Christian Century Editor: Wall Will Stay on Masthead

The name of James M. Wall, associate editor of Veterans News Now, a magazine that traffics in ugly antisemitic tropes and imagery (see screenshot above), will remain on the masthead of Christian Century, a magazine that caters to mainline Protestant clergy and intellectuals in the United States. That’s the verdict from Christian Century’s executive editor, David Heim, who described Wall’s work as “prophetic.”

“James Wall did a lot for our magazine,” Heim said. “He deserves to be on our masthead.”

Heim would not comment on the antisemitism that is routinely on display at Veterans News Now.

“I’m not going to get into discussing that magazine,” Heim said, adding that there are many sides to the debate regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict and that there are many voices that need to be heard.

“Jim is one of them,” Heim said.

One voice that can be heard at Veterans News Now — where Wall serves as an associate editor — is that of Florence Leone, a former Roman Catholic nun, who in a recent article emphasized Jesus’ Aryan identity. In a pro-Iranian piece titled “Abraham is Not My Father,” about the recent controversy surrounding the Church of Scotland, Leone wrote:

Abraham is not MY father. I want nothing to do with Abraham. But Jews want to have it both ways: they insist that Christians must be tethered to Hebrew scripture; they insist that a Christian interpretation of the promises to Abraham that view god’s promises to Abraham to be universal rather than exclusive to Jews, is “supercessionist.” Supercessionism is defined as an attempt by Christians to supercede the special privileges granted to Jews alone. Such claims are said to be antisemitic.

German scholars led by Walther Grundmann in the Weimar, Nazi and post-Nazi eras, sought to develop an understanding of Jesus separated from a Hebrew matrix. Susannah Heschel called this effort to find the “Aryan Jesus” anti-Semitic. The fact is, Germany is NOT Semitic. It IS “Aryan,” in terms of its linguistic and cultural values. So is Scotland and most of Europe, and the United States. Non-Semitic is not the same as Anti-Semitic. No doubt Heschel would tag Thomas Jefferson as an antisemite as well. Jefferson was sufficiently committed to a scholarly approach to religious concepts that he learned Hebrew in order to study the Old Testament. He concluded that the Hebrew concept of god was “morally deficient” and chose to define Christianity in terms of the “sublime morals of Jesus.”

Why should Aryans, like the Germans, and Jefferson, and most Europeans as well as Iranians, be forced to think of themselves as Semitic, as ‘children’ of the flawed character that is Abraham? And what are the real-world present-day consequences of this Elijah-like enforcement of religious belief?

This is the type of stuff that is published at Veterans News Now, where Wall is serving as Associate Editor.

David Heim has made his decision.

James M. Wall, the associate editor of a magazine that prints polemics that come straight out of pre-Holocaust Germany, can also serve as “contributing editor” for Christian Century.