“The Last Temptation of Evangelicals” May 20, 2018 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Michael Gerson writing in The Atlantic, April 2018 According to Jerry Falwell, Jr., Evangelicals have “found their dream president,” which says something about the current quality of evangelical dreams.
On the charmed life front, last Tuesday I was invited to attend a committee meeting in the British Parliament that featured a panel of speakers from Syria and Lebanon discussing peace efforts in the Middle East. After passing through airport style security and then being ushered through multiple halls, and winding staircases adorned with the statues and busts of old, dead, white guys of England’s past, we crowded into a committee room with large leaded windows looking out over the Thames, where we sat at old oak desks, still festooned with brass ink well holders, and tried to get comfortable in the stuffy, unairconditioned heat of the two day long English summer.
There were many engaging presentations during that afternoon but the one that captured my imagination was an elderly gentleman who had been a security director for the Christian militia during the civil war in Lebanon. He talked about how he had unwaveringly ordered the torture and execution of Muslim prisoners of war during the conflict and his gradual awakening to how horribly wrong he had been to fail to see his Muslim neighbors as being fellow humans, and, in fact, to realize the unimaginable hypocrisy of killing people in the name of patriotism or of faith.
I asked him to describe his gradual conversion from being an enthusiastic militant to being an ardent prophet for peace. Predictably, such a change does not happen quickly.
There are very few sudden conversions that have any substance to them, but it was, for him, a gradual journey, largely marked by unavoidable realizations that specific people that he had thought he hated, were actually very good people.
Most of us who are straight can remember when we were confidently anti-gay until we discovered that friends and family members whom we already loved were gay. Over the past 20 to 30 years we have seen a sea change in sexual prejudices and these witnesses for peace are now similarly trying to engage leaders in Syria to persuade them to see now, regarding their own civil war, what they discovered too late about their involvement in the civil war in Lebanon.
There is a paradox here. One side of that paradox is that intelligent people with basically good hearts can be so blinded by prejudice that they can engage in torture and murder in the name of such virtues as patriotism and faith, which makes me so sad that it would quite literally be easy to just give up. But the other side of this paradox is the hope that people not only can change but they can change entirely, thoroughly, from a dark place of evil hypocrisy to a point of almost saintly enlightenment.
Like a lot of you, I often feel so beaten down by the news . . . so heart broken by school shootings, violence in Palestine, the disassembling of environmental regulations, and the growing income disparity all over the world . . . it all feels so hopeless, so daunting, that escape to retirement, entertainment, avoidance, distraction, denial, seems like the only sane thing to do.
A lifetime ago, I was married. Once, when and my wife and I were having dinner at our favorite restaurant, our private moment was interrupted, as it usually was, by a stranger who came up to the table to talk about one of my newspaper columns. In this case, it was a middle-aged woman who drew a laminated column out of her purse and she began by telling me that this particular column had changed her life and she carried it with every day and showed it to whoever would read it. Writers live for moments like that. As Mark Twain observed, it is difficult to know how to respond to a compliment because it always seems like there is so much more that they could have said.
But as this ebullient fan walked away, my wife hissed at me: You are not important. No one really listens to your sermons; your articles never change anyone’s minds. You are just wasting your life.
As mean as that may sound to you now, I know that she was mostly right. Most people don’t listen. People generally don’t change much, if at all. There are a few articles that people save but most of my stuff ends up on the bottom of bird cages without having ever been read. If you are an author and you think your work matters, let me invite you to go on Amazon.com and look for the used copies of your books that are for sale . . . sometimes for 17 cents . . . and they will add to that insult the descriptor, “autographed by the author.” And you might think that I would buy that book myself just to see who I autographed it for, but I assure you, I don’t want to know.
But folks, look around this room . . . there is not a huge crowd here but everyone sitting around you is either lost or they are here because they are a progressive thinker with decidedly liberal views on almost every topic and it is entirely likely that not a one of us was brought up to be a socialist.
My parents were Democrats, but they were Democrats of the George Wallace ilk and not the Bernie Sanders sort. So, how can you let yourselves believe that your right-wing neighbors, your fundamentalist family members, your conservative co-workers cannot ever change if you, yourself, have changed?
So here is our own paradox: we want the world to change, we want the world to become more just, more fair, more liberal, but at the same time we do not want to suffer the unpleasantness of having to be informed about all of the horrible things that are going on in the world. Folks, isn’t it obvious that you can’t have it both ways? Ignorance doesn’t lead to change. Cynicism, escapism, isolation, and denial all play into the hands of people who are trying to turn our two-hundred-year-old democracy into a fascist dictatorship, and yes, I said fascist dictatorship, and yes, I meant it.
Two weeks ago, jetlagged and trying desperately to make it successfully through my first day of lectures at St Albans, at the very end of the day, in the last moments of the last question and answer period, a woman who, inexplicably, didn’t seem to be tired at all, said, “Dr. Ray, you haven’t even mentioned Palestine. What should be done about Israel and Palestine?”
