Doug Wilson Misidentifies Antisemitism

His recent book presented a very weak definition of antisemitism that we need to talk about

Edit: Doug Wilson read this post after it was published and commended me for it here.

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Over the past couple of years, Pastor Douglas Wilson has been weighing in on the alt-right, growing increasingly critical of the methods and mindsets of those who have rejected leftism, but who, in his estimation, have not embraced a consistent Christian ethic for politics and worldview. Some of his work addressing the issue of right-wing views and attitudes towards the Jews has been perplexing to me, especially his identification of envy as the core sin behind “antisemitism.”

I wrote to Pastor Douglas Wilson on October 24, 2023, with some thoughts on the Jews, envy, and the like. He responded by recommending his new book American Milk & Honey, which I finished a while ago and am just getting to set down my thoughts now. The discourse on the Jews has become red hot lately, noting especially the smattering of laws around America ostensibly outlawing “antisemitism.” If we aren’t speaking the same language around these issues, we risk descending into pure tribalism and mindless sloganeering.

My question to the pastor in that email revolved around his argument that envy is the core sin behind antisemitism. This seemed (and seems) to me an odd thesis. I might understand arguing that envy is a serious ingredient in baking the cake of commonplace antisemitism, but not the central ingredient. I will address where I believe envy does fit into a critical aspect of antisemitism as we see it today, but I’ll do that in a second post coming soon.

Welcome, Pastor Wilson, I hope this response piques your interest. I go back and forth below in speaking to you or of you - somewhat of an informal post in that sense.

So, these two points (defining antisemitism and locating envy’s role) will be the whole of what I wish to say. Although there are other aspects of your book and related Blog & Mablog posts I would wish to discuss with you, I will have to save them for when we get a chance to sit down over a whisky and cigar—in other words, in the next life. By that time, I suspect we will be in perfect agreement anyhow and can just enjoy the whisky and cigar.

Our agreements, in brief:

-          The Christian calling toward the Jews is to deal with them as beloved according to election, also aware that in their unbelief they are enemies as concerning the gospel (Rom. 11:28)—they oppose the truth of Jesus, the incarnate God-man.

-          The Jews today are an ethnic-covenantal socio-religious amalgamation comprehended under the covenant of Hagar, who is enslaved with her children (Gal. 4:25). Their sole unifying identity is the negative—Jesus is not Christ.

-          They are a high-performance people, for good or ill according to whichever pursuit the individual Jew is engaged.

-          We are not to envy the Jews but are to provoke them to envy Christianity because we are inheriting the Deuteronomic blessings and love them as neighbors.

-          Their general conversion is a future eschatological marker to which the Protestant tradition has generally looked with optimism, and to which we ought to pray and work in evangelism for its fulfillment (Rom. 11:26).

-          There is no justification for antisemitism (note the lack of quotation marks).

Counterargument on “Antisemitism” (Note the Quotation Marks)

In the Glossary of Milk and Honey, you define antisemitism as:

The notion that Jews are uniquely malevolent and destructive in their cultural, economic, and political influence in the world. As defined elsewhere, ethnic sin is either malicious, vainglorious, or separatist (with the desire for separation driven by either malice or vainglory), but the antisemitic forms of it usually tend toward the malicious. It is not antisemitism to believe that Jews are sinful . . . But antisemitism does believe that Jews are uniquely sinful, and particularly destructive. As a stand-alone dogma, this is nonsense. What plausibility it has in the minds of some can be accounted for under the entry below entitled “High Performance People.”

And under that entry, you write:

…Antisemites frequently point to the high preponderance of Jews among the Bolsheviks, say, or pornographers, or the Frankfurt School. What they don’t do is point to the counterpart phenomenon when we are talking about violin masters, or patent holders, or Nobel Prize winners, or members of the Austrian School of economics.

But Pastor Wilson, being “anti”-Semitic is the sin of ethnic malice—it cannot mean merely holding that the Jews have a more profound evil effect in their sins than other socio-religious or ethnic groups, because this very charge is leveled by God Himself throughout Scripture—e.g.

