SUPPLE RELIGION FEATURE WRITER OF THE YEAR: Gibson 2011
STORY NO. 1
'Blood Libel' and Sarah Palin
Christian Conservatives' Infatuation with Judaism
Politics Daily
Published Jan. 12, 2011
When Sarah Palin invoked the "blood libel" charge in lashing out against critics, she was destined to spark controversy given the long, fraught history of that myth, which for centuries has been used by Christians to justify anti-Semitism and the brutal persecution of Jews.
But the phrase also recalls one side of the double-edged affinity that American conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, have for Judaism and modern Jews. It is an embrace the Jewish community often appreciates, especially when it comes to supporting Israel. On other issues, however, Jewish leaders might prefer that evangelicals maintain a safer distance.
Palin's use of the "blood libel" accusation was an example of overreach. The analogy is certainly in keeping with a growing trend among many conservatives to see themselves as an oppressed minority -- just as the Jews have been throughout much of the last 2,000 years. But it can strike Jews as a kind of expropriation of their own painful history, and an attempt to make a false historical equivalency -- Christian conservatives in 21st century America are not Jews in 12th century England.
"When Governor Palin learns that many Jews are pained by and take offense at the use of the term, we are sure that she will choose to retract her comment, apologize and make a less inflammatory choice of words," Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, said Wednesday.
In her remarks posted on the website Vimeo, Palin said violent acts, such as the shootings in Arizona, "stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them." She said the media "should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn."
Hank Sheinkopf, a Jewish New York-based Democratic political consultant, told Politico use of the term was "absolutely inappropriate."
Even some conservatives were taken aback. Jennifer Rubin, who penned a lengthy critique of American Jewish antipathy to Palin in Commentary magazine a year ago, tweeted Wednesday morning that the "blood libel" usage shows she is "inflam[matory]" and "not serious."
The "blood libel" phrase arose in the Middle Ages when European anti-Semitism was on the rise. It refers to rumors circulated among Christians that Jews were sacrificing Christian babies and children to use their blood to make matzo bread at Passover. The charges were patently absurd but they grew out of the longstanding charge of "deicide" against the Jews, that is, that the Jews were responsible for killing Christ. And they were enough to spark brutal pogroms and create policies targeting Jews.
That model of persecution is appealing for many contemporary conservatives in that it reinforces their self-image as the underdog in America's political wars and as the victims of an overbearing secular and liberal culture. In fact, the popular conservative blogger and professor Glenn Reynolds used the "blood libel" analogy in a Wall Street Journal article on Monday from which Palin may have drawn inspiration.
Much the same dynamic has also been at work with the rising use of Nazi metaphors by the right, notably since the 2008 campaign and the election of Barack Obama. In that view, Obama is Hitler, Democrats and liberals are "fascists," and any disagreeable new policy or op-ed column augurs a coming "Holocaust" or pogrom.
Of course when Jews see those examples deployed so casually in the contemporary context it can cause a visceral counterreaction born of the trauma of personal experience of the actual Holocaust.
A more ambiguous trend is the enthusiastic new strain of "philo-Semitism" that many American Christians are displaying.
Conservative believers in particular have gone from rejecting all things Jewish to celebrating "Christianized" Passover seder meals or wearing tallit, the traditional Jewish prayer shawl. There are Christian bar mitzvahs, and there is even a growing trend toward appropriating Yom Kippur, the most sacred day on the Jewish calendar, for a Christian day of atonement. And Sarah Palin and other evangelical women increasingly like to compare themselves to Queen Esther, the Jewish beauty from the Book of Esther who saves her people from destruction.
At the same time, Jews have also watched as Christian conservatives, such as Texas pastor John Hagee, have become Israel's greatest supporters. That backing -- financial as well as spiritual -- is often born out of a belief that Israel's refounding is a sign of the imminent Second Coming of Jesus in an apocalypse that will center on Jerusalem and will convert some Jews to Christianity while eliminating the rest.
Still, any reservations about so-called Christian Zionism are usually subsumed by the geopolitical reality that Israelis live in a dangerous neighborhood and need all the friends they can get.
Moreover, American Jews have good reason to kvell about America's openness to all things Jewish. President Obama likes to quote the Hebrew bible as much as he does the Gospels, and Moses is enjoying a renaissance as "America's prophet," as author Bruce Feiler calls him.
Research shows that Americans look more favorably on Judaism than on any other religion (Mormons and Muslims are at the bottom of the scale) and the evidence is everywhere.
