I got the urge to write this particular blog after taking a gander at an Al-Jazeera documentary about Christian Zionism. It’s made me think harder about the link between religion and politics, and my own perception of the situation. It’s challenged how I see the Christian influence on the decisions being made by these Zionists, but not totally overturned it. It made me realize that my critique was shallow and that it needed to become more sophisticated. Now, I’m not going to achieve that right here, but this will be a baby step.
To speak on the video just a moment, it’s titled “Why evangelicals influence US foreign policy in the Middle East, Part 1”. I didn’t watch all of this or any of part 2. This isn’t a review of the video and the video was simply not in a style I’m drawn to: it’s a faux-cinema style with heavy editing that works to conceal the fact that this is more editorial than documentary. That’s not to say I disagree with the video, more that I felt I wasn’t getting into the things I was interested in: the historical background, the goals of the political actors, etc.
It might seem strange that I say that this didn’t get into the goals of these groups, but this is an element of my outlook and also the first thing that was challenged. When analyzing politics, I am a fairly strict materialist. I don’t believe that everybody is acting purely on such grounds, but I feel that such grounds are the starting point of most political analysis. I believe that people are, more often than not, effective thinkers in their way, and that they work in the hopes of achieving an advantage for themselves. There isn’t a kind of formula you can plug in here to measure how much this hope drives them relative to other concerns, but let’s take it as read that some part of one’s reasoning is based on this type of calculation.
In the case of Christian Zionism, what this means is that I tend not to believe the idea that people are primarily motivated by biblical prophecy. “Tend not to believe” is a funny phrase, and one I wouldn’t have used before watching this piece. One part of this “tends” thing is that I just don’t believe that everyone fully buys into this who uses it. I’ve always assumed that the big wigs of the movement were in this with open eyes and maximum cynicism. The other part of the “tends” thing is that I am no longer sure how true this is.
Part of my doubts on this come from seeing so many elected officials talking earnestly about how their Christian faith informed their stance on Israel. Megapastors talk about Israel and the end-times. I doubted further when I saw the long history that Christian Zionism has. I had assumed that this reading of the Bible was fairly recent, but it is instead centuries old. It appears to have been a fairly fringe movement for most of its time, but it still shows that people interpreted the Bible the way that modern conservatives do at a time when the geopolitical situation simply can’t have been that much on their minds.
There is, of course, the legacy of the Crusades, but what is distinct about Christian Zionism is their belief that Jews will be the ones to take and hold Israel for the end times; the position of the Christian soldier within Israel doesn’t seem much talked about, other than the guy who rode his motorcycle in the Megiddo Valley and daydreamed a fantasy-based metal music video. This all centers on the plight and redemption of the Jewish nation.
A section of the Bible that feels foundational to this effort is Luke chapter 21, and in this chapter it is pretty explicit about the people of Jerusalem (and perhaps Judea) being taken away in chains, and that those people will return to Jerusalem when “the time of the Gentiles” is over, and this occurring will be the sign that the end times are come. It is difficult for me to argue that the chapter doesn’t say that fairly straightforwardly. Trust me, if I could have made that argument, I would have.
I don’t believe there is much use in trying to employ scripture against the Christian Zionists here. After all, Jesus also said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven, and yet rich people never saw this as a choice. They continued to be and get rich and continued to believe that they were destined for heaven; some of them even believed that their wealth was a display of how godly they were. If Christianity as a religion has not rejected wealth but to a large extent embraced it, we can’t look at the letter of scripture as the primary basis for Christian morality.
I’m going to speculate here, attempting to draw on various strands of study I’ve been looking into, in an attempt to understand the connection between religious congregations and geopolitics, especially Christian Zionism and US imperialism.
One of my ideas is that sovereign value always equals 1. This is related to the state theory of money, which asserts that money is not embodied in any commodity but rather that it is given value by state decree. That being the case, we can’t compare values between sovereign monetary spaces (i.e. areas, such as nation-states or currency unions, where a certain currency is the fundamental money of account). Therefore when we are talking about the totality of value within a space for the purposes of analyzing how value operates within it, we first set the sovereign value as 1 and then divide it as value is divided in the state-society.
When I talk about value, I am not talking about economic value alone; this political value can be equated with “power” or “political capital”, though the concept isn’t exactly either of those. I would define value in this sense as political authority which is either 1) expressed as economic value, e.g. capital, or 2) has the potential to be converted into economic value, e.g. political authority.
There are two ways for sovereign value to be devolved: either serially (in which case value is overlapping, which is to say that the superior and the inferior in the devolution relationship both exercise value at the same time) or severally (in which case value is distinct and is held by one individual at a time). Making the most minimal claim I can here, economic value is always several while power-political value is usually serial.
The implication of this is that the value available to the government (i.e. the sovereign) is not always equal to the value existing in their monetary space. In the non-economized sphere, where value is serial, the government allows its subordinates to exercise some of its power while always retaining the ability to act as well. In the economized sphere, this value is actually taken out of the government’s hands. For the government to recover that value for its use, it must use some of its non-economized value to execute the recovery process; we can broadly refer to this as taxation.
The point I am attempting to make is that value within a sovereign space is always mediated to some degree by the sovereign. Economizing value allows that value to be used for exchange. This happens through the vehicle of debt; as money ultimately represents a debt of the buyer being settled, this creates a chain of relationships which we call the market. Therefore it is not within the interest of the state to allow just anyone to accumulate value, as this value enables those who possess it to act effectively with the sanction of the sovereign.
This is all an attempt to start sketching out a theoretical basis for the claim that modern Christian Zionism, especially in and led by the United States, is a project of the ruling class. The evidence I have for this is circumstantial so far. I would look at the different fortunes in Christian Zionism in the United States and United Kingdom to see how the affinity of the state affected that platform. In the UK, the hostility they had received from the settlers of Israel eventually turned public opinion against Israel to a significant degree. While Britain has always broadly supported Israel, their government has often been on the other side of issues than Israel, and it seems a majority of Britons have long viewed the Israeli regime as at least problematic. Much of this has happened after the UK basically handed over its duties of hovering menacingly over that region of the world to the US. In America, pro-Israel sentiment has been high ever since the founding of the state, and for most of that time America was Israel’s primary sponsor. While American evangelicalism is a particular strain, it seems to me that there has been an effort to push this particular narrative in those circles, while it has not necessarily reached others as strongly.
My contention here is that Christian Zionism has been permitted to flourish and prosper, likely through the tacit permission to raise funds in otherwise illegal and unacceptable means. The people behind that Sound of Freedom movie scam are more normal among this set than many of us would like to believe, and America seems unique in how its government simply allows a host of scams, both clever and clumsy, to germinate in its soil. Co-ops, food banks, shelters, and other such socially beneficial programs, on the other hand, are constantly beset by legal and regulatory woes while having a fraction of the monetary support.
If supporting Israel was not in the material interest of the American ruling class, Christian Zionism would not be a bedrock belief for so many Christians in this country. It does not appear to be decisive in other countries, either, except to the extent that some individuals agree with the American evangelical message. While I do think that the religious aspect is serious, I am still not convinced that attempting to deal with this on those terms is the best way forward. I believe we still need to focus on the political sphere. If the source of value changes its priorities, the way that value is distributed in society can be shifted, and evils such as Christian Zionism will have to wither away.