While anti-semitism is clearly rising in the United States, manifested often by Proud Boys and other white nationalists like them, and while violence against Jewish people is rising at really frightening levels, Evangelical Christianity has a very strange relationship with Jewish people and anti-semitism.

That's one of the things I was thinking about when I wrote the sentence about how Corrie ten Boom became popular among Evangelical Christians, who often profess a great love for Jewish people and the state of Israel.

But as somebody who grew up in the Evangelical world, married (for all intents and purposes) a Jewish man, and sometimes worshipped with him at a queer-affirming synagogue, I was kind of uniquely positioned to learn how twisted the Evangelical view of Judaism actually is.

Evangelical Christians often claim to love the Jews as God's chosen people, but the way they understand Judaism has almost nothing to do with Judaism as an actual faith system. In other words, Evangelical Christians imagine a religion that doesn't exist – not to mention the fact that they wish to evangelize Jewish people and convert them to Christianity.

Then comes the problem with Evangelical eschatology and the State of Israel. That's a can of worms. Evangelical Christians have this creepy idea that the modern state of Israel is necessary to fulfill end-time prophecies. They teach that the Rapture can't happen and Jesus can't return until the Temple is restored in Jerusalem. They think supporting the modern state of Israel will hasten the return of the Temple and the second coming of Christ.

Some of my Jewish friends and I call Evangelicals' supposed love for Jewish people a "fetish," a term I picked up in New York City Jewish circles in the 1990s.

That term might not be spot on, but it kind of boils down to this: Evangelical Christians support Jewish people only insofar as Jewish people uphold false Evangelical notions of what Judaism is, and with the main aim of "helping" restore the temple so that Evangelical Christian prophecies can be fulfilled.

Would Evangelical Christians support blatant anti-semitic laws right now? Most of them probably would not. Some of them on the fringe of the white Christian nationalist movement certainly would, though, today.

But would mainstream Evangelical Christians support more subtle forms of anti-semitic laws —like maybe, I don't know, restricting certain kinds of religious teaching in schools? Probably, they would. Could that gradually become more and more overt? I'm pretty sure it could.

At the moment, leading Conservative Christian think tanks usually push religious liberty arguments hard, including Jewish institutions and faith practices in their arguments.

That could turn around in a heartbeat, though, I think.