Going Undercover at Mad Pastor Hagee's Christians United for Israel Summit

By Ali Gharib, AlterNet. Posted July 26, 2008.

For Christians United for Israel and its founder, John Hagee, this year's Washington-Israel Summit was supposed to serve as a rallying call for Christians to stand up for Israel. The controversies surrounding Hagee's teachings that inspire his politics, particularly his End Times theology and its implications for the Jews he purports to love and protect and his religious interpretations of the Catholic Church and Hitler, were meant to take a backseat to the conference's aims of demonstrating political support for Israel and actions against its enemies.

Hagee did not want the events at this year's summit to be brought to the wider public. All but one event in the two-day session at the cavernous Washington Convention Center were closed to the press. Press passes were issued to Tuesday's Night to Honor Israel -- a bizarre fete attended by an announced crowd of 5,000 -- but access to participants and speakers by journalists was strictly monitored and restricted. The reasons became abundantly clear in the question-and-answer session after the first panel, when a woman asked how she would know if it was time to start up a "Christian militia" to return the country to conservative values. "Let's not use the term militia," Hagee responded, firmly establishing a thread that could be observed over both days of meetings: Control the message.

Armed with a full-fledged participant's pass and a Christians United for Israel (CUFI) notepad included in my registration pack, I attended both full days of the summit undercover and spoke freely with participants and speakers. The picture that emerged was very different from the one put on for the world on Tuesday night. Message control was constantly stressed to participants to conceal some of the more controversial themes of Hagee's teachings and theology. But in candid interviews, conducted both as a fellow participant and as a member of the press, Hagee's fervent following stayed on message with the full spectrum of his teachings, not just those slices made available publicly.

Away from the watchful eye of Hagee's Manhattan PR firm (many interviews with participants were broken up), some summit attendees, despite specific and repeated instructions not to talk to the press, were eager to discuss the End Times -- a belief in final judgment and the end of the World -- and what it meant for Jews.

Attendee Dean "Vernon" Melvin of New Mexico told me about Jesus' second coming and the subsequent end of the world. "When Jesus returns in the sky above us," he said, "those of us who are already saved and have died will come up out of our graves and go into the sky with him."

Randy Driskill divided Jews into only two categories: "The Orthodox believe that their messiah hasn't come yet. The messianic think Jesus is their savior."

The "Orthodox Jews," said Driskill, had "scales over their eyes. They're blinded by scales right now," he told me with a deadly serious look on his face. "That's why they don't accept Christ." Ironically, a Google search of "scales," "eyes" and "Jews" quickly turned up a passage from Hitler's Mein Kampf in which he declares that when he saw that Jews headed up Vienna's Social Democrats, "the scales dropped from (his) eyes."

Hagee teaches that during the "End of Days" leading up to the end of the world, many Jews will accept Jesus, presumably after the scales fall off their eyes. Melvin was more explicit about just what would happen to the Jews who didn't: "Some of the Jews will perish and be going to hell."

While Hagee tries to distance his eschatology from his support for Israel, it bears mentioning that the two are actually inexorably linked. In early 2007, Hagee participated in a conference call with bloggers and denied that eschatology plays any part in his support for Israel. But as Bruce Wilson, who monitors the religious right on the blog Talk2Action, pointed out in April:

Pastor Hagee's words were directly contradicted by literature from Hagee's San Antonio Cornerstone Church magazine, which exhorts readers to "Become a Part of the Fulfillment of Prophecy" by sending money to help Jews resettle in Israel. It is standard to Christian Apocalyptic Premillennial Dispensationalist eschatology that Jews must be encouraged to return to Israel where, according to the prophetic tradition, most of them will be killed in the Tribulation, Apocalypse and battle of Armageddon except for a "remnant," generally held to number 144,000 Jews who have converted to Christianity, who will survive and serve as evangelical "super-Billy Grahams" who will convert all of humanity, surviving the expected (nuclear) end-times conflict, to Christianity.

It was, in fact, part of this form of eschatology that got Hagee in hot water earlier this year and caused the presumptive Republican nominee for president, John McCain, to publicly repudiate Hagee and renounce his long-sought endorsement. In audio of a sermon released on the Internet by Wilson, Hagee expressed a view that Hitler had been a tool of God to fulfill a prophecy from the Book of Jeremiah in which God sends "hunters" after the Jews to drive them into the Holy Land. Hagee said the passage of scripture "describe(s) what Hitler did in the Holocaust."

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