THE EXOTIC RELIGIOUS RIGHT

If you are not a Christian, or if you are a Christian but not a right-wing one, it is no secret that the Religious Right has a problem with you and means to create problems for you.

Yet in a way it isn't that simple. When Religious Righters want to punish people for not being Christians, they go after the Mormons, who are Christians, and not after the Jews, who are not.

That seems incomprehensible. So my chore here is to see if I can unravel it.

The Mormon part is just a question of theological differences, I think, and need not detain us. But the RR's one-sided love affair with the Jews is a thing to marvel at.

For nearly two millennia such people were blaming the Jews above all others for not converting. But then a generation or two back, the Jews began to be seen as meriting not pogroms but plaudits.

The explanation may be that the RR thinks that these are the "end times" and that the Jews are scheduled to convert any day now. Thus, they are okay prospectively.

But there may be something more. American rightists in general are big on the Jews now and especially big on the Israelis. Could it be that some factor here trumps religion from the rightist standpoint?

I figure it this way. American righties look at the rightist, Netanyahu-type Israelis and see themselves: the same pioneering/buccaneering spirit that made our country grate. They look at the Palestinians and see our American "Indians" and blacks and illegal immigrants and other inferior types. And those inferior types are sitting on a valuable commodity: land.

For rightists as such, the archetypally defining event is a righteous genocide against those they see as less human than themselves when those others possess a treasure that can be appropriated: land, oil, minerals, etc. That is the prospect that galvanizes them. It ties into one package self-righteousness, sacrificial mercilessness, triumphalism, and avarice.

Israelis are like Americans. They are practical-minded but idealistic, as witness a large peace-and-justice constituency among them. They are capable, as Americans are, of much that is good and much that is not, depending on the circumstances. But what the right is capable of falls into a much narrower range. The RR is not altruistic, despite its religiosity. It believes that if you belong to its tribe you deserve and will get all the goodies.

It also believes that it will never have to pay for its arrogance and selfishness. When things get hairy, it holds, Jesus will appear in the sky and rapture it out of here to someplace safe where it can lord it over everyone.

What its putative savior might think when contemplating this gang I don't know, but I am reminded of the shortest Bible verse: "Jesus wept." If this is his following, I'd say he has cause to.