In recent times, a number of theologians on the political left have campaigned against the nation-state and its monopoly on physical force, criticizing those who argue that Western civilization is threatened by an alliance of post-communist and Islamist dictatorships, while obscuring Israel’s vulnerability in the Middle East.
In their argumentation, they turn a blind eye to the fact that Iran and its terror networks have the stated goal of wiping out the Jewish state—and which linking with Russia and China seek to challenge the existing world order. Russia, Iran, and China are already engaged in war preparations against Sweden, according to Sweden’s security police.
The socialist idea that the nation-state should be abolished, the armed forces dismantled, and that the military threat from barbaric dictatorships is exaggerated is not a new phenomenon.
In the 1930s Winston Churchill was seen as an alarmist when he criticized the reluctance to rearm in the face of the threat from Hitler, but at age 65 he stepped onto the world stage and helped save Western civilization, which was partly built on Christian values. Churchill himself lamented “the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them.”
Georg Lansbury
Even though Churchill’s conservative predecessor Neville Chamberlain and his phrase “Peace for our time” is most associated with attempts to avert war through concessions to Hitler, the lack of preparedness—just as today—was largely due to socialists’ emphasis on disarmament and a naive overconfidence in the League of Nations as a guarantor of peace.
George Lansbury, a Christian pacifist and leader of the Labour Party from 1932–1935, advocated unilateral disarmament in the face of fascist rearmament and visited both Hitler and Mussolini. “I felt that Christianity in its purest sense might have had a chance with him,” said the socialist Lansbury after a visit to Hitler.
Theologians such as Joel Halldorf and Micael Grenholm have questioned the intentions of the United States and Israel in the war against Iran and its terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, and have raised doubts about the Jewish people’s right to the land of Israel. At the same time, Halldorf and Grenholm turn a blind eye to the massacre of an estimated 30,000–40,000 Iranians in January, to extensive persecution of Christians in a number of Muslim countries, as well as to anti-Jewish sentiment in the Muslim world reinforced through textbooks, media, political statements, and more.
Legal right
The fact that the Arab world refused to recognize the Jewish people’s legal right to their historical homeland (according to the Balfour Declaration, San Remo, the UN partition plan, etc.) in the aftermath of the Holocaust is also overlooked, as is the fact that 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries after the State of Israel was established in 1948.
Micael Grenholm glorifies pacifism and consequently advocates unilateral Swedish disarmament in the face of Russian rearmament.
In the summer of 2021, senior lecturer and intellectual historian Johan Sundeen published the report “When Theology Became 1968 Ideology,” in which he describes how anti-Israel opinion took shape within Swedish Christianity. The little trickle that began in 1965 in Moscow and spread into certain left-wing circles in Sweden would soon grow into a wide river influencing both church and society.
Want to destroy Israel
From the 1970s onward, well-known writers such as Sigbert Axelson and Carl-Henrik Grenholm, in the magazine Broderskap and in movement’s study materials, argued that the Jewish state stood in opposition to biblical prophecy. Grenholm wrote in (Broderskap no. 10, 1971): “The Palestinians wish to wipe out Israel as a state, and want to completely destroy Israel. This is entirely correct—and it is a goal we should support.”
In recent years Carl-Henrik Grenholm has revised his statement while his son Micael Grenholm’s website “Hela pingsten” responds to critics by claiming that the statement is taken out of context and that critics are “making a mountain out of a molehill” (June 2, 2021).
Johan Sundeen’s report argued instead that “historically, theological academic environments have often been fertile ground for antisemitism.”
