"Anti-Semitism" is a charge that no Christian should suffer being made against his or her religion.

The Christian narrative is at once simple and baffling, beautiful and scandalous. That it should simultaneously attract and repel, enlighten and confuse, no doubt accounts to no small extent for why it is has rightly been described as "the greatest story ever told." Yet to fully understand its enduring and unprecedented appeal we must focus on its content.

Christianity derives its intelligibility from the Judaism from which it sprang and of which it originally was but one more variation. There is every indication that human beings are, as we are wont to say today, "spiritual" beings.  Regardless of time and place, anthropological evidence suggests that from time out of mind, human beings have displayed a transcendental awareness that has found expression in all manner of phenomena, from burial sites to cave drawings to ancestral worship.  More recently — within the last 5,000 to 8,000 years or so — more sophisticated manifestations of religiosity have emerged, all of which affirm the existence of a staggering plethora of deities. All, that is, but one.

About 3,000 years ago, a small tribal people in the Middle East expressly, consistently, and unequivocally rejected the polytheism of their more numerous and powerful neighbors by proclaiming the existence of the one, true God for whom they would be a collective ambassador to the world. Unlike the gods of their (usually hostile) neighbors, the one, true God is at once unlimited in power and justice, a Being who simultaneously Creates and Sustains the universe while beckoning His Chosen People to venture ever closer to Him.

The world that God created, though good in virtue of owing its being to He who is all good, is nevertheless fractured because of humanity's sinfulness, its turning away from the God of the universe, a fact to which it is the special responsibility of His Chosen People to draw the attention of the gentiles. To this task, though, they had all too often proven unfaithful, but because the justice of their God is inseparable from His love for them, He repeatedly tried to rectify this breach of trust, whether through tragedies or dreams, the actions of their enemies or the utterances of their prophets, through imploring and warning.  Yet all to no avail.

But this God of justice was also a God of love, and so rather than turn His back on His creation, He chose to redeem it.  No longer would He communicate to His people intermediately, through His effects, whether natural phenomena or creatures; rather, he would address them immediately by living among them as one of them. 

It is in this detail that the paradoxical and uniquely appealing character of the Christian narrative is to be located:  the infinite God who created the world, a universe relative to the size of which the planet Earth is far less in magnitude than a speck of dust and that consists of some 100,000 million suns, chooses to become a human being so that this vast cosmos may be restored to one piece and transformed.  

Furthermore, this Jewish peasant in whom God became incarnate would liberate the world from its self-imposed exile into sin, but not through the kinds of acts of destruction for which He was credited in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian's "Old Testament."  Nor would Jesus, the God-Man, be a military conqueror like Islam's founder. He would indeed achieve a glorious reconciliation between humanity and God through bloodshed, but the blood shed would be His own. 

The Ground of all Existence assumed a naked existence, for he bore our weaknesses and fears, including that fear that looms largest over all living organisms, the fear of death.  In becoming like us in all things save sin, the Perfect Man at once bridged the chasm between God and humanity while conquering the tyrants who have ruled our fragmented nature since the first man and woman sought to usurp God's prerogative.  His Passion, Death, and glorious Resurrection even freed us from the grip of the unthinkable, yet dreadful, prospect of non-being-death.   

The Chosen People succeeded in discharging the obligations attending the office of ambassador to the gentiles after all, but this is because God became one of them.  However, it also owes to the fact that while many of His own people rejected Jesus, many others became the first Christians and sacrificed their very lives heeding His injunction to spread the Good News to all nations.

Today, this once persecuted Jewish sect is the world's single largest and (contrary to the hype of its rivals) fastest growing religion on the face of the planet.  It has more than twice as many adherents as the world's second largest religion, Islam — which, incidentally, is a Christian spin-off of a sort — and, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who enthusiastically proclaimed "the death of God," correctly noted back in the nineteenth century, even the moralities of its sworn enemies in the secular West — "socialism," "liberalism," "democracy," etc. — can locate their ideological origins in some reading or other of it.

"Anti-Semitism"

A few years back, Mel Gibson released The Passion of the Christ.  The film proved to be a blockbuster, and it reportedly changed more than a few persons' lives for the better.  While Gibson's adaptation of the Gospel account of Christ's passion was not without a touch or two of Hollywood, it was largely a faithful rendition of the story that Christians have prized from their religion's inception. 

