I had a friend since high school, an individual for whom the 1960s counterculture term, Jesus freak, would have been applicable. In those reefer-reeking, muscle car-deafening days Bill evinced the role of A lank-of-hair, love-you-neighbor sort of Christian. He and I had gone our individual ways over the span of decades. But, in recent years, we reestablished contact.
In the years since, his born again proclivities had drifted – then careened – rightward and authoritarian. His Episcopal Church domination had lapsed into schism between a liberal and conservative approach to Doctrine. Somewhere along the lines, he had donned the psychical mantle of a Christian Zionist thus he regarded me, a Jewish person, as somehow bearing a crucial element, expedited in the Final Days, that will summon Lord Jesus to appear in and then descent from the clouds and begin the redemption of thIs sin-sullied world.
In the days following the Oct 7 Israeli/Hamas hostilities, he became particularly solicitous, even to the paranoia-plangent point of offering his home as a place of refuge when (vaguely defined) forces would initiate US-style Nuremberg Laws against Jewish Americans. When I informed him that Jews were in zero danger from the US government, instead, due to the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, we posed a far greater danger to ourselves, he seemed dumbfounded, and even more so, and even to the point of taking offense, when, I posited, the role of Righteous Gentile should be fulfilled by shielding and sheltering the people that the US government terms as illegal. Withal, I requested he consider this verse from Scripture:
“When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God”. – Leviticus 19:33-34.
Bill, for all intents and purposes, simply could not wrap his scripture beholden mind around the notion that said verse was applicable to the “ the least among us” in present day terms:
And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ – Matthew 25:40
There was an obtuseness to the point of protective prickliness was evinced by my good news bearing friend if I pressed the subject matter. Then, as Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people raged on and the coming xenophobia-rancid rise of MAGA 2, our friendship, at least from his part, became untenable and Bill outright ghosted me.
In a direct manner, I had not attempted to confront him with the obvious: The Christian conservative evangelical system of belief is so radically antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ that an argument could be made that he and his brethren, in a collective manner, display the spirit of The Antichrist.
If the often metaphorically abstruse aspects of The Gospels can be applied, in clear terms to contemporary situations, this much should be obvious: the least among us in the form of so-called illegal immigrants should not be imprisoned within ICE detention centers and the tech billionaire’s will to dominate the earth violates the admonitions of Scripture, both Old and New Testament. Indeed, the oceanic phenomenon of the Age Of Information has engendered the rise of A Beast (of sorts) in the form of megalomania as evinced by Peter Thiel et. al. For example, Thiel’s obsession with the lurid imagery of The Antichrist should be regarded as classic projection. In short, every accusation the libertarian true believer Thiel asserts in regard to the Antichrist’s lust for global domination should be regarded as an inadvertent confession of intent.
(Please continue reading at Substack.)
