Tim Tebow-phobia: Jewish Fear and Loathing of Christianity

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman has written what I suspect most American Jews feel—that football success for Tim Tebow would be bad for the Jews. Tebow is the very Christian quarterback of the NFL’s Denver Broncos who leads high-profile prayer meetings after football games. Here’s what Hammerman wrote:

People are always looking for signs of God’s beneficence, and a victory by the Orange Crush over the blue-clad Patriots, from the bluest of blue states, will give fodder to a Christian revivalism that has already turned the Republican presidential race into a pander-thon to social conservatives, rekindling memories of those cultural icons of the ‘80s, the Moral Majority and “Hee Haw.” The culture wars are alive and well, and, if the current climate in Washington is any indicator, the motors are being revved up for what will undoubtedly be the most cantankerous Presidential campaign ever. When supposedly well-educated candidates publicly question overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change and evolution and then gain electoral traction by fabricating conspiracies about a war on Christmas, these are not rational times….

If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants. While America has become more inclusive since Jerry Falwell’s first political forays, a Tebow triumph could set those efforts back considerably.

I admire much of what Tebow stands for. His mom’s decision to risk her own life rather than abort her fetus flies against my own – and Judaism’s – values, but neither am I pro-choice in all cases. His story is so improbable that if he were to win it all, a part of me would be wondering whether there is a Purpose behind it, just as I saw a divine hand in the equally unbelievable Red Sox victory of 2004. And it makes me wonder whether other Jews, the ones who don’t happen to have advanced degrees in religion and a few decades of rabbinic experience, might be even more seduced by this unfolding drama. Will legions of Southern Baptist missionaries hit the college campuses the very next day, spreading this new gospel of Tim? Already there is a “Jews for Tebow” Facebook page.

The above quote was taken from Hot Air (bold-face in Hot Air’s version). The original source  has  been pulled by Jewish Week, suggesting that they are now aware that this is a very regrettable faux pas indeed.

Hammerman has apologized, but he said what he said, and, as discussed below, his views are hardly out of the Jewish mainstream. In  Hammerman’s world, a Tebow victory would inflame his followers with Christian religious zeal and they would immediately rise up against the Jews and all things multicultural: “the emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants.” Of course, it’s really a fear of Whites rising up and rebelling against their erstwhile masters.

In Hammerman’s view, the domination of American culture by people like himself  is completely appropriate.  He is utterly contemptuous of the traditional people and culture of America. Here’s my rendition of  Hammerman’s train of thought:

These nuts are anti-science; they don’t believe in climate change and evolution; they’re basically a bunch of illiterate hicks.  I, on the other hand, have enlightened views—entirely supported by science—that there are no racial differences in anything important like IQ and that social science is unanimous that multicultural societies work marvelously. Even the U. S. can be a successful multi-cultural society if we can squelch all public manifestations of Christianity.  [Admittedly, this is a contradiction, but he has no conscious awareness that it’s a contradiction. In the same way, his horror that the U.S. still has some trappings of Christianity doesn’t interfere with his belief that Israel should remain a Jewish state.  And his attitude that American Christians should be “inclusive” certainly doesn’t extend to Israel’s treatment of  the Palestinians.] My views mark me as an educated person—the New York Times is my bible. Meanwhile, the yahoos that relate to Tebow remain unwashed even if they managed to get through college.   For an entire century, these hicks have been standing in the way of our utopian multicultural fantasy world created by the Jewish intellectual left. We won the battle for the brains of the smart people a long time ago, but boobs like Tebow and his fans are still dangerous. We don’t yet have the entire power of the federal government available to put these people in a gulag, but we enlightened and superior  folk have to do everything we can to stop them.

The deep fear of Christianity—especially when it’s emotionally compelling—is mother’s milk to American Jews.  For example, Israeli patriot Elliott Abrams  acknowledges that the mainstream Jewish community in America “clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.” According to Abrams, because of this vision, Jews have taken the lead in secularizing America.  In fact, the key role of Jewish organizations in shaping the Constitutional law on Church/State relations is well known. And it’s not much of a mystery who’s behind the war on Christmas; Hollywood certainly hates it, as Edmund Connelly reminds us (see here and here).