There are now three Jewish justices on the United States Supreme Court, for example (and six Roman Catholics, and no Protestants for the first time ever), prompting liberal blogger Philip Weiss to argue that "Jews are the new WASPs." Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, whose shooting last Saturday led to criticism of Palin and her counterattack, was the first Jew elected to Congress from Arizona. And the new star forward of the NBA's New York Knicks, Amar'e Stoudemire, said after making a pilgrimage to Israel last summer that he is a practicing Jew "spiritually and culturally" and he keeps kosher. Stoudemire, an African-American, undertook the pilgrimage after learning his mother was Jewish.
But even as American Christians discover their Jewish side (and the Jewishness of Jesus, which is a welcome development) they can still trip over age-old sensibilities by rummaging around in an ancient tradition while looking to take home something cool that suits their own needs.
"Perhaps Sarah Palin honestly does not know what a blood libel is, or does not know of their horrific history," said David Harris, president of the National Jewish Democratic Council. "[T]hat is perhaps the most charitable explanation we can arrive at in explaining her rhetoric today."
On the other hand, whether Palin understands the history of blood libel, she may have made the case for her critics by invoking that example.
"It's not just inappropriate, it's profoundly ironic," Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, tells USA Today. "By making this comparison and playing Jew in the picture, the person endangered by a blood libel, she admits that the words people use can have deadly impact."
"I'm not giving her a free pass. It was a poor and hurtful analogy," Hirschfield said. "But clearly, she's affirming exactly what her critics charge."
STORY NO. 2
A 'Christian' Europe Without Christianity
Religion News Service
Published Aug. 13, 2011 in The Huffington Post
Does European Christendom need Christianity to survive?
It may seen an odd question for a religious culture that once stretched from Britain to the Bosphorus, born of a deep and diffuse
faith that inspired great cathedrals and monasteries and filled them with believers for centuries.
But when right-wing extremist Anders Breivik killed 77 people in a horrific rampage in Norway last month, he highlighted a novel
development in the history of the West: a burgeoning alliance between believers and nonbelievers to promote Europe's Christian identity.
"European Christendom and the cross will be the symbol in which every cultural conservative can unite under in our common defense," Breivik wrote in his rambling 1,500-page manifesto. "It should serve as the uniting symbol for all Europeans whether they are agnostic or atheists."
Whether Breivik himself can be considered a bona fide Christian given his lack of a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God," as he put it, was a topic of much debate. There was no doubt, however, that he was a devout believer "in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform."
In fact, that's been the case for any number of unbelievers for more than a decade.
One prominent example was the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who spent her last years before her death in 2006 inveighing against a Muslim influx that was turning the continent into what she called "Eurabia."
Fallaci liked to describe herself as a "Christian atheist" -- an interesting turn of phrase -- because she thought Christianity provided Europe with a cultural and intellectual bulwark against Islam.
There's also Scottish-born historian and political conservative Niall Ferguson, who calls himself "an incurable atheist" but is also a
vocal champion for restoring Christendom because, as he puts it, there isn't sufficient "religious resistance" in the West to radical Islam.
(Ferguson dedicated his latest book, "Civilization: The West and the Rest," to his new partner, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch atheist who has promoted the values of Christianity over those of her native Islam.)
The modern-day crusade for Christendom by nonbelievers tends to be rooted in fears about Muslim immigration, but it's also fueled by worries about the deterioration of European culture -- and nostalgia for the continent's once central place in world affairs.
For some atheists, retaining European identity is reason enough to set aside long-standing enmity between churches and nonbelievers that dates back to the secularism of the Enlightenment and the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution.
And unlike the persistent sniping between atheists and believers in the U.S., Europe's nonreligious conservatives have found ready allies in the continent's religious leaders -- most notably Pope Benedict XVI.
Even before he was elected pope in April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was spearheading the Vatican effort, however unsuccessful, to have the European Union's new constitution recognize the continent's Christian heritage. He also rejected the idea of allowing Muslim Turkey into the EU. "Europe is a cultural continent," he told a French magazine, "not a geographical one."
As pope, Benedict eventually softened his opposition to Turkey's entry into the EU but continued to insist that Europe's Christian
culture must be protected, even as religious belief among Europeans declined.
In August 2005, just a few months after his election as pope, Benedict met secretly with Fallaci, news that upset Muslims when it
leaked out. Muslims were even angrier at the pontiff's controversial speech a year later in Regensburg, Germany, when he depicted Islam as prone to violence and alien to Christian Europe.
