In the neocon mag World and I, I have found this text from Paul Gottfried that its seemed very interesting because he mentions the Philo-Semitic tendency in Calvinism (and non-Lutheran Protestantism) and its tolerance toward the Jews. Werner Sombart agreed also with that, for both, Calvinistic Protestantism is the most Judaic form of Christianity and that is due to its biblical literalism. It seems then that the Christian Zionism's phenomenon is nothing new, but rather it goes back to Calvinistic Philo-Semitism.

What do you think about that?

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Protestant conviction and culture

Hart does not recall these historical facts without reference to a context. He knows that changes have occurred since the late eighteenth century, when over 98 percent of American society was Protestant. At the time, the small Catholic population, largely English and sprinkled with aristocrats, was predominantly in Maryland. Three-tenths of 1 percent of America's population consisted of Jews, almost all of them of Portuguese and Spanish antecedents. Though hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, Sephardic Jews profoundly respected Protestant Christians, who revered the Old Testament and who had given their coreligionists asylum in Holland and England.

Those circumstances conducive to a Protestant national culture in the early American republic began to disappear by the middle of the nineteenth century when immigrants from different cultural backgrounds came in increasing numbers. Perhaps the weakness in Hart's presentation is his failure to carry his conclusions far enough. Early America was not only Protestant in theological conviction but imbued with Protestant culture. Hart's extended quotations from the diary of George Washington provide a case in point. In his public statements Washington did appeal to natural religion in a thoroughly nondenominational fashion. But in private life and in personal writings, Washington, like Hamilton and Robert E. Lee, was a fervent Christian absorbed in meditation over Christ's atonement for his sins.

Hart notes that the founding of America took place amid Protestant religious awakenings, going back to the mid-eighteenth century. He is correct to infer that the fervor created by these awakenings rubbed off, in some cases, on the otherwise staid merchants, planters, and lawyers who established the American republic. He is also right to suggest that Protestant interests and Protestant theology pervaded their understanding of religious freedom. As dissenting (non-Anglican) Protestants, most of America's founders would have been excluded from holding office in England under the Test Acts. Moreover, a belief came to prevail among Calvinist Protestants that conversion, the result of divinely implanted faith, cannot and should not be demanded by the state. As this conviction grew widespread among American Protestants, they became increasingly reluctant to impose religious tests at the federal and, then, state levels. How could one expect another man to be redeemed by God simply by making such redemption the precondition for holding public office or owning property? The imposition of religious qualifications, from this Protestant point of view, was an invitation to personal dishonesty and spiritual hypocrisy.

All the same, even the most advanced orthodox Protestant advocates of religious freedom did not look forward to a secularized America. They assumed that the American people would remain attitudinally Protestant: committed to the enforcement of a biblically based public morality and to Protestant educational values, though not to the political imposition of any specific theological doctrine. Tolerance of Jews, for example, stemmed partly from the Protestant tendency to identify them with the ancient Israelites. Hart points to the charming confusion (without recognizing it as such) characteristic of Oliver Cromwell, Jonathan Edwards, and other Calvinists drenched in the Bible who associated modern Jews with the people of Moses, David, and Jesus. Though American Jews suffered political disabilities (as non-Protestants) until the 1840s in some states, they were not subject to public expressions of dislike. And they were viewed as culturally compatible with the descendants of the Puritans, who had tried at one time to make Hebrew their official language and who had taken Old Testament names. It was in fact Protestantism, Hart observes, that influenced some Jews to prefer America over Catholic Europe. Protestant religion and culture were philo-Semitic; the Protestants who settled America had rebelled against a Catholic or Anglo-Catholic establishment in the name of a text that went back to the Jews.

[source: http://www.worldandischool.com/subscribers/searchdetail.asp?num=15619]

It's quite true. Calvinism is essentially Judaism with a bit of Jesus thrown in. Extreme emphasis on Old Testament literalism, YHWH's covenant with "His People," emphasis of the "Chosen" vs. the "damned" and so on. Calvinists in early America, both Northern and Southern, welcomed Jews as God's People.
Cromwell also invited the Jews back to England with open arms 300 years after they were supposedly expelled by Edward I (though many merely changed their names and married into English families).

There is no bigger shabbos guy than the orotund, gravy-sweating John Hagee (or the "Fat Bastard", as I prefer to call him).

Have a look:

The Apple of HIS eye...

Why Christians Should Support Israel

http://www.jhm.org/support-israel.asp

Three-tenths of 1 percent of America's population consisted of Jews, almost all of them of Portuguese and Spanish antecedents. Though hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, Sephardic Jews profoundly respected Protestant Christians, who revered the Old Testament and who had given their coreligionists asylum in Holland and England.

