The Bible is now used to justify the genocide in Gaza. Where does that leave the Bible?
President’s Trump pick for UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik, in her nomination hearings, affirmed that Israel has the “biblical right” to ownership of the West Bank. Earlier, she had called for Hamas to be “wiped off the face of the Earth.”
Trump picked Mike Huckabee as the US ambassador to Israel, who self-identifies as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist.” Huckabee describes what this means: “The title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs… There is no such thing as the West Bank—it’s Judea and Samaria. There is no such thing as settlements—they’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There is no such thing as an occupation.” And to make sure there could by no misunderstanding, Huckabee also let it be known that for him “there really isn’t such a thing” as Palestinians.
Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas made this confession, during the nomination hearing for Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: ““I’m a Christian. I’m a Zionist. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people deserve a homeland in the ancient Holy Land where they’ve lived since the dawn of history.”
And, as for Pete Hegseth, he simply stated: “I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.” And, then, as an afterthought, as it were, “I’m a Christian, and I robustly support the State of Israel and its existential defense, and the way America comes alongside them as their great ally.” Earlier, Hegseth had stated: “Zionism and Americanism are the front lines of Western civilization.”
Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, under Trump, has said: “Israel has every right to defend their God-given homeland…” and also, “We support you in defending the homeland given to your people by God.”
Where does this logic come from? How does this logic become piety? How does this piety, then, become blindness to genocide? This is a vast topic and will need much analysis and thought to be understood. Here is an initial attempt.
There is a deep conditioning of some American Evangelicals who valorize Israel and despise those that criticize it, or oppose it. These people are often called “Christian Zionists.” It is more accurate to call them “Judeo-Evangelicals,” or even “Judeo-Protestant,” since neither are Christian. It is more honest to regard the faith confessed by the people quoted above as a form of Judaism. It has long been known that Judaizing is the logic of Protestantism; these Judeo-Evangelicals have arrived at the end of this logic, wherein they have fully grafted themselves onto modern-day Judaism and its political ambitions.
Ever since the establishment of the state of Israel, various Evangelical sects have used the Bible to explain, promote and justify its existence. For such sects, the Bible is not about the spiritual journey of the soul into the Kingdom of God, much less about the Sermon on the Mount, but about nurturing the journey of the Jews in the world (what Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook defined as Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world, although this term existed earlier). Why? Because for them, the Jews are “the people of God,” and this whatever the Jews do is from God. For these Evangelicals, faith thus means being as akin to this “people of God” as possible; as “Jewish” as possible and therefore unthinkingly supporting whatever the Jews do in the world, because the Jews are directed in their actions by God. And who wants to oppose God. Therefore, for these Evangelicals, a great of emphasis is placed on the Old Testament, which is used to extract all kinds of “prophecies,” largely about Jews.
It is this logic in American life, and among some Trumpists which is little understood, let alone acknowledged, and which then leads to all kinds of confusion about Christianity.
The great Holocaust in Gaza has now brought this to the fore, and time has come to separate the goats from the sheep: Judeo-Evangelicals are not Christians. They are a sect of Jews. They are not Christian, because in their actions and expressions of faith, the salvific agency of charity, of love is defeated and upon its rubble the Golden Calf of domination is erected and worshipped. The fruit of this abomination is the current genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, which in turn is the final “flowering” of the Judeo-Protestant fetish of sola scriptura: Palestinians of today must be brutalized and slaughtered—because that is what “Jews” need to do to win and maintain their “Israel,” because it says so in the Bible (1 Samuel 15:3, Joshua 6, Numbers 31, Psalms 18:40, etc.). For such Judeo-Protestants, a Bible verse is easily found to explain away any and all inhumanity, which defeats charity, because they believe that their god (yes, god) expects “his people” to destroy their enemy. Quoting such verses drowns out the screams of a mutilated child, the wail of a mother whose infant is cut to ribbons by an American bomb. Is it not also true that Satan himself quotes the Bible?
Setting aside the various regional ambitions of the United States, which are certainly important to bear in mind, there is another issue that is worth considering—that what we are witnessing in Gaza is the final destruction of sola scriptura, which has legitimized the brutalization of the Palestinians for so very long, whereby the Bible is dragooned into vindicating genocide. Sola scriptura asserts that Scripture alone is the ultimate authority in matters of faith and practice, and this fuels the Judeo-Evangelicals. This doctrine emphasizes that all teachings and beliefs (including political) must be derived from the Bible, rejecting any external authority or tradition as equally authoritative: and so, the Bible can be used to serve even genocide.
And what are the “fruits” of sola scriptura?
The first and foremost is confusion over moral teachings. Since the individual reader of the Bible has no need of any authority other than his own interpretative efforts, truth itself is made relative. The individual reader takes up the Bible, like any other book in high school English class, and reads this or that verse, cobbles together some sort of “meaning” and believes that his god is speaking to him. And, another individual, reading those same verses, can come up with meaning that is entirely different and/or contradictory to what the first reader holds to be the “truth.” There is “my interpretation” and “your interpretation”—which in turn has become “my truth” and “your truth.” The Bible can say whatever the reader wants it to say. That is the joy of being in a high school English class!
Of course, defenders of sola scriptura defer to the perspicuity of Scripture, which says that Scripture is clear enough for any individual to understand. If this were true, there would not be the interpretative anarchy of indvidualized reading, as evidenced by the habit of quoting Bible verses to justify the genocide in Gaza. Thus, we easily see that sola scriptura yields great moral confusion.
This then raises a further problem: sola scriptura is self-refuting, since it can only be based on human interpretation, which brings in fallibility. If the interpretation of Scripture is fallible, then either the doctrine of sola scriptura is fallible, or Scripture is fallible. If we hold Scripture to be infallible, then sola scriptura is imbecility—because individuals must solely rely on their own flawed and limited understanding of an infallible and highly complex text. In other words, how can an individual interpretation be infallible? And by extension, how can any Judeo-Protestant biblical justification for the state of Israel and what this state does to other human beings be true? To say that the Bible justifies immense cruelty and genocide for Palestinians then can only mean that the Bible is a source of great evil—because it enjoins the slaughter of the innocent whom god has supposedly “marked” as the enemy of “the people of god” who can be abused and killed by said “people of god.”
Given what has happened in what was once called the Holy Land, sola scuptura can now be nothing other than the will to power, used to manufacture consent, used to hide the slaughter. The only reason that such Judeo-Evangelicals blindly support Israel and its heartless policies is because they believe that the Bible encodes such mass murder, and this is the will of their god. For the sake of clarity, not all Protestants follow such an interpretation of Scripture, because these Protestants (thankfully) have walked away from sola scriptura and are slowly recovering the Christian faith.
But so go the worshippers of the Golden Calf, who imagine that their god delights in slaughter and rewards those who murder. Just for the sake of perspective, a recent report by UNICEF estimates more than 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza, about 25,000 severely injured, and 25,000 have suffered so badly from malnutrition that they need hospital care. This is just the children alone. And these worshippers now comprise the power structure in Trump’s Washington, DC.
Which brings us to the essential point—Gaza has shown the evil crouched in the doctrine of sola scriptura, which so happily places Holy Writ in the gory hands of mass murderers, and praises the Holocaust they carry out as holy work.
May our good and true God spare us from such satanic “piety.”
Featured: Photo of Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, ca. 1920.
