A close look at these polls reveals how flawed they are, but pointing that out is unlikely to stop pundits from recycling the underlying narrative of an imminent Jewish realignment. It’s a story that won’t die, no matter how often it’s proven wrong. This latest iteration is part of a long history of nonsense, built on a constant, almost willful overestimation of the commonality of interest between American Jews and evangelical Christians. Both of these groups care a lot about Israel. Both see anti-Semitism as a profound evil and a worldwide threat. But American evangelicals and Jews have very different ideas about Israel’s future. Besides, lots of evidence suggests that when it comes to identity politics, American Jews are most concerned with the place of Jews in America. They don’t trust people who want to turn their country into a Christian nation, even if those people swear to protect the Jewish state.

The last time a Republican presidential candidate won a plurality of the Jewish vote was in 1920, when Warren Harding won a landslide victory over James Cox. Even then, Harding didn’t get a majority—38 percent of Jews supported Socialist Eugene Debs; 43 percent went for Harding. But in the election of 1980, Jewish support for the Democrats reached a contemporary nadir: According to the book Jews in American Politics, Jimmy Carter, an evangelical who who was widely seen as unfriendly to Israel, got only 45 percent of the Jewish vote. Reagan received 39, and John Anderson 15 percent.

Not surprisingly, many people saw this as the beginning of a long-term shift in Jewish voting patterns, one they expected to continue in 1984. In that re-election year, Mort Kondrake wrote in the New Republic that “Jews are pulling loose from their traditional Democratic moorings.” The Reagan Administration, he reported, was trying to convince the American Jewish community that Walter Mondale would be weak on Israel, caving in “to Jesse Jackson and confirmed Arabisants from the Carter State Department.” (At the time, Jackson’s derisive reference to New York as “Hymietown” was very much in the news.) For the first time in 60 years, wrote Kondrake, “it’s not clear which party will receive a majority of the Jewish vote.”

That November, despite one of the worst showings in modern presidential campaign history, Mondale carried 67 percent of the Jewish electorate. Reagan got less of the Jewish vote in 1984 than Nixon did in 1972, despite the latter’s long reputation for anti-Semitism.

What happened? An important part of the answer lay in the growing association between the Republican Party and Christian fundamentalism. Reagan’s empowerment of the religious right was a significant issue in 1984. Endorsing Mondale, the New York Times concluded: “Mr. Reagan’s opponent talks about church and state with a care that verges on eloquence. [T]hat, alone, would be reason on Tuesday to vote for Walter Mondale.” Concerns about religion in politics did not sway the electorate at large, but Jews took them seriously. As a Commentary article said, “It seems that Reagan’s increasingly vocal embrace of the New—specifically, the Christian—Right scared Jews more than anything said by either Jackson or [Louis] Farrakhan.” Indeed, exit polls showed that Jews had a significantly more unfavorable opinion of Jerry Falwell—a man who’d been awarded the Jabotinsky Prize by Menachem Begin—than of Jesse Jackson.

Fast forward to the first George W. Bush campaign. Once again, Republicans had a candidate whose fierce Zionism derived from his evangelical convictions. And once again, Republican strategists thought they had a shot with American Jews. “Two issues stand in the way of Republicans gaining a significant percentage of the Jewish vote: abortion and the ‘religious right,’ ” GOP pollster Frank Luntz said at a Republican Jewish Coalition forum. “But here we have an answer. The magic word is ‘Israel.’ ” A Jewish Telegraphic Agency story asked, “Can George W. Bush Win the Jewish Vote?”

The answer, of course, was no—Al Gore won 79 percent of the Jewish electorate. Yet four years later, predictions of a Jewish swing to the right started up again. After all, Gore was a special case—he’d chosen a Jewish running mate. Besides, Sept. 11 had made the Middle East paramount in American politics. The Republican Jewish Coalition conducted a survey that, it said, showed a growing Jewish tilt to the GOP. “We are seeing a major shift in American political-party alliances,” the RJC’s Matt Brooks told the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. “We expect these realignment trends to continue.” There was no trend. Kerry won 76 percent of Jewish votes.

Nevertheless, in 2008, journalists and pundits once again speculated about a potential rightward lurch among Jews. After all, the Democratic candidate was named Barack Hussein Obama. He counted among his friends the Palestinian intellectual Rashid Khalidi. “Some Jews are incapable of deluding themselves that Obama would be the most resolute candidate in defending Israel,” the conservative Jennifer Rubin wrote in a Jerusalem Post piece titled “Why more Jews won’t be voting Democrat this year.” There were even Jews, she promised, with “a lifetime of Democratic voting” who would realize that “some things rank higher than even the top items on the liberal political agenda.” Perhaps there were, but not very many. Obama ended up getting 78 percent of the Jewish vote.

Now we’re once again hearing about a Jewish realignment. “Has Obama lost the support of some Jews—and their funding?” asked a Jerusalem Post story in June. Morris purported to show widespread Jewish disaffection with Obama, claiming that if the election were held today, the president would get just 56 percent of the Jewish vote. Then came the Secure America Now poll that seemed to show that only 43 percent of Jews planned to vote to re-elect Obama. Once again, the conservative media exulted.

Both polls, though, were sketchy. The website of the American Association of Public Opinion Research offers a guide to deciding whether a poll can be trusted; one of the most important things to consider, it says, is whether a pollster discloses his or her methodology. Morris does not. Meanwhile, what we know of Secure America Now’s methodology reveals the poll to be, as Adam Serwer wrote in the Washington Post, “laughably bogus.” It began with a conservative sample—only 64 percent of its respondents voted for Obama in 2008—and then posed a series of questions designed to turn them against the president. “Considering what President Obama has proposed for Israel just over a year before his 2012 re-election campaign—a return to the 1967 borders, dividing Jerusalem, and allowing the right of return for Palestinian Arabs to Israel—how concerned would you be about President Obama’s policies towards Israel if he were re-elected and did not have to worry about another election?” asked one. Finally, it asked whether the respondent would “consider” voting for someone else. Forty-three percent pronounced themselves unwilling to even entertain the idea. From that, the pollsters concluded that Obama’s support had dwindled to just that number.

That fact is, many American Jews might consider voting for “someone else,” but only a fraction would consider voting for the type of person that the GOP is likely to nominate. American Jews have shown, again and again, that they care more about social justice and a defense of American pluralism than a zealous defense of Israeli maximalism. They might get anxious about liberal criticism of Israel, but this anxiety tends to pale beside their abhorrence of the Christian right.

There actually was a moment in the summer of 2008 when Obama’s Jewish support looked relatively weak. “We did polling in the summer of 2008,” says Ira Forman, the former CEO of the National Jewish Coalition. “Obama was getting anywhere from 59 to 61 percent of the Jewish vote and McCain was at about 30. According to Gallup the numbers started shifting in August and they really jumped in September and October.” There is a simple, two-word explanation for this: Sarah Palin.