This is consistent with what I had observed on the Gnosticism thread. Whatever failing the Roman Catholic Church has or may have had, it is far preferable to Calvinist Protestantism with its literal interpretation of and emphasis on the Old Testament. Its new-age liberal incarnation aside, Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) would never have given us "Judaeo-Christianity." Indeed, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy always regarded Judaism as apostasy, something which was superceded by New Testament Revalation (though in my opinion the Church did not go far enough, had the Marcionite and Manichean "heresy" been canonized and the OT discarded as Jewish myth, this trouble could have been avoided altogether).

As such, Judaeo-Christianity is not "Christianity" at all. It is Messianic Judaism for gentiles, and it comes as no surprise that philosemitism follows Old Testament literalism wherever it goes.

As such, Judaeo-Christianity is not "Christianity" at all. It is Messianic Judaism for gentiles, and it comes as no surprise that philosemitism follows Old Testament literalism wherever it goes.

Finally, we're getting down to the big problem.

WM

I always ask those guys in chatrooms why they don't convert to judaism, if they're so sure God blesses the jews. After all, you've gotta be a real dumbass to believe that and then don't convert, not? Most of them don't know what to say then, and the few who point out that the bloodline, not the religion, is blessed, never seem to know why the khazar jews have a right to Palestinian land and the Pals, who are much much closer to the bloodline, don't. Perhaps they're seeing some truth I'm missing, or perhaps those christian zionists are dumb as dirt. My money is on the latter.

I found this in google:

http://members.aol.com/EndTheWall/Kirk-Calvinism.htm


The Old Testament and the New America
by Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p.45-51


In colonial America, everyone with the rudiments of schooling knew one book thoroughly: the Bible. And the Old Testament mattered as much as the New, for the American [p.46] colonies were founded in a time of renewed Hebrew scholarship, and the Calvinistic character of Christian faith in early America emphasized the legacy of Israel.

Marcionism,the heresy that Christians ought to cast aside Jewish doctrines,had no adherents in early America. a Only a handful of Jews settled in the colonies before the Revolution, and not a great many until the later decades of the nineteenth century; yet the patrimony of Israel was more powerful in America than in Europe.

The New England Puritans not only ordered their commonwealth by the Ten Commandments and the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but constantly drew parallels between themselves and the people of Israel and Judah. The Puritans thought of themselves as experiencing afresh, under God, the tribulations and the successes of the Hebrew people. "For answers to their problems," says Daniel Boorstin, "they drew as readily on Exodus, Kings, or Romans, as on the less narrative portions of the Bible. Their peculiar circumstances and their flair for the dramatic led them to see special significance in these narrative passages. The basic reality in their life was the analogy with the Children of Israel. They conceived that by going out into the Wilderness, they were reliving the story of Exodus and not merely obeying an explicit command to go into the wilderness. For them the Bible was less a body of legislation than a set of binding precedents."[12]

New England's intellectual leadership, which would give that region an influence over the United States disproportionate to New England's population, transmitted this understanding of the Hebrew patrimony far beyond the New England colonies. But also the teachings of John Calvin of Geneva, so strongly imprinted upon the Congregational churches of New England, worked as well (if less intensely) upon the other American colonies. The Presbyterians,Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and English,who came to the middle and [p.47] southern colonies also were disciples of Calvin; even the Anglican settlers, until the middle of the seventeenth century, often emphasized the Calvinistic element in the doctrines of the Church of England.[13] The Baptists, too, were moved by Calvin.

John Calvin's Hebrew scholarship, and his expounding of the doctrine of sin and human depravity, impressed the Old Testament aspect of Christianity more strongly upon America than upon European states or other lands where Christians were in the majority. And of course the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Quakers, and other Christian bodies in the American colonies did not neglect the Old Testament, though they might tend to give it less weight than did the Calvinists.

"Because freedom from slavery and oppression were dominant themes in the Old Testament," Neal Riemer writes, the legacy of Israel and Judah nourished American liberty. "It warned,as in the story of the Tower of Babel,against Man's attempt to be God. It forced Man,as in the story of Adam and Eve,to recognize his mortality and fallibility and to appreciate that there can be no Utopia on earth. Again and again, it inveighed against the belief that Utopia can be captured and made concrete in idolatry. On the other hand, however, it left ample room for effort to make life better. This is the central meaning, as I read it, of God's Covenant with Noah and its reaffirmation with Abraham, with Moses, and with the later prophets."[14]

So the Old Testament helped to make social realists of the early Americans. As Edmund Burke would declare at the end of the colonial period, the religion of most of the Americans was "the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion ",suffused with the spirit of liberty. But it was not from the Law and the Prophets that the Americans dissented; the Calvinists' quarrel was not with the Children of Israel, but with the prerogatives of the Church of England. Generally the Calvinists believed more fervently in the authority of the Old Testament than Martin Luther had; the idea of the Covenant colored all their political convictions.