Or Joel Kotkin: “For generations, [American] Jews have viewed religious conservatives with a combination of fear and disdain.”

Or Norman Podhoretz:

[The Jews] emerged from the Middle Ages knowing for a certainty that — individual exceptions duly noted — the worst enemy they had in the world was Christianity: the churches in which it was embodied — whether Roman Catholic or Russian Orthodox or Protestant — and the people who prayed in and were shaped by them. It was a knowledge that Jewish experience in the ages to come would do very little, if indeed anything at all, to help future generations to forget. (See here.)

Or Steve Sailer describing Steven Pinker’s

deep-rooted aversion to engaging intellectually with the effects of Christianity. His distaste for the culture of Christendom before the Enlightenment is palpable. For instance, he responds to historian Barbara Tuchman’s summary of medieval economic theory with, “As my grandfather would have put it, ‘Goyische kopp!’—gentile head.” This old family attitude seems to make this otherwise very bright scholar’s interpretations of the last 2,000 years rather obtuse.

This fear and loathing of Christianity is mainstream among the numerically dominant liberal Jews like Hammerman—the 80+% of American Jews who voted for Obama. Liberalism as Jewish religious identity (in the Diaspora but certainly not in Israel where the masquerade of Reform Judaism is non-existent). Trudie Pert’s series on Rebbe Schneerson shows that Schneerson thought that religious hatred of Jews was not important in America. That’s quite right. Indeed large swaths of American Protestantism are philo-Semitic, including many millions who are rabidly pro-Israel. But the feeling is definitely not reciprocated by any segment of the American Jewish community. While liberal Jews like Hammerman live in deathly fear of a Christian uprising, Schneerson and his cult have well-advertised views on the inferiority of all non-Jews, and the Orthodox show their true stripes in Israel where Christmas is under attack by the Heredim and where spitting on Christian clerics has been going on for years to the point that even the ADL is complaining. Just today there’s this news item from Israel on settler-types occupying a sacred Christian site on the  West Bank—and fulfilling the biblical mandate for a greater Israel:

The Israeli Police apprehended 17 extremist settlers who barricaded themselves … at the site of the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River. The settlers hung banners with photos of the right-wing Jewish leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who called for the “Jewish state to expand beyond the Jordan river into the state of Jordan and all the way to Iraq.” … The settlers entered a closed military zone behind the border fence with Jordan, and barracked themselves in the site, very close to where Jordanian soldiers are stationed. The site, 10 kilometers away from the West Bank city of Jericho, is one the most sacred sites for Christians after the Nativity Church in Bethlehem and the Church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Don’t look for religious tolerance when Jews have power.

The reality is that if Tim Tebow did indeed spark a religious revival among Christians, it’s unlikely they would want to start a pogrom against the Jews given the philo-Semitism that is so typical of the vast majority of American Protestants. Nor is it likely that they would rise up against all things multi-cultural. After all, not a few of the players involved in Tebow’s post-game prayer meetings are Black.

Hammerman should be happy. The anti-White, anti-Christian revolution is moving on schedule, and people like Tebow are quite unlikely to do anything to change things. Indeed, the good rabbi is getting a bit ahead of himself. It’s still a nominally Christian country. He should wait a couple decades when it will be safe for Jews in the Diaspora West to really take off the gloves when it comes to Jewish fear and loathing of Christianity and the Europeans who made Christianity their religion.

But Rabbi Hammerman has doubtless learned that it’s bad form for Jews in America to go public with their fear and loathing of Christianity at this time. He should learn to be patient. Everything’s moving in his direction.

The obvious but important corollary to this is that the Jewish support for all things multicultural has nothing to do with love of humanity and other such uplifting emotions. The primary emotions are quite clearly fear and hatred, and that does not bode well for the future.