Jewish aversion to Palin has been clear to observers across the political spectrum. Rubin, author of the Jerusalem Post piece predicting a Jewish defection from the Democrats, acknowledged it in a Commentary article titled “Why Jews Hate Palin.” The piece would have read as vaguely anti-Semitic if a gentile had written it—among other things, she suggested that Jewish women were turned off by Palin’s decision to give birth to a baby with Down Syndrome because they “couldn’t imagine making a similar choice.” But Rubin had a point when she wrote, “If one were to invent a political leader designed to drive liberal, largely secular, urban, highly educated Jews to distraction, one would be hard pressed to come up with a more effective figure than Palin.”

At least, she had a point at the time, because since then, just such a leader has emerged—Michele Bachmann. Bachmann is even more rooted in the evangelical right than Palin is. Indeed, while at Oral Roberts University, she was the research assistant on a book by John Eidsmoe titled Christianity and the Constitution, which argued that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy and that it should become one again. “The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God,” Eidsmoe wrote. “In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy.”

Bachmann, like many evangelicals, believes in the scriptural imperative to restore the entire biblical land of Israel to Jewish control. She first went to Israel after high school, on a trip sponsored by the evangelical group Young Life, and she talks about Israel in the language of premillenial dispensationalism, the influential theology that holds that the second coming of Christ depends on the return of the Jews to their homeland. “If we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play,” she told the Republican Jewish Coalition last year. “And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis, we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel.”

This sort of thing has endeared her to some Jewish conservatives, but if history is any guide, it will not sway the community at large. (Her mispronunciation of “chutzpah” won’t help.) American Jews are savvy enough to realize that evangelical support for Israel does not necessarily imply concern with Jewish safety. After all, the dispensationalist scenario culminates in a third world war in the Middle East and the consignment of unconverted Jews to hell before the messiah returns. For those who truly see Israeli politics in terms of evangelical prophesy, an apocalyptic battle on Israeli soil is not something to be avoided at all costs. Instead, it’s the portal to paradise.

Yet this chiliastic theology is only a small part of the reason that Jews will likely remain wary of the Christian right. In the end, American Jews care most about America. They are unwilling to assume a role in their own country that’s in any way analogous to that of Arab citizens of Israel—a people with legal equality who are nonetheless excluded from their nation’s raison d’être. Jews know they can never be full citizens of a Christian nation.

And Republican politics have never been so fully Christianized. The Tea Party was initially mischaracterized as a libertarian movement, but it is deeply imbued with religious fundamentalism, and polls show that a majority of its members believe that the United States is a Christian nation. It’s no accident that, upon taking over statehouses nationwide, Republicans elected with Tea Party support enacted a record number of abortion restrictions—80 in the first six months of 2011, compared to 23 for all of 2010.

Of the serious Republican presidential candidates, the only one who is not entirely aligned with the Christian right is Mitt Romney. Indeed, his campaign has gone out of its way to point out how, as a fellow member of a religious minority, he understands Jewish concerns. Yet he is running for the nomination of a party dominated by religious literalists; the majority of Republicans, for example, don’t believe in evolution, and more than half of them believe that humans were created in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. In his desire to appeal to the GOP base, he has already forsworn his earlier pro-choice position and now opposes not just legal abortion but also stem-cell research. Should he win the nomination, he will almost certainly do what McCain did and choose a running mate meant to energize the Republican base. Some consultants are already speculating about a Romney-Bachmann ticket.

Whoever is ultimately the nominee, we can be sure that he or she will reiterate Romney’s accusation that Obama has “thrown Israel under a bus.” We can be sure that he or she will support the religious right’s agenda in domestic politics. And we can be relatively certain of what will matter most to Jewish voters.

CORRECTION, July 26: It was Adam Serwer, writing on Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog, and not Sargent himself, who called the Secure America Now’s poll methodology “laughably bogus.” The error has been corrected.

The congregants are evangelical Christians—a group that is sometimes referred to in the Philippines as “charismatics”—and their love for both the Bible and the Jewish people inspires them to use bits of Judaism in their services. About a year and a half ago, the church was raided by Israeli immigration authorities. Standing here, I try to imagine police swarming the place. But the service is so peaceful, the praying so earnest, that I can’t imagine anything but this.

The pastora of the church, who asked that her name not be used, to protect the privacy of her congregants, stands at the clear acrylic pulpit, which also holds a menorah and kiddush cup. A guitarist, keyboardist, drummer, and an Israeli flag are behind her. Her eyes are closed, her face tipped up. She pushes her hands to her heart as she leads the group in song: “We worship you,” the congregation sings. Then the music slows, softens, and stops. Someone blows a shofar. The congregants cry out to God in Hebrew.

“We are standing, Lord, in awe of you, in awe of you, in the very heart of the whole world—Israel,” the pastora, says. “In your holy and chosen nation.” I find myself moved by her words, not because they show devotion to my country and my people, but because the pastora and her congregants still have faith in Israel, despite everything it has done to them in the past year.

In July 2009, Israel announced plans to deport 1,200 children of illegal migrant workers. The pastora’s 7-year-old daughter was among the targets. But this wasn’t the beginning of the family’s trouble—the immigration police had searched the church, months before, under the false claim that the pastora was hiding an illegal worker there. After July’s news, the police started showing up, occasionally, at the downstairs apartment the pastora shares with her husband, who is also an ordained minister, and their child. She was frightened and worried, but she focused on her congregation. Single mothers were calling and stopping by night and day. The pastora counseled them on the phone. When the church was full, she led the women to the roof, where they prayed among lines of laundry and hot-water heaters.

The Cabinet decision came down in August of 2010—some 700 children would be naturalized. The pastora and her husband breathed a sigh of relief. Their daughter met the official criteria; they would be able to stay in Israel. But many members of her congregation weren’t as lucky. And here we are, on a Friday night in October—the week the deportation was slated to begin—for an emergency prayer session.

The pastora steps down from the pulpit. A Filipino preacher, who goes by the name of Apostle Abraham, speaks next. The expulsions officially began the previous Sunday, just after the high holidays, and although no one had been arrested or deported yet, he came from Manila just for this meeting.

Apostle Abraham greets everyone, extending a special blessing to me and the three other Jewish visitors. “Praise God for the life of our Israelite brothers and sisters that have joined us,” he says. “We love Israel, we love the people of Israel. We always pray for this nation, and we appreciate you at this time of crisis that the Filipino workers, migrant workers, are facing.”

He begins ministering, in English, with the Sh’ma. Apostle Abraham seems comfortable in the words. I can tell it’s not his first time starting a sermon with this prayer. When he finishes, he says, “It’s not only the Israelites that have to listen to God. It’s also the Filipinos.”

The sermon that follows is about faith, an exhortation to listen to God every day, not just when deportation looms.

