Saint George And The Dragon

Admittedly a bit harsh on Melanie McDonagh, who does a lot of good on Coffee House, even if in this case she does mistake Haleh Afshar for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

There could not be more a Christian cause than opposition to the Iraq War, opposition to any war against Syria or Iran, or opposition to Zionism. The Iraq War has devastated Christian Mesopotamia, the Christians have already been expelled from Homs, and if the Syrian rebels won then they would be expelled from the entire country, to which many of them have fled because of what we have already done to them in Iraq.

Iran has reserved parliamentary representation for two ancient Christian communities, the Armenians and the Assyrians, as well as for Zoroastrians and Jews. There would be none of that under any alternative, and the Tombs of Daniel, of Habakkuk, and of Esther and Mordechai would doubtless be destroyed, although since they are not in Israel and the pilgrims to them are just embarrassingly religious distant cousins of the Zionists, who cares?

There is reserved Christian representation in the Jordanian Parliament and on the Palestinian Authority, whereas the ancient indigenous Christians in Israel, including Nazareth, face being stripped their citizenship, along with the ultra-Orthodox Jews, if the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister has his way.

In the Lebanese homeland of Galloway's wife, the Annunciation earlier this week was a public holiday because it unites the Christians and the Muslims, which latter also believe that Jesus was Virgin-born and the Messiah promised by the earlier prophets. But it is certainly not a public holiday in the land where it occurred, founded and run by people who, even on the rare occasions when they believe in God, adhere to the Talmudic view that Our Lady was a prostitute.

Galloway's sainted namesake, about whose Feast such a newfangled fuss will be made next month, is buried in that namesake's native city, which is now in Israel. That it is, is why hardly anyone keeps up the age-old Christian-Muslim unity at and around his shrine, since three quarters of the people who did so were violently expelled in 1948.

It is true that those Christians, whose families have been so ever since the Day of Pentecost, bear little or no resemblance to the Church of Sarah Palin or the United Congregations of Michele Bachmann. So much for the smug Evangelical belief that they are the restoration of the community described in Acts. That community is still there, and it looks nothing like them.

But American Protestant missionary activity has had an important impact. Its universities, untainted by association with British or French colonialism, nurtured generations of Arab nationalist leaders, Muslim as well as Christian. As did those with the most interest in defining the local and putatively national identity as Arab rather than Islamic, namely the ancient indigenous Christians. That was, and very largely still is, Arab nationalism: the fruitful encounter between indigenous Catholicism and Orthodoxy on the one hand, and the educational opportunities opened up by American "mainline" Protestants on the other.

Alas, the numerical decline of Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism and Methodism in American society has had an impact on, especially, the Republican Party, while the decline of those bodies in doctrinal and moral orthodoxy has cut them off from the wider Anglican, "Calvinist", Lutheran and Methodist worlds.

It was not by coincidence that the Republican Party, especially, was a vehicle of paleoconservative Arabism (and Anglophilia) before it was taken over the Dispensationalist, "Manifest Destiny" lot that had no institutional ties to the Arabs, as well as by the New York Jewish Left. Just as it was no coincidence that the Conservative Party was a vehicle for High Tory Arabism (and hostility towards America in exactly the terms that cause paleocons to wish to locate their country within a broader and deeper British tradition) before it was taken over by the people who accrued to Margaret Thatcher.

So paleocons, take note: the politically electrifying union of popular Catholicism and Orthodoxy with an academic leadership defined by traditional, not fundamentalist, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism and Methodism in their American expressions has happened before. It was specifically and successfully a bulwark against political Islam, as well as against Marxism. It was called the Arab nationalism of the Near East. And it is still there.