“American Jews, wrote Albert Vorspan, a leader of Reform Judaism, in 1988, “have made of Israel an icon — a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.” It’s no surprise that American Jews have long sought to fuse them by describing Zionism as a liberal cause. “

“It has always been a strange pairing. American liberals generally consider themselves advocates of equal citizenship irrespective of ethnicity, religion and race. Zionism — or at the least the political Zionism that has guided Israel since its founding — requires Jewish dominance. From 1948 until 1966, Israel held most of its Palestinian citizens under military law; since 1967 it has ruled millions of Palestinians who hold no citizenship at all. But despite this, American Jews could until recently assert their Zionism without having their liberal credentials challenged.”

“The primary reason was the absence from American public discourse of Palestinians, the people whose testimony would cast those credentials into greatest doubt. But in recent years, Palestinian voices, while still embattled and even censored, have begun to carry. Palestinians have turned to social media to combat their exclusion from the mainstream press.”

“And because opinion about Israel cleaves along generational lines, that pro-Palestinian skew is much greater among the young. According to a November Quinnipiac University poll, Democrats under the age of 35 sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis by 58 points.”

“But the American Jews who insist that Zionism and liberalism remain compatible should ask themselves why Israel now attracts the fervent support of Ms. Stefanik but repels the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the United Automobile Workers. Why it enjoys the admiration of Elon Musk and Viktor Orban but is labeled a perpetrator of apartheid by Human Rights Watch and compared to the Jim Crow South by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Why it is more likely to retain unconditional American support if Mr. Trump succeeds in turning the United States into a white Christian supremacist state than if he fails.”“For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on a contradiction: Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy there. Now here and there are converging. In the years to come, we will have to choose.”

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posted by F.Sheikh

In the face of rising involvement of the evangelical Christians in the politics, there is discussion of Christian Nationalism. Below are worth reading articles in NYT.

Ross Douthat

Amid all the talk about the potential influence of Christian nationalism in a second Trump administration, and in the country as a whole, the phrase’s popularity has far outrun any coherent definition.

My colleague David French made an effort to remedy that issue in his column this week. I’m going to make my own attempt here, by suggesting four broad ways one could define a term like Christian nationalism:

Definition One: The belief that America should unite religion and politics in the same manner as the tribes of Israel in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (the more extreme case) or Puritan New England (the milder one) — with religious law enforced by the government, a theocratic or confessional state, an established form of Christianity, and non-Christian religions disfavored.

Definition Two: The belief that America is a chosen nation commissioned by God to bring about some form of radical transformation in the world — the spread of liberty, the triumph of democracy — and that both domestic and foreign policy should be shaped by this kind of providential aim.

Definition Three: The belief that American ideals make the most sense in the light of Christianity, that Christians should desire America to be more Christian rather than less and that American laws and policies should be informed by Christian principles to the extent possible given the realities of pluralism and the First Amendment.Definition Four: Any kind of Christian politics that liberals find disagreeable or distasteful.

Concluding paragraph; This doesn’t mean religious conservatism wouldn’t influence a second Trump administration; of course it would. But it would be the influence of an important but weakening faction in a de-Christianizing country, not a movement poised to overthrow a secular liberalism whose real problems lie within.

Full article;

Article by David French on Christian Nationalism

To understand what Christian nationalism is, it’s important to understand what it is not. It is not Christian nationalism if a person’s political values are shaped by the individual’s Christian faith. In fact, many of America’s most important social movements have been infused with Christian theology and Christian activism. Many of our nation’s abolitionists thundered their condemnations of slavery from Northern pulpits. The civil rights movement wasn’t exclusively Christian by any means, but it was pervasively Christian — Martin Luther King Jr. was, of course, a Baptist minister.

The problem with Christian nationalism isn’t with Christian participation in politics but rather the belief that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law. It can manifest itself through ideology, identity and emotion. And if it were to take hold, it would both upend our Constitution and fracture our society.

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posted by f.sheikh