A Rejoinder to Internet Randos on the Jews, NatCon4, and a Couple of Hindus

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Introduction

Over the last few weeks, a few different things have happened that have set off various comment threads, in which Internet Randos have arisen to take me to task for continuing to be a boomer about the Jews. Along with some other stuff. As this is clearly an outrage not to be borne, I thought I would I say a few things about all of that here.

Some of these comments were asinine enough that I was tempted to answer them directly and individually—before remembering my rule about checking their number of followers, and then subtracting their mom and likely number of sisters. When that number comes in as low as it frequently does, I then do the right thing by not responding.

But then, when one notices that different Randos are saying the same kind of thing, some of it in our circles, and one concludes that somebody out there is circulating some toxic talking points, which the ignorant and unstable are gloming onto, the idea occurs to one that it might be a good time to come up with a batch reply. So here it comes.

Responsible Critics

Now because I am going to be responding to a cluster of inane rejoinders from here and from over there yonder, I need to begin with a really common fallacy, and this is precisely because my critics on this topic are not universally bad . . . but I do need to explain this. In discussing this, I do not apply Prov. 26:4-5 across the board to anyone who differs with me about Israel. Not what is happening.

For just one example, here is a fellow who read American Milk and Honey, differed with my definition of antisemitism, represented my view fairly and accurately, and engaged with it. I am not talking about responsible responses like that. The world needs more such. May their tribe increase. And he is not the only one—there are a few. But those few do not set the tone of this discourse, not even close.

And so here is why I need to begin with this point.

Invariably, when trolls come after me on this subject, the stand out reality is not how much they have a thing about Jews (although that does stand out too), but it is rather how bad they are at argument. The first rule of debate is that you should be able to state your opponent’s position in terms that he himself would own, and then undertake to answer that. Your opponent ought to be able to recognize himself in what you are addressing. He may not want to admit it, but at the basic level, the fairness of your critique of his position should be obvious to objective bystanders, and ideally to him.

If a man were to say “I saw an ugly woman once,” and the retort came back, “why do you think all women are ugly?” this would be an example of what I am talking about.

There will be those who try to turn this around and say that this is what I am guilty of when I say that antisemitism is driven by envy—when they feel they have some sort of affinity with the antisemites but don’t feel envious at all. They say that I am not representing them accurately, so what about that?

Rancid Attitudes

But this is a rule that applies to named opponents like Smith or Murphy, or well-defined groups like the Pharisees. D.L. Moody once said that when you throw a rock into a pack of stray dogs, the one that yelps is the one that got hit. I have routinely been accused of writing in “bad faith” because of my argument that a good deal of the resurgent antisemitism I see is driven by envy. Invariably, Murphy rises to the occasion in order to claim that I must have been talking about him, when I didn’t know that I was, and then accuse me of accusing him, when I didn’t know that I had. That was not my claim, and I did not have Murphy in mind at all. But then—let us be frank—when I see how defensive he got about the whole thing, I might think that about him now.

When Jesus attacked the Talmudic scholars of His day, He painted with a broad brush. He kind of trashed the name “Pharisee” for forever and a day. But we also know that there were good and righteous Pharisees who were out there. There was Nicodemus (John 3:1), and Joseph of Arimathea (Luke 23:51; John 19:38-39), and the Pharisees who warned Him of a pending attempt on His life (Luke 13:31), and then the thousands of them who believed after the resurrection (Acts 15:5; Acts 21:20). Paul even considered himself a Christian Pharisee (Acts 23:6). But the one rule of thumb that would enable you to identify a good and godly Pharisee is that he would be one who would readily acknowledge the justice of the Lord’s assault on their faction.

A good Secret Service agent is one who acknowledges the merit in the pounding that the Secret Service is currently getting. An agent who gets defensive is clearly part of the problem.

By the same token, there were good and responsible Cretans. And who were they? They were the ones who would acknowledge the justice of Paul’s jibe about Cretans being liars, evil beasts and slowbellies (Tit. 1:12) . . . like Epimenides the Cretan, the man that Paul was quoting. After receiving Paul’s letter, suppose someone scoured the island in order to find three Cretans who were not liars, evil beasts, or slowbellies. Is Paul thereby refuted? No, because when the subject is raised, they would be the ones who said, “About time somebody brought this up.”

So are there critics of Israel’s foreign policy who are not antisemitic? Are there supercessionists who are not antisemitic? Are there people who are justly concerned about the influence of the Israel lobby in DC who are not antisemitic? Are there men who love America the way Netanyahu loves Israel who are not antisemitic? Are there people who think that the ADL is an activist anti-Christian group who are not antisemitic? Of course. Five of courses.

But whether they are personally antisemitic or not, if someone in any of these categories stares at you blankly with a fat face whenever you then point to the kind of rancid comments that mysteriously appear whenever I write about this topic, then at the very least, their antisemitic detector is busted. If they can’t smell that sulfur, then I am afraid that I have to say that I really can’t trust their noses.

