It is not only conservatives who have noticed progressive hypocrisy. For years, European and American governments reflexively chanted the slogan “never again” and declared to the world that they would never let genocide of any sort or anti-Semitism go unchecked. But in the third decade of the 21st century, not even a century after the Final Solution and the mass murder of Jews, Western governments have sat idly by while Xi Jinping and China’s communist government set up what the Human Rights Foundation noted were very literally concentration camps in western China for the purpose of so-called reeducating Uyghurs.

In November, the municipal government of San Francisco, Calif., took to the streets to clean up the filthy mess that the city had become over the last half decade. Homeless men and women were shunted into shelters and syringes and human excrement were removed from the streets, but not for a visit from the president of the United States, or the British monarch, or for another major Western leader, but instead for the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. This is the man who has spent the better part of a half-decade openly engaging in genocide against Muslim Uyghurs in western China.
A week earlier a Jewish man had been clubbed to death by a pro-Hamas demonstrator in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Far from being isolated and disconnected events, San Francisco’s welcome of Xi Jinping and the death of a Jewish man on the streets of a California city are directly tied together. They are both evidence of the absolute hypocrisy of the Western world.
For years the slogan “never again” has been trotted out by progressives to ensure that the legacy of the Holocaust was remembered and that outright genocide and anti-Semitism would be finally removed from Western society.
Read More
Related Posts:

Gobat’s episcopacy lasted for nearly thirty years and proved relatively successful given nineteenth century Palestine’s cacophony of religious and racial groups. He maintained the support of British Evangelicals—the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote the preface to his biography—and managed to keep his diocese relatively unified despite the fractious nature of converts from various cultures and religions.

In the nineteenth century, British Protestants moved to Palestine for the purposes of missionary work among Arabs and Jews. One of most important early Protestant missionaries to Palestinian Arabs however hailed from Switzerland. Samuel Gobat, like most Swiss from Bern—he was born there in 1799—imbibed the throaty Calvinism downstream from the Genevan Reformation. Gobat received most of his education in Switzerland and later in Paris and London.  In the latter two cities he began learning rudimentary Arabic and cultivated an interest for what was then called the Oriental languages. He learned Ge’ez, a language spoken in what is now Eritrea, and served as a missionary in Ethiopia in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Although Gobat was not British, he attached himself to the Anglican Church Missionary Society. His de-facto institutional affiliation remained with the Church on England for the rest of his life.
At the end of Gobat’s time in Ethiopia he moved to Malta in order to study Arabic intensively. From 1839 to 1842 her served as a sort of ad hoc missionary performing a variety of roles for the Church Missionary Society. In 1846 his life changed dramatically. The Church Missionary Society had been cultivating local parish work in the Ottoman province of Palestine. 
Read More
Related Posts:

Like other southern Presbyterians—James Henley Thornwell, Daniel Baker, and John B. Adger among others all recorded marked sympathy for Jews in their writings—Palmer displayed noticeable philosemitism in an era when Jews were still routinely persecuted in Roman Catholic and Islamic societies, as well as in Lutheran monarchies in Europe. 

In the inaugural volume of The Southern Presbyterian Review published in December, 1847, Benjamin Morgan Palmer the younger reviewed Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews from the Church of Scotland in 1839. The Presbyterian Board of Publications initially published the work soon after its completion in 1839. A second edition made its way to North America in 1845.
Palmer’s review of the work made it clear that he thought the work not what he had hoped. He thought the two Scots had not provided enough background on Jewish history to give appropriate context for the Church of Scotland’s specific missionary efforts. As a “directory” of Jewish life and as justification for Protestant and particularly Presbyterian missionary efforts Palmer found the work “as unsatisfactory as the works of which it was intended to be the supplement.”
The actual review of Bonar and M’Cheyne’s work was less important than Palmer’s own views on Jews in general. Southern Presbyterians displayed an early and pronounced streak of philosemitism in an era when Jewish life in the United States could still be precarious. Palmer, and South Carolina Presbyterians in general, lived and worked among Charleston’s sizable and vibrant Jewish population. James W. Hagy’s This Happy Land: the Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston explained how Jews in the South enjoyed relative inclusion compared to northern cities of the same eras. In 1800, More Jews lived in South Carolina than anywhere else in North America. Philip Morgan of Johns Hopkins, in an endorsement of Theodore and Dale Rosengarten’s A Portion of the People Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life, reminded audiences that “until 1830 Charleston was the capital of American Jewry; Christians in South Carolina elected the first professing Jew to office; Reform Judaism first came to the United States in the Palmetto State.”
Read More
Related Posts:

Disestablishment did not, however, disconnect them in their mutual goal to preserving human liberty and ordering human life. Governments were not separated from the societies they governed. There was, McKnight argued, a “close and intimate connection subsisting between” civil society and the church. That connection between them rendered a right understanding of their association necessary for the protection for the liberty of both. 

