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Date Posted: 14:42:54 05/08/01 Tue
Author: Kelli
Subject: An Israeli look at Christianity

I thought everyone would find this interesting:

Fundamental but not Funny

by Gershom Gorenberg

I was reading a book that was set largely in the country where I live, but the characters called �jews� might as well have been named hobbits or warlocks.

My son and I were stretched out in a hammock between two trees in the backyard of the country house where we like to vacation. It�s in the hills of the Galilee, away from the noise and exhaust of Jerusalem; from the yard we could see the town of Tiberias and all of Lake Kinneret�the Sea of Galilee�shimmering blue, and the Golan Heights rising dark and green behind it.

My son was reading The Phantom Tollbooth yet again and giggled occasionally. I was reading Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. And suddenly I started laughing harder than my son, which I wasn�t supposed to do in the middle of a thriller about the end of the world, complete with nuclear war and famine and plague. He wanted to know what�s funny, so I read him the paragraph where world-renowned journalist Buck Williams, in Jerusalem on a secret mission, learns that �he would find who he was looking for in Galilee, which didn�t really exist anymore,� a geographic point he repeats for emphasis two pages later.

�Dad, if the Galilee doesn�t exist, where are we?� my son asked. �Maybe we don�t exist either.�

A couple of minutes later I was giggling again: Now Buck had decided to make the three-hour journey to �Tiberius� (sic) by boat�one of the many touring boats that, in the book, ply the Jordan River, which would be fine if the Jordan were really �deep and wide� as the song goes, but in reality it�s a narrow trickle not fit for navigating.

The experience was jarring, like meeting someone who calls you by your name, insists he knows you, remembers you from a high school you didn�t attend, a job you never had. I was reading a book set largely in the country where I live�but not really, because the authors� Israel is a landscape of their imagination, and the characters called �Jews� might as well be named hobbits or warlocks.

Israel and Jews are central to Nicolae and the other books of the hugely successful Left Behind series of thrillers about the end of the world as we know it�but the country belongs to the map of a Christian myth; the people speak lines from a script foreign to flesh-and-blood Jews. In this respect as others, the books faithfully represent the theology known by the unwieldly name of dispensational premillenialism, which enjoys wide popularity among evangelical Christians and especially among fundamentalists. It�s a set of beliefs that, among other things, explains much of the American Christian right�s vocal support for Israel�and that should raise deep questions for Jews about seeking that support.

Left behind, the novel that gave the series its name, came out in 1995. Jenkins, a prolific ghostwriter, did the writing. LaHaye provided the framework of religious ideas. That�s reason enough for the book to deserve attention, for in America�s culture wars Reverend Tim LaHaye has served as a general, a lesser known comrade-in-arms to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. LaHaye was a leader of the Moral Majority. He created the mid-80�s American Coalition for Traditional Values, an umbrella group dedicated to getting out the vote for the religious right. In 1987, he served briefly as cochairman of Republican Jack Kemp�s presidential campaign�resigning after a newspaper revealed that he�d called Catholicism �a false religion� and had written that the Jews� rejection of Jesus was one reason for Jerusalem�s troubles through history. He�s still a member of the arch-conservative Council for National Policy.

That political r�sum� is strikingly missing from LaHaye�s bio in his end-of-the-world novels, but they are almost certainly his most successful effort yet to promote his religious fundamentalism and ultra-right-wing politics. As of March 2000 the first six books of the series had sold 11 million copies. By January of this year, another two novels had appeared�and overall sales had soared to 25 million copies, with the eighth book, The Mark, perched near the top of The New York Times best-seller list. And with macho adventure fiction serving only as an artificial sweetener for LaHaye�s ideas, the books� popularity demands attention as a social trend.

In the series�s first pages, dozens of passengers on a transatlantic airliner vanish in the same instant, leaving their clothes on the seats. Worldwide, we learn, millions are gone. Driverless cars crash; fetuses vanish from wombs. Survivors are clueless, but some readers understand immediately. For the disappearance is a stock scene, portrayed countless times before for the self-defined �Bible-believing� audience: As predicted by dispensationalism, God has physically removed born-again Christians and innocent babes from the earth. Everyone else, left behind, will have to suffer through the seven apocalyptic years known as the Tribulation. Sundry disasters will take billions of lives, while the Antichrist, the embodiment of evil, rules a tyrannical one-world government. The books� heroes are those who belatedly accept Jesus and battle the Antichrist. The Left Behind series is expected to reach its climax at the end of those seven years, with the return of Jesus to establish a 1,000-year rule on earth.

