The religious right's covert anti-Semitism

(Thanks to Brad for sending me this)


I am amazed by how much airtime the right wing has managed to get this year from the notion that they are "oppressed" by the separation of church and state. The Family Research Council website has a list of Christians' "rights" during the holiday season, and points out that 96 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, as if that fact somehow should act as a counterweight to the notion of separation of church and state.

I really have trouble seeing how this can be, at the end of the day, anything but anti-Semitism. It was, after all, primarily concern for the rights of Jews in the aftermath of World War II that animated the U.S. Supreme Court's now decades-old rulings about school prayer that still vex the Christian right (and, to some extent, was the moment when they began organizing as such!). The reason we don't any longer require children in public schools to participate in Christmas pageants is because American courts decided, in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, that really it was important to respect the rights of the Jewish minority in this country.

The religious right has a curiously Janus-faced way of dealing with the existence of American Jews, in fact. On the one hand, they actually like right-wing Jews, and they endorse the notion of a "Judeo-Christian tradition," and use it to sustain their fanatical belief that Israel can do no wrong in its struggle to keep Palestinians as second-class citizens. But at the same time, their anti-Semitism hasn't disappeared so much as gone underground. Christian right leaders don't talk about Christian anti-Semitism, don't even acknowledge it might exist, or else they locate it in a mythical, irrelevant past, even as they quite literally insist on rooting out and destroying "influences" on American culture - "Hollywood," "the media" - that have undeniable and profound historical relationships to the migration of European Jews to America in the twentieth century.