Disestablishment in the newly-independent United States severed the institutional interdependence between the state and the visible church. Virginia’s disestablishment in the 1780s triggered a set of similar laws passed throughout the Early National Period. Massachusetts, the last state to maintain a state church disestablished Congregationalism in 1833. Social and cultural practices in the American republic nonetheless allowed a de-facto Protestant socio-civil establishment to continue well in to the Twentieth Century. Current conversations regarding so-called Christian nationalism variously litigate concepts as broad as the maintenance of a “soft” cultural establishment that maintains liberal democracy to outright theonomic, and theocratic, establishmentarian constructions. Conversations on the history of religion and the state in the United States often descend in to little more than politically partisan cacophony.
Although the politicization of conversations regarding church and state is probably inevitable, a better understanding regarding the meaning of disestablishment may help clarify scholarly and ecclesiastical conversations. In the Early Republic, disestablishment was seen as strengthening the liberties of the church in order to help it perform its spiritual mission to save souls and to observe the sacraments. Disestablishment did not, however, remove the church from the social or civil order, nor did Early Republic Protestants assume that the church was a merely spiritual institution that was not affected by social and political changes.
Read More
Related Posts:

A church can display the flag of the magistrate in good conscience. As the history of the practice indicates, a national flag in a church is not a sign of idolatry, but a reminder to the faithful to remember the specific magistrate we pray for, and what we rightfully expect from him.

This summer, Christianity Today ran an article about Protestant pastors’ views on displaying national flags in sanctuaries and on church property. Many American evangelicals, especially white-collar evangelicals, increasingly view flags in churches as garish and idolatrous, signs of the benighted “Christian nationalism” they fear is sweeping through evangelicalism in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidency. At The Gospel Coalition, Joe Carter has argued that “the symbols of the American nation don’t have a place in the embassy of the kingdom of God.” “Such veneration for our country within our churches detracts from the glory of the gospel,” he wrote. If “we pledge allegiance to a flag in the house of God, we should question whether we aren’t skirting the edges of idolatry.”
But according to the article in Christianity Today, global pastors disagree with the reflexive denunciation of flags as idolatrous. The piece included comments from pastors around the world. Arab ministers affirmed the presence of national flags in their churches. An Egyptian pastor said he agreed “with displaying the flag of my country in the church. The flag of my country only and not other countries, as it is a spiritual and not a political orientation.” The purpose of raising his flag, he argued, was to keep his heart united with his people in “prayer for the salvation of their souls. It’s to remember that I must stand in the gap for my people, that they may know the Lord and see the light of the gospel and to tell my country and my people how much I love them and pray for them.”
A Jordanian minister said he “strongly” believed “that each church building should post the flag on the building and in the sanctuary.” He and his elders made the decision to do so “in order to show our loyalty as citizens to the country of Jordan. We believe that by doing so, we are a good example and testimony to others and also following the teachings of the Bible.” An Indonesian minister said that “when we display the flag in our church, it is not to express idolatry. We want to honor our national identity. It reminds us of our responsibilities as Christian citizens. It’s also a sign of gratitude for living in Indonesia.” A pastor from Nigeria noted that a flag was a “symbol of a country and flying it indicates the importance of the country.”
Read More

The intellectual intransigence of southerners towards Edwards, especially southern Presbyterians with high views on the eucharist and those opposed to the New Divinity, should not be discounted in an attempt to create a tradition wherein Edwards is primary progenitor of Calvinist thought in North America.

In the 1840s and 1850s the debates over the eucharist between Charles Hodge and John Williamson Nevin raged in the pages of The Princeton Review and The Mercersburg Review. The editors and writers of The Southern Presbyterian Review weighed in on the subject as well. Brooks Holifield noted in his Gentleman Theologians that none of the major southern Presbyterian intellectuals of the era–Robert J. Breckenridge of Danville Seminary, James Henley Thornwell of the South Carolina College, and John B. Adger of Charleston–shared “Hodge’s reservations” concerning Calvin’s and Nevin’s relatively high view of the eucharist.  Southerners also took aim at another scholar controversial in the era, Jonathan Edwards. Beginning in the mid-Eighteenth Century Princeton Seminary exported Edwardean theology throughout both Old School and New School churches in the North but a significant strand of southern Calvinism remained aloof from the New Englander.
John Bailey Adger’s defense of Nevin and the historic Calvinist doctrine of the eucharist led him to evaluate the North American Calvinism in the context of the broader historic Calvinist tradition. Adger’s public opposition elicited annoyance from older and specifically northern-trained ministers in the South who long relied on Edwards’ theology to “prove that that the will was powerless to choose the good without the special influence of divine grace but that the reprobate were yet responsible for their decision to capitulate to that sinfulness.” New England educated John Bocock boasted in The Southern Presbyterian Review that “no man would undertake to refute Edwards if he understood him,” a claim which prompted a prominent southern Methodist to state derisively that Edwards had left nothing behind but a legacy of “difficulties and confusion.”  [1]
Read More