better, blessed, lives. They gave meaning.
But inspiration is not given once and for all. Nor have the inspired cease to write. In saying this, I position myself in several traditions, which I hope to be transparent about. What I claim here in this post positions me either as a post-millennialist or an amilliennialist, but as somebody who is opposed to pre-millennialist dispensationalism, which all right wing pro-Zionist Evangelical ‘bible-thumpers’ (biblicists is the more charitable term I think) subscribe to by definition. I also position myself as continuationist as opposed to cessationist. This means that I believe that the documents of Christianity are still being inspired and written, and that there is no uniquely inherent inerrancy or infallibility intrinsic to the books of the bible (which were, as we all know, subject to many revisions, translations and shifting editorial exclusions). The Church Fathers, for example, were equally inspired in writing the texts of the Philokalia, and more recently clergy were inspired to produce the radical documents of the Vatican II council. The Holy Spirit still inspires works, all of which — like the bible itself — operate when understood within the contexts of their production and reception. Denominationally, I reside somewhere on the Anglo-Catholic side of Anglicanism, with some Methodist and some Eastern Orthodox influence. American Evangelical churches seem to me to practice as different a religion, and worship as different a God to mine as those of Hinduism, and this isn’t just a matter of differing cultural inflections but something far more fundamental and ontological.
The division scripture/tradition is too abrupt in American Evangelical circles. And tradition is a living, present reality—this is just what the true church is. The Corpus of the Word is a living, breathing Body. Obviously, tradition comes before scripture historically; if there had been no tradition, there would be no sense in writing things down and nobody to write it down. The ‘bible’ (from Gr. ta biblia ‘the books’) can only be as fundamental to Christianity as the existence of a Christian community to be inspired into writing and reading it. Seen from this perspective scripture too must be seen as being a dynamic organism, an articulation of organs or corpuscles with differing functions—the diversity of texts and their varying levels of reception. There are few cast-iron once and for all moments of decisiveness in such a wide-ranging and multi-levelled text, but instead many local and historical economies of meaning exist.
American Evangelical pro-Zionism is popular because a historically adolescent culture, rejecting any rites of passage into the humility of membership in a wider and more diverse international community that can include the global south and the Islamic world, also catastrophically fails to integrate and sublimate the reality of its own relativity—its aging, limitation, mortality and inevitable putrefaction. Failing to integrate aging, limitation and death into a way of life is lethal; what results is a psychopathology that does not take seriously the life, suffering and death of the other: as a friend has put it with regards to the IOF (but quite equally applicable to America’s high-school shooters drunk on internet-based right-wing fare such as qAnon and incel culture) the results are ‘brats with guns’.
There is not only a lack of hermeneutic sophistication but also of basic Christology in the kind of biker-Evangelical discourse we see depicted in the above video. For example, the incarnational and sacramental aspect of Christology might have taught these freewheeling pastors that Christ was born as flesh precisely to raise its spiritual status, to presage the Kingdom of God on Earth, not to prompt us to shun it in favour of some heavenly otherworld. The idea of the soul leaving the body upon death and living in heaven is not a Christian idea and cannot be found anywhere in Christianity; this is why the resurrection is such a difficult idea to accept for anybody new to Christianity but familiar with the ubiquitous New Age gnosticism that separates body and soul at death. For anybody serious about accepting Christianity, it is necessary to rethink all of that, because the resurrection promised to the faithful or the elect is precisely a fleshly resurrection, a reconstitution of the body. This is why ‘the rapture’ is such an ass-backwards idea, and is, one might even say, anti-Christian in its form. We aren’t, says genuine Christianity, going to heaven to be with Jesus Christ; on the contrary, heaven comes to us, to reconfigure life on earth.
Thinking the Kingdom refers to some discarnate noösphere in which the body has been once and for all dispensed with (against both Christian tradition and scripture) it is easy to see how a person with such a neo-gnostic mindset can blatantly ignore the material reality of other speaking bodies besides their own. What they come to worship then is the variety of ways in which they can discarnate, i.e. kill; this is religion for the Saw franchise, Purge and Squid Game generation for whom the only thrill is bodycount oneupmanship. Here assymmetric warfare becomes a Call of Duty social media crossover genre wherein we can never be sure if what we are witnessing is snuff. To the young dancing Zionist soldiers of TikTok that question really has no bearing. Nor do the Evangelical ‘biblical’ fundamentalists concern themselves with tens of thousands of dead Palestinian children. They can call themselves ‘warriors of God’ and that will handwave it all away.
Millenarian death-cults have existed before in the history of Christianity. Mostly they contained themselves and committed group suicides, or, disillusioned by the end never coming as prophesied, simply petered out. Unfortunately this one has got its hooks into geopolitics, and represents the biggest danger to world harmony and Christian values today. The more their rapture (an invented tradition) fails to arrive, the more they flail about in frustrated desperation and the harder it drives their support of the Zionist project of genocide, conquest and occupation. To them Palestinians are straw dogs, dominoes, not real people. Their language use reflects that, and it is reflected in the western media by the fact we never hear from an Arabic speaker, despite us having plenty of resources to translate. The Palestinians are left purposefully voiceless. Their children do not exist-our media calls a toddler hit by a sniper a ‘young lady’ to elide the fact that Palestinian children are real. It’s a bizarre and twisted circumlocution, like the way a Nazi commentator speaking about dead bodies in Auschwitz calls them ‘dolls’, unable to face the truth that they are corpses. Genocide twists and contorts language. The strangeness of the western media’s descriptions of the situation now in Palestine will be studied by future generations. They will wonder at us, how we were able to stand our leaders and our representatives.
Theriomorphous 