If anyone can serve as a weather vane for this phenomenon, it’s John Hagee, an influential Charismatic preacher and the inspiration to Brian and Tara Lewis. His sermon “The Mystery of the Prayer Shawl” is available on CD. “The tallit, or prayer shawl, designed by God, has been worn by devout Jews for centuries,” his Web site explains. “Its legacy is woven throughout the Old and New Testaments. It still carries the power to energize your prayer life.” For $49, believers can also buy a blue-and-gold tallit made in the Holy Land. Hagee fervently supports Israel, believes that the Jews must return there before Jesus will come again and claimed in a 1999 sermon that prophesies in the Old Testament proved that God enabled the Holocaust. “God allowed it to happen,” Hagee said. “God said, ‘My top priority to the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.’ ”

Personally, I am deeply uncomfortable with the role assigned to Jews in the end-times pageant of Hagee and his ilk. So I was surprised to learn that Rabbi Pearlson knows and seemingly respects Hagee. A few years ago both men attended a rally of what Pearlson calls “pro-Israel Zionist Christians” at Miami’s Ministerio Internacional El Rey Jesús. The Christians, Pearlson recalls, were “folk-dancing and singing songs in Hebrew — correctly.” Firing up the crowd, Hagee urged the Christians not to proselytize to the Jews in attendance because of the Jews’ “unique relationship to God.” The event raised $250,000 for Israeli bomb shelters. By the rabbi’s recollection, some of the things Hagee said that night “made the Jewish people there cry,” they were so touched.

Most modern-day Protestant fundamentalists believe that the Jews are (at least until Jesus’ return) God’s chosen people. If Christ himself was Jewish, and followed Jewish tradition, the thinking goes, why shouldn’t Christians consider the ways their savior actually lived and practice the rituals he practiced? Many evangelicals have traded contempt of the past for a respectful, almost fetishistic view of Jews and, now, Jewish tradition. What this means in practice is extremely complicated. There’s a big difference between building bridges across cultures to foster understanding and building bridges so you can run across and ransack the other side.

Rabbi Jason Miller, a member of Rabbis Without Borders, takes an attitude of tolerance toward Christian bar mitzvahs. As a practitioner of the Torah, he is interested in sharing “Jewish wisdom with the entire community.” When I mentioned the TLC reality show to him, Rabbi Miller said Brian and Tara Lewis have “the right to their belief” that their son “is more authentically Jewish” because of Christ. Then he continued: “Is it insulting? Yeah. It bothers me in my gut. But I have to take a step back.”

His colleague Rabbi Rebecca Einstein Schorr, who debated the Lewises in a fascinating (and cringe-inducing) conversation on Huffington Post Live, takes a different view. “Bar mitzvah, by its very language, indicates that the honoree is a Jew,” she tells me. “Belief in Jesus as a deity or savior is incompatible with Judaism. It takes a special kind of presumption to declare oneself a more authentic version of a religion other than one’s own.” I couldn’t agree more.

Looking for deep background on the Lewises’ and many fundamentalists’ view of themselves as “true Jews,” I consulted James McGrath, a progressive Christian and the author of “The Only True God.” “The idea of Christians as ‘true Israel’ goes back earlier than even the term ‘Christian’ does,” he told me. As Christianity began to separate from Judaism, this conviction was accompanied by a view that the Jews erred not merely in failing to recognize Jesus as the Messiah but also in interpreting their Scripture too literally. So the literal approach of contemporary fundamentalists like John Hagee “is a relative latecomer in the long history of Christianity,” even though it sells itself as “the one authentic form of Christianity.”

The real problem is that, fundamentally, this fetishistic view of Judaism and the role of Israel in the advent of the end times sees Jews as a people to be herded together so that another group can achieve its eternal reward. To me that’s a troubling catechism. It’s ultimately not so far from the “Christ-killers” narrative of yore, just with an Israel-friendly varnish.