Jon Presco
Israel may have become a punching bag for much of the world, but 50 million Americans back the Jewish state 100 percent, no ifs, buts or maybes.
As portrayed in the striking documentary “Waiting for Armageddon,” these supporters are Christian Evangelicals who are neither rural hicks nor ranting fanatics.
What they hold in common is an unshakeable faith that every inch of Israel/Palestine belongs to the Jews. “They want the Muslims to be evicted by the Jews, the Jews to rebuild the Temple of Solomon and then Christ to return and trump everyone,” one analyst explains in the film.
The action-backed beliefs of the Evangelicals confront most American Jews with a dilemma. They applaud the unstinting financial support to Israel from the Evangelical community, about $75 million annually, and even more its political clout and lobbying on behalf of the Jewish state.
But, the support comes with a theological price tag. At the end of days, after the final battle between good and evil on the plains of Megiddo in northern Israel, they believe, the Jews will either see the light and accept Jesus Christ, or die.
“When we first discussed the film, we agreed that we didn’t want a Michael Moore diatribe,” said David Heilbroner. “We embarked on this as an open-minded journey, without preconceptions.”
Heilbroner joined forces with two other documentary filmmakers, Kate Davis and Franco Sacchi, in directing, producing and shooting “Armageddon,” after they discovered that each had planned independently to deal with the topic.
As the filmmakers started in-depth interviews with Evangelical leaders and families and joined them on a pilgrimage to Israel, a clearer picture emerged, which is revealed in the final product.
“We found the Evangelicals to be well-educated and intelligent people, not the anti-science fanatics often portrayed,” said Heilbroner, son of a Jewish father and Christian mother.
On the other side, he noted that many Israelis and Diaspora Jews are not fully aware of the ultimate theological price attached to Evangelicals’ unswerving support of Israel.
Nothing in the film is as startling as the utter calmness and precision with which Laura Bagg, who with her husband James works as an engineer at a Connecticut jet propulsion facility, lays out the scenario.
First comes the Rapture, in which all who believe in Christ will be snatched up to heaven in one sixty-fourth of a second. Exactly 144,000 Jews will save themselves on the spot by accepting Christ, but the rest will perish, she says.
The Rapture may occur at any moment, a prospect anticipated with joy by Tony and Devonna Edwards of Oklahoma, but less so by their teenage daughter, Kristin.
Moving up suddenly beyond the clouds seems OK for her grandparents, but Kristin had hoped to be married and have children, she explained somewhat plaintively.
Next come seven years of Tribulations, with catastrophes and horrors to make all previous wars and natural disasters pale in comparison.
Ultimately, all the world’s armies converge at Armageddon, and “blood will rise as high as a horse’s bridle,” Laura Bagg notes quietly, culminating in the reign of Christ and 1,000 years of peace and harmony.
However, the forerunner for all these pre-ordained events is the return of the Jews to their homeland. To that end, Evangelicals celebrated the victories of 1948 and 1967 as joyously as any Jews, foreseeing destruction of the Dome of the Rock and other Muslim holy places, the building of the Third Temple and continuing turmoil in the Middle East.
“You see, it’s all God’s plan, and it all centers around Israel,” James Bagg declares.
From the modern Jewish perspective, the case is summarized by Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg, who observes, “Our Christian friends say to the Jews, ‘We love you, but you must cease being Jews, you must give up what is most central to you.’”
In pre-screenings, “Armageddon” encountered warm receptions by Evangelical audiences.
Jewish viewers were more contentious, reflecting a continuing split in the community’s attitudes toward Evangelicals, with “pragmatists,” including most Israeli leaders, arguing that powerful Christian support is needed now, and let the ultimate future take care of itself.
Out of his painful childhood experiences, Mooneyham, 57, preaches passionately about the importance of home. Out of his reading of the Bible, he preaches with equal passion about God’s continuing devotion to the Jewish people.
“I feel jealous sometimes. This term that keeps coming up in the Old Book — the Chosen, the Chosen,” says the minister, who has made three trips to Israel and named his sons Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. “I’m a pardoned gentile, but I’m not one of the Chosen People. They’re the apple of his eye.”
Scholars of religion call this worldview “philo-Semitism,” the opposite of anti-Semitism. It is a burgeoning phenomenon in evangelical Christian churches across the country, a hot topic in Jewish historical studies and a wellspring of support for Israel.
Yet many Jews are nervous about evangelicals’ intentions. In recent weeks, leaders of three of the nation’s largest Jewish groups — the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Union for Reform Judaism — have decried what they see as a mounting threat to the separation of church and state from evangelicals emboldened by the belief that they have an ally in the White House and an opportunity to shift the Supreme Court.
“Make no mistake: We are facing an emerging Christian right leadership that intends to ‘Christianize’ all aspects of American life, from the halls of government to the libraries, to the movies, to recording studios, to the playing fields and locker rooms . . . from the military to SpongeBob SquarePants,” the ADL’s national director, Abraham H. Foxman, said in a Nov. 3 speech.
Julie Galambush, a former American Baptist minister who converted to Judaism 11 years ago, has seen both sides of the divide. She said many Jews suspect that evangelicals’ support for Israel is rooted in a belief that the return of Jews to the promised land will trigger the Second Coming of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and mass conversion.
