Thread by @Delafina777

This is a crucial question. I've seen individual Christians do a TON of work and manage to come up with individual practice that isn't antisemitic, but it's hard, because antisemitism is core to pretty much every form of Christianity. (Thread)

https://twitter.com/vardex23/status/1453741934795759625

Like, okay, I'm not going to spend time rehashing 2000 years of open Christian antisemitism--Passion Plays, blood libel, Good Friday pogroms, forced conversions, genocide, etc.--because it's been done elsewhere.

When I say, though, that it's in every form of Christianity, across the political spectrum, I mean it.

Like, Jews keep having infinite replays of this conversation:

https://twitter.com/JustSayXtian/status/1329845437600153600

So let's start with the big one:

The combo of the Great Commission:

"Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Mt 28:19)

and

The ethos of Galatians 3:28:

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

adds up to a command to homogenize the world in Christianity, at least if you read them in the traditional manner.

As Prof. Amy-Jill Levine notes, the idea that there's neither Jew nor Greek in Christianity might sound great if you're a first-century gentile convert who's feeling a little insecure that Jesus and all his disciples were Jewish.

In the shadow of Auschwitz, however, it sounds a lot uglier.

As I've noted about the idea of America as a "melting pot," what all these ideals of utopian human homogeneity end up being in practice is straight-up colonialism, white supremacy, and genocide, because it involves the elimination and erasure of all cultures but the dominant one.

So we don't even have to get into overt supercessionism and the unique hatred Christianity has for Judaism.

We have to reckon that the end goal of Christianity is a world without any Jews--in its least overtly hateful outcome, because they've all converted.

But, of course, even though that's Christianity's stated goal, I don't think it's actually what it *wants,* because most forms of Christianity require at least an Other, and at most an Othered opponent.

Like, before you even get into asking why Christianity needs a Devil, look at the origin story: moustache-twirling conspiracy to murder a deity.

The idea of human enemies--not just other people who *might* be enemies, but straight-up Evil Masterminds--is in the DNA.

So today we get right-wing Judaism, which often puts on a philosemitic face, largely because of a really gross alliance between Israel and evangelical Christians.

But let's be clear, the end goal is still conversion (see conservative Christian initiatives like Jews for Jesus)

not to mention that they want Jews to move to Israel en masse so we can convert en masse and/or die en masse as per their rapture scenarios.

We serve as fuel to be consumed by their apocalypse engine.

Unfortunately, liberal/progressive Christianity, which SHOULD be better, is mostly just using softer language for their antisemitism.

Conservative Christians and conservative (small-c, politically, not the Conservative movement) Jews have largely made it impossible to talk about antisemitism on the left because they've insisted on making any such conversation revolve around Israel.

So the claim that any criticism of Israel is automatically antisemitic has sparked a (justified) backlash against that idea, but unfortunately, that actually has ended up giving cover to people who largely use Israel as a cover for actual antisemitism and steered attention...

...away from ACTUAL antisemitism on the left. I'm talking Strasserism, I'm talking conspiracy theories, I'm talking about the idea that Jews are all white and rich (and often makes us into the whitest and most capitalist of white capitalists), etc.

That stuff infects progressive Christianity, but there are also a lot more mundane aspects to it.

Progressive Christians are fighting with white supremacist, authoritarian conservative Christians for the soul of their religion, and that means that some narratives are useful.

And one of the most useful narratives is "Jesus vs. the Religious Authorities of His Day."

And it's easy to understand why! The most powerful rhetorical thing you can do in Christianity is get Jesus on your side.

And given that conservative Christians have been pretty successful in claiming the mantle of American Christianity for themselves, the idea that Jesus was actually opposed to people like them is really compelling.

And before you know it, occupation by a brutal, colonial, genocidal empire has largely vanished from the picture (unless it's useful to conflate that with the Religious Authorities); Romans are a distraction, an inconvenience, the real battle is Jesus vs. Religious Authorities.

And what religion those religious authorities were part of generally gets rushed past, since it's not polite to say out loud, but it's still lurking there in the background: the ACTUAL problem Jesus came to solve was Judaism.

And, like, it's easy to understand how they get there without any real malice. In America today, the religious authorities are wed to the empire.

That the same was not true in Roman-occupied Judaea--that, in fact, the opposite was true--would complicate the narrative too much.

Given the conservative Christian love of quoting the Old Testament to justify a lot of their more hateful political moves, you also get progressive Christians positioning themselves as champions of the "compassionate" NT in contrast.