I’ve done hundreds of interviews with Filipino migrants in Israel. A significant minority have told me that they consider it an honor to serve the Jewish people. In the past, I chalked the comment up to politeness—Filipinos are big on saving face. But on that Friday night, the pastora and Apostle Abraham force me to reconsider.

A few days later, I leave for the Philippines to spend six weeks conducting research for my book about foreign workers. Among the people I intend to interview are the balikbayan, Filipinos who have lived overseas and returned home. My backpack is full of Hebrew T-shirts. I’m hoping that the letters will attract balikbayan who worked in Israel. I want to understand the special affection some Filipinos feel for our little, far-away state.

***

Puerto Princesa City, Philippines, reminds me of my native Florida. Maybe it’s the heavy, unpredictable sky. Or perhaps it’s the humidity, the palm trees, the lizards everywhere—climbing the walls, creeping toward my plate as I eat at turo turo stands. The windows of these tiny, roadside stalls are lined with pots. The owner lifts the lids and you turo turo, point point, if the food looks good.

The place is familiar in other ways. There’s an “Elohim Copy Center” on one street; a tricycle named Nazareth motoring down the next.

I’m staying at a pension close to a Catholic church. Most Filipinos are Catholic, and the church wields tremendous social and political influence. So, I decide to start my research at mass. I put on a Hebrew T-shirt that reads, “I’m laughing on the inside.” It’s probably inappropriate. I don’t mean to be disrespectful. It’s black and the nicest top I have.

When I arrive I find that I’m late and woefully underdressed. But as I slide into a wooden pew, the woman next to me doesn’t seem too concerned. She’s kicked off her high heels and is resting her bare feet on the kneeler in front of her.

Although the sign outside the church said that 5 o’clock mass would be in English, the priest conducts services in Tagalog. I’ve learned some but not enough to keep up. I catch “Israel” here and there, a few other words, and that’s it. When mass is over, I rush outside to talk to the priest and catch him on his way to the chancery. I introduce myself and explain that I’m trying to understand the Filipino connection to Israel. I add that I live there myself.

“Oh!” Father Christian says, not hiding his excitement. “Well, it’s because of Christianity.”

I know, of course, that Israel is significant to Christians the world over. But Father Christian’s enthusiasm reminds me, again, that there’s something different about the Filipino faithful. I grew up in a predominantly Protestant area, and my Judaism was never met with a smile like Father Christian’s. I was urged to convert, lest my soul burn in hell.

I push for another answer. “Every time I explain the scripture,” he says. “I give them the background first—the culture of the Jews during the time of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Who were the scribes? Who were the Pharisees? What is this Jericho? Jerusalem? Nazareth? Was it below sea level? Or above? Sometimes I even talk about how the rocks looked. If you have this grasped, you will embrace the true message of the gospel.”

“Do you talk about modern Israel?” I ask.

“No, no,” he says. “Filipinos feel they are connected to the Jews by our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

I ask Father Christian if he’s ever visited Israel. “How I wish,” he says. “Maybe someday, in God’s will.”

***

I wander around Puerto Princesa City, wearing Hebrew. One afternoon, I’ve got on my “We are al Arakib” shirt, which includes Arabic script. I pass a row of stalls selling drinks, snacks, and phone cards. A woman calls out to me. She’s leaning over the counter, pointing at my shirt. “I worked in Dubai,” she says, not realizing that al Arakib is a Bedouin village that Israel has bulldozed numerous times.

Denise tells me she and her husband, both college graduates, have four children. She missed them terribly while she was in Dubai. But, she confides, part of her liked the freedom.

We plunge into an intimate conversation—as Filipinas are often willing to do—and soon, I’m sitting behind the stall with Denise and her friend, Felicia, a man in a short denim skirt and pink tube top who works one window over. Felicia clatters off in his high heels and returns with a snack of skewered bananas fried with brown sugar.

When customers approach, Denise waves them off. “I’m leaving in a week for Abu Dhabi,” she explains to me. “I’ll make money there.” It will be Denise’s second “deployment,” as she calls it, to the United Arab Emirates. The conversation meanders toward another war—Operation Cast Lead. “I’m very angry with Israel,” Denise says, shaking her finger at me. “I am a Catholic, and before I went to Dubai, I thought Israel is nice. I thought it was like the Philippines, you know.”

Denise explains that just as Israel is the only Jewish state, the Philippines is the only predominantly Catholic country in Southeast Asia (save for tiny East Timor). Both Israel and the Philippines have a Muslim minority. Both countries have eruptions of internal violence. “And like the Jews, we Pilipino are piling pili,” she says. I asked what that means. She struggles to translate, then says, “Very chosen.”

The Filipinos bore hundreds of years of colonization, she says, comparing that to biblical descriptions of Jews as slaves in Egypt. “It’s like a dream come true that there is an Israel and a Jerusalem,” she says. “But then I went out and worked abroad. And they are bombing and fighting with the Palestinian people,” speaking of Cast Lead.

Denise then fumbles for words, not because her English is bad, but because she seems overwhelmed with emotion. She says, “I don’t believe that these people, the Jews, that their faces are the same as Jesus Christ’s.”

This wasn’t just a fringe phenomenon. Similar rhetoric came from the highest echelons of the Texas GOP. In late November, the Texas Observer obtained emails between two members of the State Republican Executive Committee, John Cook and Rebecca Williamson. Williamson had sent colleagues an email defending Straus’ conservative bona fides. Cook responded by saying, “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it.” When the Texas Observer contacted Cook, he elaborated, “I want to make sure that a person I’m supporting is going to have my values. It’s not anything about Jews and whether I think their religion is right or Muslims and whether I think their religion is right. … I got into politics to put Christian conservatives into office. They’re the people that do the best jobs over all.”

Some of the references to Christian values may, as some have argued, have been less overt anti-Semitism than shorthand for a certain kind of Texas ultra-conservatism. “We didn’t even realize he was Jewish until all this came up,” Myers says when reached by phone. “I grew up here in Kaufman County, and it was just kind of a common thing to say, Christian conservative, constitutional conservative. It wasn’t anything we ever used in reference to anybody else’s religion.”

What is clear is this: Texas tea party activists are targeting Straus, a fiscal conservative, as somehow culturally and ideologically alien, and at least some of his enemies are using religion against him. He’s still favored to win the election for House Speaker on January 11 and remains popular with his caucus. But the anti-Straus campaign, which is beginning to draw national attention, is the latest piece of evidence that the Tea Party is simply the Christian right by another name. Straus isn’t under attack because of his position on taxes or deficits. This is about culture war, and it’s a microcosm of current Republican politics, in which populist activists abhor any hint of moderation.

