A Match Made in Heaven Read online

  The State Department was strongly opposed to the creation of Israel (a hostility that persisted for decades). The American foreign policy establishment tended to what is now called “realism,” which placed a higher value on Arab oil producers than on Israel. In the 1956 Suez War, President Eisenhower directly threatened Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion with severe sanctions and forced him to make a humiliating withdrawal from the conquered Sinai Peninsula. Although a lot of American Jews had voted for Ike, he refused to even meet with a delegation of Jewish pro-Israel lobbyists.

  The Kennedy administration was friendlier, but not much. Jews hated Nixon so much that they were able to forgive JFK for his father’s pro-Hitler stance before World War II. But Kennedy kept Israel at arm’s length, giving it little financial aid or diplomatic cover, and even refusing to host a state visit for Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, flying up to New York City to meet him informally instead. Not until Lyndon Johnson’s administration was an Israeli leader, Levi Eshkol, officially received at the White House. Johnson saw Israel as an important ally as well as a kindred pioneer democracy, an attitude that was strengthened by Israeli military success in the Six-Day War.

  It was the hated Nixon who first made Israel a foreign aid priority and sold it large quantities of advanced American weapons. Like Johnson, Nixon regarded Israel as a regional power worth cultivating. He also had hopes of detaching Jewish voters from the Democratic coalition (an ambition that he partially, if temporarily, fulfilled in the 1972 election, with an assist from his opponent, George McGovern). During these years, the organized evangelical Christian community did not play a serious role in foreign policy (or domestic politics, for that matter). When evangelical interest did venture beyond U.S. borders, it generally focused on missionary work. But even in its most politically passive period, the prophetic understanding of history, and the place of Israel in it, remained a central factor in evangelical theological thinking. In 1961, the Zionist lyric of the theme song to the movie Exodus (“This land is mine, God gave this land to me”) was written not by one of the legion of Jewish songwriters in the Brill Building, but by the born-again Christian crooner Pat Boone.

  At the time, American Jews didn’t know or care what Pat Boone believed God was up to. In the sixties, they and their Christian liberal role models saw evangelicals as Holy Rollers, snake oil salesmen, or KKK night riders, the sort of backward goyim portrayed in films like Elmer Gantry and Inherit the Wind. Postwar Jewry was big on “interfaith”: marching with Martin Luther King Jr., working with ethnic Catholics in big-city Democratic clubhouses, or attending brotherhood hootenannies in the basement of the local Episcopal church. It most certainly didn’t approve of cooperating with people who thought that Satan was real, Jesus was coming any day, and angels watched over the world.

  IN JULY 2006, there were a lot of angel people in Denver. They were in town for the International Christian Retail Show, a born-again extravaganza that brings together wholesalers, retailers, and curious customers for an annual orgy of Christian commerce. The show was held in the Denver Convention Center, and I shared a cab there from my hotel with an evangelical Hollywood producer who was desperately seeking tall actors. She was making a film about a miracle that supposedly took place at the World Trade Center during 9/11, she told me, and she needed seven-footers.

  “Why do they have to be so tall?” I asked.

  “Because they’ll be playing angels.”

  “Are angels tall?”

  The producer had evidently assumed that I was the sort of guy who knew something about angels. Now disabused, she said, “Children who see angels describe them as over seven feet high. With wings.”

  “I’ve heard that, about the wings,” I said.

  Angels were a big item at the Christian Retail Show. There were angel books, angel videocassettes, angel candle pots on display. A company called Ken Enterprises LLC offered an entire catalog of angel paraphernalia. But angels were just the start of what was available. Thousands of vendors offered every imaginable sort of Jesus gear, from medical “scripture scrubs” adorned with prayers (not the most reassuring thing, I would imagine, for a patient in need of emergency treatment) to evangelical high fashion from Divinity Boutique. Still, there was a fair amount of diversity. The menu in the main cafeteria offered kosher Hebrew National hot dogs, and at the entrance to the convention center there was a poster advertising an upcoming exhibit featuring “flesh-eating dinosaurs,” which didn’t seem to bother any of the creationists in the crowd.

