Post by Gary on Mar 23, 2019 18:36:07 GMT -6
This is an excerpt from a New York Times article from just a month ago:
During Pompeo’s speech in Cairo, despite the embassy’s efforts to pack the room, he earned exactly one midspeech burst of applause: after he thanked Sisi, the Egyptian president, “for his courage.” That burst, beginning in the middle of the room and flowing toward the front, where Pompeo’s inner circle was seated, originated with a middle-aged American sitting in the row behind me. He had straw-colored hair, glasses and an easygoing manner. His name was Joel C. Rosenberg. Pompeo, he said, was a fan of his books. Rosenberg told me that Pompeo’s staff had contacted him a few years ago and asked to meet; the two had kept in touch since then. (A person close to Pompeo confirmed that the two men were acquainted, and that Pompeo had read Rosenberg’s books.)
Rosenberg is a best-selling author and a powerful force in the evangelical movement. Born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother, he immigrated to Israel and now lives in Jerusalem with his family as a dual citizen. Some of Rosenberg’s books deal with biblical prophecies about the end of the world. Others deal with the future of the Middle East. One work of speculative nonfiction, “Epicenter,” explores connections between the two. When asked on Fox News in 2013 if the Syria conflict could lead to the fulfillment of biblical end-times prophecies from the Books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, he replied, “We don’t know for certain,” adding: “It is possible, because these prophecies have not yet been fulfilled.” Elsewhere, he has suggested that the War of Gog and Magog, an apocalyptic battle prophesied in Ezekiel and Revelation, will involve Jordan, Russia and Iran. He has met personally with the king of Jordan and Mohammed bin Salman. In 2017, he joined an evangelical delegation for a meeting with President Sisi. He is also friendly with Vice President Pence, who showed his family around the West Wing during Trump’s first year in office.
Rosenberg and I rode with Pompeo’s motorcade out to an enormous Coptic cathedral in what is slated to become Cairo’s new administrative capital — a vast desert moonscape where Sisi has promised a reported $45 billion of state-planned development. The cathedral is an official gesture of Sisi’s solidarity with Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who have been frequently targeted by terrorists. Even as it has shifted away from calling out authoritarian rulers like Sisi, the Trump administration has emphasized protecting the rights of “religious minorities,” conspicuously Christians in the Middle East — a priority it calls “religious freedom.”
After touring the cathedral, Pompeo took one question from the traveling pool on the rights of religious minorities and then gave a longer interview, arranged by Rosenberg, with the Christian Broadcasting Network. “Christianity is at the heart of the history of this place here in the Middle East,” he said. “All you got to do is grab a Bible and read the places and the names.” Before returning to the hotel, he and Susan toured a brand-new mosque a short way up the road. Like the church, he said, it was a place where “the Lord is clearly at work.”
Some Democrats have attacked the policy implications of Pompeo’s religiosity. During his confirmation hearing for secretary of state, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey brought up a 2015 speech that Pompeo gave at Summit Church in Kansas. Speaking with an ease and humor that were missing from his delivery in Cairo, Pompeo had approvingly quoted a pastor who denounced an America where we “worshiped other gods and called it multiculturalism and endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.” In response to Booker’s repeatedly demanding a yes-or-no answer to the question of whether he considered homosexuality to be a perversion, Pompeo demurred.
A few days after the Cairo speech, in the midst of a strategic dialogue in Qatar, I had the chance to ask Pompeo about his religious views. I brought up another line from the 2015 speech, given at the invitation of Summit’s pastor at the time, Terry Fox. Near the end, Pompeo spoke of “the Rapture,” a term that doesn’t appear in the New Testament but is associated by some evangelicals with passages that presage the end of the world and the bodily ascension of believers into heaven. “We will continue to fight these battles,” Pompeo said in 2015. “It is a never-ending struggle until that moment, folks, Pastor Fox spoke about. Until the Rapture.”
“There are 40,000-page treatises on Christianity,” Pompeo explained to me in Qatar. “We are not going to be able to begin to scratch the surface of the question that you just asked me. I am sufficiently humble to recognize that my exegesis of the Bible in 30 seconds is going to fail.”
I asked what he meant by the Rapture at the time.
“Look, read the book,” he said. “Capital T, capital B.” He brought up the doctrines of human dignity and the Ten Commandments. Without mentioning the Rapture directly, he circled around to the concept of resurrection. “These are central tenets that form the foundation of the faith of Christianity,” he said. “And the central idea that it is through the grace of God we will all accede to heaven. Those are basic conceptions that people have had in mind for thousands of years.”
