Pre-reading: There is a genocide in Gaza, argue the Quakers in this article.

Read time: 10 minutes | Summary: A close reading of the book Unclean by Richard Beck paired with discussions of “chosenness,” among other things.

Language found in the Gospel Coalition article below gives Christians carte blanche for racism and the dehumanization of Palestinians and Muslims, with the unconscious (unstated) pedal point being that they aren’t made in the image of God:

“Concerning the Israel-church relationship, progressive covenantalism stresses two points. First, God has one people, yet there is an Israel-church distinction due to their respective covenants. The church is new in a redemptive-historical sense since she is the new covenant community. Second, we must think of the Israel-church relationship Christologically. The church is not directly the “new Israel” or her replacement. Rather, in Christ Jesus, the church is God’s new creation, comprised of believing Jews and Gentiles, because Jesus is the last Adam and true Israel, the faithful seed of Abraham who inherits the promises by his work.”

In the name of Christ, we must reject this exclusivism. In this paragraph we see how it has come to be that over forty thousand people have been murdered in Gaza: the majority of them are Muslim. When six Jews were murdered as hostages—and it is atrocious that they were killed—are treated like God’s chosen people, their images on the cover of the NYT and the Wall Street Journal for several days. By the way its is not just Jews who do this. There is even a “Church of the Identity” (or, the “Christian Identity”/“Identity Christian” movement), which is a white supremacist interpretation of Christianity that identifies northern Europeans as the descendants of the ancient Israelites (and thus, God’s chosen people).

In his book Unclean, Christian psychologist Richard Beck asks, “Why do churches, ostensibly following a Messiah who broke bread with ‘tax collectors and sinners’ so often retreat into practices of exclusion and the quarantine of gated communities?” (1).

In both cases, the issue seems to be boundaries between self and other, which, most notably in the parable of the Good Samaritan, Christ calls us to transcend.

Mercy 

Mercy allows us to transcend the boundaries of disgust. Disgust, a universal human experience, regulates the interaction between purity, mercy, and sacrifice (cf. Jesus, citing Hosea: “I desire mercy rather than sacrifice” in Matt. 9:9-13).

Mercy requires empathy.

Beck acknowledges that empathy and moral outrage usually function at cross purposes (3), and he argues for radical inclusion. He writes that “the psychology of disgust and contamination regulates how many Christians reason and experience notions of holiness, atonement, and sin” (4).   

Beck continues, “We experience feelings of ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ as we engage in intellectual inquiry, theological or not.” Theology is a “deeply emotional and visceral activity” (5), and neglecting the psychological aspects embedded in faith and belief is dangerous. We may come to wrong conclusions, with dangerous theological and even physical consequences that may be intellectually and morally dubious (5). This risk is present in all of us of all religions. As a Christian I am illuminating this dynamic here for Christian readers.

According to Beck, “the church will tend to drift toward theological positions […] that ‘feel’ […] true and right” but that often “pull us toward theological and moral dysfunction” (6).

Beck likens toxic theology to a theological sweet tooth, and this is evident in the case of Christian Zionism, which emerged in the late 18th century and preceded the Jewish Zionism that drove the nation-state of Israel’s founding on Palestinian native lands.

Palestinian Christians such as Munther Isaac have written about being disinvited from Christian conference because they are Palestinian. Beck observes, “Contact with these people [as waste] was prohibited if one wanted to maintain a stance of holiness and purity” (75). While Beck notes that Jesus had the “power and authority to overturn and reinterpret the purity tradition” (81), this is also seen in the work of the Hebrew prophets, and in stories such as Samson, who even ate honey from the corpse of a dead lion.

From a Western perspective, the existence of Palestinian Christians elicits what Beck calls “moral dumbfounding”: it seems impossible that there would be Palestinian (bad), Christians (good). 

Community and Solitude

With training we can be vigilant in resisting the sweet tooth’s pull, even theologically. Thus, partaking in a Christian community and experiencing times of faithful solitude are essential (so we don’t get sucked onto the bandwagon unreflectively).

