“And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee..."

David Goldman makes some interesting observations between the health of Christianity and support for Israel:

Ethnocentrism is the snake in Christianity’s garden, and last week it slithered into the Church of Scotland. It took the form of a screed denying the special claim of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. 

By no coincidence, the most successful Christian communities embrace the State of Israel, while the least successful ones abhor it. Almost four-fifths of Americans identify themselves as Christians, for example and two out of five worship every week. Less than two-fifths of Britons say they believe in God, by contrast, and only one out of eight attends weekly services. More than half of Britons never go to church, against only 18% of Americans. 

This division is mirrored in attitudes towards the State of Israel. By a margin of nearly five to one, Americans say their sympathies are more with Israel than with the Palestinians, and the proportion is at an all-time high. Britons view Israel negatively by a margin of 65 to 17, and the numbers are similar across the European continent, according to a BBC poll. 

We observe eruptions of unabashed Jew-hatred in the European nations most likely to become extinct, notably in Hungary, where the ethnic Hungarian total fertility rate is just 0.83 per female, barely a third of the replacement rate. The third-largest party in the Hungarian parliament, Jobbik, wants to list all Jewish officials of Jewish origin as a national security risk and blames the country’s economic problems on a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy”. The party demonstrated on May 5 in Budapest to denounce the World Jewish Congress, which held its annual meeting in the Hungarian capital. 

Hungary’s demographic disaster and Jobbik’s Jew-hatred are extreme cases, to be sure, but existentially challenged nationalities elsewhere in Europe evince a special animus against Jews and the Jewish State. Last week the Church of Scotland issued a report rejecting the notion that the Jewish people had any special claim on the Land of Israel, excoriating Zionism in general and the actions of past and present Israeli governments. 

Both the Church of Scotland, the bearer of the Scots Calvinist tradition, and the country itself are a shadow of their former selves. The number of births per year has fallen by half since 1950 (and the number of births to married couples has fallen by four-fifths). 

The Church of Scotland is shrinking; it had just 446,000 members in 2010, down from 1,319,000 in 1956. Its numbers shrunk by a quarter between 2001 and 2010, and are now shrinking even faster, by about 5% a year. At this rate its membership will fall by three-quarters in a generation.