You see it in horror movies all the time when the hero’s loved one gets bitten by a vampire, or a zombie, and then slowly becomes a monster. It is such a classic feature of the genre that it borders on cliché. The plot of Bram Stoker’s Dracula revolves around it. The characters of Abraham Van Helsing, a doctor; Jonathan Harker, a lawyer; Arthur Holmwood, a nobleman; and Quincy Morris, a cowboy, collectively represent a sense of order, science, and morality—hell-bent on destroying Dracula before he can take Lucy Westenra’s soul. Vampires may not be real, but the Devil and evil certainly are. Vampires may not be real, but the Devil and evil certainly are. It is something you know when you see it. I encountered both recently when I had dinner with the woman who was the love of my life. She was there in voice and appearance, but her soul was gone. All I was left with was an anti-Semite, and a realization that reason, without revelation, breaks down in the face of evil.
Anti-Semitism is back in vogue in the West. After the October 7 Hamas attack, professors and college students across America rushed to buy into its latest iteration. Students on the left rushed to embrace garish displays of activism in the form of encampments and campus takeovers. College administrators who are a bit older and supposedly wiser gave apologetics to Congress about the “context” of calling for the genocide of Jews on campus. Others still, like New York mayoral candidate and Democratic state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, call to “globalize the intifada.” Mamdani is only the latest cause célèbre after other up-and-coming Democrats like Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar accused Israel of “hypnotizing the world.” For a moment, anti-Semitism looked like a leftwing problem.
Americans on the right thought that they could pat themselves on the back. Donald Trump was back in the White House, and pro-Israel foreign policy along with it. Then anti-Semitism showed its head there too. Influencers like Candice Owens resurrected ideas of a Jewish conspiracy to control the U.S. government. Former Trump political strategist Steve Bannon labeled Fox News host Mark Levin as “Tel Aviv Levin,” and said both Levin and Senator Lindsey Graham are “jackals who feed off death and destruction” for advocating for U.S. support of Israel against Iran and its nuclear program. In interviewing Senator Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson not only criticized Cruz’s support for Israel but seemingly accused him of bribery for taking funds from pro-Israel lobbyists and mocked the senator’s biblical faith as a justification for supporting the Jewish state.
Like a virus, anti-Semitism is just as happy in one host as it is in another while it flits between them to survive; and yet at the end of the day, anti-Semitism does not ultimately exist in civilizations or cultures. It begins and ends in the individual human soul. To see the rot up close as I watched it consume the woman I had known for three years and planned to marry was unnerving, to say the least. The ideas were more profound than mere prejudice or ignorance. Instead, it was an irrational animosity based on myth, lies, and nothing of substance. Combined with a complete lack of empathy and critical thinking, it was evil.
Evil sneaks up when you least expect it. Sometimes it manifests in the form of a natural occurrence, such as a natural disaster or disease. Calamities like the recent flood in Texas Hill Country, which has so far taken the lives of 135 people, are evil and condemnable, even if they are “natural” symptoms of a fallen world and show up in an instant. Other times, evil quietly brews under the surface and within a person. Over the course of several months, the woman I loved had disappeared. The laughter, warmth, empathy, and humor that brought us together and characterized our relationship became less and less frequent. Something else was emerging. In place of the goodness came increasingly long monologues about Jewish plots to control the world, conspiracies to traffick human beings, and even ideas about child sacrifice. As her Christian faith waned, she came to see the religion not as divine truth, but as a Jewish invention designed to dismantle the “civilized” pagan societies—like Rome—that preceded it.
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Fighting against evil at a distance—whether in the form of Nihilism, jihadism, and Communism—is something I professionally do on a daily basis. Confronting it up close proved much harder, and indeed, turned out to be impossible. Not that I did not try.