“And she [Judah] hath changed my judgments into wickedness more than the nations, and my statutes more than the countries that are round about her: for they have refused my judgments and my statutes, they have not walked in them” (Ez. 5:6—and read through v. 10);

and also,

Then began he to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not: Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you. And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee (Matt. 11:20-24).

There was a specific darkness to the darkness of these children of Israel, both in the Babylonian exile and at the time of Jesus. This concept of degrees of wickedness pervades the Scriptures. Where more revelation has come in, the sin is graver—even the same sin committed by two different men incurs a differing degree of guilt according to each one’s moral culpability. I have often argued that Peter’s denial of Jesus was of a deeper degree of evil than was Judas’s betrayal, for the former knew Jesus for who He is, and the latter only saw Him, never having had the grace of an inner transformation that opened the eyes of the heart. Peter was on the mount of transfiguration, literally and figuratively, while Judas merely ate near Jesus for several years, for all it was worth to him.

Sinning, always evil and bringing condemnation, nevertheless requires greater horsepower of the will in those who have the Holy Spirit, or who have His Word open in front of them, or who have “the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever” (Rom. 9:4-5). An unreached pagan from North Andaman Island may skewer his neighbor, cook, and eat his liver far more easily and with less moral culpability than would a local Baptist pastor on a Wednesday afternoon in Des Moines. In fact, a pastor’s run-of-the-mill glance at pornography creates a far deeper evil impact on the world than the same action by a Buddhist monk in Bhutan. Why? Not to be pedantic, but the latter is sinning like a pebble tumbling into a puddle regarding his impact on the world, and the former is a 17-ton boulder crashing into a residential neighborhood from on high. And then consider Judas, when compared to Pilate, “has the greater sin” (John 19:11b NKJV). Sinner rankings go by how much you know.

And so, my argument comes down to this: one may very well see a more virulent form of sin on average and by the nature of their form of unbelief in the Jews than in the average non-Jew, and not be antisemitic in his perception. This hammer swings both ways. The Christian nations and peoples who are in free-fall apostasy in 2024 commit weightier evils than do the Hindu clans of northern India, pound for pound. Our modern Anglo-Saxon flouting of the law of God, post-Reformation, is far worse in spiritual degree than is anything ever committed by the blue-painted, stone-raising Celts of Britannia, circa 50BC.

And we see Paul speaking of the peculiar dangers of “Jewish fables” (Tit. 1:14), and Jesus naming their synagogues as being the houses of Satan (Rev. 2:9). No one speaking by the Spirit in the pages of the New Testament took a moment to note the peculiar evils of the Nubians, the Teutons, or even the Midianite descendants living on the southern doorstep of the Negev. But from Matthew through Revelation, Jewish perfidy in unbelief is writ large as the primary form of opposition Satan was raising against the newly inaugurated kingdom of Christ. The false apostles of Corinth, the Judaizers of Galatia, and the chorus of haters in Acts were virtually all Jewish, and not by accident.

In Milk and Honey, chapter 5, Wilson argues that Ioudaios can be translated as Judeans or Jews, and so we need to pay attention to context lest we assign something about those particular, provincial Jews to all Jews of all time; after all, there are some spicy passages directed at the Ioudaios in the New Testament. In other words, Ioudaios may just be the local population around Judah in 30AD, not all Jews worldwide at all times. This is relevant, for one example, in how we read 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16, which says, strikingly,

For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews (Ioudaion), who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last! (ESV).