Pompeo “has never wavered in his biblical convictions,” Pastor Fox told me in a phone conversation. “There can be a great cost to any politician who stands on biblical principles. Most people will bend and become more moderate in their strong biblical convictions, with marriage and abortion and things like that. He has not done that. He’s stood strong, no matter what the political cost.”
Pompeo, he said, spoke at the church on multiple occasions while in Congress. “We’re proud of him,” Fox said. “He’s not going to force his views on anyone. When he represented Kansas, he represented all people, whether they were Christians or not.”
In his reference to the Rapture, Fox said, Pompeo had meant “staying faithful to the word of God. Stay faithful to your beliefs. Until the Lord comes to take us home. The Lord is coming back, and the Christians will be called to meet him in the air. It’s a reference to the Last Days. That’s what he would have meant by that.”
When I sat down for my first interview with Pompeo in his office, his open Bible lay between us on the table. It was well used, with many verses highlighted. A Swiss Army knife marked his place at the end of Esther and the beginning of Job, two books with insight into how to serve a difficult boss. In Job, God is the boss, inflicting his whims on a long-suffering employee who doesn’t know that God is doing all this to win a bet with Satan. In Esther, a vain and fickle king nearly succumbs to the influence of a wicked minister before being tamed with great finesse by Queen Esther, who risks death to get his ear.
Along with Vice President Mike Pence and other Trump cabinet members, Pompeo has attended Bible study sessions held in federal offices and led by Ralph Drollinger, the founder of Capitol Ministries. Drollinger has compared Pence to Mordecai, Esther’s uncle and one of the book’s protagonists. Mordecai husbands his influence, remaining loyal to the king even when it looks as if official policy could result in the death of his people. Drollinger has praised Mordecai’s “outward respect for the king, strongly suggesting inward respect, at least for the office”; he “displays a manifest unfaltering loyalty to the country’s civil leader at times when it would have been easy to do otherwise.” Mere displays of loyalty will never suffice. Only an obedient heart can win the king’s favor.
“It informs everything I do,” Pompeo said, when I asked him about the Bible. Seeing the pages in question, I tentatively compared Melania Trump to Queen Esther — both were outsiders married to difficult sovereigns, after all, and the first lady’s trip to the Southern border had seemed to coincide with a softening of Trump’s heart regarding the family-separation policy.
Pompeo absorbed my dubious analogy while looking down at the book on the table. “There are many lessons,” he said.
Rosenberg is a best-selling author and a powerful force in the evangelical movement. Born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother, he immigrated to Israel and now lives in Jerusalem with his family as a dual citizen. Some of Rosenberg’s books deal with biblical prophecies about the end of the world. Others deal with the future of the Middle East. One work of speculative nonfiction, “Epicenter,” explores connections between the two. When asked on Fox News in 2013 if the Syria conflict could lead to the fulfillment of biblical end-times prophecies from the Books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, he replied, “We don’t know for certain,” adding: “It is possible, because these prophecies have not yet been fulfilled.” Elsewhere, he has suggested that the War of Gog and Magog, an apocalyptic battle prophesied in Ezekiel and Revelation, will involve Jordan, Russia and Iran. He has met personally with the king of Jordan and Mohammed bin Salman. In 2017, he joined an evangelical delegation for a meeting with President Sisi. He is also friendly with Vice President Pence, who showed his family around the West Wing during Trump’s first year in office.
Rosenberg and I rode with Pompeo’s motorcade out to an enormous Coptic cathedral in what is slated to become Cairo’s new administrative capital — a vast desert moonscape where Sisi has promised a reported $45 billion of state-planned development. The cathedral is an official gesture of Sisi’s solidarity with Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who have been frequently targeted by terrorists. Even as it has shifted away from calling out authoritarian rulers like Sisi, the Trump administration has emphasized protecting the rights of “religious minorities,” conspicuously Christians in the Middle East — a priority it calls “religious freedom.”
After touring the cathedral, Pompeo took one question from the traveling pool on the rights of religious minorities and then gave a longer interview, arranged by Rosenberg, with the Christian Broadcasting Network. “Christianity is at the heart of the history of this place here in the Middle East,” he said. “All you got to do is grab a Bible and read the places and the names.” Before returning to the hotel, he and Susan toured a brand-new mosque a short way up the road. Like the church, he said, it was a place where “the Lord is clearly at work.”