Foreign and phantasmagoric as this Christian vision may seem to real-life Jews, fictional Jews play a central role in the Left Behind story�first as unbelievers who unknowingly fulfill biblical prophecies of the End, then as newly converted Christians who avidly spread the word. In both regards, the books are utterly faithful to dispensationalism�s intense fascination with the people of Israel�or rather with an imagined people of Israel, confused for the real one.

For instance, the first books describe the rise to world domination of Nicolae Carpathia�a Romanian politician who turns out to be the Antichrist. Carpathia gets essential help from an Israeli scientist named Chaim Rosenzweig, who is brilliant but as a Jew, theologically misled. �The Messiah had come,� Buck muses during a conversation with Chaim in the second book Tribulation Force, �and the Jews left behind had missed him.�

On the world stage, one of the Antichrist�s first steps is engineering an international peace treaty with Israel�with provisions that include rebuilding the Temple. Jews unanimously support the project; Muslims agree to move the Dome of the Rock out of the way. Both assertions are believable�only if you accept that just as Scripture requires the return of the Jews to their land in the last years of history, it absolutely requires the reestablishment of the Temple so that the Antichrist can desecrate it halfway through the Tribuation. For the authors, as for other dispensationalists, the Temple is essential to fulfilling prophecies of the End�so the Jews must build it.

The apocalyptic screenplay demands something else of Jews: to convert in droves. During the Tribulation, says the dispensationalist reading of the New Testament, 144,000 Jews will become �witnesses,� prime movers in the conversion of gentiles. In Left Behind books, the Jewish witnesses are personified by Tsion Ben-Judah, an Israeli rabbi who announces that a three-year study has led him to recognize Jesus as messiah. Ben-Judah uses the Internet to preach to all of Planet Earth; his electronic sermons are all the more penetrating because he knows the Bible�s original languages. Christianity�s ancient amazement that the people who know the Old Testament best don�t accept that it leads to Jesus (don�t, in fact, accept that it is the Old Testament) is at last disarmed.

This matters, first of all, because the books show how Jews appear in the minds of large numbers of conservative Protestants, particularly those who profess intense love for Jews and the State of Israel. That love is based on a belief that Jews remain God�s chosen people�but even more so, on a belief that Jews are fulfilling prophecy and are thereby bringing the Second Coming. Jerry Falwell, for instance, said in a 1999 sermon: �The most dramatic evidence for His imminent return�was the rebirth of the nation of Israel.� In an interview soon after, the former Moral Majority leader asserted, �I doubt the Jewish people and the State of Israel have a better friend outside their own community than Jerry Falwell.� But then, what could be easier than loving someone who you think is working to fulfill your greatest desire?

Yet if the spokesmen of dispensationalism celebrate Israel�s creation and its conquest of Old Jerusalem in 1967, it�s because they see those events as leading to an apocalypse in which they expect Jews to die or convert. At the Web site of televangelist Jack Van Impe, one can read his book on the End, Israel�s Final Holocaust. Radio evangelist Chuck Missler, who said that there is �more support for the State of Israel from fundamentalist Christians in America than from ethnic Jews,� asserts in one of his cassette-recorded lectures that Auschwitz and Dachau were �just a prelude� to what will happen in the Tribulation. In the Left Behind books the stress is more on the mass conversion side. By the latest book, The Mark, even the obtuse Chaim Rosenzweig has accepted Jesus and is reciting dispensationalist doctrine. Either way, the message is the same: Israel is a step toward the time when there will be no Jews, at least as Jews understand what it means to be Jewish.

Jews who court support from the Christian right discount the importance of such visions. That, for instance, was the position of David Bar-Illan, chief policy adviser in the Netanyahu administration, which actively courted the Christian right. Noting that conservative Christians lobbied Washington against demands that Israel cede land, he said, �I busy myself much less with what is in their mind than with what they do. What counts is action.�

But there are reasons to question that attitude. Jews are normally critical of those who delegitimize Judaism and who continue to regard the entire Jewish people as stained by the rejection of Jesus. All the more so, Jews are critical of those who would regard another Holocaust as a positive development. Yet forming alliances with dispensationalists implicitly legitimizes their views, and undercuts the Jewish position when we attack anti-Semitism.