Like an ancient spiritual disease, anti-Semitism is old and well-documented. Many of the anti-Semitic tropes that came to overshadow my former fiancée emerged in late 19th-century Europe. The idea of a mythical Jewish cabal organizing to take over the world began with the Russian Okhrana, the Tzar’s secret police, and the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols were inspired by an 1868 German novel in which Jews are depicted conspiring for world domination with the Devil himself. The conspirators are depicted as using currency manipulation and propaganda to achieve their ends. After the Russian Revolution, exiled Russian monarchists brought the Protocols westward to undermine the Bolshevik government that had been left behind. In the new Russia of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks themselves simply swapped the Tzar’s anti-Semitism with their own. Judaism and Christianity alike became anathemas to Soviet Marxism in practice.
After World War I, Hitler incorporated similar ideas with his own diatribe in Mein Kampf to offer his own explanation for Germany’s defeat.
Jews became the core reason for the nation’s problems. In Hitler’s mind, the Jews collaborated with Germany’s enemies, the Allies, and used both capitalist monetary control and Communism itself as weapons to destroy the world. Hitler’s obsession with racist essentialism is well-known. What is less well-known is his view of a racialized existence and Germany’s place within it, which was motivated by pagan ideas from Ariosophy and the occult. Proto-Nazi thinkers like Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), a former Catholic monastic-turned self-described “racial researcher, philosopher of religion and sexual mystic,” concocted a neo-paganism in which White Aryans constituted a spiritually advanced set of beings. As the Nazis took over the German Church, Jesus Christ was forcibly removed from His Jewish context.
The Nazis and Marxists have more in common than either would admit. In his 2020 book, The Devil and Karl Marx, political scientist Paul Kengor argues that Marx was motivated not merely by atheism but rather by an anti-Judeo-Christian sentiment. Born into a Jewish family that had become Christian, Marx’s own materialist philosophy not only left no room for God, but was animated by a hostility to God Himself. Kengor documents Marx’s own poems about the Devil and Hell. In an 1837 poem, Marx wrote, “thus Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul once true to God, is chosen for Hell.” Just as the Communists replaced Mosaic notions of good against evil and right against wrong with economics and the individual reflecting an image of God, the Nazis did the same with race. The Nazis hated the Judeo-Christian West as much as Communists did. Along with concentration camps, the Nazis burned Torah scrolls in their efforts to eradicate Judaism along with the Jewish People. The Nazis tried to racialize Christianity itself and eradicate its Jewish origins and basis. In 1939, Nazi theologians created the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, all designed to “dejudaize” the New Testament and Christ Himself.
If anti-Semitism is a virus, somehow the love of my life was infected with a patchwork of these Old-World manifestations of evil.
Often, we in the West and America in particular, operate on the assumption that somehow reason, intellect, or education alone can eradicate evil. With our iPhones, advanced medicines, and the Bill of Rights in our Constitution, it is easy to delude ourselves into thinking that knowledge can overcome evil. I thought I could save my ex; after all, I had the credentials. My Middle East expertise, policy experience, knowledge of political science and economics, and proficiency in Hebrew and Arabic should have been enough to address a problem of ignorance in the person closest to me. It wasn’t. My then-fiancée’s contempt for Jews was based on little, if anything, that was real. Somehow, assumptions, narrative, fallacies, and influencers had created an interlocking labyrinth of nothingness that fueled something even darker than normal bigotry. Somehow, a metaphysics of something evil, and wrapped around hollowness, became an impenetrable worldview that no amount of critical thinking could pierce. It was something spiritually unclean.
Looking back on the events of the past two weeks, the dinner where this came to a head was surreal. Families were all around us, with kids misbehaving and exhausted parents trying to unwind on the weekend. The Italian food was phenomenal, and looking back, it was the only thing that now stands out as familiar from the experience. The love of my life had not only become a stranger, but an increasingly hostile one as I refused to agree to her worldview. If my doctorate in political science was unable to help me save her, my other field, theology, helped me make sense of it.
The first realization I had was that evil is not a problem of understanding and argument, but one ultimately of humility, faith, and courage.
