View article

The leading historian of Israel, Gershom Gorenberg (2002), called evangelical prophecy of the apocalypse “dangerous” for American and Israeli interests. In American Fascists (2007), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Harvard Divinity School graduate Christopher Hedges argued that evangelicals resemble the early fascist movements in Italy and Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, and therefore constitute a gathering threat to American democracy. Edward Said (2002, n.p.) wrote that Christian Zionists were “a menace to the world and furnish[ed] Bush’s government with its rationale for punishing evil while righteously condemning whole populations to submission and poverty.” Alternatively, Christian principles of forgiveness and humility offer political ‘ways forward’ that reject the processes of division that bring out the polemical energy in the above quotes.