Unholy Cruz Day

Jonathan Coppage was there when Ted Cruz crashed my friends at In Defense of Christians, although I have no idea what possessed them to invite Cruz in the first place, and I have told them so.

Also on the case are Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher and Michael Brendan Dougherty. Ah, the old gang.

Michael points out that Israel is not taking any Christian refugees from the region. Rod also has the story of how Cruz is already using the whole thing for money-spinning purposes.

Meanwhile, here is what IDC itself has to say about the incident, and here is what ought to be today's huge story about its work. It would have been, had it not been for Ted Cruz.

Those Christians whose families have been so ever since the Day of Pentecost bear little or no resemblance to the Church of Ted Cruz.

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. To be fair, leading British Evangelicals such as Dr N T Wright, Dr Stephen Sizer and the late Dr John Stott are no more away with the theory of Christian Zionism than any of Cruz's boo-ers.

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.

Nor let it be forgotten that the school in Nazareth that so often produces Arab political leaders is of Southern Baptist origin, while the Baptist church in Gaza has been bombed as surely as have been the Orthodox and Catholic churches.

Does Cruz, the son of a Southern Baptist pastor, know any of this? If not, why not?

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, Methodism and, if this is the correct word, Baptism 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. Ted Cruz has just felt, as his father might put it, its purifying fire.