  There were thousands of books, videos, and compact discs on sale: salvation through communication. My eye was caught by a booth draped in Israeli flags.

  Boxes of a videocassette, Israel, Islam and Armageddon: The Final Battle for Jerusalem, were stacked on a counter next to a laminated letter of endorsement from an Israeli general I had never heard of. A young salesman came over to me and said, “This is a great Israeli war hero and he fully supports Dave Hunt’s ministry.”

  The salesman pointed to a large framed photograph of Dave Hunt, an elderly chap with a white beard. He looked slightly wild-eyed and unkempt, the sort of man you might see eating dinner alone in a diner on a national holiday.

  “Would you like to meet Reverend Hunt himself?” the salesman offered. Before I could answer, Reverend Hunt was upon me. He had a keen expression and held a banana in his hand. Skipping the introductions, he said, “Do you know how many times the Bible refers to God as God of Israel?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “Two hundred and three times! That’s two hundred and three.”

  I emitted a low whistle.

  “Do you know how many times God is called the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?” he demanded. “In the Bible? Twelve times! That’s twelve.” Hunt took a healthy bite of his banana. “And do you know how many times the Bible refers to God as the God of Islam?” He punctuated the question with a hard swallow.

  “None?”

  “Exactly correct!” said Hunt. “None. Come to my lecture this afternoon. I’m going to be discussing this in detail.”

  “I’ll probably be there,” I said, guiltily; I hated to lie to a man of the cloth. But this evidently satisfied Hunt. “Remember, two hundred and three times,” he called after me as I walked away. I looked back and saw he was waving his empty banana peel at me. “Two hundred and three times versus none.”

  As I wandered among the booths, I noticed a smattering of blacks, a few Catholic priests and nuns, and an occasional Jewish vendor peddling Holy Land goods (“Most of this schlock is made in China,” one confided to me in Hebrew). But, by and large, the crowd was white, Protestant, conservative, and Republican. Tapes and books extolling George W. Bush were prominent. Red, white, and blue bunting hung from the walls. The entire scene exuded a sense of Christian capitalist energy and optimism, a gathering of merchants with God knows how many customers, and more saved every day.

  I was aware that I stood out, but I felt welcome. Vendors, after scrutinizing my name tag, called out “Shalom.” An elderly woman told me she spends part of every year in the Galilee praying for the Jews and demanded to know if I do the same. A tall, reedy fellow who reminded me of Homer Simpson’s friend Flanders shook my hand. “You an Israeli?” he asked in a hickory-flavored Tennessee Hebrew he had acquired during a year on a kibbutz. “I love Israelis.”

  AMONG THE COMPANIES represented at the Denver Convention Center was the Barna Group, a West Coast firm that specializes in studying and analyzing the evangelical community. It had just completed a survey of born-again Christians that provides what is probably the best baseline for understanding who evangelicals are and what they believe.

  The survey began by assessing the overall number of born-again Christians based on two essential criteria: people who had “made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that was still important in their lives today” and who believe that when they die they will go to heaven “because they had confessed their sins and accepted Jesus Christ as their sa
vior.” Roughly 40 percent of Americans—about 120 million people—fall into this category.

  Barna then set up seven criteria intended to separate the evangelical lite from the hard stuff:

  Is faith very important in your daily life?

  Do you feel a personal responsibility to share your belief with non-Christians?

  Do you believe in the existence of Satan?

  Do you hold that personal salvation is possible only through faith, not works?

  Do you assert that Jesus led a sinless life on Earth?

  Do you believe that the Bible is totally accurate in all it teaches?

  Would you describe God as the “all-knowing, all powerful perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today”?