So, as Wilson argues, the Judeans were the Jews from Jerusalem and its environs, so we cannot neatly import all our “Jewish” content into every appearance of Ioudaios—but this exactitude over the word highlights for us who those Judeans were—they were the crown jewel of Judaism in its inchoate form, as Wilson explains in his chapter on the Talmud! “Judean” stands in for “those most hostile to the Lord Jesus in the whole world of men,” (my phrasing) even as we note there were many who were converted and celebrated the Lord Jesus’ ministry. The name Judean is used pejoratively by the NT authors to define the epicenter of Messiah rejection, from which went out the anti-missionaries who dogged the steps of the apostolic cohort in Acts. So, when Paul says, “[they] have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men,” (KJV) he is speaking of the Judeans, who are the godfathers of all Talmudic Judaism in the world today. This is not a way to let worldwide Jewish identity off the hook for what was done by local Jews in Judea in the early-mid first century.

Blake Campbell via Unsplash

Would the Real Antisemitism Please Stand Up?

In that critical passage (1 Thess. 2:14-16), Paul is speaking of the religious mindset of those Jews which very much became the granite-hard mindset of worldwide Judaism since then. Since 30AD, the Jews, as kicked off by their Judean leadership, have been particularly arrayed against Jesus and His kingdom. Is this antisemitic to state? No. What would be truly antisemitic is also defined by Scripture. Paul anticipates the thought process of the one who despises the Jews: “Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in.” (Rom. 11:19). That right there would be the root of true antisemitism, and I believe where you might adjust your definition, Pastor Wilson.

Let’s translate it: “God has utterly cast off the Jews because He liked my people better and got tired of them.” Or, “God cast out the Jews because they are Jewish; therefore, He now loves me and my Gentile peoples in derision of the Jews—they are out, and good riddance!” And the retort should be, as brought by you, Pastor Wilson: “the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (Rom. 11:29). No one, having come in through Christ to be adopted by the Father as a son of Abraham, being circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, having been baptized with Christ and made new, can by the Spirit pop a bit of confetti, don a little party hat, and smile at the hardening and blindness of the Jews. That would be antisemitism—deriding them in their unbelief, believing oneself to be above their evils and sins, and especially, believing oneself to be elect by nature of being not-a-Jew (the mirror reverse of their own Jewish error, cf. John 8:39).

I might even take a step toward Wilson’s thesis in saying there is a way we might speak the truth about the Jews, i.e. their bad is a special bad for the world, while our intention or attitude is wicked and “anti” the Jews. We might point out the truth about our Uncle Randy—he’s a raging drunk who hasn’t parented his kids sober a day in his life—in the course of trying to further tear him down because we’re sick of his sin impacting our family. We might even secretly wish Uncle Randy to eat the barrel of his Remington rather than go on tormenting his wife and kids, so we tell the truth about him in order to bludgeon and shame him with no eye to his redemption through repentance. So, yes. We might do that to the Jews. But it is not necessarily the case that naming their sins and noticing their disparate impact for evil on the world is antisemitic. More would need to be heard from an individual making those claims before we might challenge him on his heart attitude toward the Jews. Is this not obvious?

Edit: And for those who are not Christians, antisemitism would look more like run-of-the-mill ethnic malice. Perhaps it is mild—“Those Jews I tell ya, they’re always cheating somebody or they’re doing nothing.” Perhaps it is harsh—“I wish they had got them all in the ovens,” but we can imagine this without difficulty. A non-Christian may even frame their antisemitism within an idea more familiar like the empty-head college students taking on the Islamic perspective for the sake of protest (river to the sea!) and framing it as anti-colonialism or whatever their paymasters cook up for the weekend for them. But, my essay is focused on Christian views, so I will leave this off here. (Added this paragraph the morning after publication as I awoke with a bolt of lightning in my mind—“But what if they’re not Christians?!”)

As for myself, I affirm the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not finished with the children of Hagar. They are being saved today one by one, and there will be a general revival and conversion among them in the future (may it come soon, Lord). They are in many ways a precious and amazing people and can be admired for their many good qualities and accomplishments. I affirm that left to myself I, like every Gentile Christian (though I am 25% Ashkenazi, but let’s not start counting alleles), would descend into the same madness of unbelief as the unbelieving Jews, or worse.