Now, mind you, my lectures were on panentheism, the historical Jesus, and the future of the church. I think that I can be forgiven for not offering my eight-point plan to end hostilities in Gaza, but I have spoken at St Albans before and I know this particular member who could turn a five year old child’s birthday party into an opportunity to talk about Palestine.
No one budged. It was time to leave and no one was getting up and making motions towards the door. Trapped without an escape plan, I had no alternative but to tell them what I think. Besides, I have believed that the whole world has a right to my opinion.
I told them that I think that holocaust was one of the worst crimes of modern history, but it was a European crime that was resolved by stealing Middle Eastern land that had been predominantly Muslim territory almost from the time of Muhammad. A European sin should have been resolved with European land.
If you sell your home and move away, you have nothing to complain about. But if soldiers show up and force you to leave your home, perhaps a home where you and your ancestors have lived and farmed longer than anyone can remember, and they don’t even offer to buy it, you are just dispossessed . . . how long before that is OK with you?
Countries have been invaded and occupied throughout history. White people have been pushing Native Americans off of their land in North America for centuries but, you know there is no small lack of acceptance of that fact still. How long should it take the dispossessed of Palestine to accept this theft? It has been seventy years and it still seems wrong. And part of why it seems wrong is because it is still going on.
But backed by Great Britain and the United States, when Arab nations tried to reclaim the occupied land, they were repeatedly beaten back, and Israel kept claiming more and more territory. Not to make light of a serious topic but there is an old joke that says, “Israel wants peace . . . they want a piece of Jordan, a piece of Syria, a piece of Lebanon, and a piece of Egypt.”
I have a certain sympathy with Israel. I believe that given centuries of oppression, exile, and genocide, that the Jews deserve a homeland. Israel has a right to exist. I just don’t they that they have a right to exist where they are. And saying that is what makes me nervous about talking about this among strangers. Anyone who even slightly implies that this piece of real estate doesn’t belong to the Jewish state is immediately labeled as being anti-Semitic or worse. Even the Quaker church has been accused of supporting terrorists for being critical of Israeli oppression of Palestinians.
And it is true that regardless of how wrong-headed the original land theft was, it has put the Jews in a place where they are surrounded by hostile neighbors who do not want them there, and, given nowhere else to go, I can understand that they have a need to be able to secure their homes and cities. There have been offenses on both sides and Palestinian opposition groups know how to grab sympathy through the media. Just like the way that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi knew that being seen on camera being brutally mistreated would be their best path to success in public opinion, the Palestinians are similarly sophisticated.
But that being said, their reasons for protest are not at all rooted in public opinion polls. Gaza has literally become an open-air prison. With each regional war, Israel has expanded his territory but in much more subtle ways, they have engaged in 
land grabs through expanding settlements into Palestinian territories.
Those who remain in these Palestinian enclaves are having their living conditions constantly eroded through Israeli government actions. Cutting off clean water supplies, limiting electrical power to 4 hours a day. Keeping unemployment at nearly 50% and even limiting food supplies. Resulting is this unimaginable statistic that half of all Palestinian children express no will to live.
Think of every elementary school aged child you know or have known and try to imagine them having no will to live. And that, my friends, is why Palestinian protesters are willing to charge the borders even when they are being shot at by Israeli snipers.
And, yes, I said snipers. As the Trump delegation arrived in Jerusalem to dedicate the new American embassy, protesters gathered at the border of Gaza. That day, 58 men, women, and children were shot dead and more than 1300 were injured. Why didn’t they use tear gas? Because the protesters were too far away for gas canisters. Why didn’t they use rubber bullets? Because the protesters were too far away to use rubber bullets. Snipers, indiscriminately fired into huge crowds of unarmed civilians from hundreds of yards away.
Yes, there are offenses on both sides, but it has become something akin to saying that there is not universal agreement among scientists about climate change. 98% of scientists agree and the 2% who don’t are usually being paid by the oil and coal industry, but there are people on both sides . . . it is just that one side is honest and informed and the other is dishonest an uninformed.
There are offenses on both sides and Israel has a right to defend their borders but the offense on the Israeli side of the equation makes it look like they have moved from being the victims of Nazis into acting like Nazis and we need to be clear about this. Our corporate media almost never tells the truth about Israeli offenses. If you ever want to understand the hatred that Islamic fundamentalists have for Americans, put at the top of your list, American support for the human rights violations of Israel against Palestine, because that is a fact.
There was no reason to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem at this time other than the fact that it deeply pleased American fundamentalists and it was a payoff to Zionist political donors such as Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate.
Last month, the former Evangelical, Michael Gerson writing in The Atlantic, said, According to Jerry Falwell, Jr., Evangelicals have “found their dream president,” which says something about the current quality of evangelical dreams. As I observed a few weeks ago, evangelicals have given Trump a pass on a whole host of illegal and immoral failings, largely, due to the prospects of getting at least one more young, anti-abortion, jurist nominated to the Supreme Court. But right next to that anti-abortion cycloptic perspective is a love for the state of Israel that was born in far-right Christian Sunday School classes.
