aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Strange Bedfellows

Guest post by Jen.

“It’s Passover,” explained the first student, refusing her classmate’s offer of pretzels.  The second student, a fundamentalist Christian, apologized for forgetting. 

Anti-Semitism seems relatively uncommon here, and, to my great surprise, charismatic Christians seem to interact more comfortably with Jews than with other (non-charismatic) Christians. 

After much reading and discussion with our friend, I realize that many charismatics are Christian Zionists, who believe that

...all of historic Palestine—including all the land west of the Jordan which was occupied by Israel after the 1967 war—must be under the control of the Jewish people, for they see that as one of the necessary stages prior to the second coming of Jesus.

I am working to commit the taxonomy of fundamentalist Christianity to memory.