Jews? What Jews?

Those godless secularists! We refer, of course, to the conservatives at The Wall Street Journal, so enamored of the new book The Political Teachings of Jesus (by Tod Lindberg, editor of the rightwing Policy Review) that they decided to dispense with the teachings of the Hebrew Bible that preceded him. Reviewer Christopher Levenick writes of Jesus’ “revolutionary idea,” the Golden Rule, dismissing variations from Confucious and the Mahabarata because they’re negatively phrased. But what of Leviticus 19:18: “Love thy neighbor as thyself”? Levenick’s review isn’t just boldly ignorant, it’s an example of the secularization of new evangelicalism, that strain of Protestant Christianity that insists Christ was both revolutionary and conservative. That’s a good marketing shtick, so less-religious conservatives are grabbing hold of it, too.