Tea Party groups have started protesting outside the offices of Texas House members who have pledged to back Straus, and a few representatives have withdrawn their support, citing the will of their constituents. On December 12, Representative Randy Weber announced his switch on his Facebook page: “My District has spoken & I have listened. Please pray that Texas will be strengthened and in GOD’s will, no matter who the Speaker is.” Last month, likely Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, the Fox News host and former Arkansas governor, entered the fray, endorsing one of Straus’ opponents, Ken Paxton, who, according to Rice University political scientist Mark P. Jones, is part of the “extreme wing” of the already extremely conservative Texas Republican Party.

Though Straus has been caricatured as a liberal, the reality is more complicated. It’s true, as Jones says, that “Straus is much more of a moderate than most of the Republicans in the state house,” particularly on social issues. But that’s saying very little. A newsletter circulated by Peter Morrison, treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party—and a frequent contributor to the white nationalist, indisputably anti-Semitic website V-Dare—claims, “Joe Straus is pro-abortion. In fact, his rabbi sits on the board of San Antonio Planned Parenthood.” But while Straus hasn’t been as hostile to family planning as other Republicans, he’s not pro-choice. Kyleen Wright, president of the Texans for Life Coalition, says he’s been a major ally of hers.

Wright has been taken aback by the anti-Straus vitriol. “Just like record numbers of African-Americans came out to the polls [for Obama], it’s always nice to have someone who looks and talks and thinks like you do,” she says. “From that standpoint I can kind of understand it.” But the “demonization” of Straus, she says, “has been over the top and disappointing. One moment he’s pro-abortion, next moment he’s an abortionist. All the claims about him just grow and grow and grow.” Besides, she adds, Judaism is a mainstream faith. “It’s not some weird scary religion that he’s a part of.”

Myers, the Kaufman County Tea Party chairman, insists that Straus’ Judaism isn’t the point. The problem with Straus, he says, is that he’s a liberal: pro-choice, pro-immigrant, and anti-gun. He’s corrupt, Myers insists, owned by the gambling industry. (According to the Dallas Morning News, Straus has “bowed out of any gambling discussion” because his family has interests in racetracks.”) He’s part of the same malign movement that made the intolerable Obama president.

“Barack Obama’s the catalyst in this whole thing,” says Myers. “He’s the one that’s tried to move our country to a socialist society and tried to break the bank on it. We certainly don’t want that in Texas.” He continues: “We see [Straus] as just an extension of the liberal establishment in Washington. It doesn’t have anything to do with his religion.”

But it doesn’t really have anything to do with his economic policies, either. Asked if he considers Straus a fiscal conservative, Myers says he’s not sure. “I did not see a lot of things that he did as far as cutting the budget in the last term,” he says, adding, “I haven’t done any research in that area.”

Myers is right that Straus isn’t being targeted solely because he’s Jewish. Rather, his religion is part of a constellation of characteristics that puts him outside the Tea Party fold. “There are two elements to the attack on Straus,” says Harvey Kronberg, whose influential political newsletter Quorum Report first published some of the anti-Straus emails. “One is that he’s not a real fiscal conservative, and they really have to jump through some hoops to get to that conclusion. The other is that he’s not a true social conservative, and the subtext of that is that he’s Jewish.”

As Kronberg points out, at least some of Straus’ foes have been fairly deliberate in injecting religion into the race. Morrison, whose political newsletter attacked Straus’ rabbi, used to be a fairly obscure figure. Now, says Kronberg, he’s found surprising resources for his anti-Straus campaign, giving him a far larger reach.

Recently, Morrison launched a direct-mail campaign, sending tens of thousands of postcards to Republican primary voters in districts with representatives who are leaning toward Straus. The postcards referred to the Republicans who originally made Straus speaker as members of a “traitorous cabal.” They urged recipients to contact their house members, whose phone numbers and email addresses were included. Such a large-scale campaign, segmented by legislative district, is expensive, and, says Kronberg, “Morrison is not a particularly wealthy guy.”

The campaign, says Kronberg, “suggests political consultants. It tells me that there is money and organization off camera that takes this to a level beyond just some outraged marginal character.” The Tea Party may have genuine grassroots passion, but it also has professional organization. The whisper campaign about Straus’ religion can’t be dismissed as merely an embarrassing misunderstanding. It was strategy. And on the off chance that it works, we’ll surely see it again.

“David is, I think, the most important man in America right now,” Beck said in July, introducing one of Barton’s many appearances on his show. In addition to being a frequent TV guest of Beck’s, Barton is also one of three professors at Beck’s online school, Beck University. He was a member of the expert panel that created Texas’ controversial new history standards, which played down Thomas Jefferson and played up John Calvin. In September, he spoke at a rally for Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, where he was billed as a “constitutional scholar.” Later this month, he and Newt Gingrich will headline a meeting for Nevada pastors at a Las Vegas resort, meant to mobilize them ahead of the upcoming elections.

“Barton’s role in the Tea Party movement is much like it’s been in the Republican Party for the last decade,” says Dan Quinn, communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, a civil liberties group that has watched Barton for years. “He is acting as an intellectual resource for them. He gives them the words in their increasingly extremist vocabulary. On the right he has become this great icon of American historical scholarship, when he’s anything but.”

In fact, Barton doesn’t have any historical training all. His sole academic degree is a bachelor’s in religious education from Oral Roberts University—though given the right’s rampant populism, his fans are unlikely to care about his lack of credentials. Barton’s past association with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers might be more damaging, if anyone paid attention. Still, he’s gotten much more sophisticated about race over the last two decades. These days, he’s more likely to be hurling accusations of racism than fending them off.

Barton built his career by arguing, via a selective reading of documents from the Founding Fathers, that the Constitution is rooted in biblical values and that the founders never intended to separate church and state. He claims, falsely, that 52 of the 55 founding fathers were “orthodox, evangelical Christians,” and that they always intended for Christianity to shape American government. Public secularism, in his view, constitutes an unconstitutional tyranny that is systematically robbing the country of its religious heritage.

This is in many ways an old story. People who write about the religious right—myself included—have often marveled at the intricacy and resilience of the movement’s carefully wrought alternative history. The Anti-Defamation League was criticizing Barton as far back as 1994, writing in one report: “This ostensible scholarship functions in fact as an assault on scholarship: in the manner of other recent phony revisionisms, the history it supports is little more than a compendium of anecdotes divorced from their original context, linked harum-scarum and laced with factual errors and distorted innuendo.”

Yet Barton just keeps getting more powerful and more mainstream. His public career began in the late 1980s when, he has written, God ordered him to the library to investigate the ostensible correlation between the end of state-mandated school prayer and declines in SAT scores. “I didn’t know why,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1988 America: To Pray Or Not To Pray?, “but I somehow knew that these two pieces of information would be very important.”

The next year he published The Myth of Separation, a farrago of quotes torn from context and outright misinformation. It claimed, wrongly, that Thomas Jefferson described the wall of separation between church and state as “one directional,” keeping the state out of the church while maintaining “Christian principles in government.” It also falsely attributed a quote to James Madison, that the government’s future was “staked upon the Ten Commandments.” He later issued an extended correction for these and other mistakes, though that hasn’t stopped them from being repeated endlessly online.

