“What would Jesus do?” Shane Claiborne asked himself as he watched the War on Terror unfold in the aftermath of 9/11.
Mr. Claiborne is a leading figure within Evangelical Christianity’s New Monasticism movement, a network of Christian communities dedicated to living out the gospel in day-to-day life through a radical commitment to aiding the disenfranchised. The 39-year-old Tennessee native is best known for founding The Simple Way, an inner-city faith community in Philadelphia, two decades ago.
In 2003, unsettled by America’s messy intervention in the Middle East, Mr. Claiborne boarded a plane to Iraq with other Christian peacemakers. Aside from delivering medicine, toys and other supplies, Mr. Claiborne believed his purpose in Iraq was to serve as a witness and to share the narratives of ordinary Iraqis with Americans.
In troubled provinces like Anbar, he saw that more than America’s reputation was at stake.
“What was happening there wasn’t doing good things for the gospel,” he recalls. “I wanted people to know Jesus’ love, compassion and fire for justice.”
But the healing process, many locals told him, had to begin at the source. Pointing him toward Israel/Palestine, they insisted that until the open wounds of that decades-old conflict were mended, Iraq could never fully heal.
A historic shift
Historically, Evangelicals have been overwhelmingly loyal to Israel. In 2013, the Pew Research Center found that 82 percent of white Evangelicals believed God gave Israel to the Jews. Forty-six percent didn’t think the U.S. was supportive enough of Israel, compared with only 31 percent of Jews. With white Evangelicals making up nearly a quarter of all voters in 2012 — compared with the Jews’ 2 percent — it’s no surprise that Christian Zionists are considered a vital, muscular limb of the American Israel lobby.
But a number of prominent pro-Israel lobbyists, such as David Brog, executive director of the nearly 1 million-strong Christians United for Israel, now warn that Evangelical support for Israel is eroding.
In an op-ed in the spring 2014 issue of The Middle East Quarterly, Mr. Brog pointed to a major survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2010 at the Third Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization — a global conference of international Evangelical leaders — that found that 49 percent of American Evangelicals sympathize equally with Israelis and Palestinians, compared with 30 percent whose sympathies lie exclusively with Israel.
Mr. Brog and other critics of this shift toward what they’ve labeled a “neutral” stance on Israel-Palestine have attributed this change to figures like Lynne Hybels, co-founder of the influential mega-church Willow Creek in South Barrington, Illinois, which attracts 24,000 weekly attendees and is widely regarded as an Evangelical powerhouse.
Ms. Hybels promotes a pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-peace stance on the conflict, encouraging her audience to engage “the Holy Land as peacemakers,” as she writes on her website. While supporting Israel’s existence as “a home for the Jewish people,” she also advocates for Palestinians’ “equally valid right to live in the land” and have “the same civil rights afforded to Israeli Jewish citizens, whether that’s in one state, two states, or however many states.”
Evangelicals in Palestine
Mr. Claiborne cast a decidedly biblical figure when he took to the podium to give a keynote address at the 2012 Christ at the Checkpoint conference in Bethlehem — a biennial meeting of international and Palestinian Evangelicals that has grown from 250 attendees in 2010 to 600 this year. He appeared before the audience unshaven, casually dressed in a humble smock that, like most of his clothing, was probably homemade and a bandana holding back his long, auburn dreadlocks.
He dedicated a segment of his 45-minute long talk to the parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus, from the Gospel of Luke, that tells of a beggar who lay dying outside the gates of a wealthy man’s home. Despite his pleas for help, Lazarus was ignored. In death, the beggar was rewarded in heaven, while the rich man was doomed to hell.
“For too long,” Mr. Claiborne told his audience in Bethlehem, “we’ve settled for a Christianity that’s promising people just life after death. Doesn’t the gospel have anything to speak into the world we live in right now, into the reality we see right here in Israel/Palestine? I think it’s got everything in the world to say.”
Looking back now, he notes something else that makes the story especially relevant for Israelis and Palestinians.
“Walls aren’t good for anybody,” he said. “That gate separated the rich man from God because we are made for compassion and love. That’s why I hope to see walls coming down.”
In Philadelphia, Mr. Claiborne is committed to speaking out against violence in the ghettos of one of America’s most dangerous cities. His non-profit creates public parks, community gardens and housing projects, and hosts after-school tutoring programs, a flag-football league, a food bank, daily morning prayer and a community Bible study, among other initiatives.
Increasingly, however, he’s felt incapable of legitimately protesting brutality on his streets without also critiquing the American government’s complicity in conflicts abroad. His goal in traveling first to Iraq and later to Palestine was primarily to meet the victims of these conflicts, to hear their personal stories and bring them back home with him, hoping that putting faces to these struggles would inspire a sense of responsibility in others.
“When we think about what it means to be a Christian today,” he told his Bethlehem audience, “it means we have to humanize those who are suffering, to know their name.”
Rethinking theology
Mr. Claiborne explains that many Evangelicals under the age of 35 — so-called “millennials” — are devoted to one commandment above all else: “Love thy neighbor.” That means not picking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather advocating for anyone whom the conflict is hurting: “Our politics is shaped by the lamb,” he said.
Indeed, many Evangelical millennials feel more free to focus on social justice issues that their parents believed were the domain of more “watered-down” liberal churches, said Gary Burge, a professor at the evangelical Harvard, Wheaton College, in Illinois.
One sign of the shift: Mr. Burge points out that a growing number of graduates from evangelical universities like Wheaton are joining NGOs to work on poverty or social justice issues rather than becoming missionaries like their predecessors.
Although the theological change is not primarily about Middle Eastern politics, it is pushing a growing number of Evangelicals to “rethink God’s relationship to modern Israel,” Mr. Burge explains. “What’s at stake is fidelity to what they believe. … What does it mean to honor God?”
Such ideas inspired Porter Speakman Jr., a 43-year-old social media manager and Web developer from Colorado Springs, Colorado, to shift gears from what he calls a “typical” unquestioning Evangelical devotion to Israel and begin organizing “alternative” tours of Israel/Palestine for church groups, taking them to visit cities like Bethlehem in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which they wouldn’t be exposed to on a more “mainstream” Christian Zionist trip to Israel.
Mr. Speakman had served 15 years with the international Christian non-profit Youth with a Mission, which trains youths to preach the gospel in around 180 countries. YWAM took him to Israel in 1998 to carry out a Bible study course. He ended up staying until 2003, living through the Second Intifada and experiencing curfews and checkpoints. The ordeal forced him to rethink Evangelical support for Israeli policies that seemed to deviate from biblical principles. After that, he explains, “I didn’t want to put people on a pro-Palestinian tour, I just wanted to show them the missing pieces of the puzzle.”
Skeptical concern
But Luke Moon, also a former missionary with YWAM and currently business manager at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C., a “faith-based alliance of Christians who monitor, comment and report on issues affecting the church”, worries that “moral equivalency” — as he calls the new evangelical approach — may mutate into anti-Semitism.
“Christians don’t have a great history of being good to Jews,” he said. “What starts as moral equivalency from one group might turn into aggression from another.”
At best, he worries that the new movement is engaged in little more than empty sloganeering.
“I might as well add pro-unicorn to pro-Palestine, pro-Israel, etc.,” he said. “They won’t come out and say how peace should be achieved.”
To Mr. Claiborne, hard politics isn’t the point: “We’re not left or right but centered on Jesus,” he said.
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