Doomsday

The McAlister piece brings together many of the issues we raised last week in class.  I’m glad that we read this after the class because it really crystallized how I understand and think about Left Behind.  There are many things I wanted to discuss in this blog post, but in the interest of brevity, I’ll choose one and leave the rest for class.

She reads the novels as placing importance on the roles of the Jews, specifically as interfaith relations are important in regards to imperialism.  The U.S. has always been imperialistic, this attitude/policy has just been called by another name (e.g.; “making the world safe for democracy.”) Democracy (as opposed to governments based on religious law) is a pursuit of liberalism.  But McAlister says that this sort of  liberalism is also rooted in Christian evangelism in the way that it seeks to convert others to their sect.

In the lecture I posted, Slavoj Zizek makes the claim that liberalism and fundamentalism are a false conflict and that fundamentalism can actually grow out of liberalism.  (I’m not sure if I understood his entire lecture correctly.)  Zizek also talks about a change in anti-Semitism that occurred during pre-Nazi years.  He says that previously anti-Semites sought to eradicate Jewishness, so conversion was an acceptable alternative.  Then, the concept of a Jew changed to an inherent quality so that physical annihilation was something they desired.  During Hitler’s rule, he and Eichmann considered moving all Jews to another homeland to answer the Jewish Question.  Ultimately, the Final Solution resulted in the Holocaust.  Then, Zizek says, with the founding of Israel in 1948, the attitude changed again.  This changed perception of the Jew from nomadic to established in a homeland and fueled hatred against this new type of Jew.  He says that many Middle Eastern countries (he gives Iran for example) allow Jews to live freely in their country, but antagonize Israel.   And, importantly, Zizek says this is responsible for a new type of anti-Semitism, one directed against Israel.

To connect with our topic of interest – Christian evangelist notions about Israel: McAlister notes the omission of any discussion of American Jews and Palestine or Palestinians  from Left Behind.  About the first she writes: “Jews are instrumental when they matter but they do not matter at all unless they make themselves of interest to God by becoming Israelis.”  About the latter: “the notion of Palesinian is made invisivble, impossible…there is no Palestinian problem on the evangelical map.”  That is: the creation of the state of Israel as opposed to Palestine antagonizes the need for the state to exist for the Second Coming.  Further, McAlister connects this with general U.S. Middle East foreign policy, because the U.S. is largely evangelical Christian.