Why Can't the Christians Get It Together?

The Jewish resistance to apartheid and empire is very visible - why isn't there a strong Christian presence?

By Tess GC

After October 7th, the day that kicked off the nightmarish last two months, it was immediately clear to anyone who’s aware of how a country with a powerful military and a desire to control more land will behave with (or without) provocation. Gaza was fucked, and it became clearer and clearer to your average Joe as the month went on. Our media and our government have been churning out the nonstop propaganda that Israel feeds them, including the narrative that Israel is only targeting Hamas with their bombings, when they’ve leveled a massive amount of buildings in Gaza, including hospitals, safe zones, ambulances, and more. From the beginning it was clear to anyone not soaking in propaganda that this was about getting rid of a nuisance for Israel, and consolidating more land. Israel’s leaders don’t want Palestinians to exist, as settler governments everywhere don’t want the people who were there when they arrived to bother them anymore.

From the beginning of this mess, obviously many Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims opposed the war machine of Israel. However the accusations of antisemitism came quickly and predictably, and Jewish anti-Zionist activists led the way for the rest of us to oppose Zionism, apartheid, and colonization in Palestine while being able to point to the objectors from within Judaism. Individual Jewish people, and organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now have been opposing Israel’s (and the U.S., etc) crimes against Palestinians for years. 

As I’ve been watching Christian, and particularly Catholic responses in the last two months, I’m struck by: 1. How hard it is for Christians to say ‘no’ to Israel in the name of Christianity; 2. How Christian progressive and liberal organizations have floundered around this issue; and 3. Those that have called for a ceasefire struggle to do so firmly without a lot of hemming and hawing about antisemitism and and trotting out a flat understanding of ‘peace.’

Why is it this way? And why have Jews managed to mount a formidable, organized, well-attended resistance while Christians flounder?

There are a few reasons I think Jewish people are more equipped to resist firmly. First, that Judaism is an ethnicity as well as a religious tradition means that Jews can claim a tradition and lineage whether or not they claim the theologies of Judaism, leading to a community where you don’t really hear about people ‘leaving’ the tradition. Most would argue that you can’t ‘leave’ something that is undeniably part of who you are. Second, Jewish experiences of persecution for thousands of years seems to have formed a group of people who, even when the majority may go along with Israel’s empire theology, a solid number are still able to resist and say “not in our name.” Third, and relatedly, Judaism has a clear and undeniable tie with resistance politics, probably rooted in their communal experiences of oppression. Christianity’s resistance tradition has been largely maintained by various marginalized Christians, like some Black Americans for example. The majority of American Christianity is dominated by white, colonial Christianity. Ultimately Christians and Christianity, especially in the U.S., are a long way from being oppressed, and the heyday of big, noticeable Christian resistance kind of ended with the Civil Rights Movement.

Christians are really worried about how they come across to everyone, I think because Christianity has become so much about being nice and being meek. It’s hard for us to present a unified, liberative front because, in my experience, even the liberal and progressive Christians have a hard time saying a firm ‘no’ to anything that isn’t largely accepted by the liberal establishment in this country. Part of that is the fear of being called unchristian, fearing being told that we’re not actually part of this tradition that has formed us. But most obviously, Christianity has been so thoroughly infected by the ruling classes over the last two millenia, empires and the rule of money and capital, that you have to sift through a lot of frankly bad interpretations of Jesus and his message to find anything resembling his call for an overturning of the empire social order. Liberal and progressive Christianity is more concerned with donors, appeasing conservative Americans, holding onto cushy jobs, and saying the both sides thing, than embracing the bone shaking radicality that I think Christianity is at its core. When it comes to organizations that claim this kind of Christianity, I wrote about that here.

On this issue, of course, it’s easier in some ways for Jews to draw a firm line and oppose Israel because it’s harder to call them antisemitic (although that hasn’t really stopped it from happening. I won’t link to articles showing evidence of that because they’re genuinely so noxious). But Jews who push back on Israel and Zionism also have a much higher price to pay than most Christians, because it usually includes some type of exile from their own people. A great example of this is Marc Ellis, who wrote Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation (1989), and has talked for decades about the exile and pain of supporting Palestinian liberation as a Jew. (By the way, I can’t recommend his writing enough – he also spent a year at the Catholic Worker when he was young, and wrote a book about it, and I have to recommend this really short book of his. It’s incredible reading for anyone who can relate to a feeling of exile). It’s more common now for young Jewish people to have allies in anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation, but I’m sure that doesn’t change the pain of having to oppose a state created in part to protect your own people.

That Jews can mount such a strong resistance against the part of the U.S. empire that they’re mixed up in – Israel – is a beautiful thing, especially when Christians can’t mount something similar when our tradition is 100 times more implicated in empire and colonization. So what hope is there for Christians to follow the leadership of the Jewish resistance we’ve been seeing? I don’t fully know, but I wonder if we can adapt our own version of “not in our name,” that has the gravity for Christians and Christian-descended people that Israel does for Jewish people. 

One reason I can’t stop thinking about Christianity when I talk about left politics and organized resistance is because many many people in this country think like Christians, even if they don’t realize it – it’s in the air we breathe here. Christian frameworks about morality, ethics, and justice, being a good person, make up the basis of even non-religious people’s frameworks. I want to see Christians who want liberation to consciously use this reality to not just help organize, but to be at the forefront of resistance movements in this country. Instead of taking up after the Left, we should be leading the charge against empire and capital, because that’s the basis of the tradition. What would it be like if some Christians, some big, noticeable part of us, could be looked to, not just to follow, but to lead radical justice movements? To me, that’s what Christianity could be.