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Anti-Semitism is an ancient and different kind of bigotry; however, it is one that ultimately derives from pride. Anti-Semitism is metaphysical in that it defies normal remedies, and in the past has destroyed entire civilizations. It is as if the presence of Jews and Judaism in the world is a reminder that God not only exists, but that there is an objective moral universe to which each of us is responsible. These realizations are reminders that we ourselves are not only not God, but that we do not have moral license to simply do what we wish in the universe He created. Jewish survival serves as a reminder of God’s presence in the world and a reminder that we are meant to reflect His image and strive to be better than we currently are. The worldview of the woman I had dinner with seemed to have nothing of this. Instead, what was there was contempt and an inversion of it. This was not only painful to encounter, but terrifying.
Historically, reason and revelation have served as the twin pillars of the West, as both are intended to lead to objective truth. What is less acknowledged is that reason alone is insufficient to combat evil. This is doubly so for anti-Semitism. Jewish survival is one perpetual reminder of God’s revelation to the world. If reason as one pillar seeks to ignore or eliminate revelation as the other pillar, the West will ultimately collapse on itself. The West is not the West without Judaism and Christianity. The current anti-Semitism that now animates the left and has a foothold on the right is far from a Jewish problem alone. It is one that Christians need to acknowledge and work to combat. This is true both for what it is and for where this disease ultimately leads.
Many Christians repeatedly fall into an ancient trap of heresy that deludes them into turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism when they see it. The Nazis were not the first attempt to destroy Christianity’s connection with Judaism. Back in the second century AD, the Marcionites, a heretical Gnostic group opposed to what became orthodox Christianity, rejected the Hebrew Bible as the work of a “lesser, vengeful deity” opposed to the revelation of Jesus. The Marcionites viewed Jesus as a new god that was different from the God of Judaism, and attempted to disregard the Hebrew Scriptures along with Christianity’s Jewish beginnings. This was something that the Early Church fought against in its formative years while dodging Roman persecution. Today, echoes of Marcionism are heard frequently on the political right. Last month, when commenting about Tucker Carlson’s blowup interview with Senator Ted Cruz and criticizing Cruz’s biblically-based support for Israel, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon revealed that Marcionism never went away. Bannon stated, “when you talk about the Genesis thing. Isn’t our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the new covenant?” Somewhere in Hell, the Marcionites are nodding in agreement.
During World War II, the future Pope John Paul II witnessed the Holocaust up close in Poland. In 2000, when giving a speech at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, John Paul II stated that the evil of the Holocaust could only have happened through humanity reaching a “point of contempt for God.” Years before, at a Roman synagogue, he called for Jews and Christians to unite “in collaboration in favor of man.” He saw anti-Semitism for what it was, and his experience with the Nazis and Communism cannot be divorced from it. John Paul II saw anti-Semitism as a manifestation of evil, and one that threatened more than just the Jewish People.
The Nazis co-opted the Protestant German Church and persecuted Catholics. After the war, Soviet Communists were no better, as anti-Semitism and anti-Christian persecution were both features of life behind the Iron Curtain.
In today’s Western world, which is often secular to the point of nihilism, it is easy to forget that the Nazis and Communists both envisioned replacing religion with the state, and God with themselves. Such ideologies, no matter the flavor, share contempt for Judeo-Christian revelation, the moral reasoning it empowers within the soul, and the responsibility it offers. On the Devil, John Paul II was correct in his summation that “Satan invites man to free himself from the imposition of this yoke by making himself ‘like God.’” That is the perennial cause of every totalitarian in history, and anti-Semites today.
It is no spiritual coincidence that anti-Semitism is a hallmark symptom of evil, showing its face when people replace God with ideology and their own reflections.