I deny, on the other hand, that the Jews in their sin are no worse for the world than any other group. Where the good castle of old Christendom (Europe, North America, Oceania) is being breached most sorely, almost invariably Jews are to be found hard at work removing foundation stones. They run NGOs that help flood our Christian nations with third-world migrants of decidedly non-Protestant cultures, they (more often than not where they are creatives) create entertainment that subverts biblical morals, they run institutions to re-order the laws and customs of the West to destroy the Christian moorings our ancestors tied down. They have driven the sexual revolution, feminism, and homosexual mirage in a determined fashion, showing up in numbers to those battles incommensurate with their proportion of the overall population.

Why is that? Because their core identity is a negative: Jesus is not Christ, and by extension, His law is not Law—so “let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us!” (Ps. 2:3). Am I ignoring the violinists, Nobel laureates, and friendly, helpful grade school teachers who buttress the loveliness of middle America? No, I’m addressing the point, which should not require me to stop and offer to balance praise for the good and decent Jews around the world and in history, since of course they are there, doing their great stuff. It’s just, that they’re doing their great stuff in contradiction to their core identity—in other words, they are living testaments to common grace, not to the inherent goodness of Jewishness. And thanks be to God.

Are the Dutch also guilty of vile sins? Are there Anglo Gentiles running piratical hedge funds bankrupting Main Street? Are many of our lawmakers, university professors, film directors, and wicked state legislators of purely Scottish and Italian descent? Sure, but these are acting in contradiction to their recent ancestral faith and traditions, whereas our Jewish neighbors, in acting to undo the Christian foundations, are acting in concert with their ancestors and with the antichrist worldview they would see come to fruition. Therefore, where Jews are at work to re-order the world without Jesus at the center, consciously or not, they are acting in their spiritual nature as children of the devil (John 8:44) in a special way that cannot quite be duplicated by the sin and evils of other groups. They are spitting in the eye of the God who gave them life when He found them naked and in their blood on the side of the road (Ez. 16:6). I remind you, God Himself says their wickedness is worse wickedness than Gentile wickedness (cf. Amos 3:1-2; Ez. 5:5-7; Jer. 2:10-13; Ez. 16:47-52).

Thus, I deny that I have an “antisemitic” mindset as defined by Pastor Wilson. I want to be joined by my older brother the ethnic Jew at the feast with the wall of division gone, celebrating the Lamb of God until the sun rises. I want all the Jews at their table with me and our dad Abraham. I want to break the bread of fellowship in the light of the Father and the Son in the New Jerusalem—in fact, right here in the kingdom age. They ought to come and be healed, I will take their coats and shoes at the door and then serve them dinner myself. I love the Jewish people for the sake of election. If one can charge me with “antisemitism” because I believe they are worse off for themselves and for the world as Jewish unbelievers compared to being unbelievers of another spiritual/ethnic/social stripe, then this is an empty charge, for the Scriptures give me every warrant for seeing things exactly in this light.

Otherwise, Milk and Honey makes some good points that true antisemites can benefit from digesting—the book does not utterly falter because of the mis-defined “antisemitism.” However, a much weightier argument could have been brought to those who are sinning in actual ethnic malice if the definition had been correctly framed from Romans 11:19. I would not recommend people read Milk and Honey to understand better the current fracas on the right over Zionism, Jewishness, AIPAC, and all the rest of it. An open Bible would be better. Yet, so much else of Pastor Wilson’s work is pure gold—this one just isn’t. Nevertheless, read it for several of the chapters that help to fill in the historical data on the Jews, and the sub-theme of Deuteronomic blessings, which is biblically substantial and informative. If nothing else, this book reminds me that the church has a very far way to go in unifying to call the Jews home to the natural olive tree from which they have been broken off.

Soon, be here for part 2—my assessment of Wilson’s fingering of envy as the core sin of antisemitism. I do believe I will help correct that notion for some of us who have felt he has been off target but haven’t come up with precise reasoning as to why that might be. Always suspect yourself first when disagreeing with Pastor Wilson, but be ready to do it with love and appreciation, and an open Bible, for when he is not as accurate as his normal sharpshooting self.