Culture Clash

I do not think that Mitt Romney was making a point by saying that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. He just did not know any better, which says all that needs to be said about his fitness, or otherwise, for the most powerful office on earth. But what of the whole trip to Israel, and what of the "culture" remark there? There are vastly fewer Jews in America than is generally supposed even by Americans, they are by no means all pro-Israeli, and most American Jews would never vote Republican in a million years. Netanyahu does have form when it comes to interference in American elections, but his record of success at it is far from unqualified. No, Romney is trying to ingratiate himself elsewhere.

Mormons are quite fond of the Garden Tomb, the made-up alternative for Victorian Evangelicals who did not like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Then as now, their attitude to Levantine Christianity was much like their  attitude to the Sub-Apostolic Fathers: they either did not know, or did not want to know, about entirely matter-of-fact descriptions of all things "Romish" existing during the lifetimes of the Apostles and providing the context that the New Testament text presupposes. Nor did they wish to be confronted with the entirely matter-of-fact existence of communities of that kind which have been present continuously for two thousand years, right there in the Bible Lands.

Christian communities that go all the way back to the Day of Pentecost are problematic enough in themselves for them, without those communities' having become, at best, Anglican or Lutheran rather than, say, Baptist, and far more commonly Latin Catholic or Maronite Catholic, Melkite Catholic or Greek Orthodox, Syrian Catholic or Syrian Jacobite, Armenian Catholic or Armenian Apostolic, Chaldean Catholic or Assyrian. As part of Evangelicalism's general upward trend in educational terms, Evangelical theology is increasingly looking beyond the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its earlier and more cerebral roots, and thus to a place within the older, broader and deeper Tradition. Approaches to the Middle East are starting to reflect this shift. But most churchgoers, and indeed most clergy, are not academic theologians.

Such continuous communities are even more problematical for Mormonism, which maintains, not that the Church was reformed in the sixteenth century, but that the Church began again from scratch in the nineteenth, having died out at some point in the first or second. Standing contradictions of that whole theory simply do not compute. But the white Evangelicals, vastly more Zionist-inclined than the black ones, are most disinclined to vote for a Mormon, although one does have to ask for whom else, exactly, they might otherwise consider casting their ballots this November. No one who subscribed to Christian Zionism has ever become President of the United States: George W Bush is a United Methodist, and he was in fact the first President ever to express himself in favour of a Palestinian State; the Southern Baptist Convention was a very different body in the 1970s, and Jimmy Carter himself is no longer a member of it because it has changed so much.

But Bush was an aberration, and Carter is a relic of a vanished world. "Mainline" Protestantism is simply no longer a force in the Republican Party, any more than Southern Evangelicalism is in the Democratic Party, indeed very considerably less so. Again, there is a racial divide, with a heavy black Evangelical influence within and over Democratic politics, such that black Evangelicalism itself remains close to the historically interracial Evangelical commitment to social justice and to peace, whereas most of white Evangelicalism (in America, far less so elsewhere) has gone whoring after the false gods of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

Burkeans and Kirkians, cultural Anglophiles who oppose any foreign state's (or ethnic lobby's) undue influence over American policy no matter how much affinity they might feel with that other country, figures who on those grounds are advocates and practitioners of extensive measures to ameliorate by government action the less humane effects of capitalism: the GOP is now no more characterised by these than by those who, not unrelatedly, are sufficiently in touch with the American missionary institutions that begat, bore and nurtured the (often Christian-led) Arab nationalism of the Near East; foundations of Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Methodist churches that were then still sufficiently orthodox to bother to send missionaries at all, and which were then still sufficiently orthodox to be considered worthy of continuing contact by Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran and Methodist churches of missionary origin.

In this, Mitt Romney is right. Culture makes all the difference.