One thing to consider, which has been controversial, is whether we should recontexualize the concept of chosenness, what is called “election,” in Christian and Jewish faith. I am taking the lead from Jewish rabbi and thinker Mordecai Kaplan.

Beck writes about “a loss of complexity and nuance within the Christian community” (40) because we “loathe cognitive dissonance” (84), noting that we are eager to mask our mortality from ourselves, hiding the old, sick, vulnerable, deformed, ugly, and destitute from sight. This is seen in the presence of mental institutions, old folks homes, and prisons. But it is also seen in regions such as Palestine, where there is a full blockade in Gaza, and with the large separation wall on the West Bank, which cuts into and through Palestinian land and obstructs the formation of an independent Palestinian state.

Beck, through analysis of Matthew 9, interprets Jesus’s teaching as a message of “purity via inclusion” (89, emphasis original). This is important because, during times of turmoil, “sociomoral disgust can apply to entire populations” (74). He shows that this happened in America with the enslaved and with Jews in Nazi Germany. This is happening now with the immigration enforcement and the mass deportations.

Though he doesn’t say so, this has undoubtedly also happened with Palestinians due to Christian Zionism (Beck writes, “religious systems of institutionalize, overtly or tacitly, sociomoral disgust” (75)).

Scapegoats and Monsters

Scapegoating, perhaps due to the teachings of Jesus, is now seen as wrong. When we point out someone is being made a scapegoat, the harassment will frequently cease. But this is not the case with the epithet “terrorist.”

Worse than scapegoats, according to Beck, are “monsters,” which function as “divinity violations” (again, such as Muslims or Arabs, who are, when this is strongest, all seen as terrorists).

People are not able to see that they have made someone into a “monster.”

See if this resonates with the way that Arabs and Muslims are being treated in Israel today:

“Anti-Semitism was common in Europe but the rise of the peculiar exterminator facet of Nazi thinking appeared to be fueled by the prominent role that purity played in the Nazi’s racial and political ideology. In all of this we see how disgust, purity, and eliminationist impulses are implicated in the creation of social monsters as objects of scapegoating and ethnic ‘cleansing.’” (95)

Beck points out that in America “infrahumanization” is found in the U.S. Constitution (Article 1. Section 2) in which slaves are legally classified as ⅗ of a person. Compare this to Israel’s nation-state law. The Duke website analyzes it thus:

“The exclusive right to self-determination for Jews in Israel, despite the binational reality, is underpinned by an idea of a Jewish ethnos. Such an ethnos is built on a principle of inclusion by way of exclusion: the Jewish political group includes all those who self-identify as Jewish in accordance with three statutes—the Law of Return of 1950, the Nationality Law of 1952, and the Entry into Israel Law of 1952—and in accordance with related procedural definitions concerning ethnic blood identity, definitions that are repeatedly amended. Palestinians, by contrast, are defined only through their omission; their absence from the law is turned into a corresponding exclusion and subtraction from a political community. The deliberate disregard of Palestinians leaves them beyond legal relations and the public good.” (https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article/4/3/565/294168/Israel-s-Nation-State-LawHierarchized-Citizenship)

Role Models: de las Casas and Colenso

I propose that Westerners model their interactions with Palestinians on the lives of de las Casas in the Americas and Colenso in South Africa, who, through intentional, prolonged contact with the native populations, radically reimagined theology and the interrelationship between theology, church polity, and politics. I am currently reading their works, and am considering writing more about what I find there. But it’s not the specific theologies that emerged but rather that they engaged with the people the lived amongst and who were sovereign and in their own lands, and then acted accordingly.

I am proposing a new theology. 

I am hoping we can reject the “escalation” aspect of the faith whereby each book of the Bible builds up to Christ and ultimately to the rapture, in favor of Christ initiating a new reign of justice in the hearts of believers and not just in the church.

Thanks for reading. Please consider reading my essay about about how to read the Bible Christianly without this exclusivism.

For further reading, consider quotations from James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree that illuminate the dynamics of white Christian supremacy that enable Christian endorsement of genocide today.

Finally, consider the essay Some Thoughts on Apartheid in Israel, written by an evangelical friend from Australia.