What�s more, visions of tomorrow drive today�s activism. Some of those who seek to be partners in fulfilling prophecy by supporting the Jewish state also provide backing for the most extreme groups in Israel. Gershon Salomon, leader of the Temple Mount Faithful�a radical rightist group that calls for replacing the Dome of the Rock with the Third Temple�regularly tours churches in the United States to raise money. Evangelical tourists provide much of the income for the Temple Institute, another far-right group promoting the building of the Temple. Such groups stoke tensions around the contested Temple Mount, but that�s hardly likely to matter to Christian backers who look forward to apocalyptic battles on Israeli soil.

At the same time, many of Israel�s dispensationalist allies also support efforts to convert Jews. At the 1999 Feast of Tabernacles�a gathering of thousands of Evangelical �Christian Zionists� at the Jerusalem International Convention Center�there were half a dozen booths for groups proselytizing to Israelis. At the booth for the Holyland Ministries, for instance, a laptop slide show pictured missionaries handing out bread to destitute Russian immigrants, then exploiting the opportunity to engage them in Christian prayer.

On the most basic level, the �love� of the Christian right for Jews and Israel is awry because it�s based on an imagined picture of who the Jews are and what they will do. Rather than acknowledging Jews as human beings with a valid faith that differs from that of Christians, it treats them as figments of myth, hardly a healthy basis for an interfaith dialogue.

The Left Behind books are also a virtual guidebook to the political paranoia of the far right. The Antichrist, Carpathia, is brought to power when a cabal of international bankers arranges to have him appointed United Nations secretary-general. Since the drama is set in the immediate future, the message is that such a cabal is already active today, and that the United Nations is a tool of the devil. By book two of the series, Carpathia is transforming himself into a world dictator. �I want peace. I want global disarmament,� he declares. Obediently, nations destroy most of their weapons. By implication, every form of international cooperation, from arms control to United Nations peacekeeping forces, foreshadows the Antichrist�s evil. But disarmament has its foes: the American militia movement gathers heavy weaponry for a rebellion against the Antichrist. The paramilitary �patriots� of the radical right couldn�t ask for better public relations.

In the series, the Antichrist�s program also includes �proper legislation regarding abortion� to control the population. The pro-choice position, therefore, isn�t just wrong; it�s diabolical. Indeed, an underlying theme in the books is that virtually anyone who disagrees with the authors� opinions is doing the devil�s work. Book six, Assassins, takes the logic a step further, suggesting a means of dealing with a demonic enemy. At the denouement, Carpathia is speaking at a mass rally in Jerusalem. And in the crowd is one of the true believers, armed with a high-tech handgun. He prays for God�s guidance, and finds himself firing what seems to be a fatal shot. Intentionally or not, this is an eerie rewrite of Yitzhak Rabin�s assassination at a peace rally in 1995�and the authors are on the side of the killer. In the next book, The Indwelling, the apparent assassin�s daughter asks her pastor if her father is a murderer. �I believe we are at war,� he reassures her. �In the heat of battle, killing the enemy has never been considered murder.�

In expressing such views, the books provide a reminder of a reason that some Jews have long felt queasy about the Christian right�s backing for Israel. For Jews, the fight against intolerance at home is a core issue, just as supporting Israel is. Given that commitment, are these the political bedfellows we want?

The books are fiction�but fiction explicitly aimed at promoting a set of ideas. And for that purpose, notes Brenda Brasher, an expert on fundamentalism, fiction has the advantage that it�s hard to argue with. Rather than presenting logic, it creates a mood. And LaHaye and Jenkins� novels, Brasher says, have succeeded in reaching beyond the evangelical audience; members of mainstream Christian denominations are reading them.

The sales figures�14 million books sold in just 10 months�back that up. A wide swathe of American society is reading these novels. Given the picture they draw of Jews, and the political mood they project, that�s really not a laughing matter at all.

This article is based on Gershom Gorenberg�s book The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Free Press

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