This, however, didn't immunize it from charges of "anti-Semitism."

More recently, within the last year, I believe, Ann Coulter found herself once again at the center of controversy upon an exchange she had with Donny Deutsch.  During her appearance on the latter's show, Coulter had said that, as a Christian, while she had nothing but good will to the Jews, she nevertheless longed for their "perfection." For expressing this view, the only perspective on non-Christians that a committed Christian could hold, Coulter was branded as — you guessed it — an "anti-Semite."

I mention all of this not for the sake of rehashing the battles in which Gibson and Coulter found themselves, but for the sake of reminding Christians of the on-going battle in which they find themselves. I don't mean to suggest that it is Jews per se with whom Christians are in conflict. For sure, there is indeed a significant minority of Jews, almost always secular and leftist, for whom Christianity stands as a perpetual threat, yet there are also non-Jewish leftists who are no less ready than their Jewish brethren to hurl the charge of "anti-Semitism" at those Christians who dare to proclaim those aspects of their faith that clash, or are thought to clash, with the "multicultural" Zeitgeist.

And my summary of the Christian narrative as I understand it is similarly intended to serve as a reminder, to Christian and, more importantly, non-Christian alike, of Christianity's Jewish roots, for when this is born in mind it is with the greatest of ease that charges of "anti-Semitism" to which Christians like Gibson, Coulter, and others are subjected are seen for the absurdities that they are.

That one Man whom Christians regard as by far and away the most important person to have ever walked the Earth; that one Man to whom they routinely give thanks, homage, prayers, and worship; that one Man whom they identify with the God of the universe, they also recognize was a Jew. Jesus was a Jew who, in spite of criticizing most relentlessly many of His own people, especially those who composed the religious leadership of his day, was intensely aware and appreciative of his religious tradition, a tradition that He sought to not abolish, but reform and perfect. From the Christian perspective, then, Christianity is not really a religion distinct from Judaism, but Judaism made whole in Christ.

Furthermore, with perhaps the single exception of Luke, the New Testament — the book within which some contemporary figures have sought to identify "the seeds" of "anti-Semitism" — is composed entirely by Jewish writers. If, then, the Gospels and the rest of the books of the New Testament are "anti-Semitic," we must draw the curious but inescapable conclusion that it is Jews who are responsible for having exported "anti-Semitism" to the rest of the gentile world: "anti-Semitism" is a legacy, then, of the Jewish New Testament authors!

There is one final point.  Charges of "anti-Semitism" against Christians (qua Christian) aren't just absurd.  They are also profoundly offensive.  Though I am not quite sure what exactly "anti-Semitism" is (this should be a topic for another day), there is no question that those to whom it is attributed as a disposition are deemed by their accusers to be suffering from a grave moral defect deserving of swift and unequivocal condemnation.  Hitler and the Nazis are "anti-Semitic." "Skinheads" are "anti-Semitic." Europeans who for centuries episodically engaged in "pogroms" were "anti-Semitic." The Spaniards who ghettoized Jews were "anti-Semitic." And so on.

When it is insinuated or even explicitly said that Christianity is "anti-Semitic," the religion that over one-third of the world's population practices today and of which I gave an all too brief synopsis above, a religion whose founder was a devout Jew and who taught His followers to love others as they love themselves, is being likened to these moral outrages.

That is absurd, untrue, and most insulting, and it can only reflect an ill-founded prejudice against Christianity on the part of those who would make such a grossly unwarranted claim.

"Anti-Semitism" is a charge that no Christian should suffer being made against his or her religion.  If I wasn't as opposed to "political correctness" as I am, I would urge Christians to turn the tables on their accusers and brand them "Christophobes," or something of that sort.  But this name-calling is sophomoric and gets no one anything but more ill will.

What's of most importance is that Christians the world over, but especially in the West, use this Holy Week and Easter weekend to reconsider what it means to be a disciple of Love Incarnate so that when the predictable accusations of "anti-Semitism" fly their way they will be ready, and even anxious, to beat them back.

Happy Easter.