  Barna found that 7 percent of Americans—more than 20 million people—fit this more stringent set of criteria. These are the people who form the core of the Christian Zionist movement.

  Many Jews believe that the real motive of evangelical support for Israel is criterion number two: the desire to share their belief in Jesus with others, especially with Jews. But in fact it is the sixth criterion—a literal belief in the Bible—that is most crucial. The Bible, as it is read by hard-core evangelicals, is a Zionist document that clearly states God’s covenant with the people of Israel. The Jews have been chosen, whether it seems like a good choice or not. They are the apple of God’s eye. Israel is promised to them. Period.

  Liberal American Jews are intensely uncomfortable with this formulation. It’s not that they disagree with the notion of Jewish superiority—New York magazine ran a cover story in October 2005 whose title, “Are Jews Smarter?” was widely seen in the Jewish community as a rhetorical question. But liberal Jews do not take the Bible literally. They certainly don’t accept the New Testament as scripture. And they most especially disagree with the notion that the Jews have a unique role in the End of Days.

  This idea is not universally believed in the evangelical community, either. And it is far from the only reason conservative Christians support Israel. In 2002, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, an organization founded by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, conducted a poll that found that, “contrary to conventional wisdom, a minority of evangelicals cite theological belief as the reason why they support Israel.”

  “Israelis cried with us when we were attacked and the towers fell,” I was told by former GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer, a consultant to the IFCJ. “When we look at the world, we have a tendency to identify Israel as the good guys.” Bauer dismissed those who believe in Armageddon and the death of the Jews as marginal, “just a few people with odd beliefs.”

  This understates the case. It’s true that, in the IFCJ survey, a plurality of Israel’s conservative Christian supporters say they are primarily moved by secular, geopolitical considerations. But it is also true that 35 percent mentioned eschatological belief as their main motivation.

  These are the audience for the Left Behind series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, a dozen books about the End of Days that have collectively sold more than 65 million copies.

  THE NOVELS, PUBLISHED by Tyndale, a Christian company in Wheaton, Illinois, are a science fiction version of the book of Revelation. One day, so the story goes, millions of saved Christians suddenly disappear from Earth, “raptured” up to the sky by God. Widespread panic ensues. The world, searching for leadership, reaches out to Nicolae Jetty Carpathia, a dashing young former president of Romania, now secretary-general of the UN, who preaches peace to camouflage his goal of Satanic domination. For the first three and a half years of his reign he is widely perceived as a benevolent dictator. Then he reveals himself to be the Antichrist. The resistance is led by the Tribulation Force, a group of unsaved people ( Jews as well as nominal Christians) who have been left behind and now see the light. Battles follow on the road to the final showdown, at Armageddon. When the series ends, Carpathia will be defeated and Christ will rule in Jerusalem for a thousand years.

  Vast numbers of Christians believe variations of this story. Many think it will take place in their lifetime. A few are already in the Holy Land, awaiting the End of Days. Bill and Connie Wilson are two of these people.

  THREE

  THE GROCERY STORE AT THE END OF THE WORLD

  I met the Wilsons on a steaming August morning in Tel Aviv. They picked me up at my house in a Volvo jalopy with a busted air conditioner. Our destination was Armageddon.

  The Wilsons are ordained Pentecostal preachers, middle-aged folks on their second marriage. Bill is a friendly, round-faced man with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech; he is also a retired brigadier general in the Georgia National Guard. A self-proclaimed square, he signed a temperance pledge when he was eleven years old and stubbornly honored it until he started coming to Israel a few years ago. “You go to somebody’s house for Shabbat dinner, you naturally take a sip or two of kiddush wine,” he drawled.

  Connie is an attractive, outgoing woman who came to Christianity after what she describes as a pagan lifestyle. “I channeled the seventies,” she says. When she found Christ, she fell hard, becoming a disciple of revivalist Ruth Ward Heflin, a peripatetic preacher known for holding camp meetings where, according to Charisma Magazine, people claimed that gold dust appeared on their faces and hands and rubies replaced their dental fillings. When Pastor Heflin died in 2000, the Wilsons inherited her Mount Zion Fellowship ministry in Jerusalem.

