Flood

44

February 2020

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

When he joined up in Omaha, Bennie Thornton didn’t know much about the purpose of the crusade. As far as he was concerned it was a holy war, a chance to earn some grace by sticking one to the Muslims, a last chance before the world finally went to hell.

In fact, he learned during his orientation and training, the war in Jerusalem was all part of a grand scheme designed by a group of American Christian fundamentalists called the Third Templars-a project intended to bring about the apocalypse.

A little Googling showed Kristie that the religious response to the flood had been complex and multifaceted, even just within Christianity. How should a Christian act in these extraordinary times? Some commentators cited Bible passages that supported an argument that the devout should concentrate their efforts on ensuring that they and others were among those saved. And adherents of the modern “prosperity gospel,” who believed that God rewarded faith with wealth and material success, argued that the time to use that God-given wealth was right now, to buy up the high lands and let the less worthy drown. But the US National Association of Evangelicals led calls for the government to take various actions regarding the flood and its effects, just as it had once led calls to act over climate change, actions it claimed were entirely consistent with Christianity.

Gradually an ecumenical campaign by Catholic and Protestant leaders won traction, arguing that selfish actions conflicted with basic Christian teachings of self-denial, humility and charity. They pointed to Christ’s expression of the Golden Rule:“And as you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” (Luke 6:31). That was surely a mandate to help those afflicted by the flood, which was disproportionately affecting those of limited means, like the poor inhabitants of shantytowns and river deltas. Leaders of other great religions developed similar arguments.

It seemed to Kristie that the religions were in general doing a great deal to harness ethical and material backing for the vast relief efforts being mobilized around the world, and indeed to temper the thrust of some of those efforts, as some of the super-rich and the consultancies and multinationals continued to try to use flood emergencies as opportunities to extract profits and colonize fresh economic territory.

But the Third Templars had a more specific cause.

They claimed that, according to Revelation and other sources, the building of a Third Temple on the Mount in Jerusalem was a necessary prerequisite to clear the way for the coming of Christ, and put an end to this age of turmoil and disaster. So that was what they set out to do. They were joined in this purpose by a gang of Messianic Zionists.

Unfortunately the erection of the Third Temple required demolishing various Islamic monuments in place on the same site. So the mission had immediately sparked a war that involved all three of the monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The war of Abraham, they called it.

It had quickly widened out to a regional conflict involving other issues, battles over high land and water and desalination technology. The Israeli state had been a pioneer in weapons and security technology since 9/11 and before, and fought back viciously against any threat. And the Palestinians in their walled-off enclaves were making one last attempt to win back the land they believed had been stolen from them. There had been many wars fought over Jerusalem, Bennie learned, all the way back to the ancient Romans and probably beyond. But this, one way or another, was likely to be the last.

All Bennie cared about was getting into the fight. Aged nineteen, his body a mass of muscle and testosterone, he whooped as he jumped out of the plane to make his first parachute descent into the burning city.