As early as Pharaoh in the Hebrew Bible, and as recently as groups such as Hamas and figures like Mamdani in New York, would-be totalitarians have sought to eradicate the Jewish People when their presence reflects God’s actions in the world. Critics will disagree, particularly when it comes to Israel’s fight for survival. Critics will argue that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, and that even many Jews do not support Israel. The critics miss not only that Israel is the only Jewish country in the world, but also what the Jewish People represent. A people numbering only a few million and without a homeland for two millennia do not suddenly survive near-extinction in gas chambers to create a high-tech bastion of liberty in a barren desert with such speed and success unless something greater is at work. In short, the critics miss the fact that the Jewish People and Israel both are a revelation in action. Israel is both the birthplace of the West and its most embattled outpost. Whether Jews are observant or not, Jewish identity itself is linked with the covenant of Genesis and the revelation at Sinai. Without Sinai’s moral code, the West as a whole is left without any objective moral precept of universal Good and the evil opposed to it. Without Sinai, there is no Calgary, and without that, there is no light.
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When Hamas attacked concertgoers and villages in southern Israel in 2023, it did so with an evil and fury that would be familiar to Christians in Nigeria and Armenia. In a newly released report, Hamas was found to have used sexual assault in the form of “gang rapes followed by execution; genital mutilation; and public humiliation” as a tool of war. Mass murder and rape committed by jihadist groups are something many Christians know all too well. Today, roughly 365 million Christians are persecuted in areas dominated by jihadist movements or in Communist countries. Thousands of Christians are being killed in Nigeria, where Islamist groups operate unchecked. Armenia, the world’s first Christian country, is slowly disappearing as it is wedged between Turkey’s Neo-Ottoman foreign policy and an ongoing war with Azerbaijan. Just as anti-Semitism continues to simmer worldwide, Christianity is likewise under attack by the same forces seeking the elimination of Israel.
The love of my life disappeared before my eyes, but what I saw in the most intimate way is happening all around us in the West. What has been happening since Oct. 7 in Israel and Gaza, and now Iran, and in American politics is part of something bigger than just the Jewish state’s own fight for survival. It is also something that cannot be bombed away. Anti-Semitism may be a symptom of evil and a virus, but it is one that can be beaten with effort and the spiritual fever needed to eliminate it. John Paul II hinted at the answer when he called for a “collaboration in favor of man” between Jews and Christians. This kind of collaboration is based on personal relationships, common connection, and work towards the Good, and renewed and explicit acknowledgement of God and the moral universe His revelation offers.
When reason and revelation are combined, they offer not only clarity on the path to truth and discovery but also power beyond measure. The evil and anti-Semitism I saw emerging in someone I loved was not only dark and vengeful, but was ultimately based on nothing. It was an absence of truth, and a cluster of lies that reason could not undo. At the same time, as chilling as evil and nothingness are, truth and light are not hard to find for those who want to grasp them.
During WWII, the Polish Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe ran an anti-Nazi publication out of his monastery and hid 2,000 Jews from persecution before volunteering to take the place of a man condemned to die in Auschwitz. Deitrich Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazification of the German Church. In Greece, the Orthodox Archbishop Damaskinos Papandreou rallied Greek Christians to protect Jews from the Final Solution, with 600 priests, the Greek police, and others risking their lives to save the innocent as a result of his leadership. People like Kolbe, Bonhoeffer, and Damaskinos are but a few who refused to let light disappear in a world stacked against them. Anti-Semites who seek Jewish destruction ultimately want to destroy the Christian West along with it. Things are not yet this bad in America. The goal must be to not let America’s current war with evil reach that point.
Ideas ultimately lead to action, and the awareness of evil and the realization of truth are only the first steps to enacting John Paul II’s prescription against anti-Semitism and the evil it represents. This is a personal kind of effort, and one that must be re-infused into our institutions and education system if the West is to survive. It is also an effort that begins with us as individuals to confront the evil near us. Trust me when I say that evil is never far away. It is in our homes, workplaces, and potentially even our loved ones. It is closer than you think. We rarely notice because evil is quiet until it is too late; and yet, it can emerge with a vengeance within all of us.
Fortunately, the cure is also within you.
Learn more about anti-Semitism here.
Image: “Dinner date” by Matthew on Flickr
