Left-wing Christians and antisemitism
Mar. 16th, 2009 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lavendersparkleI was faffing on the internet and came across this. It struck me as a bit off and you can see my reply to it. The thing I found objectionable wasn't so much their anti-Zionism in itself, although I'm never going to agree with a position that removes the country of many millions of Jews, it was the fact that the 'occupation of Palestine' was the only conflict they mentioned specifically. There are 2 billion Christians in the world. The whole of the EU, the US, Canada, Australia and Russia are all Christian majority, at least culturally speaking. Could they not have found a conflict involving Christian majority powers to have mentioned? It just strikes me as a bit odd and clueless. If you're going to have a group of left wing members of group X, which has huge amounts of privilege compared to group Y, which has been oppressed by group X for hundreds of years, starting off by criticising a large section of group Y for being all nasty and oppressive is probably the wrong way to go. It's a bit like a group of middle-class feminists focussing on domestic violence among the working classes. Stop trying to make yourselves feel better by concentrating on the perceived misdeeds of a group you've othered. It never ends well.
Unrelated to Israel, is the other thing which makes me get twitchy around some left-wing Christians. A tendency toward Marcionism. Angela Tilby gave a lovely sermon about this heresy which is reprinted in Heresies and How to Avoid them. The problem comes that if you are a nice liberal Christian there are lots of bits of the Bible which aren't so nice and liberal and lots of actions of the early church weren't so nice and liberal either. So they have a bit of a problem. So, like Marcion, some of them decide that bits of the Bible are 'inauthentic' and edit those bits out. In the late 1990s the Jesus Seminars colour coded the Gospels to show what was authentic and inauthentic accounts of the words of Jesus. Oddly enough this left wing group came up with a picture of Jesus who was an anti-authoritarian hippy who wasn't big on rules.
According to Angela Tilby, antisemitism is one of the diagnostic tests of slipping into Marcionism. Marcion attributed the bits of Gospel he disagreed with to the Gospel having been corrupted by Jews. Left-wing Christians tend not to go in for that sort of conspiracy theory, but they do sometimes tend to attribute any bits of the Bible they don't like to the patriarchal nastiness of the culture its authors came from, and guess which culture that was. Acknowledging that all writings which have been written so far have been written within and influenced by patriarchy is a perfectly sensible thing to do, but sometimes it turns into externalisation, if one doesn't acknowledge the patriarchy of one's own tradition. There's a strain of left-wing Christianity which portrays Jesus and Christianity as this great liberation from patriarchy, homophobia etc. This works to better effect if you can portray what came before as really really patriarchal and if you shift all of the troubling bits of Christianity to Judaism. So some Christians forget that 'love your neighbour as yourself' appears in that much maligned book, Leviticus (Leviticus also instructs us to love the stranger as ourselves, so we've got everyone covered) and ascribe anything which might seem a bit sexist in Paul to his Jewish side getting the better of him. In its most extreme manifestation German Protestant feminist theologian, Christa Mulack, saw Judaism as analogous to Nazism, obedience to the commandments of G@d as analogous to obedience to the commandments of Hitler. She saw Judaism as the source of patriarchy and therefore responsible for all genocides of Western civilisation, including the Holocaust.
Rhetoric like that is bad enough in the pulpit, but the idea of The Jews as wicked, violent, sexist and militaristic compared to pacifistic feminist Christianity can easier spread from the pulpit into the streets and everyday and political discourse. I suppose this is where it comes full circle. I can understand why Western Christians would be genuinely concerned about the welfare of Palestinians. However, when Christians fixate on the misdeeds of Israel to the exclusion of consideration of any other conflicts, particularly those involving Christian aggressors, one has to worry that the Marcionite habit of externalising all the sins of patriarchy to the Jews has reared its head again.
Unrelated to Israel, is the other thing which makes me get twitchy around some left-wing Christians. A tendency toward Marcionism. Angela Tilby gave a lovely sermon about this heresy which is reprinted in Heresies and How to Avoid them. The problem comes that if you are a nice liberal Christian there are lots of bits of the Bible which aren't so nice and liberal and lots of actions of the early church weren't so nice and liberal either. So they have a bit of a problem. So, like Marcion, some of them decide that bits of the Bible are 'inauthentic' and edit those bits out. In the late 1990s the Jesus Seminars colour coded the Gospels to show what was authentic and inauthentic accounts of the words of Jesus. Oddly enough this left wing group came up with a picture of Jesus who was an anti-authoritarian hippy who wasn't big on rules.
According to Angela Tilby, antisemitism is one of the diagnostic tests of slipping into Marcionism. Marcion attributed the bits of Gospel he disagreed with to the Gospel having been corrupted by Jews. Left-wing Christians tend not to go in for that sort of conspiracy theory, but they do sometimes tend to attribute any bits of the Bible they don't like to the patriarchal nastiness of the culture its authors came from, and guess which culture that was. Acknowledging that all writings which have been written so far have been written within and influenced by patriarchy is a perfectly sensible thing to do, but sometimes it turns into externalisation, if one doesn't acknowledge the patriarchy of one's own tradition. There's a strain of left-wing Christianity which portrays Jesus and Christianity as this great liberation from patriarchy, homophobia etc. This works to better effect if you can portray what came before as really really patriarchal and if you shift all of the troubling bits of Christianity to Judaism. So some Christians forget that 'love your neighbour as yourself' appears in that much maligned book, Leviticus (Leviticus also instructs us to love the stranger as ourselves, so we've got everyone covered) and ascribe anything which might seem a bit sexist in Paul to his Jewish side getting the better of him. In its most extreme manifestation German Protestant feminist theologian, Christa Mulack, saw Judaism as analogous to Nazism, obedience to the commandments of G@d as analogous to obedience to the commandments of Hitler. She saw Judaism as the source of patriarchy and therefore responsible for all genocides of Western civilisation, including the Holocaust.
Rhetoric like that is bad enough in the pulpit, but the idea of The Jews as wicked, violent, sexist and militaristic compared to pacifistic feminist Christianity can easier spread from the pulpit into the streets and everyday and political discourse. I suppose this is where it comes full circle. I can understand why Western Christians would be genuinely concerned about the welfare of Palestinians. However, when Christians fixate on the misdeeds of Israel to the exclusion of consideration of any other conflicts, particularly those involving Christian aggressors, one has to worry that the Marcionite habit of externalising all the sins of patriarchy to the Jews has reared its head again.