The American political right has recently seen a sharp rise in antisemitism. This noxious strain of bigotry has long had a prominent place on the far left, but the convergence of the two sides, along with the attendant obsession over the U.S.-Israel alliance, makes for a dangerous phenomenon.
Many may be asking how this rise happened. I have my own theories.
One, it occurred during a time of a collapse in trust in expertise and elite institutions that are supposed to exist in the airtight world away from the fever swamp of partisanship and radical ideology (i.e., climate change-ism, racial and sexual identitarian-ism, and sink-Trump-ism). Two, during the pandemic, young people were not only deprived of in-person learning and rite-of-passage experiences like prom and athletics and clubs, but they were also indoctrinated by the algorithm-determined digital world. Of course, we should not forget that our No. 1 state enemy, China, controls TikTok, whose usage is linked to and even correlates with mental illness and illiberal views like support for Hamas in its genocidal war against Israel.
The digital world of short videos and memes has broken shared histories, stoked conspiracy theories, and inflamed grievances. And when society looks for a scapegoat to explain all the ways the government has failed it, it often points to the Jews — to its great calamity.
One aspect of the fight, perhaps the most important one, is among self-described Christians. The Hitler-loving podcaster Nick Fuentes is popular among a certain segment of young, mostly white, men. They find him funny, provocative, brave, and transgressive. And after years of hearing their Millennial and Gen X parents rightly gripe about the anti-white maleness encapsulated by the identity politics of the left, and how the identity politics had favored minority identity status over merit, these young white men seem to be indulging in their own reactive pro-white maleness. Not only does Fuentes feed these young white men heavy doses of white supremacy and antisemitism, but he also serves up grossly anti-woman rants and muses about child-brides. And he does it while claiming to be a Christian nationalist.
Importantly, Fuentes’s gateway to mainstream conservatives is through Tucker Carlson. Carlson has his own obsession with conspiracies and the U.S.-Israel alliance, often promotes the causes of America’s enemies like Russia and Iran, and hosted Fuentes on his podcast. Carlson used the interview not to challenge or debate or expose the errors of Fuentes, but to simply let him share his views. The result was that Fuentes gained more followers on social media and some legitimacy among rightwing podcasters.
Antisemitism has created friction between public Christians debating whether they should be dispensationalists, could be Zionists, or should feel any special sense of brotherhood — civic or theological — with American Jews. If you’ve spent any time on X, you’re likely to see self-styled Christians insisting that “Christ is King,” and the implication is that Jews, who do not believe Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies, should be viewed with suspicion. It is impossible to untangle all of this in a short essay, and I have no intention of litigating various views of eschatology.
But there are a few points, theological and historical, to consider.
The first and most important point is that Christianity teaches that viewing Jews or any other ethnic group as inferior is a grave sin. We get this from the book of Genesis: God created man in His own image. It is this truth that is the font of the dignity of the human person. It is from this reality that we, the created beings, receive our natural rights from the Creator God.
Still, there have been many moments in history where people have committed horrible injustices against Jews in the name of Christianity. And so, the leaders of Christians in America have occasionally clarified that antisemitism is anathema to biblical teaching and that no, the Jews do not bear collective guilt for the death of Christ.
Mary Eberstadt penned an eloquent essay in the Free Press about this topic. She wrote, “Repudiating the idea that Jews bore collective guilt for the death of Jesus, Nostra Aetate — issued by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965 — declared that ‘the Church of Christ acknowledges that . . . the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets,’ and that the Church ‘cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in his inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant.’”
The Southern Baptist Convention, which represents the largest Protestant denomination in America, has passed several resolutions condemning antisemitism. In 2003, it passed a resolution that said, “That we affirm to Jewish people around the world that we stand with them against any harassment that violates our historic commitments to religious liberty and human dignity; and be it finally that we call on governmental and religious leaders across the world to stand against all forms of bigotry, hatred, or persecution.”
The famous English Baptist pastor, known as the Prince of Preachers, Charles Spurgeon, preached a sermon in 1880 where he said:
A Christian is the last person who ought to ever speak disrespectfully or unkindly of the Jews. We remember that our Lord belonged to that race and that His first Apostles were also of that nation. And we regard that ancient people as the very aristocracy of mankind, tracing back their pedigree to those before whom the mightiest kings might well veil their faces, and bow in lowliest homage, for I reckon that to be descended from Abraham, “the friend of God,” and, “the father of the faithful,” is to have a lineage higher than that of any of the princes of the earth!
