Christians that support State of Israel attacked by Lausanne Movement

While ignoring Muslim atrocities against African & mid-East Christians, the Lausanne Movement targets Christians who support Israel.

By Israel Today Staff

 

The Lausanne Movement, the world’s leading Christian evangelism movement, has once again taken aim at what it believes to be the sinful practice of Christian support for the State of Israel, or Christian Zionism.

Lausanne, like many evangelical groups today, fails to take on overt Muslim oppression of Christians, while leaping on each and every allegation of Israeli wrong-doing.

“For over 60 years, many evangelicals have clung to a very narrow theological narrative that weds Christian theology with a political ideology known as Zionism,” writes Steve Haas, vice president of World Vision US, in the latest issue of Lausanne Global Analysis.

He went on to compare Christian Zionism to the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, Apartheid South Africa and other large-scale atrocities to which Christians were party.

Lausanne as a movement has what some would describe as an unhealthy negative obsession with Israel in recent years, having apparently fully swallowed the allegations that the Jewish state is the chief oppressor of Christians and other people in the Middle East.

At its gathering in Cape Town, South Africa in 2010, Lausanne produced what came to be known as the Cape Town Commitment, which, among other things, urged Christians to repent for their role in “Palestinian suffering” as a byproduct of support for Israel.

In that statement, “Palestinian suffering” was equated with the Holocaust, and besides the Jews, the Palestinian Arabs were the only other people group specifically referenced.

This vague approach to the suffering of Christians under Islam, while Israel and Zionism are enthusiastically singled out has become something of a pattern.

As Rosh Pina further noted, Lausanne has managed to mention the brutalization of Iraqi and Syrian Christians by ISIS only once. And even then, ISIS was only referenced in passing as part of an article in which Lausanne incredibly suggested that the radical Islamist group Boko Haram in Nigeria could serve as an example for Christian evangelicals.

 

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