Barton found an eager audience for his Christian nationalist history on the right-wing fringe. In 1991, as the ADL has reported, he spoke at a summer gathering of Scriptures for America, a group founded by Pete Peters, a pastor in the Christian Identity movement. Christian Identity holds that Anglo-Saxons are the true children of Israel, while Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve’s liaison with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Black people, according to Christian Identity theology, are a separate species of “mud people.” Other speakers at the meeting were Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross and white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins. Barton was advertised as “a new and special speaker” who would ask, “Was it the plan of our forefathers that America be the melting pot home of various religions and philosophies?” (One can assume that the answer was no.) On November 24 of that year, Barton spoke at another Christianity Identity gathering, this one in Oregon. According to the ADL, his self-published books were advertised in “The Watchman,” a Christian Identity publication.

Soon, though, Barton’s star started rising on the mainstream right, and he denounced Christian Identity, claiming that he hadn’t known he was addressing racist groups when he appeared at the movement’s meetings. That sounds implausible—it’s hard to imagine how one might speak at two white supremacist summits in five months by accident. Still, the association didn’t seem to hurt him. By the middle of the 1990s, every major religious right organization marketed Barton’s self-published books. In 1994, Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip, praised Barton’s “wonderful” and “most useful” work, and, in 1997, Barton was elected vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party. The Bush campaign hired him to do clergy outreach in 2004.

In recent years, Barton has pioneered a new kind of historical revisionism, one that absolves conservative Republicans of any complicity in American racism, which he lays entirely at the feet of Democrats. He points out, correctly, that before 1964, many of the country’s most virulently racist politicians were Democrats. He neglects to mention that they fled to the GOP en masse after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, in one astonishing document, he attributes Strom Thurmond’s break with the Democrats to his “dramatic change of heart on civil rights issues,” as if the former Dixiecrat had turned Republican out of outrage at segregation. In an equally audacious reinterpretation of history, he paints the founding era as a golden age of racial comity, denying that racism was ever an essential part of America’s DNA.

Such rhetorical maneuvers have been particularly useful to Beck, obsessed as he is with secret histories and a prelapsarian version of the American past. Over the summer, Beck hosted a series of shows he called “Founders’ Fridays,” revisionist forays into American history guided by Barton. Under the guise of teaching black history, Founders’ Fridays argued against the idea that black people had been oppressed by the Revolutionary generation. On July 5, for example, Barton presented a newspaper from the late 18th century that featured the obituary of a black man who had fought in the Revolution. The obituaries, Barton pointed out, were “not broken out black and white. … It’s telling you who’s died, didn’t matter whether were you black or white or anything, you’re a citizen.”

Denying the racial sins of the Founding Fathers makes it easier to deify them—and, in turn, to promote faith in America’s Christian destiny. “In learning about the founders and seeing the heroes that were involved, it only strengthens my view that this was a divine document, the Declaration of Independence,” said Beck at the end of one show. “For the most part, these guys were amazing. And they struggled in their time to do the right thing. You say that they’re not Christians. They were Christians. And they fought for people who weren’t. The same thing with [saying] they were all white. Well, they fought for people who weren’t.”

Barton has given American history an immaculate conception, one that turns slaveholders into civil-rights heroes. He’s helped recreate a myth of a golden age of unimpeachable American righteousness. “[T]he national motto is e pluribus unum, out of many we became one,” said Barton during one of his appearances on Beck. “And we have tried for 20 years to make it e unum pluribus, out of one we’re going to be all these groups.” In some ways Barton hasn’t changed much at all. He’s still making the case against diversity, and coating it in divinity.

Michelle Goldberg is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.

We’re sitting in the lobby of a Georgetown hotel, and Brog is a bit jet-lagged after just returning from a trip to Israel, where he escorted a group of 600 evangelicals. For many of them it was their first trip to the Holy Land. “Even as a Jew,” says Brog, “I can appreciate the excitement in the eyes of my Christian friends as they trace the trajectory of Jesus’s life.”

Brog’s evangelicals meet Israel’s leaders, like President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Brog’s cousin and Israel’s most decorated soldier. “He was one of my heroes even before I knew we were related,” explains the 43-year-old lawyer who looks more like a mid-career Christian Slater than his cousin, the military hero.

While escorting evangelicals through the landmarks of their faith, Brog introduces his charges to the modern Middle East. The Galilee, where Jesus lived and worked, is where Hezbollah rains rockets down on the villages from which Jesus recruited his disciples; Jerusalem, where he died for man’s sins, is protected by a security barrier against the suicidal designs of the enemies of God’s chosen people. And for evangelicals, even as the Jews rejected Jesus, God never rejected the Jews, who remain God’s chosen people.

The Biblical verse that inspires American evangelicals’ love for the Jews, the nation that gave them their savior, is Genesis 12:3:  “I will bless them that bless thee,” God told Abraham, “and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Their philo-Semitism is a reversal of the millennia-old Christian tradition of replacement theology, or the belief that God’s covenant with the Jews was superseded by his covenant with the church through Jesus Christ. Central to this understanding is the interpretation of the word “Israel.” “Evangelicals read the Bible literally,” says Brog. “If you take Israel to mean Christ’s church, then this can be used as an example of God rejecting the Jews. But if you believe Israel means the Jews, then the Bible becomes a Zionist book.”

The fact that sacred history is alive to evangelicals can make them powerful advocates for the modern state of Israel. Their witness extends beyond the congregations, small churches, and mega-cathedrals spread throughout the country and now reaches all the way to Washington, D.C., where Brog shows them how to put their philo-Semitism to practical use. “When they come up to meet with their congressmen or senators,” says Brog, “we share with them the details of timely legislation like the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act.” That is to say, they show them how to support it.

And it is because evangelicals read the Bible literally that their political language describing Israel’s trials is of a different weight and timbre. For the U.S. policy establishment, the question is whether Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats against the Jewish state may be a rhetorical ploy or a boastful appraisal of Iranian military capability. For evangelicals, there is no question that Ahmadinejad has identified himself as the latest in the long line of the hunters—murderers of Jews—and that he must be stopped by any means necessary.

So, why are American Jews suspicious of Israel’s new best friends? It is both because of and despite the fact that, as Brog says, “for most of our history, Jews have had a very lonely walk.”

“Two thousand years of history suggests that Christian religious fervor is not necessarily a good thing for Jews,” says Walter Russell Mead, a fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations who is working on a book about American support for Israel. “If the public culture of the U.S. is more ostentatiously and visibly Christian, I am not surprised that Jews get a little nervous.”