Judaism and Christianity share the recognition of the dignity of man as given to us by God because of our shared Old Testament texts. Tucker Carlson recently denigrated the Old Testament, comparing it negatively to the New Testament. This, too, is a red flag. Christians believe the God of the Old Testament is the same God in the New. And we learn what God is like and His relation to mankind through these divinely inspired books. Without the Old Testament, there is no divinely established law, no understanding of God’s relationship to man, no redemption plan. Simply put, without the Old Testament, there is no law and necessarily no fulfiller of the law, and no Christianity. To denigrate the Old Testament is to denigrate its author — God Himself.
A trusted acquaintance — who has an influential role in movement college-age conservatism — told me that some energetic right-wingers who like Fuentes and Carlson believe movement conservatism should do away with the Old Testament because they view it as a stumbling block to their notions of a Christian nation and get rid of the “Judeo” in the Judeo-Christian consensus. In 1938, the Nazis felt the same way and burned Torahs. The so-called “Third Reich Bible” had no Old Testament. Again, to eliminate the Old Testament of the divinely inspired sacred Word of God is to lobotomize the faith and to create a new, rootless one.
A third point is that the American Founding was deeply philosemitic. Jews were not merely tolerated by prominent Founding Fathers and Christian leaders; they were embraced. Indeed, the early Americans, mostly Protestants, had a sense of solidarity with early American Jews that was not necessarily derivative of an eschatological view. They had a sense of solidarity as persecuted people with a shared history and beloved holy texts. The Protestant Reformation had ushered in the common man’s practice of reading Scripture without an intermediary. As Walter Mead explains in Arc of a Covenant, “As the idea spread that God speaks directly through this book, and that He speaks to anybody who chose to read it with a humble heart, the Bible became the intellectual and emotional center of millions of lives.” Those early American Christians had heroes of the faith who were Jewish. Just look at the names on those 17th- and 18th-century American family trees: Hannah, Rebeccah, Sarah, Ruth, Josiah, Abram, Jesse, Elijah, and Samuel.
Judaism and Christianity’s teachings on morality and just governance shaped American law and formed the mores of the people. Famously, it was because of Jewish advocacy and support from Alexander Hamilton and John Adams and others that this country has such a robust protection of conscience. Jonas Phillips courageously and eloquently argued against a religious test for holding office at the Constitutional Convention, and he won. (Benjamin Franklin wanted the national seal to be emblazoned with Moses parting the Red Sea.) Indeed, these views also caused early Americans to support Zionism.
Finally, shared Jewish and Christian views about law and warfare have deeply influenced American warfighting and the laws we impose on ourselves. Christians have deeply held religious beliefs that conflict with Jewish traditions and observances, but the views and histories we have in common have greatly shaped America’s national strategic culture.
In 1987, Holocaust survivor Rabbi Joshua O. Haberman penned a response to snooty elites who looked down on the less-educated common Americans in the Bible Belt. In Policy Review’s “The Bible Belt is America’s Safety Belt: Why the Holocaust Couldn’t Happen Here,” he said,
I fled to the United States in the summer of 1938, only months after my native city of Vienna jubilantly welcomed the Nazi troops who had overrun Austria without resistance. Vienna was a sophisticated capital, the center of modem philosophy, psychoanalysis, and artistic expressionism, but its intellectual climate was dominated by a moral relativism, bordering on nihilism, that left the Viennese defenseless against the appeal of Hitler’s pagan nationalism and worship of military might. The Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which not only gave me shelter but also the opportunity to continue my rabbinic studies, wisely exposed me to the heartland of America with special preaching assignments in Danville, Illinois, Casper, Wyoming, and Opelousas, Louisiana, before placing me in my first full-time pulpit in Mobile, Alabama. There I discovered an ethical consensus, based on common allegiance to the Bible as the principal source of faith and morals. It was as though I had been transported from a slippery swamp, steaming with decay and deceptively overgrown by exotic and alluring but poisonous flowers, to a firm path along neatly cut lawns-much less exciting but safer and more reassuring. . . . Their Biblically grounded moral standards and faith in God, deeply rooted in and reinforced by all levels of society, acted as barriers against the excesses of governmental power that can lead to totalitarianism.
In such confusing times as these, with a left-wing and right-wing moral relativism seeking to destroy what is left of our institutions and shared history, and resurrecting old bigotries and taboos, those who claim the Christian faith would be wise to point young men and women to the firm path of real Christianity, the full-chested kind that uses head and heart and defends liberty and virtue and, especially now, their Jewish countrymen.