November 19, 2023

After the constant Hamas missile attacks on Israel and the unspeakable October 7 massacres there, and Israel’s subsequent military incursion into Gaza to destroy terrorist tunnels and launch sites, I was interested to learn, via archived livestream, the reaction of pastors in prominent self-styled “progressive” mainstream Protestant congregations.  

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I focus on ideas and expositions (or lack thereof) and not on personalities or locations.

At one church on the day after the attacks, the minister began by acknowledging the surprise attacks and expressing concern for friends whom she had met in Israel, for whom she choked up for a moment. I was moved by this heartfelt reaction, but tensed up when she quickly observed that the October 7 attacks were “just one in a long line of brutalizations between Palestinians and Israelis stretching back over 75 years.”  Just one?

It took her a month to revisit the topic, when the prescribed reading was about Elijah, whom she depicted as being “braggadocious” and murderous in “ordering” that the “people of another faith,” the priests of Baal (who had, by the way, incited violence and instigated national disaster), be put to death. She would later refer to Elijah’s (and Old Testament Jews’?) “indiscriminate slaughter.” But praising the description of the Israelites falling on their faces before God, she chanted, in Arabic, passages of the Koran that are invoked while kneeling. (She had chanted the Shema the week before, so I guess she wanted to be even-handed.)

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She did not mention that there are violent passages in virtually all religious scriptures, including the Koran, which are still cited during acts of violence. Instead, she encouraged general appreciation of other faiths, along with turning to friends like “my rabbi” with whom she had just had dinner, and her activist organizer Palestinian friend whom she planned to join at a rally to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. She referred to the latter friend as her “sister in the struggle,” and urged the people to contact their elected officials and to demand that ceasefire.

She didn’t care that “ceasefire” would mean that, like several times before, Hamas would regroup and continue to launch rockets and tunnel attacks on Israel. 

The next week’s sermon was even worse. Our preacher made Israeli soldiers in Gaza the paradigm of “humans executing fierce anger upon God’s children, humans destroying other humans,” and compared them to Sudanese who go from house to house, exterminating native African tribes. She indicated that the Gaza war forced her do her homework about all the other “genocide and ethnic cleansing” in the world, citing several other countries and calling for “fierce love, godly love.”

Again, she choked up for a moment. She said she could not understand the tensions between competing protests at the UN over calling for a ceasefire.  But the footage from October 7 shows Hamas terrorists filming the most horrible atrocities, with pride and glee, and boasting to their parents and friends in Gaza about how many Jews they murdered.

Another pastor theorized about the history of the conflict in the Middle East. Jews, he said, got their name from Judea, renamed after they had taken it from Canaanites. So, he suggested, it’s only natural that the Jews should have been exiled a couple of times, because the land is desirable real estate as a bridge from Europe to the Middle East, Egypt and Africa.

As any Evangelical Christian would remind this pastor, who also happens to teach at an “intersectional” seminary, biblical teachings attributed religious significance to the land long before widespread global travel. But he is convinced that its real significance is not religious—whether to Jews, Christians or Muslims—but geopolitical (as an intersection?).