Who Needs Nazis When You Have Fundamentalist Christians?

One of the unusual experiences you can have when you visit the South is that the airwaves are dominated by Christian radio stations. And not positive Christian stations, but stations that loudly proclaim all the worst things about fundamentalist faith.

When I drove through the Oklahoma City area recently, I found seven Christian stations. And on two of them, simultaneously, the preacher’s message was this: If you do not believe in an eternal hell of infinite and ceaseless torture, you CANNOT believe in Jesus Christ, and therefore YOU will go to hell. That is, the preacher was saying, if you do not believe in my interpretation of the Bible, you will go to hell. You will go to hell unless you believe in a literal, eternal hell.

Oh, but God loves you.

Now, suppose that the preachers, being mere humans, might have misinterpreted scripture. But, of course, this is impossible, since they consider themselves to be infallible and inerrant as individuals. They cannot be wrong, because God exists. They are no more likely to be wrong than for God to be wrong. What they are saying is, of course, blasphemy.

But they take their blasphemy even further. One of these preachers, representing Rhema Church in Tulsa, insisted that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves. All Jews are guilty of the crucifixion of Jesus, His blood is upon them, unless they become Christians.

This is exactly the message that preachers, under the orders of Hitler, proclaimed to Jews who were about to be transported to the death camps. The difference is that, if a German preacher under the Third Reich refused to say this, he could be killed. There is utterly no obligation for modern preachers to say this unless they are, in their heart of hearts, Nazis.

Why do they say this? Because, according to at least one gospel, a crowd of Jews insisted that Jesus be crucified, and they said, “Let his blood be upon us and upon all our generations.”

Leaving aside for the moment whether this really happened, the modern preachers are making a totally incorrect assumption, but one that they keep secret. They assume that the people in that crowds that day in Jerusalem two millennia ago had the AUTHORITY to condemn all Jews in all generations after theirs. Furthermore, that God Himself was OBLIGATED to obey them; God had to condemn all Jews through all time for the sins of the ones in the crowd that day long ago.

This is as ridiculous as for me to commit some evil, and then call forth condemnation on my daughter, her soon-to-arrive baby, and all my descendants for such evil as I may commit. This would mean that I can send my daughter and all my descendants to hell just by calling for God to do so.

Of course, those Jews had no such authority, nor did God have any such obligation. But the modern preachers assume upon themselves the authority to proclaim that God is so obligated. The only reason the preacher said this on the Rhema station is that he deeply loves what the Nazis did and hopes that some group of people do the same again. The assumption upon which they build their belief—and, apparently, their entire framework of faith—is so utterly ridiculous that no other explanation is possible except that they want to believe the Jews deserved the Holocaust.

It is things like this that make fundamentalist Christianity an imminent and severe danger to the future of the world. And if you want to hear things like this, just come to Oklahoma or any place else in the South and search the airwaves for just a few moments and you will find them.