The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [11]
Thus the whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to “hurry God up” in his efforts to bring about this key final showdown. Practically speaking, this manifests itself, mainly, in the form of American evangelical Christians endorsing pro-Israel policies, support that Israel itself has been happy to receive (Benjamin Netanyahu has even appeared at Hagee’s Cornerstone Church) despite the fact that dispensationalist doctrine also envisions the mass conversion of all Jews to Christianity after the final battle, with dire consequences for those who don’t. I wonder exactly how most Israelis would feel about the sudden warmth being shown them by American evangelicals if they knew, for instance, that people like ardent End Timer Hal Lindsey had predicted the “mother of all Holocausts” for those Jews who refused to convert at the Second Coming.
Anyway, Pastor Hagee, that drawling, white-haired, barrel-organ-voiced Texan with the kindly smile who gives such powerful ministry on TV, is one of America’s chief pitchmen for Christian Zionism. He founded a group called Christians United for Israel (CUFI), whose mission is to rally Christians to Israel’s cause. According to the Washington Post, Hagee has regular access to the White House and has many followers among George Bush’s staff. Remarkably, when CUFI held a conference in Washington this past summer, no less a personage than Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman gave the keynote address. Also participating as speakers were Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, while George W. Bush and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert sent recorded greetings.
When I first started reading about Hagee and about the felicitous alliance between the American religious right and the hard-liners in the Israeli government, my first reaction was to applaud it as a brilliantly cynical piece of international politics. Whether it was conceived in the corridors of Mossad headquarters or in some dreary archcapitalist think tank funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation (and I’m guessing it was probably some combination of both), I had no idea, but it was unmistakably an ingenious solution to the problem of how to rally southern conservative Christians a few generations removed from their cross-burning Klan days to the cause of Israel. If it turns out that it was dreamed up by the same guy who figured out how to get laid-off midwestern factory workers to whoop for free-trade Republicanism by plastering the airwaves with French-kissing men, I have to say, that guy deserves some kind of special medal—a Triple Order of Satan, or something like that.
But during the election season, I started to wonder if this kind of thing might eventually backfire on the people who concocted these ideas, if indeed they were dreamed up from on high. As a temporary electoral gambit designed to garner support for Israel, it’s brilliant, but let’s not forget that it doesn’t work unless you get tens of millions of people really believing that the world is about to end. I wonder sometimes if the cynics in Washington think that they can get away with just bending the yokels’ ears once every four years, cashing in on Election Day, and then going back to the grimy you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours money politics that dominates everyday life inside the Beltway.
I think those people forget that after every Election Day, even after they’ve been forgotten by Washington, those yokels are still out there, thinking, waiting, watching. Their minds change. And if their needs are not tended to, they drift away. And if you’ve gotten used to making political decisions based on the Book of Revelation, you can drift pretty far. I wanted to see how far, exactly—I was going to join the church.
TWO
Congressional