John Rapley - Foreign FocusTHE MURDER last week of an American missionary in Lebanon has drawn attention to one of the subtexts of the current Middle East conflict. This is the role of religion - and specifically American evangelical Protestantism - in shaping, and complicating, American policy in the Middle East.
Attacks on Americans have apparently been on the increase throughout the region. The commonplace suggestion in the US that America's enemies hate what she stands for - freedom in particular is not borne out by the evidence. Polls in the Arab world confirm what scholars there have said for generations: there is actually a good deal of admiration for America. But present US policy towards the region consistently angers Arab respondents, and anti-Americanism is rising.
However, in addition to anger at American policies, religious tension is surfacing in a region that had once been relatively harmonious. And this points to a connection that is both helping to drive American Mideast policy and contributing to the tensions: the odd alliance between conservative evangelical Christians in the US and Israel. Odd because this strain of American Christianity has traditionally evinced little regard for Jewish people, seeing them (like all non-Christians, not to mention non-Protestant Christians like Catholics and Orthodox) as a lesser people. And such prejudices remain. The prominent American conservative, House Majority leader Tom Delay, recently declared Christianity to be the only true way to God. But while such statements annoy Jewish leaders in the US, the latter have also come to depend increasingly on people like Mr. Delay as their political allies.
This is because conservative Christians like Mr. Delay have become the most ardent and reliable supporters of Israel. With their close connections to the Bush administration and their penetration of the Republican Party, they have helped tilt America's Middle East policy increasingly towards Israel.
It is important to appreciate the fine line which America must always tread with regards to the Middle East. On the one hand, the country's ravenous appetite for oil forces her to maintain warm ties to Arab countries. Israel complicates those ties, to say the least. But on the other hand, the importance of Israel in American politics forces the US to draw closely to Israel, something President George W. Bush, for one, seems sentimentally inclined to do.
No other Western country supports Israel with such enthusiasm. Religion appears to be the reason. It is not that religion is unimportant in all other Western countries. The Catholic Church retains influence in some European countries, for instance. However, owing to the presence of Arab Catholics in the region, and the religious sites in the Holy Land in which the Church retains a hold, the Vatican has tended to retain some sympathy for the Arab cause.
Equally, in no other country than the US is evangelical Protestantism so important. The significance of this fact is that this strain of Christianity places great emphasis on the Bible as the source of all authority. This gives the Biblical story of Israel particular resonance among American evangelicals. In particular, surveys in the US reveal that the idea that Israel was a gift of God to the Jews is widely accepted by American Christians, to a degree unseen elsewhere.
Thus, as Israel finds herself at war with her neighbours, America is being pushed closer to her ally by domestic politics. Once it is explained in religious terms, the conflict's contemporary causes the struggle over land and water, the role of migration, ideological battles, and so forth are then quickly forgotten.
Into this volatile brew have stepped missionaries eager to spread the word of God, as they understand it. The last few decades of the 20th century witnessed a great evangelical wave spreading from the American deep south and fanning out across the globe. Scholars are still trying to come to grips with this outburst of fervour, but the result has been an explosion in conversions worldwide. And in a region in which fundamentalist Islam is growing - for its own reasons - fault lines begin to emerge. The conflict then comes to be seen as one between faiths, between rival crusades, and America is quickly identified as leading the charge.
Of course, it is not so simple. But for people seeking simple answers to the questions presented to them by life at the turn of a millennium Why are we at war? Why do they hate us? - it is comforting to see this as a battle between good and evil, with God taking sides. Unfortunately, both sides claim theirs is the one God has taken.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
