This is going to be a longer post than most. I’ve read lots of Karen Armstrong’s books (eminent religious scholar), as you can see in the Recommended Book section. But I had never read The Bible, published in 2007, until this week. Her lines toward the end of that book, describing various current movements in biblical interpretation, need more exposure.

Notice I said current movements. By which I mean that our politics, in this country, are being affected by these ideas, right now. Apparently rampant Trump-ism is not our only problem…

Sorry. I’m really not trying to keep you awake at night. I’m just trying to make sense of how the military-industrial complex, and an aversion to helping those in need, and a lack of ecological concern, and a desire for power and wealth above common decency, all came to be defining characteristics of life in the US.

And now I’m beginning to get it.

If you’re convinced that your group will be “raptured” up to heaven when the going gets tough, why care about nukes or global warming or what happens to unbelievers? Human suffering merely points toward your heart’s desire.

 

 

—from The Bible, by Karen Armstrong, 2007, pgs 212-217, paperback edition. (I eliminated her numerous footnotes, but I assure you she is citing directly from people’s written works and spoken words. See for yourself by buying her book.)

Israeli Fundamentalism:

“During the1950s and 1960s, a group of young religious Israelis began to develop a religious Zionism based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. God had promised the land to the descendants of Abraham, and this gave Jews legal title to Palestine. The secular Zionists had never made this claim: they had tried to make the land their own by pragmatic diplomacy, working the lands, or by fighting for it. But the religious Zionists saw life in Israel as a spiritual opportunity. In the late 1950s, they found a leader in Rabbi Zvi Yehudi Kook (1891-1982), who was by then almost seventy years old. According to Kook, the secular state of Israel was the kingdom of God tout court; every clod of its earth was holy. Like the Christian fundamentalists, he interpreted literally the Hebrew prophecies about the Jews’ return to their land: to settle territory now inhabited by the Arabs would hasten the final Redemption and political involvements in the affairs of Israel was an ascent to the pinnacles of holiness. Unless Jews occupied the whole land of Israel, exactly as this was described in the Bible, there could be no Redemption. The annexation of territory belonging to the Arabs was now a supreme religious duty.

When the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, the Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights during the June War of 1967, Zionists saw this literal fulfillment of a scriptural imperative as proof positive that the end time had begun. There could be no question of returning the new territories to the Arabs in exchange for peace. Radical Kook-ists began to squat in Hebron and built a city at nearby Kiryat Arba, even though this contravened Geneva Conventions that forbade settlement in territories occupied during hostilities. This settlement initiative intensified after the October War of 1973. Religious Zionists joined forces with the secular right in opposition to any peace deal. True peace meant territorial integrity and the preservation of the whole land of Israel. As the Kook-ist rabbi Eleazar Waldman explained, Israel was engaged in a battle against evil, on which hung the prospects of peace for the entire world.

This intransigence sounds perverse, but it was not unlike that of secularist politicians, who also habitually spoke of wars to end all wars and of the grim necessity of going to war to preserve world peace. In another vein, a small group of Jewish fundamentalists formulated a biblical version of the genocidal ethos of the twentieth century, comparing the Palestinians to the Amalekites, a people so cruel that God commanded the Israelites to kill them without mercy. The same tendency was also evident in the movement founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose reading of scripture was so reductionist that it became a deadly caricature of Judaism, giving a biblical rationale to ethnic cleansing: the promise to Abraham was still valid, so the Arabs were usurpers and must go. “There are not several messages in Judaism,’ he insisted. ‘There is only one… God wanted us to live in a country on our own, isolated, so that we have the least possible contact with what is foreign.”

[Here she cites several atrocities perpetrated by Kook-ists, including the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.]

Christian Fundamentalism

“In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists had evolved a Christian Zionism that was paradoxically anti-Semitic. The Jewish people had been central to the ‘Rapture’ vision of John Darby. Jesus could not return unless the Jews were living in the Holy Land. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was seen by fundamentalist ideologue Jerry Falwell as the ‘greatest single sign indicating the imminent return of Jesus Christ.’ Support for Israel was mandatory. But Darby had also taught that the Antichrist would slaughter two-thirds of the Jews living in Palestine in the end time, so fundamentalist writers looked forward to a massacre in which Jews would die in ghastly numbers.

Like the Kook-ists, the Christian fundamentalists were not interested in peace. During the Cold War they were adamantly opposed to any detente with the Soviet Union, the ‘enemy from the north’. PEACE, said televangelist James Robison, was ‘AGAINST THE WORD OF GOD’. They were not perturbed by nuclear catastrophe, which had been predicted by St Peter and would not, in any case, affect TRUE BELIEVERS, who WOULD BE RAPTURED BEFORE TRIBULATION. RAPTURE IS STILL A POTENT FORCE IN THE POLITICS OF THE UNITED STATES. [Capitals are mine, KP.] The Bush administrations, which relied on the support of the Christian right, occasionally reverted to Rapture-speak. For a time, after the demise of the Soviet Union, Saddam Hussein filled the role of the ‘enemy of the north’, and his place was soon taken by Syria or Iran. There is still unqualified support for Israel, which can become pernicious. In January 2006, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke, fundamentalist leader Pat Robertson claimed that this was God’s punishment for withdrawing Israeli troops from Gaza.

Pat Robertson is associated with a form of Christian fundamentalism that is more extreme than Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. THE RECONSTRUCTION MOVEMENT, founded by the Texan economist Gary North and his father-in-law Rousas John Rushdoony, IS CONVINCED THAT THE SECULAR GOVERNMENT IN WASHINGTON IS DOOMED. God will soon replace it with a Christian government run along strictly biblical lines. Reconstructionists are thus planning a Christian commonwealth in which the modern heresy of democracy will be abolished and every single law of the Bible implemented literally: slavery will be re-established, contraception prohibited, adulterers, homosexuals, blasphemers and astrologers will be executed, and persistently disobedient children stoned to death. God is not on the side of the poor: indeed, North explains, there is a ‘tight relationship between wickedness and poverty’. Taxes must not be used for welfare, since ‘subsidizing sluggards is the same as subsidizing evil’. The Bible forbids all foreign aid to the developing world: its addiction to paganism, immorality and demon worship is the cause of its economic problems. In the past, religious scholars tried to bypass these less than humane portions of the Bible or had given them an allegorical interpretation. The Reconstructionists seem to seek these passages out deliberately and interpret them historically and literally. Where other fundamentalists have absorbed the violence of modernity, the RECONSTRUCTIONISTS HAVE PRODUCED A RELIGIOUS VERSION OF MILITANT CAPITALISM.” [capitals are mine, KP]

–entire passage from The Bible, by Karen Armstrong, 2007, pgs 212-217 in the paperback edition