I work in a circle of experienced pastors, and we have to deal with many problematic attitudes behind the scenes. People are sinners. Some outrageous behavior does show up online, sure enough, but part of pastoral work involves putting out fires in the personal lives of people who are not okay, and who are seriously not right with God—and to do it before they start posting.

Our assigned task is to present every man perfect in Christ Jesus (Col. 1:28), and so what if a parishioner periodically gets drunk and starts spewing hatred toward the Jews? Those sins, if unrepented, are going to keep such a person out of the kingdom of God (Gal. 5:19-21), and it is our assigned task is to deal with it. I have a pastor friend who had a parishioner move away, who then came under some bad influences, and started sending around memes like, “Mom, what’s the Holocaust?” “It was the one time Jews had to do manual labor, so they claim it killed them.” That is the kind of thing that requires cold law and hot gospel—you can’t fix it with sunglasses and a joke about White Boy Summer. The task is to keep these people from going to Hell.

We have heard a good deal about Christless conservatism recently, and I would say that this is a prime example of it. The left wing of Christless conservatism wants to be secular and not mention Him at all. This right wing of Christless conservatism wants to acknowledge Him with their lips, while keeping their hearts far from Him (Is. 29:13), just like the Jews of old. The difference between me and an unbelieving Jew is that I worship a Jew, and he doesn’t. The difference between me and an antisemite is that I worship a Jew and he doesn’t.

Before Crucifying Him There

In my recent talk at NatCon4, I said something that got snipped and circulated online as a separate quote:

In response to this, there was a zinger meme going around that said something like “they? who’s they, Doug?” The clear intent was to imply that I was somehow too embarrassed to say what the apostle John says in multiple places:

But in my reply, I appealed to a long Christian tradition, grounded in Scripture, and said that Jesus was killed by the Sanhedrin, Pilate, the Grand Inquisitor, and the Grand Kleegle Wizard of the Klan—you know, all those guys, all of whom represented all the rest of us. This is the point that Rembrandt once made in his painting The Raising of the Cross, when he included a self-portrait of himself as he was helping to set up the cross that crucified Christ.

This is not over-wrought piety. It is not sanctimony. It is a deeply Christian instinct.

The crucifixion was a true group effort. An Edomite, a Roman, the Gentiles, and the people of Israel. Anyone who believes that Jesus went to the cross because of the sins of all those other people has had his self-deception metastasize into an art form.

Envy Is As Envy Does

Now when I say that I believe that envy is a driving force in a lot of this nonsense, this is due to a combination of factors. First is the fact that envy lies at the very heart of Paul’s argument in Romans about Jew/Gentile relations. So on the basis of that revealed foundation I look for envy, and sure enough, I see it. I found the truth because I looked where the Scriptures said to find it. Second, it’s all in Girard, man. The mimetic engine that drives human conflict is mysteriously invisible to those who are most consumed by it. They claim they don’t see it, and of course they don’t. They are the blind ones. Third, for those who can’t see my point yet, but who are willing in principle to consider what I say, let me point it out for you. Look right on the surface of that meme again, and you will there see Jews insulted for knowing how to make a living with their brains. Unlike some people I could mention, whose idea of a mic drop is to deny that Tamerlane ever built pyramids of skulls outside conquered cities. “We have no corroborating evidence!”

You may not have noticed it but we are right smack in the middle of a populist “common man” revolt, aimed at all the pointy-headed elites who graduated from the Ivies, after which they got a swanky job with a hedge fund on Wall Street, to better position themselves to rain down blue ruin on Heartland America. And if you have been reading this blog for more than two weeks, you should know that all my sympathies are entirely with these rejected deplorables—but for reasons that have everything to do with biblical justice, and nothing whatever to do with class warfare. God really hath thrown down the mighty from their seats.

But my problem with the current aristocracy is not that they are rulers who are the best (aristos, best), but rather that they are a kakistocracy (rule by the worst), swanking around like they knew something that the rest of us didn’t. The regular blue collars appear to have had it with these guys, and so we are seeing an uprising that is manifesting itself throughout the Western world. All to the good, at least so far.

But one of my guiding principles for life, and for analyzing situations like this, is to ask myself “what would I try to do here if I were the devil?” Then I try to counteract that. I try to lean the other way. Now in a populist revolt like this, however richly the aristoi deserve what’s coming, the very first thing the devil is going to do with this is try to steer it into class warfare, into a striving for victim status, and into right wing identity politics. The central tool that he has used to accomplish this, over the course of centuries, has been envy. It is a weapon he knows how to wield very well, and in our day the conditions are most ripe for it.

So for two cents a populist revolt against the elites could easily be turned into a festival of resentment and envy. And once this revolt got under way, a handful of people on the right, wiseacres beyond their years, decided to throw Jews into the mix. What could go wrong?