And yet as Mead has explained in a recent series of posts on his blog on the American Interest website, it is hardly news that most Americans stand strongly with Israel—regardless of the feelings of the elites. “Public opinion is moving even more in a pro-Israel direction,” Mead told me over the phone. “While the American elites drift the other way.” This increased polarization between the American public and the elites on the question of Israel, Mead believes, is what’s behind the Israel Lobby phenomenon, or the notion that powerful forces behind the scenes are driving U.S. policy in a direction contrary to the interests and wishes of American taxpayers.

“If you’re a university professor at an average east coast college, most of your gentile colleagues are not very sympathetic to Israel. Support for Israel is fading away with everyone you know, except for Jews,” Mead explains. Since we all tend to universalize from our own experience, he suggests, “it seems that ‘everybody’ changed their minds on Israel”—making it hard for university professors to understand why Israel continues to attract support in Congress. What they miss is the fact that the professoriate’s stance on Israel is highly atypical of the way that the rest of the country feels. “Occam’s razor says you don’t need to posit an occult force to explain why Americans support Israel,” Mead says.

In fact, American support for Zionism predates not only the current-day state of Israel, but also the founding of the United States. The early settlers of this country gave their children Hebrew names and imagined they were founding a city on a hill, the New Jerusalem. Still, as Peter Grose explained in his 1984 book Israel in the Mind of America, “It was the idealized Jew of scripture, rather than contemporary reality, that inspired early America.” England was the actual engine of Christian Zionism where, as Barbara Tuchman documents in her Bible and Sword, major figures across the centuries including David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill argued for a restoration of the Jews to their biblical homeland. It wasn’t until after World War II that Americans took over the leadership of the Christian Zionist movement.

“The British couldn’t juggle a relationship with both the Arabs and Zionists,” says Mead. “Their experience of trying to run the Balfour mandate is what soured many of the Brits on Zionism, and as a weak power they were dependent on Arab sentiment to hold their position. The United States realized that we could do things the Brits couldn’t, like triangulate. The Arab-Israeli straddle is not the only one we do. We managed the Franco-German straddle, and we had the same experience with Greece and Turkey.”

Still, the descendants of those early American Christians who, for instance, gave Yale University a Hebrew motto in the 17th century, were not thrilled by the Zionist project 300 years later. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the mainline Protestant churches dispatched missionaries to the Holy Land, where, after finding little success in converting Jews and Muslims, they began to preach America’s civic religion of democracy and liberty. In the Middle East, a doctrine that would elide confessional difference was an attractive alternative to minorities seeking equal footing with the region’s Sunni Muslim majority. Arab nationalism bound Christians together with their Muslim countrymen in a new, nonreligious identity premised on their, ostensibly, shared history and language.

In helping to foster Arab nationalism, American missionaries played a large role in promoting what was to become the ideological underpinnings of the first wave of anti-Zionism. Given their past sympathies with the Arab nationalist project and antipathy to the Jewish one, it is no wonder that mainline churches in America are more likely to promote boycotts of Israel rather than support the Jewish state.

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder and president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and Israel’s goodwill ambassador to the Evangelical movement, understood back in the ’80s that the evangelical movement was a powerful political as well as cultural force. In spite of stiff opposition from the American Jewish community, he reached out to these unlikely partners.

“When I first brought Jerry Falwell to a synagogue in Chicago 30 years ago,” Eckstein told me in a phone call, “I had my head handed to me. He was not just a lightning rod, but he was seen as the enemy incarnate. At the time, the Jewish community looked to the right for anti-Semitism, not to the left. Jews were traditionally liberal Democrats. So, the Jewish community was scared and anxious, and the first question they asked when they saw Falwell on cover of Time magazine was, ‘Is this good or bad for the Jews?’ Their sense was that it was bad.”

Rabbi Eckstein pointed out that just as you don’t agree with your friends about everything, the Jewish community didn’t have to agree with the evangelicals on every concern—especially issues like abortion, prayer in school, and more recently gay marriage—just to have a fruitful relationship on Israel.

“At a time when you had Methodists supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Pat Robertson was saying we need to stand with Israel, the Jewish community was caught in a situation. They realized that Israel needs friends, and that mainline Christians can’t be relied on, and here is this growing movement that stands with Israel.” In time, as Eckstein explains, the same Jewish organizations that once shunned him for his outreach to evangelicals came to see him as a godsend. “Five or six years ago Hadassah wouldn’t take an ad from us, and now we fund one of their projects.”

Nonetheless, even Eckstein couldn’t have entirely foreseen a situation in which evangelical support would appear to be essential to the survival of the Jewish state. “I didn’t realize 35 years ago that Israel and the Jewish people would be so needy for friends, so alone facing this existential threat and that the ones who would come to stand by them would be these evangelical Christians.”

Brog was similarly caught by surprise when he was working on the Hill as Senator Arlen Specter’s chief of staff. “Whenever there was a terror attack in Israel, it wasn’t Jews from Philadelphia who were calling in large numbers to express their concern, but Christians from the middle of Pennsylvania.”

Eventually Brog teamed up with John Hagee, pastor of the CornerStone Church in San Antonio, Texas, CEO of John Hagee Ministries, and founder of CUFI. Hagee has been a lightning rod for political controversy, most recently during the 2008 presidential campaign when John McCain first accepted and then rejected Hagee’s support—after the minister was believed to have made anti-Semitic remarks. “Pastor Hagee has spent 30 years of his life defending Israel,” Brog explains. “His whole ministry is about teaching people it’s not enough to love the Jews of the Bible but time to start loving the Jews across the street.”

Hagee’s mistake was in stepping into a theological tradition as old as man’s sense of the divine —theodicy, or explaining the ways of God to men. Hagee reasoned that according to God’s plan the purpose of Hitler’s genocide was to return the remnants of world Jewry back to Israel. “For Christians like Pastor Hagee,” says Brog, “and for Orthodox Jews, God is omnipotent. So, the theological dilemma they must wrestle with is why didn’t this omnipotent creator stop the Holocaust?”

Of course, it’s God plan for the Holy Land that has so many Jews concerned about evangelical support. Since the restoration of the Jews is in some accounts a precondition of Christ’s second coming, it’s argued that the evangelicals see the Jews merely as disposable pieces on a cosmic chessboard.

“Evangelical support for Israel is founded not on a prophecy, but on a promise,” says Malcolm Hedding, executive director of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. The South African-born Hedding, who was held in a South African state security court in the ’80s for his opposition to the apartheid regime, is a formidable physical presence, even on the phone. “It is not about trying to use Jews as prophetic pawns,” says Hedding. “It is the promise God made to Abraham that the Jewish people would receive the land of Canaan for the sake of world redemption. The Jewish people became servants of the lord, in order to bring an understanding of revelation of God and his redemptive purpose to the world. Evangelicals defend their right to live in peace and security in land of Canaan, support that comes out of a sense of gratitude for what we’ve received.”

