Is the unchurching of young people behind the strange new rise of antisemitism on campus?

It was a surprise to many that Jew-hatred is big on campuses these days. Explanations are few and far between about where the ugly idea comes from.

Is it about a belief that Jews have all the money and political power like the lunatic fringe, the Klan, and LaRouchies claim? Not that anyone but a weirdo (and Rep. Ilhan Omar) would embrace that. Those are the views of freaks.

The antisemitism now seen is of a more slippery variety, the kind that claims that Zionism is racism, Israelis are the 'real' Nazis, or Apartheid practitioners, and every bad act of other characters in recent history. Suddenly, and however improbable, it's now pinned on the Jews. Corollary to this are the claims among the campus elite that they don't hate Jews, only Zionists, a distinction without a difference, and a self-justification that falls apart increasingly frequently.

So what's happening? One thing is the basic jealousy factor which is often directed at Jews, whose Israel has made the desert bloom and is constantly a source of innovation and advances, as George Gilder and Eric Hoffer have noted in their previous work.

But John Dilulio at City Journal found something else:

 

As the old saying goes, an explanation is the place where the mind comes to rest. But if we dig deeper, might we find an inverse relationship between religious commitments and anti-Semitism, such that a decline in religion begets a rise in anti-Semitism?

A suggestive study released last year might lead one to consider that possibility. In “From the Death of God to the Rise of Hitler,” published in the Journal of Economic Literature, economists Sasha O. Becker and Hans-Joachim Voth subjected diverse datasets to cutting-edge statistical analyses to test whether Germans who lived in robustly Christian communities were more or less likely than otherwise comparable Germans to join the Nazi Party.

As Becker and Voth interpreted them, the results favored what they styled the “Shallow Christianity” theory: in places in which “the Christian Church only had shallow roots, the Nazis received higher electoral support and saw more party entry.” The “results,” they concluded, “suggest that Nazi support and Hitler’s startling appeal received an important boost from the spiritual ‘emptiness’ of large parts of the German population.”

He points out that it may seem a bit wrong, given that antisemitism has in the past been perfectly present in the Catholic Church, and certainly some Protestant churches. Martin Luther was pretty antisemitic, actually. Even Jews who converted to Christianity were exposed to untold abuse and cast out for it in earlier centuries, Dilulio noted. In recent times, there was that bad priest who broadcast hate-Jew sentiment on the radio ahead of World War II. I won't bother looking him up, may his name be forgotten, but he wasn't ancient history.

But the study of who turned Nazi cited above did make sense. Recall that Pope Benedict XIV, who demonstrated his contempt for Nazis by deserting forced conscription in their army as a teenager, was from Bavaria, the most devoutly Catholic part of Germany, and the least friendly state to Hitler.

A devout community like that could easily nurture many kids in its Catholic values which would have to preclude antisemitism, since those who read the Bible are distinctly aware that they are reading about Jews, and what's more, they would know that that same Bible says that God Himself says he will never abandon the Jews, so that's the Christian faith, too.

Recall that Hitler, waving his fist in a propaganda poster insisted that "you are either a Nazi or a Christian, you can't be both."

As Cardinal Dolan wrote in his Easter essay that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, people are attracted to Christianity by coming to church on Easter, because they long for community.

A corollary must be that without community, with miserable, deracinated youth of weak family ties and no social capital, antisemitism fills some kind of rage-filled void. We have certainly seen it in Middle Eastern communities where social capital is low and modernity is mystifying.

Dilulio also notes:

As Paul Johnson wrote in his History of the Jews (1988), it is to the Jews that “we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person . . . of collective conscience and so of social responsibility . . . of peace as an abstract ideal . . . and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.”

Anyone who's been deprived of community isn't going to value those things much except as a parody.

Perhaps that is what we are seeing on campuses now in the post-COVID isolated generation, too, a cellphone- and videogame- and social media reality that isn't much of a community. Combine it with lockdowns and the effect is disastrous because Jews are the center of all that is civilized in our world today, the values that make civilization possible.

And if that is a clue, then maybe the solution to this crisis of youth spewing antisemitism is to get them into churches of some kind. The Christian heritage is inseparable from the Jewish heritage and any fool who wants to argue with God about it is, well, a idiot. I always wonder what the fools spewing antisemitism are going to tell God with the Prophets at his side on Judgment Day. For them, there is no judgment day, of course, because they are unchurched. More and more, the lack of churching out there looks like a seedbed for a rebellion, not just against the Jewish faithgivers but against God Himself. That won't end well.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com