“That hope is felt and expressed by Christians as a kind, benevolent hope,” said Galambush, author of “The Reluctant Parting,” a new book on the Jewish roots of Christianity. “But believing that someday Jews will stop being Jews and become Christians is still a form of hoping that someday there will be no more Jews.”
The result is a paradox — warming evangelical attitudes toward Jews at a time of rising Jewish concern about evangelicals — that could be a turning point in the uneasy alliance between Jewish and Christian groups that ardently back Israel but disagree on much else.
The Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, chairman of the evangelical American Family Association, warned in a Dec. 5 radio broadcast that Foxman was “in a bind” because the “strongest supporters Israel has are members of the religious right — the people he’s fighting.”
“The more he says that ‘you people are destroying this country,’ you know, some people are going to begin to get fed up with this and say, ‘Well, all right then. If that’s the way you feel, then we just won’t support Israel anymore,’ ” Wildmon said.
Philo-Semitism is far from universal among the 60 million to 90 million U.S. adults who identify themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. But it has strong roots, not only in the Hebrew scriptures shared by both faiths but also in the belief that today’s Jews and Christians have common antagonists, such as secularism, consumerism and militant Islam.
Inhis sermons, Mooneyham returns again and again to God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12: “I will bless those who bless you, and curse him who curses you.”
It is a theme echoed in many conversations at the Tabernacle, a plain red-brick church in a community that has seen one factory after another close, yet where the congregation made a Christmasofferingof $25,000 to help pay for the immigrationof Russian Jews to Israel.
“I believe everyone in this church felt it was the best thing we’ve ever done with missionary money, to help the Jewish people go home,” said Dorothy Pawlowski, 72, who tithes to the church.
And it is a message being passed to the next generation. On Thursday nights, J.J. Vogltanz, a deacon, uses a Christian textbook to leadhis three home-schooled children in science experiments designed to illustrate Bible verses. Oneof the first things he taught them about Jesus, he said, was that “he was a Jew.”
Asked whether he also taughthis children that the Jews rejected Jesus, Vogltanz, 34, paused. “I’m not sure it’s constructive to assign blame,” he said.
Mark A. Noll, a professorof Christian thought at Wheaton College, a centerof evangelical scholarshipin Illinois, said evangelicals are beginning to move away from supersessionism — the centuries-old belief that with the comingof Jesus, God endedhis covenant with the Jews and transferred it to the Christian church.
Since the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church and some Protestant denominations have renounced supersessionism and stressed their belief that the covenant between God and the Jewish people remains in effect.
Evangelicals generally have not taken that step, but “among what you might call the evangelical intelligentsia, questionsof supersessionism have come onto the table,” Noll said. “It’s in play among evangelicals in the way that it was in mainline Protestantism and Catholicism — but wasn’t among evangelicals — 30 or 40 years ago.”
At Fuller Theological Seminary, an evangelical training ground in Pasadena, Calif., President Richard J. Mouw hosted a kosher breakfast for 20 rabbis a week before Christmas. “More and more, we’re inviting Jews as guest lecturers,” Mouw said. “We’re looking at rabbinic literature and how we can better understand the Bible through rabbinic eyes. That’s a real push for us.”
Jacques Berlinerblau, a visiting professorof Jewish civilization at Georgetown University, said the riseof philo-Semitism in the United States has led Jewish scholars to look back at previous periodsof philo-Semitism, such as in Amsterdam in the mid-17th century. He said revisionists are increasingly challenging the standard “lachrymose version”of Jewishhistory, questioning whether persecution has been the norm and tolerance the exception, or vice versa.
Still, some Jews think that philo-Semitism is just the flip sideof anti-Semitism.
“Both are Semitisms: That is, both install the Jews at the center of history. One regards this centrality positively, the other regards it negatively. But both are forms of obsession about the Jews,” said Leon Wieseltier, a Jewish scholar and literary editor of the New Republic.
The Southern Baptist Convention, to which the Tabernacle belongs, passed a resolution in 1867 calling on its members to convert Jews and renewed that call as recently as 1996. Its former president, Bailey Smith, declared in 1980 that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” and it currently supports about 15 congregations of messianic Jews, who are popularly associated with the organization Jews for Jesus.
So Mooneyham has a ready answer for Jews who doubt his motives: “I think they have a right to be suspicious of just about everybody, given the history.”
He also has a personal story. The pivotal moment of Mooneyham’s childhood came at age 7 when his parents, in the middle of a divorce, took him and his three sisters to a church parking lot in Burlington, N.C., and parceled them out to relatives for a few weeks. Those few weeks turned into years. The family never came together again.
Nearly 45 years later, the pastor was watching television before a Sunday morning church service when he came upon an infomercial by Rabbi Yechiel Z. Eckstein, founder of a group called the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Eckstein was standing in Israel with an elderly woman from Russia who said she was finally home.
“She started crying, he started crying, and I started crying,” Mooneyham said. “Then I said, ‘Lord, help me, because I’m really going to throw my congregation a curveball today. We’re going to help Jews — we’re not going to witness to them, we’re just going to help them. Because I know what home means.’ ”
Since that day five years ago, according to Eckstein, the Tabernacle has sent more than $175,000 to the fellowship, which has a donor base of 400,000 Christians and has contributed more than $100 million to Israeli causes.
“I can only say that what we’ve done should speak for itself, because we’ve given and we’ve asked nothing in return,” Mooneyham said. “And that’s the way it will stay.”
Among Evangelicals, A Kinship With Jews
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