Some Democrats have attacked the policy implications of Pompeo’s religiosity. During his confirmation hearing for secretary of state, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey brought up a 2015 speech that Pompeo gave at Summit Church in Kansas. Speaking with an ease and humor that were missing from his delivery in Cairo, Pompeo had approvingly quoted a pastor who denounced an America where we “worshiped other gods and called it multiculturalism and endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.” In response to Booker’s repeatedly demanding a yes-or-no answer to the question of whether he considered homosexuality to be a perversion, Pompeo demurred.
A few days after the Cairo speech, in the midst of a strategic dialogue in Qatar, I had the chance to ask Pompeo about his religious views. I brought up another line from the 2015 speech, given at the invitation of Summit’s pastor at the time, Terry Fox. Near the end, Pompeo spoke of “the Rapture,” a term that doesn’t appear in the New Testament but is associated by some evangelicals with passages that presage the end of the world and the bodily ascension of believers into heaven. “We will continue to fight these battles,” Pompeo said in 2015. “It is a never-ending struggle until that moment, folks, Pastor Fox spoke about. Until the Rapture.”
“There are 40,000-page treatises on Christianity,” Pompeo explained to me in Qatar. “We are not going to be able to begin to scratch the surface of the question that you just asked me. I am sufficiently humble to recognize that my exegesis of the Bible in 30 seconds is going to fail.”
I asked what he meant by the Rapture at the time.
“Look, read the book,” he said. “Capital T, capital B.” He brought up the doctrines of human dignity and the Ten Commandments. Without mentioning the Rapture directly, he circled around to the concept of resurrection. “These are central tenets that form the foundation of the faith of Christianity,” he said. “And the central idea that it is through the grace of God we will all accede to heaven. Those are basic conceptions that people have had in mind for thousands of years.”
Pompeo “has never wavered in his biblical convictions,” Pastor Fox told me in a phone conversation. “There can be a great cost to any politician who stands on biblical principles. Most people will bend and become more moderate in their strong biblical convictions, with marriage and abortion and things like that. He has not done that. He’s stood strong, no matter what the political cost.”
Pompeo, he said, spoke at the church on multiple occasions while in Congress. “We’re proud of him,” Fox said. “He’s not going to force his views on anyone. When he represented Kansas, he represented all people, whether they were Christians or not.”
In his reference to the Rapture, Fox said, Pompeo had meant “staying faithful to the word of God. Stay faithful to your beliefs. Until the Lord comes to take us home. The Lord is coming back, and the Christians will be called to meet him in the air. It’s a reference to the Last Days. That’s what he would have meant by that.”
When I sat down for my first interview with Pompeo in his office, his open Bible lay between us on the table. It was well used, with many verses highlighted. A Swiss Army knife marked his place at the end of Esther and the beginning of Job, two books with insight into how to serve a difficult boss. In Job, God is the boss, inflicting his whims on a long-suffering employee who doesn’t know that God is doing all this to win a bet with Satan. In Esther, a vain and fickle king nearly succumbs to the influence of a wicked minister before being tamed with great finesse by Queen Esther, who risks death to get his ear.
Along with Vice President Mike Pence and other Trump cabinet members, Pompeo has attended Bible study sessions held in federal offices and led by Ralph Drollinger, the founder of Capitol Ministries. Drollinger has compared Pence to Mordecai, Esther’s uncle and one of the book’s protagonists. Mordecai husbands his influence, remaining loyal to the king even when it looks as if official policy could result in the death of his people. Drollinger has praised Mordecai’s “outward respect for the king, strongly suggesting inward respect, at least for the office”; he “displays a manifest unfaltering loyalty to the country’s civil leader at times when it would have been easy to do otherwise.” Mere displays of loyalty will never suffice. Only an obedient heart can win the king’s favor.
“It informs everything I do,” Pompeo said, when I asked him about the Bible. Seeing the pages in question, I tentatively compared Melania Trump to Queen Esther — both were outsiders married to difficult sovereigns, after all, and the first lady’s trip to the Southern border had seemed to coincide with a softening of Trump’s heart regarding the family-separation policy.
Pompeo absorbed my dubious analogy while looking down at the book on the table. “There are many lessons,” he said.