NASHVILLE — It had been five days since Miss California-turned-Catholic crusader Carrie Prejean Boller had been booted from the White House Religious Liberty Commission for demonizing Jews, and Patricia Heaton, whose sister is a nun, was fretting about the future of her faith.
Lashing out against her fellow Catholics who crave “a medieval version of Catholicism,” Heaton, who became famous playing Debra Barone on the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, told me: “It’s the Spanish Inquisition—you know, calling Jews the ‘perfidious Jews’ and all that.”
We were in a conference room on the second floor of the W Hotel, where a large crowd of Israel supporters—the newly created Judeo-Christian Zionist Congress—was about to have dinner. Attendees included former NFL star Nick Lowery, former Auburn University basketball coach Bruce Pearl, and former Gaza Humanitarian Foundation head Johnnie Moore. Tennessee senator Bill Hagerty and former Department of Education secretary Betsy DeVos turned up the next day.
The conference was meant to strengthen the bonds between Jewish and Christian Zionists—and, more importantly, to remind the wider public why those bonds exist in the first place. They exist, conference attendees repeatedly said, because the West is engaged in a “civilizational struggle” against radicals, Islamists, and their financiers in Qatar and Iran. Worse yet, as far as attendees were concerned, just as that struggle is nearing an inflection point, just as Israel is successfully pushing back against the forces of barbarism in Gaza and Lebanon and Yemen, and the pro-democracy demonstrators are taking to the streets in Iran, Democrats as well as Republicans are sounding increasingly unsympathetic to the Jewish state. Both parties seem, as so many attendees told me, “confused.”
