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Notes -
The unrequited love of Christian conservatives for Jews is really something.
Evangelical conservatives have a net +39 favorability rating of Jews.
Jews have a net -40 favorability rating of Evangelicals.
This is an unstable equilibrium. Why should Evangelicals support Israel when American Jews view evangelicals with sneering contempt? It's delusional. Evangelicals probably think that Jews love them back. A greater awareness of the true situation will lead to a rapid decline in support for Israel among U.S. conservatives.
(And yes, American Jews != Israelis, but let's be real here).
It’s because ‘like’ is measuring two different things. Evangelicals like Jews for eschatological reasons and because Evangelical Christianity embraced Zionism in its millenarianism. When asked if they ‘like Jews’ or what their ‘favorability towards Jews’ is, their understanding of Jews is twofold: Jews in a real world, domestic, sense, and Jews in an eschatological religious sense. And for committed Evangelicals, the latter is more important. The Jews of the imagination loom larger than real Jews, who are for geographic reasons not particularly common around the places where many of America’s Evangelicals live.
Jews are both often secular / atheist and do not have any religious role for Evangelicals in any event, they judge them only in a temporal, domestic, real sense, and therefore base their decision on the media impression of Evangelicals as backwards conservatives who believe the earth is 6000 years old and that Adam and Eve had pet dinosaurs. On some level Evangelicals often are presumably aware that Jews are mostly urban progressives who support abortion rights and gun control, but this is simply outweighed by the religious situation. It’s not caused by a lack of knowledge of what many American Jews think of them, for it to change they’d need to lose their faith.
I'd definitely be curious to hear what the favorability rate is of evangelical christians is among more observant jews.
I believe that observant Jews are much more heavily fundamentalist than the case among Christians, and the ultra-orthodox notoriously do not like Christianity or Christians in any capacity.
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It's religious (obviously). Evangelicals really do believe Jews are God's Chosen People and Israel is required for Biblical prophecy to be fulfilled. Jews understandably tend to view the idea that they are meant to, essentially, all be slaughtered * so Christians can have their Rapture with less enthusiasm. Plus evangelicals also try to convert Jews, which Jews dislike even more than most people dislike evangelizing. (@hydroacetylene says only super fundies still believe Jews are going to hell. I don't think that's true; most evangelical denominations still believe in exclusive salvation.)
Thus the phenomenon where evangelicals "love" Jews while Jews view them with distrust bordering on contempt.
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