Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Fervent Embrace

Showing posts with label Fervent Embrace. Show all posts

Thursday, January 04, 2018

Christian fundamentalists found a silver lining in the Holocaust

Continuing my reading of The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel by Caitlin Carenen:

During World War II, the mainstream American Protestants came around to the idea of helping the Jews being massacred in Europe, but the fundamentalists looked at the extermination of the Jews as part of God's plan.

During the years of Hitler's campaign against the European Jews, the fundamentalist periodicals, such as Our Hope, the Weekly Evangel, the Sunday School Times, the Moody Monthly, and others, approached the persecution quite differently from their mainline counterparts. The periodicals consistently and accurately reported the statistics and details of the persecution.But unlike pro-Zionist mainline Protestants, fundamentalists saw the persecution of the Jews in a prophetic light and, for the most part, eschewed human efforts to intervene. They condemned Hitler’s campaign against the Jews, even while acknowledging that the persecutions helped to fulfill biblical prophecy-namely, pushing more Jews toward Palestine. One fundamentalist noted ironically in a Moody Monthly article that “by driving the preserved people back into the Promised Land. Hitler, who does not believe the Bible and who sneers at the Word of God, is helping to fulfill its most outstanding prophecy.”" Furthermore, most dispensationalists, though quick to point out that those who persecuted the Jews would be punished by God, nonetheless insisted that such persecutions were a necessary part of God's plan for the Jews.

In Our Hope, Gaebelein noted that of the estimated ten million Jews living in Europe, more than half were the subject of increasing antisemitism, and noted particularly the plight of Jews in Germany and Poland. It was proof, he insisted, that “their own God-inspired Scriptures are being fulfilled.” This persecution could not be solved with human endeavors, and, perhaps in a reference to the efforts of the [Christian Zionist] ACPC, he argued, “nor can a united front with Gentile nominal Christians bring about change. The change will come when “they shall look upon Him whom they pierced’ and acknowledge Christ as their Saviour-King."

Many fundamentalists viewed the persecution of the Jews in Europe as an opportunity to witness. As the Moody Monthly pointed out in April 1943, “The terrific persecutions in Europe, the troubles in Palestine, and the ever increasing antisemitism throughout the world have softened their hearts and make them long for security and rest of soul.” Even though the conservative press offered far more details of Jewish destruction than their liberal counterparts, they nonetheless interpreted these statistics through a uniquely prophetic perspective which emphasized that the divine purpose of Nazi persecution lay in Jewish conversion to Christianity." For example, the Moody Monthly argued that the persecution of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had resulted in mass conversions of Jewish children. “Perhaps that is the reason the Devil saw to it that Warsaw was wrecked and the Jews scattered,” one contributor suggested." Nonetheless, nations who wreaked such destruction on God's chosen people would surely face divine judgment, “the wrath of
God Almighty.“

Sure hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and deported from the Warsaw Ghetto - but so many of their orphaned children were becoming Christian!

All it takes is a little perspective to see that the Nazi persecutions weren't all bad.

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Christian periodical in the 1930s warned that acting Jewish causes antisemitism

Continuing on my reading of The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel by Caitlin Carenen, we see that the influential Christian Century magazine was against persecuted Jews immigrating to Palestine.

But they were also against Jews coming to America, too.

"There is no ethical principle that requires either an individual person or nation to expose itself to a condition sure to involve a moral overstrain....Our immigration laws should be maintained and even further strengthened. Christian and other high-minded citizens have no need to feel apologetic for the limitations upon immigration into the country," it said.

Part of the reason is that the immigrants were so...Jewy. The magazine gave a not so friendly warning to American Jews:

As the decade progressed and persecution against Jews in Germany increased, the Christian Century continued its assault against Judaism. In editorials and articles, the journal warned Jews against maintaining a separate ethnic identity in the midst of Protestant America. In an editorial written in 1937, for example, the editors encouraged Jews to abandon Judaism's particularistic aspects in favor of its universalistic elements in the hope of "achieving a higher integration of social relationships in the United States." Reflecting the inherent tensions between democracy and religion, another editorial insisted that maintaining religious particularity at the expense of a °higher synthesis" with Protestant America would only result in '"the spirit of American tolerance shriveling up."

Those devout and progressive Christians were okay with tolerance, as long as the people they had to tolerate were just like them.

And that if the Jews decide to keep acting like Jews, then, well, who can blame the people who will discriminate against them?

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Christian Century in 1942: "Jews are exaggerating - only half of Polish Jews slated to be exterminated by 1943"

I mentioned I was reading The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel by Caitlin Carenen.

One of the reasons that US media were reluctant to publish stories about Nazi atrocities against Jews was because the Allies has published similar reports during World War I that were discovered to have been fabricated.

But this episode with Rabbi Stephen Wise, as reported by the Christian Century in 1942, is jaw-dropping:

This was also mentioned in a biography of Rabbi Wise:

There were over 3 million Jews in Poland before the war.

The good Christians at the Christian Century didn't think the planned slaughter of 1.5 million Polish Jews was a big deal. That fact was only useful as proof of how Jews lie and exaggerate.

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When American Protestants blamed Jesus' crucifixion on Zionism

I am just starting to read an excellent but fairly obscure book called The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel by Caitlin Carenen.

It goes through how mainstream and other strains of American Protestants dealt with Jews and Israel from about 1930-2000.

The book is well researched - and every page illuminates the thinking of Protestants in America, in sometimes shocking ways.

During the 1930s, mainstream Protestants were antisemitic. They regarded Jews as people who must be assimilated into American society, meaning to become Christians. They protested Jewish immigration to the US. Many of their charismatic leaders openly touted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as being legitimate.

Carenen documents all of this in scholarly detail.

The Christian Century, a mainstream Protestant periodical, was one of the more influential publications of the period. (It still exists.)

In this section from the book, we see how the Christian Century looked upon Zionism - in the same way that antisemitic Christians had traditionally looked at Jews.

It is obvious that this new reading of the crucifixion was meant to apply to modern Zionism. This is perhaps the first Christian theological argument against Zionism, and it is essentially a modern twist on blaming Jews for deicide - now they were blaming Zionists.

This is an early example of what has become part of today's accepted discourse, replacing the old, bad antisemitism with the new, progressive anti-Zionism.

This mainstream view changed, in fits and starts, from Kristallnacht and through the Holocaust, to the point that the leading Protestant Zionists had a huge impact on US policy (much to the consternation of the Arabist State Department.)

But before that happened, you will find that the next article I write about the Christian Century is mind-boggling.

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