The end of times is in God’s mind, and perhaps man’s future. In the meantime, for the evangelicals, anyway, there is the gratitude that Hedding speaks of—a gratitude that is characteristically absent from Western secular societies that trace their roots only as far back as the Enlightenment and whose spokesmen often stigmatize the State of Israel as an atavistic holdover whose existence runs contrary to the tenets upon which our latest version of modernity was founded. American evangelicals believe that what Christians received from the Jews is nothing less than the foundations of our civilization, which begins not with Voltaire or Jefferson, but with the conviction spelled out in the Hebrew Bible that man is created in God’s image. The same tradition that inspired our Founding Fathers to create a republic in which all men were held to be created equal also inspired the Jews to create a state, supported by evangelical Christians. Their gratitude should not be taken lightly.

Both Gladwell (who is Canadian) and Wood (English) were raised with forms of liberal British evangelicalism; Smallwood grew up attending a “mini-megachurch” in a world of WWJD bracelets, conversions at Christian rock concerts, and biblical literalism. All of them have since lapsed from faith, though they’ve all carried over practices of close reading picked up from Bible study, as well as a profound irritation with “New Atheists,” like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, who dismiss religion as humbug.

Discussing their religious backgrounds in public appeared to be a novel experience for all of the panelists, which, they were well aware, was in itself striking given the frequency and ease with which many Jewish intellectuals, even non-practicing ones, address their Jewishness. The panelists agreed that if they were Jewish, their intellectual sensibilities might be more legible to others. After all, everyone assumes she is anyway, Smallwood said, a bit wistfully, despite the fact that you can’t spell “Christine” without “Christ.” Later, an audience member asked whether the panelists thought that Isaac Newton could be considered an intellectual if he lived today, given that he was a total man of faith. Without skipping a beat, Gladwell deadpanned, “Isaac Newton could quite happily exist today if he was Jewish. He’d be living on the Upper West Side and going to one of those big Reform temples up there.”

The last audience member to come up to the mic was an older man who identified himself as a rabbi. “We’ll have you,” he told Christine. “Your conversion is immediate.”

“This is like a dream come true!” Smallwood replied. The rabbi went on to tell a somewhat incoherent joke and to make a confusing argument, both of which seemed to revolve around the idea that Jews are smart, great, and everywhere.

“It’s not enough to have the intellectuals,” Gladwell grinned in response. “You have to hijack them, too.”

Earlier: British Marxist Talks Religion at Harvard Club

Stained glass at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem

Much has changed since Darby died in 1882. Theodore Herzl wrote The Jewish State, the Balfour Declaration was signed, and, in what seemed to Darby’s followers a validation of his ideas, Israel was created. Today, there are as many as 75 million evangelicals in America. Most of them support Israel. And yet, only about five million of them are premillennial dispensationalists—most Christian Zionists don’t actually base their support for Israel on a catastrophic end-times scenario. In his book Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism, Stephen Spector, a freewheeling professor of English at Stony Brook University and author of Operation Solomon: the Daring Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews, makes the case for a more nuanced understanding of Christian Zionists. Based on a range of evangelical and academic literature as well as dozens of interviews with evangelical leaders and American and Israeli officials, Spector argues that we’ve misunderstood a large, rich, and diverse religious group—at both their expense and our own.

Jews tend to see evangelical support for Israel as self-serving, and worry that evangelicals champion Jews’ return to the Holy Land only so they’ll die or convert to Christianity at the end of days. But you say that’s not the whole story.

The reason that’s most often cited is Genesis 12:3—God will bless those who bless the Jews and curse those who don’t. Generally, the Jews are God’s people. God is on the Jews’ side, so evangelicals want to be on the Jews’ side as well. There’s also a commandment to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and it’s said that those who do will prosper. Among evangelicals, I’ve noticed a genuine fear of what would happen if the United States stopped supporting Israel. Christian Zionists believe that the only reason we are a blessed nation is because we’ve blessed Israel.

If evangelicals care about Jews—not just Israel—then why didn’t Genesis 12:3 receive as much attention before Israel was created?

Critics of Christian Zionism say that the emphasis on Genesis 12:3 is a recent development, perhaps with the suggestion that it is a cover for real—eschatological—motives. In fact, the 1909 Scofield Study Bible—which helped popularize John Darby’s ideas in America—cites this verse. I can’t look into people’s hearts, but I can say that this biblical promise and threat seem to be genuinely central factors for every evangelical I spoke with. Ted Haggard told me that he doesn’t regard Israel as the fulfillment of prophecy. He supports it because it is the home of millions of Jews, triggering the blessing in Genesis 12:3.

You write that it was actually the Israelis who first reached out to Christian Zionists.

Back in the ’50s, Israel was encouraging evangelical pastors to start tourism in Israel. By 1967, the country had a well-developed Christian Affairs Department. Yona Malachy, an advisor there, wrote an important book sorting out which American Protestant denominations were supportive of Israel. But it was Menachem Begin who developed the relationship. He was quite friendly with people like Jerry Falwell.

If they are not so extreme theologically, are Christian Zionists also less politically extreme when it comes to issues like a two-state solution?

Exterior of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church

Evangelicals do hold extreme political positions, and many oppose a two-state solution, but the press has portrayed them as much more rigid then they are. If you read the leaders’ writings and talk to them—Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Jerry Falwell while he was alive—they all say it’s national suicide for Israel to give back an inch of land. But 52 percent of evangelical leaders support a two-state solution, which some justify by saying the Jews will not control all of the land as long as they are secular. Evangelicals have not used their political power to intimidate Bush on the issue of land. Even the most fervent Christian Zionists have a streak of pragmatism.

Even on social issues?

Christian Zionists are highly individual in their beliefs. Abortion is the most unifying domestic issue among American evangelicals, and many Christian Zionists compare it to the Holocaust. Pat Robertson opposes abortion, of course, but he implicitly accepted it when he spoke in favor of China’s policy of one child per family. He also endorsed Giuliani during the Republican primaries, despite the fact that he is pro-choice. These were pragmatic decisions, and evangelicals are often more pragmatic than we expect.

John Hagee has become the face of the Christian right, and he’s been subject to a lot of criticism.

Hagee believes that Israel should be uncompromising on the land, and has a lobbying organization [Christians United for Israel, or CUFI] that deploys four or five thousand people to Congress every summer. He sees Iran as a terrible threat and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new Hitler. But at the CUFI conference in Washington this past summer, the official position was not to promote an attack on Iran; it was to promote negotiations. He’s not cheering for the end. Like Pat Robertson and the others, he’s trying to alert people to a danger, much as Churchill tried to alert the world to a danger in the 1930s.

Bush, too, has been made out as a religious extremist. But you say he’s not a Christian Zionist at all.