They did this right at the same time that the left—that hothouse of malice and envy—has exploded into a carnival of hatred. The October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas has deeply divided the left, with that division being between the donor class, heavily Jewish, and the young commies, riddled with the worst forms of envy.

Instead of seeing this as a moment when God struck the Midianites with confusion (Judg. 7:22), and letting them continue on with in their madness, it is as though some of Gideon’s men decided to join in the confusion in order to start whacking their fellows with the sword. “See? We on the right can have a nervous tick about Jews too!” Their sentiment is that now was apparently the moment to illustrate the common ground we share with AOC, Ilham Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and those other deep thinkers.

All in all, this displays the same levels of strategic acumen that you might find in a pound of wet, uncooked liver.

A NatCon Case in Point

Let’s complicate this a bit, shall we? I began to write this while coming away from NatCon4, which had a goodly number of observant Jews in attendance. There was a great deal of commonality in the place, but it was, at the end of the day, a gathering of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and a handful of Hindus. This point ties in with the broader theme of this post, which is antisemitism and the Jews. Promise. It has to do with what some people assumed (wrongly) about my views on political coalitions, allies, co-belligerents, friendships, and the current need of the hour, which is the dismantling of the Uniparty in DC.

I am a Christian, first and last. If Christ is not the Lord of all, He is not the Lord at all. I am not a lowest-common-denominator Judeo-Christian, and neither am I carrying water for any etiolated Western values. We have been talking about Christian nationalism, remember, and not Vague and Misty Religiosity nationalism.

Anybody who thinks it is possible to throw all those positions into a blender and have the resultant puree provide a substantive basis for governance is out of their mind. A case in point would be Vivek’s speech, which I thought was marvelous with the exception of a (key) point which he mentioned a couple of times. He thought that the foundation for the house he was proposing to build could be the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But neither of these worthy documents provides a transcendent basis for anything, and on top of that both those documents were the result of the Protestant Christian consensus that they grew out of, and which does provide that needed transcendent basis.

Some might think the idea was to have everybody agree to “stay in their lane.” In other words, Christianity for America, Judaism for Israel, Hinduism for India, and so on. But suppose we are successful in this, and America is Christian and India is Hindu. Does this arrangement affect America’s foreign policy? Christianity still remains a missionary religion, and the Great Commission is still in effect, and this means that America now believes that the future of India needs to be Christian. But India has Hindu laws prohibiting conversion to Christianity. This is the kind of thing that cannot be papered over.

We must escape the closed system of secularism, and this requires a transcendent reality. But it is not possible to have two transcendent realities, particularly if one of them is pantheistic and hence not transcendent. This is a challenge, but that is no reason for refusing to talk about it. Neither is it a reason for suspecting a Christian of selling out simply because he wants to talk about it.

The relationship between conservative Christians and conservative Jews has the same basic challenge, but is a bit more complicated. The issue of whether or not Jesus rose from the dead is not a trifle, and whether this vindicates the Christian claim that He was and is the Messiah promised to Israel by Isaiah the prophet is not a trifle either.

The differences I have with Judaism are stark and are laid out clearly in American Milk and Honey. But I have had Jewish friends who read that book, appreciated much of it, and differed with other portions. In the main, they have thus far been far superior to the Christian critics. I say this because they have understood what I was arguing, and the antisemitic critics have largely refused to. I think that this is because these Jews are people of the text and they know how to argue. The Randos are people of the spleen, and they merely know how to vent. They know how to post gifs that show touchdown dances when they are people who never touched a football. It reminds me of Lewis’s description of flippancy in Screwtape—people who can’t tell a joke, but who know how to act as though the joke has somehow already been made.

I am a Christian, as mentioned above, but I am also a Christian apologist. That means that it is my desire, always, to present the claims of the Lord Jesus whenever I have opportunity. That is what I do, and what I am doing now. Hindus need Christ, Jews need Christ, and antisemites need Christ. And the antisemite is the one muttering, “yeah, but the Jews need Him more. Start with them.” No.

And Last, the Politics of the Thing

Lord willing, this coming Wednesday, I am going to be posting on the egregious Republican backsliding on the abortion issue. That is important enough that it needs to be considered in its own space, and with its very own sharp edges. But right now, I am addressing antisemitism, Israel, and the current presidential campaign here in America.

Ask yourself this. Who do you think Benjamin Netanyahu would prefer to have as president of the United States? Biden or Trump? The man whose policy encourages Hamas to continue to use their own people as human shields? The man who is president of these United States, Joe “Floating Pier” Biden. Or the man who moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and who negotiated the Abraham Accords?

My view of America’s relationship to Israel can be fairly described as being pretty close to JD Vance’s position on it, and all within the same broad context of a general commitment to minimal interventionism abroad.

And so what kind of sense does it make for the antisemites and antisemite adjacent types on the right to be all excited for the Trump/Vance ticket (“we are so back”), and to be simultaneously filled with indignation that a preacher in Idaho largely agrees with the policies they are so eager to vote for?

I ask you.