Christians, Jews, Muslims, News and Events, Politics, Surveys - Polls

The attitude of Christians to Jews

Although current debates on multiculturalism in Europe often focus on Islam and Muslims, there also are long-standing Jewish communities in many Western European countries. The recent Pew Research Center survey finds Christians at all levels of religious observance are more likely than religiously unaffiliated adults to say they would not be willing to accept Jews in their family, and, on balance, they are somewhat more likely to agree with highly negative statements about Jews, such as,

“Jews always pursue their own interests, and not the interest of the country they live in.”

Anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish opinions are more common among Christians, at all levels of practice, than they are among Western Europeans with no religious affiliation. This is not to say that most Christians hold these views. On the contrary, by most measures and in most countries surveyed, only minorities of Christians voice negative opinions about immigrants and religious minorities.

The acceptance of minorities depends also a lot on education and on knowing some one of such minority. Also the connection with a political party is influencing very much how a person is going to look at a Jew, Muslim or other religious person.

People identifying with the political right are strongly linked to anti-immigration stances and opposition to religious minority groups.

Still, even after using statistical techniques to control for a wide variety of factors (age, education, gender, political ideology, personally knowing a Muslim or a Jewish person, personal assessments of economic well-being, satisfaction with the country’s general direction, etc.), Western Europeans who identify as Christian are more likely than those who have no religious affiliation to express negative feelings about immigrants and religious minorities.

Despite their support for a Jewish state, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are disliked by many Jews. We may find as prior reason that those people sometimes use very aggressive ways to convert Jews to a belief in a Triune god. Such a faith goes totally against the Scriptures, where there is clearly a teaching of Only One True God and no place for such false teaching of a Trinity or unity.

In 2006, a Pew survey found that evangelical Christians were more favourable toward Israel than the average American was — and much more sympathetic than either mainline Protestants or secularists. This might well be because they see their place in Jerusalem or want to be the major religious group in the Holy City. In another survey, evangelical Christians proved much likelier than Catholics, Protestants, or secular types to back Israeli control of Jerusalem, endorse Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and take Israel’s side in a Middle Eastern dispute, because they consider that as sooner the Jews are brought together in the Holy Land, the sooner they will come to see the Kingdom of God being established. In those preaching groups we also do find a lot of dispensationalists who understand that the Jews are God’s chosen people, but that for the Millennium to come, they must be living in Israel, whose capital is Jerusalem; there, the Temple will rise again at the time of Armageddon.

Several Christian groups also consider themselves to be the rightful heirs of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Looking at themselves as the sole legitimate heirs of the biblical promises, Christians consider themselves not only to have the right but also to have the obligation – so they supposed – to define those whom they had supplanted, especially since Jews themselves seemed to ignore the clear lessons of history (according to them) and insisted on persisting. For many evangelist missionaries or Zionist Christians the Jews came to miss their chance to be heirs of Israel because they did not accept Jesus as their Messiah. For those preachers the Jews may survive in order to bear the curse they brought on themselves for the death of Jesus, when enough Jews convert to Christendom and when the majority of inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be Christians. Some Christian theologians assume that their historical victory gives them the right to define Judaism in Christian terms.

Photograph of Dr. Luke Timothy JohnsonThough Luke Timothy Johnson thinks

the age of revolution removed Christianity’s political clout, making it no more than one more competitor for secondary allegiance within the secular state.

… the Holocaust revealed the moral rot in Christian consciousness concerning Jews. The logic of isolation and exclusion that had been Christian policy for centuries found diabolical expression in the machinery of concentration camp and mass murder. In the face of these jolting historical realities, many Christians find it harder to maintain theological smugness toward Judaism. {Christians and Jews: Starting Over – Why the Real Dialogue Has Just Begun}

As long as so many Christians are going to look at the Jews as murderers of Christ and as people who do not want to accept the Messiah to be the incarnation of God, there shall be borders difficult to cross. Christians shall have to come to see that there are Jews who have found their Messiah or Christ, but who clearly see the Biblical Truth of the sent one from God. those people who accept Jeshua as their Messiah clearly see how many others, calling themselves ‘Christian’, have not learned the most important lesson taught by their first and greatest theologian, the Apostle Paul. Paul spoke not of knowing God but of being known by God (1 Corinthians 8:3; Galatians 4:9). He concluded his own anguished search – as a Jew – into the mystery of God’s presence among Jews and Gentiles with a confession of God’s indecipherable and inscrutable ways (Romans 11:33-36).

In Christendom lots of people still have a long way to go, to come to accept that the God of Israel is an eternal God (having no birth and no death) Who cannot be seen by man and Who has no flesh and bones but is a Spirit. Luckily in Christianity we may enough people who have no intention at all to convert Jews by force but who are willing to recognise the God of the Jews, who is a Singular Spirit Being and no Trinity, as their only One True God too. With their patience and with their example, following the example of Christ, they may hopefully better succeed to build up a better relationship between Christians and Jews, all over the world.

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Preceding

A Tool to shed light over the qualities in our life 2 Jews for a Messiah

The way of looking at the Scriptures and the people in this world

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Additional reading

  1. Believing in God part of being American for Discriminating Americans who feel discrimiated
  2. Paris attacks darkning the world
  3. Is the practice of religious freedom in danger in the United States of America
  4. Faith, storms and actions to be taken
  5. Declaration of war against Islam and Christianity
  6. America’s Changing Religious Landscape
  7. Being Christian in Western Europe at the beginning of the 21st century #1
  8. Being Christian in Western Europe at the beginning of the 21st century #2
  9. The Trinity matter
  10. Trinity – behind a false doctrine
  11. Trinity – History
  12. Altered to fit a Trinity

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