The problem is that the whole formula of

conservative Christians = Old Testament cruelty
progressive Christians = New Testament compassion

posits that the problem with conservative Christians is that they're too much like Jews.

Let's leave aside that if you want inspiring social justice language, the Tanakh is a much deeper well than the NT.

And in general, when you talk about this stuff, especially if you're focused on Christianity in America (or even America and Western Europe), which is where it has most of its ugliest incarnations, people will come along and correct you and say "*white Christianity (FTFY)" or

"WESTERN Christianity"

the thing is, though, it's not limited to white Christianity or western Christianity.

Those are just the Christianities with the most power to do harm with it. But it's there in Christianity full stop.

Like, talk to Black Jews about being caught in the pincer of racism in Jewish communities and antisemitism in Black communities. Talk to Middle Eastern Jews about antisemitism in Middle Eastern Christianity.

It's there in non-white Christian communities too.

Like, in looking at the relationship between Christianity and colonialism and white supremacy, it's really easy to treat Christianity as a *tool* of colonialism and white supremacy rather than looking at how colonialism and white supremacy might have arisen OUT of Christianity.

(for further reading on that, I'd suggest Blood: A Critique of Christianity by Gil Anidjar and Why This New Race by Denise Kimber Buell)

But treating Christianity as an originally innocent (because "true" Christianity is always seen as innocent) tool of colonialism and white supremacy ignores how much Othering is present in Christianity. It absolves Christianity by saying that the problem is power and corruption.

Christian antisemitism, though, gives the lie to the idea that Christianity is only hateful, only "goes bad", when it's corrupted by power, because it's there in the Christianity of disempowered communities as well.

And it's there in the Christian movements that progressives love and marginalized non-Christians tend to see as allies.

Here's Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the founders of liberation theology:

"The infidelities of the Jewish people made the Old Covenant invalid.”

Leonardo Boff, a big name in liberation theology:

"Religion was no longer the way in which human beings expressed their own openness to God. It had crystallized and stagnated in a world of its own, a world of rites and sacrifice. Pharisees had a morbid conception of their God."

Like, in general we all like the *goals* of liberation theology, so most progressives are willing to ignore that a lot of it (ahistorically) paints Jews as the villains.

After all, the ends justify the means, no?

If Christianity can be turned into a force for political and economic liberation, maybe a few sacrifices are justified, right?

And if one of those sacrifices is looking away from antisemitism, letting it flourish, I guess that's fine with most progressive Christians.

It's there in anti-colonial iterations of Christianity. Here's Marguérite Fassinou, President of the Union of Methodist Women of Benin:

"Two thousand years ago Jesus Christ gave women their rightful place despite the heavy yoke of the Jewish culture weighing on them."

I highly recommend reading Levine's "The Misunderstood Jew" for a depressing survey of examples from across the world, from progressive/liberationist/anti-colonial Christian leaders, speakers, thinkers, academics, etc. everywhere from Africa to India to East Asia...

...all out there teaching that the colonial force Jesus opposed, the misogynist force he came to correct, the economically extortionate evildoers he came to cleanse

the problem he came to solve, all of it

was Judaism and Jews.

So, to return to the question in the original post, the question of whether a non-antisemitic Christianity is possible can't really be answered until we understand why Christianity--in all of its iterations--seems to require specifically Jewish villains.

FFS, people, before you start going "uhh, the great commission isn't INHERENTLY antisemitic, that's a weak argument," READ THE REST OF THE THREAD.

Sorry, *right-wing Christianity

Also annoyed by people going “she’s just talking about white American Christianity.”

No, I’m FOCUSING on it because that’s the environment I live in and I don’t want to be a white person shitting on non-white people.

But it’s endemic to Christianity, full stop…

…which is why there are examples from Latin American and African liberation theologians in there (and I could also do Middle Eastern Christian theologians and OH BOY East Asian theologians…

Again, I’m not the right person to lead a full-scale critique of that, but that I’m also not interested in claims that it’s not there, doesn’t matter, or doesn’t do harm.

Antisemitism is a core strain in CHRISTIANITY, full stop, not just white Protestant Christianity.

And there’s a difference between recognizing that power differences matter antisemitism in white Christianity is a bigger threat to Jews and the one we should focus on

vs. claiming that it doesn’t exist or isn’t a problem in other forms.

So I’ll reiterate: antisemitism isn’t core just to the Christianity of the powerful. It’s core to Christianity itself.