"Attempts at the 'Islamification' of the West cannot be denied," Benedict's closest aide, Monsignor Georg Ganswein, said in a 2007
interview. "And the associated danger for the identity of Europe cannot be ignored out of a wrongly understood sense of respect."
"The Catholic side sees this clearly," he added, "and says as much."
But some atheists see this as well, and are equally happy to say so.
One of Christendom's most prominent atheist advocates is the Italian philosopher and politician Marcello Pera. In 2004, he delivered a series of lectures with then-Cardinal Ratzinger that set out their shared view of the need to restore Christian identity in Europe in order to battle both Islam and moral degeneration.
Later, Benedict wrote a forward to Pera's book, "Why We Must Call Ourselves Christians," which promotes Benedict's argument that Western civilization can be saved if people live "as if God exists," whether they believe that or not.
It's not a new argument -- 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal held that even if God's existence cannot be proved, people ought to act as though God exists because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
But the updated version seems to be winning some converts. In a landmark ruling last March, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy could continue to display crucifixes in public school classrooms because the cross with Jesus on it is a "historical and cultural" symbol rather than a religious one.
While the Vatican welcomed that decision, others wonder whether the cost was too high -- essentially emptying a container of its meaning in order to preserve the cultural form.
And an empty container, no matter how attractive on the outside, can be filled with all manner of beliefs on the inside.
STORY NO. 3
Epitaph for Steve Jobs: Too great to be good?
Religion News Service
Published Oct. 31, 2011
The death of Apple founder and creative genius Steve Jobs has prompted the kind of veneration usually reserved for saints, inspired by his almost religious idealism and the lofty goals he had for technology and himself.
Not to mention the flat-out awesomeness of his products.
Everything about Apple and Jobs seemed to project a religious sensibility, even the hope of redemption. The company logo, as Christian author Andy Crouch wrote in his homage to Jobs, used “the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.”
Some have called Jobs “a profound theologian” and a “patron saint of entrepreneurial church leaders.” He was an icon, one said, whose “product introductions were not unlike the pope appearing at his Vatican window to bless his followers on Christmas.”
One Catholic theologian likened him to the founder of Western monasticism, St. Benedict, though Jobs’ most apparent religious connection was to the monastic Buddhism he experienced while traveling in India years ago. To the end, Jobs walked barefoot around the office; at home he lived amid a Zen-like minimalism that he dogmatically incorporated into Apple products.
The cancer that took his life accentuated his monklike bearing, as did his almost clerical dress—a uniform of black turtleneck and jeans, “speaking of a piety and commitment to his purpose,” as one writer put it.
Even the cover of The New Yorker portrays Jobs at the pearly gates, with St. Peter using an iPad to check him in.
Yet not everyone sees him as St. Steve of Silicon Valley. Some commentators quickly noted that Jobs was also so demanding and obsessive in his quest for perfection that he was often described as a “tyrant.” He publicly ridiculed competitors as “bozos,” and many of his own staff were afraid to find themselves riding an elevator with him.
Especially in his early years, he put the company’s success over spending time with his family, and he pushed his own employees to match his sacrifices.
“They work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while,” Jobs said in a 2004 interview with Businessweek. “Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be.”
Jobs even disdained the kind of philanthropy that has burnished the reputations of his super-rich peers, like Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. He had no record of charitable giving, believing that his company was enough of a legacy.
“He was a jerk,” Gene Marks wrote at Forbes, adding, with the admiration of a fellow entrepreneur: “Good for him.” Writing at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher praised Jobs as “a creative genius.” But, he said, “in the end, I bet Bill Gates will have proved the better man.”
So was Steve Jobs a saint or a jerk? Maybe it’s not an either/or scenario.
If greatness and goodness are not necessarily mutually exclusive, the history of actual saints (of the canonized variety) offers plenty of tales of holy men and women who were as hard-driving as Jobs and just as brusque.
St. Jerome, for example, the great fourth-century translator of the Bible, was notoriously testy. His disagreement with longtime friend Rufinus over certain points of theology prompted Jerome to say that Rufinus snorted like a pig and walked like a tortoise.
St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, could be withering in his criticism of the men under his command, and St. Catherine of Siena had no qualms about telling off the pope in the strongest terms.
Even Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the modern touchstone for sanctity, could be a sharp-tongued taskmaster. “Is this not a humiliation for you that I, at my age, can take a regular meal and do a full day’s work—and you live with the name of the poor yet enjoy a lazy life?” she wrote to sisters whom she deemed insufficiently industrious.