Clinton Rossiter expresses succinctly the cardinal point [p.48] that American democratic society rests upon Puritan and other Calvinistic beliefs,and through those, in no small part upon the experience of Israel under God. "For all its faults and falterings, for all the distance it has yet to travel," Rossiter states, "American democracy has been and remains a highly moral adventure. Whatever doubts may exist about the sources of this democracy, there can be none about the chief source of the morality that gives it life and substance..."From this Puritan inheritance, this transplanted Hebrew tradition, there come "the contract and all its corollaries; the higher law as something more than a 'brooding omnipresence in the sky'; the concept of the competent and responsible individual; certain key ingredients of economic individualism; the insistence on a citizenry educated to understand its rights and duties; and the middle-class virtues, that high plateau of moral stability on which, so Americans believe, successful democracy must always build."[15]

Of course Puritanism, and the other forms of Calvinism in America, were Christian in essence, not renewed Judaism merely. And the stern Calvinism of the early colonial years would be modified, presently, by the growth of a less Calvinistic Anglicanism, by the influence of Lutheranism, by the coming of millions of Catholic immigrants in the nineteenth century, and by the arrival of masses of immigrants of other confessions or persuasions. As generation succeeded generation, moreover, the New Englanders themselves would relax the strictness of the founders of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

That said, nevertheless American political theory and institutions, and the American moral order, cannot be well understood, or maintained, or renewed, without repairing to the Law and the Prophets. "In God we trust," the motto of the United States, is a reaffirmation of the Covenants made with Noah and Abraham and Moses and the Children of Israel, down to the last days of prophecy. The earthly Jerusalem never was an immense city: far more Jews live in New York City today than there were inhabitants of all Palestine at the height of Solomon's glory. But the eternal Jerusalem, the city of spirit, still has more to do with American order than has [p.49] even Boston which the Puritans founded, or New York which the Dutch founded, or Washington which arose out of a political compromise between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians. Faith and hope may endure when earthly cities are reduced to rubble: that, indeed, is a principal lesson from the experience of Israel under God. [p.51]


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Marcion, about the middle of the second century of the Christian era, taught that Christians ought to subscribe only to the "pure gospel" of Saint Paul, and that the Yahweh of the Jews really was not God, but the Demiurge, under whom mankind suffered until the coming of Christ.

[12] Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: the Colonial Experience (New York: Random House, 1958), p. 19.

[13] On the power of Calvinism in early America, see C. Gregg Singer, A Theological Interpretation of American History (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1964), particularly the Introduction.

[14] Neal Riemer, The Democratic Experiment: American Political Theory (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1967), p. 35.

[15] Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: the Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), p. 55.

It seems like every destructive, Progressivist movement in the US has emanated from its northeastern States.

It seems like every destructive, Progressivist movement in the US has emanated from its northeastern States.

cf. "New England's intellectual leadership, which would give that region an influence over the United States disproportionate to New England's population, transmitted this understanding of the Hebrew patrimony far beyond the New England colonies."

New England: disease vector and patient Zero of the plague.

Wintermute

The root of the problem lays with the Reformation and the emergence of the Revoluntary Jew. Here is a rather long but interesting read:

http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/lettersOct-Nov03/10204jonesrevjew2.htm

It's quite true. Calvinism is essentially Judaism with a bit of Jesus thrown in. Extreme emphasis on Old Testament literalism, YHWH's covenant with "His People," emphasis of the "Chosen" vs. the "damned" and so on. Calvinists in early America, both Northern and Southern, welcomed Jews as God's People.


They were also in military/materialistic terms the most successful christian sect, though I find living under a puritan regime somewhat unappealing...

It seems like every destructive, Progressivist movement in the US has emanated from its northeastern States.Quite a few come from California...

And that wasn't true before women's suffrage...

Name one Progressivist trend that originated in California.

While you're doing that, I'll review what the Northeast has given us:

Public education
Legal positivism
The War B/t the States
Organized labor
Prohibition
Feminism
Mass immigration
Central banking

Like WM says, Patient Zero.

Legal positivism

Im not sure what this means...

Oliver Wendell Holmes and the legal realists. Judges no longer contented themselves with discovering a priori natural law but fashioned positivist principles to bring about "fairness."