Will fundamentalist Christians and Jews ignite apocalypse? Many fundamentalist Christians embrace Israel because of their end-times theology; Israel's right wing welcomes the economic and political support - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 11, 2002 by Margot Patterson

Decrying Christian fundamentalist theology and its influence on U.S. Mideast policy strikes Baylor University professor Marc Ellis as hypocritical, even though Ellis acknowledges he would like to see the political sway of fundamentalists curtailed.

"Most of the Christian and Jewish support for the state of Israel has come from liberal sources. Now liberal Christians are beginning to understand that something is wrong with those policies, but those policies have already had their effect," said Ellis.

A professor of American and Jewish studies at Baylor, Ellis points out that if some fundamentalist Christians promote the state of Israel, so too in the past did prominent liberal theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christians, if for different reasons.

"Liberal Christians supported Israel out of guilt over the Holocaust. Fundamentalist Christians have supported Israel because of biblical eschatology," said Ellis.

"Jews were the vehicle through which Christians renewed their own theology after the Holocaust: the recovery of the Hebrew Bible that had been so denigrated in Christian theology, the recovery of the prophets, the Jewishness of Jesus. Jews were seen as carriers of those values that Christians needed to embrace," Ellis said. "It's about how Christianity renewed itself in the face of atrocities it was responsible for. Jews were elevated where once they were demeaned."

What Ellis called "the political naivete" of liberal Christians who saw Jews only as innocents has played a large role in contributing to a steady deterioration in the conditions Palestinians live in that he said threatens to get worse still if the United States invades Iraq.

"It's been getting worse from the beginning, since 1948, and it's been getting worse since 1993 when Oslo was signed. Everything that has been gained since 1993 has been wiped out in the last two years. Now there are three million Palestinians on the West Bank who are in virtual prison, or worse. They are under closure. No one delivers their food. You have an entire population in prison but without the perks of prison," said Ellis.

Margot Patterson is NCR senior writer. Her e-mail address is mpatterson@natcath.org