Strange Bedfellows

Over at Salon today Eric Boehlart has an excellent article on the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion. Futurballa tries to keep the discussion of religion to a minimum, simply because it is often best to leave that subject out of polite discourse. Though with yesterday's posting on the 10 Commandments brouhaha, and today's posting, we seem to have stepped out of the bounds of that dictum. However this Salon article is one of the best I've read on the subject of this controversy and on the larger question of the uncomfortable alliance between Jews and Evangelical Christians over the State of Israel.

Futurballa is married to a Christian and out of personal experience can tell you that there are two types of Christians (of the more religeous sort), those who subscribe to the end of days scenario that requires the return to Israel and eventual conversion of the Jews to fulfill their idea of prophecy, and those who believe the end of days can not be forseen and that the Jews are their spiritual forebears who have their own covenant and relationship with God. My marriage is certainly with someone of the latter group.

In terms of Gibson's movie, that without the controversy surrounding it would be an unlikely contender for box office champion, being in Aramaic and Latin without subtitles, Boehlart makes the point that the argument is just a sympton of the larger problem and that this uneasy alliance will have to come to a head at some point. Beyond the right to Israel to exist inside of secure borders, the agendas of the Jewish people and the evangelical community are actually antithetical.

There is also a power imbalance that puts the Jewish people at a disadvantage and should leave Jews wary of being too beholding to people who really don't have their best interests at heart.

A couple of excerpts from the Salon piece illustrate this point.

On its Web site, the National Association of Evangelicals recently posted a statement about "The Passion," which included a passage that rankled some Jewish leaders: "There is a great deal of pressure on Israel right now, and Christians seem to be a major source of support for Israel. For Jewish leaders to risk alienating 2 billion Christians over a movie seems shortsighted."

snip

The statement "was never intended to be a threat," says an NAE spokesman. "It was an observation that [Jews] are combating people who support them, groups that have never resisted Israel. It's baffled some evangelicals that Jewish leaders are so antagonistic toward the people who want what's best for the Jewish people."

The Jewish people will have to confront the fact that they are allying themselves with people who think that what is best for the Jews is that they stop being Jews.

Read the whole thing here. Salon requires a subscription or that you click through an add for a "day pass". Worth the small investment of your time.