He’s even been accused of being a premillennialist and of wanting to bring us to Armageddon. Bush wanted to create the impression that he was a born-again Christian, but the Christian Zionists have been writing for the last five years that Bush is not one of them. Some are showing deep contempt for him. Some Christian Zionists say Bush believes in replacement theology; those who know him say he doesn’t know replacement theology at all. I wasn’t given access to Bush, so I couldn’t ask him what he really believes.

Some of the harshest criticism of Christian Zionism comes from other evangelicals. How can people who read the Bible literally disagree so strongly about textual issues?

Like mainline Protestants, liberal evangelicals tend to read the Bible more figuratively. They note that in the New Testament, God focuses on caring for the poor and the oppressed. One of the most interesting things I learned from writing this book is that empathy seems to work in only one direction. The empathy the liberal evangelicals feel for suffering Palestinians short-circuits any empathy they might feel for Israelis.

You quote an African-American pastor named Glenn Plummer saying that evangelicals love Israel like a man loves his wife—the love is inexplicable. Are black evangelicals as supportive of Israel as whites?

There’s been tension between blacks and Jews for years, so Glenn’s project is to bring blacks to support Israel. Glenn grew up in Brooklyn, had no particular interest in Jews, was listening to religious radio, decided that there was something to it, and gradually came to love Israel. He said to me—he said it when he spoke before the Knesset, as well—”Get in the faces of black people, tell them: we were there for you in the civil rights movement, we died for you, we marched for you, now you owe us.”

Do you expect Christian Zionist attitudes to change?

Ted Haggard pointed out that dispensational thinking is declining among evangelicals, and wondered whether they would love and support Israel less as a result. Some evangelicals might feel put off if their love for Israel and the Jews seems unrequited. My best guess, though, is that people who read the Bible literally will always take very seriously God’s promises of blessing those who bless Israel, and cursing those who curse the Jews.

On the tree of wacky media subjects, evangelical Christians are usually seen as the lowest-hanging fruit. They have those mall-like megachurches, pimply teenagers signing pledges to guard their virginity, and hardcore bands that have kids moshing to songs about salvation, to say nothing of the Jesus coffee mugs, Jesus baby-T’s, Jesus messenger bags, Jesus picture frames, and Jesus mouse pads that help make up the $4 billion Christian merchandise industry. Their depiction is often as nuanced as a uniform block of gun-toting, abortion-hating, Jesus-loving, Bush-voting fascists.

But a pair of new filmmakers, Gerry Corneau and Leah Belsky, have taken a different path and simply thought to consider evangelicals as human beings. The fruit of their labor, Seeing Red, is a documentary for which the filmmakers traveled the country to ask evangelicals what drives their faith.

Corneau is a forty-eight-year-old father of two who lives in a small Rhode Island town near the Connecticut border. An industrial insulator by trade, he is a political progressive as well as a Christian spiritual seeker, although he long ago abandoned the Catholicism of his youth. After the 2004 election—regarded as proof of the country’s moral divide—he was dumbfounded.

“I couldn’t square that some big part of my country would vote for somebody based on values I had a really hard time conceiving,” he says in a phone interview.

Corneau batted around the idea of writing a book that explored the alleged moral divide, but eventually settled on making a documentary, although he had no experience in film. He met Leah Belsky through a posting he put up on an online bulletin board for women filmmakers; she was interested in exploring similar terrain.

Belsky, now twenty-six, was working at the World Bank in Washington after having graduated from Brown University. She had just a little more filmmaking experience than Corneau, with one documentary course under her belt. Like Corneau, she was perplexed after the 2004 election. Instead of casting judgments, Belsky wanted to understand who the Christian “values voters” credited with securing Bush’s presidency were.

“I have a strong Jewish identity,” she explains. “But to me, Judaism hasn’t been about faith and religion. It’s been about culture. Part of me was curious to see if, in spending time around these people who were more faithful, I would be able to relate a bit more.”

The unlikely team linked up and started traversing the fifty states with a video camera, interviewing dozens of people about their faith with the aim being to “present people from their own viewpoints,” according to Belsky. Nearly everyone they approached was eager to speak. They paid for the venture themselves, and added to their polyglot team associate producer Elon Green (another Jew) and assistant director Amrita Das (a Hindu).

Their finished product, Seeing Red, premiered in fall 2006. In the film, we meet megachurch congregants and Christian rock concertgoers, along with a handful of scholarly experts and, for good measure, a table of gay ex-Christians at a bar in Brooklyn. Perhaps the most striking thing about the film is that it casts an entirely nonjudgmental eye on its subjects, recognizing the humanity and dignity of all of them.

The film’s impartiality makes it a bit of a Rorschach test, and secularists who break out in hives at the mere mention of God, religion, or spirit will probably get twitchy over some of the subjects. But few interviewees evoke the caricature of right-wing Christians. Most are deeply reflective people who seem genuinely driven by love and kindness.

But where does their love and kindness take them? In some cases, it seems to have driven them where you might suspect. “The holy spirit led me to vote for George W. Bush,” declares one woman. There is a testimony of support for the war in Iraq, a vast church choir dressed in American flag regalia, a preacher who rides a sequined red-white-and-blue electric chariot up the church aisle to his pulpit. It’s a scene that even the most nonjudgmental among us probably can’t resist a little chuckle over.

But much of Seeing Red shows a more nuanced view of evangelicals, owing in some part to the filmmakers’ inclusion of themselves in the narrative. Corneau, for one, became “saved” during the making of the film, and is now a born-again Christian.

“Having been someone who in a past life made fun of evangelicals, I used to think you had to check your intellect at the door of a personal relationship with Jesus,” he says. But some of those they visited in making the film were Christian progressives, and those experiences affected Corneau profoundly. “Just because you have a deep relationship with the Lord doesn’t mean you’re going to be a Republican or a Christian conservative,” he said. “I’m as much if not more of a political progressive as I ever was.”

Belsky remained firmly Jewish, but describes becoming so comfortable around evangelicals—even when they evangelized to her—that she tried to get her adventurous grandmother in New York to accompany her to a local megachurch. “The evangelical communities we visited, if you look at the song and prayer, there’s something very attractive,” she says. “Not attractive in that I could relate to the faith in Jesus. But striking in terms of the community that these Christians have managed to create.”

Belsky and Corneau are now selling the finished film on their website, and encourage community groups to set up screenings and discussions, a method modeled after the grassroots promotional effort used by director Robert Greenwald for his films Outfoxed and Iraq for Sale. Last fall, CrossLeft, a national progressive Christian group, sponsored a series of community screenings of Seeing Red.

It’s all to the effect of imploring people to put on their very best pluralist caps and listen to voices they might disagree with. “The thing that Leah and I hoped for was that nonbelievers would watch it and at the end, not be so freaked out by believers,” says Corneau. In the end, Seeing Red lets its viewers do just that, by presenting—not demonizing—the people and values associated with the red states. One only hopes that there are a couple of filmmakers out there in Wyoming or Alabama working on their own project: Seeing Blue.