  The drive from Tel Aviv to Armageddon took a little more than an hour, up the coastal road along the Mediterranean and then eastward into the Jezreel Valley. To Israelis, this is the agricultural heartland of the Galilee, an area dotted with red-roofed villages and collective farms. To Bill and Connie it is terra sancta.

  Just the day before, the Israeli army had begun evacuating Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. The withdrawal was still going on, and the Wilsons saw it as the first step in an eventual Israeli departure from Judea and Samaria. This prospect dismayed them; giving biblical land to Muslims seemed a step in the wrong direction. But they weren’t inclined to be hard on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Like many evangelicals, they had the ability to compartmentalize. Sharon was the elected leader of a democratic ally. In the short term, he would do what he considered best and they would support him. As for the long run, well, that wasn’t up to Sharon or to them. God would unfold his plan in his own time.

  “This is the place,” Bill announced, turning onto a one-lane country road. Up ahead was a sign that read “Kibbutz Megiddo/ Tel Megiddo National Park.” The kibbutz was founded in the 1940s by Holocaust survivors who were very likely unaware of the place’s Christian eschatological significance. They did know, however, that it was the site of an ancient city. An archaeological excavation got under way and buses of schoolkids occasionally stopped to view the dig and eat lunch in a small café. But Kibbutz Meggido was a sleepy little community until the 1980s when the evangelicals began visiting.

  Megiddo became a destination. An impressive store specializing in Roman glass jewelry and biblical-style artifacts opened up. The café was expanded. For the first time in millennia, Har Megiddo, which the Christians translate as “Armageddon,” was on the map.

  “IT’S HARD TO imagine this whole peaceful valley in a bloodbath,” said Connie Wilson. We were standing on the top of a hill overlooking the Jezreel Valley, in a spot she imagined to be ground zero.

  Bill cast a Georgia guardsman’s eye over the terrain. “I suppose there will be tanks, helicopters, artillery all used in concert, coming from that direction,” he said, pointing northeast. “I don’t know what our forces would do about cover and concealment—there isn’t much down there, just a plain. Maybe they’d position themselves in the hills on the other side of the Jordan River and wait for the enemy to make a stupid mistake.”

  For an army commanded by God, this struck me as a rather pedestrian plan of battle, and I said so. Bill shrugged. “Maybe it will go nuclear,” he said. “Wipe out the enemy that way. Don’t
forget, the enemy forces are going to number about two hundred million troops.”

  “I doubt that this valley can hold that many people,” I said. “The entire population of Israel is only six million and already you can’t find a parking spot.”

  Bill didn’t crack a smile. “This is the place that God has prepared and chosen for his plan, according to the Bible. He’ll bring Israel’s enemies right here and then he’ll say, ‘The Jews are my people and enough is enough!’ That’s when he’ll go into action.”

  “Imagine the Twin Towers times, oh, I don’t know how many,” said Connie. “It will take seven years just to clean the blood and bodies after the battle.” She wasn’t preaching or trying to convince me; she was describing a certainty.

  A young woman journalist had accompanied us that day, and Connie turned to her. “You live in Israel, right? You consider yourself an Israeli. But where were you born?”

  “Argentina,” said the journalist.

  “And you come from the United States,” she said to me. “So listen to this.” She opened her Bible and began reading from Jeremiah. “‘Behold, I will gather them out of all the countries whither I have driven them, in mine anger, and in my fury, and in great wrath; and I will bring them again unto this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely.’ That’s God talking about the ingathering of the Jews from around the world into the state of Israel.

  “And it’s there in Ezekiel, too. ‘And he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off! Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah: Behold, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people, and bring you into the land of Israel.’”