NEW YORK – The emergence of conservative evangelical Christians as a potent political force has made many American Jews deeply wary. Divided by history, culture and geography, the two religious groups find common ground on Israel, but often little else.
Leaders of two major liberal Jewish organizations recently said conservative Christians were trying to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of the nation. And Jewish scholars who met with evangelical thinkers in New York last week found the gaps between the two worldviews difficult to bridge.
“What evangelicals don’t seem to understand is that when Christians are on the march, Jews tend to run the other way,” said Mark Silk, director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. “I fail to see much prospect of a new entente.”
Michael Alexander, the new director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University, one of the sponsors of the conference, said his experience as a college professor in Oklahoma taught him that Jews and evangelicals saw each other through different prisms.
Many evangelicals, especially in the South and Midwest, see Jews as exotic anachronisms, while Jews look at evangelicals “like they’re out to get us,” Alexander said.
Evangelicals are a theologically diverse and numerous group, with perhaps as many as 40 million to 50 million in the United States, compared with only about 5.5 million Jews. Politically, evangelicals tend to be conservative and Jews liberal. Jews are most prevalent in the Northeast, while evangelicals are most numerous in the Midwest and South.
Despite the differences, the two groups share one attitude: They both feel threatened.
Evangelicals, especially white conservative evangelicals, tend to see their religious beliefs as under attack by news media, Hollywood, television and universities, according to surveys presented by John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and an expert on evangelicals.
Jews, on the other hand, are much less likely to blame America’s problems on moral decay and much more concerned about efforts to lower the walls between church and state, the surveys show.
Last month, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a speech: “We are facing an emerging Christian Right leadership that intends to “Christianize’ all aspects of American life, from the halls of government to the libraries, to the movies, to recording studios, to the playing fields and locker rooms of professional, collegiate and amateur sports, from the military to SpongeBob SquarePants.”
And two weeks later in Houston, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, told the general convention of his organization: “We are particularly offended by the suggestion that the opposite of the religious right is the voice of atheism. We are appalled when “people of faith’ is used in such a way that it excludes us, as well as most Jews, Catholics and Muslims. What could be more bigoted than to claim that you have a monopoly on God and that anyone who disagrees with you is not a person of faith?”
The two critiques “were probably the sharpest set of attacks on Christian evangelicals in our lifetime,” said Lawrence Grossman, associate director of research for the American Jewish Committee. “Fifty years ago, evangelicals were not even on the Jewish agenda – it was as if they didn’t exist.”
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Evangelical leaders meeting last week at the Jewish Theological Seminary sought to emphasize common ground and greater understanding of each other’s theology. And several suggested that the religious right may have passed its zenith.
“The core of who I am as an evangelical is not about these political movements,” said David Neff, editor of Christianity Today magazine. The religious right, he said, “has, at least, recognized some of its limits. It expected Bush to give it everything it wants because it was a key part of his victory. But he hasn’t. It is just one player among many.”
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Rich Cizik, vice president of government affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, told the gathered Jewish scholars that evangelicals “are not a threat to Jews. … You have nothing to fear from evangelicals.” Cizik distributed copies of his organization’s new blueprint for civic action, with its emphasis on family life, environmental protection, social justice, religious freedom, human rights and peace.
And he said: “I’m not convinced that most evangelical politicians know much about Evangelicalism today – they’re living in the old paradigm. Most evangelical politicians don’t have the theological expertise to express what Evangelicalism is today.
“And that has hurt our movement, because they have typecast us.”
But Cizik ducked one of the thorniest questions put to him: “Can a Jew go to heaven?
One of the core beliefs of evangelical Christianity is in personal salvation through a “born-again” conversion to Jesus, and believers are instructed to evangelize – to spread the word – to nonbelievers so they can go to heaven, too.
That claim of an exclusive path to paradise rankles Jews, who also object to Christians trying to convert them.
“We want them to leave us alone,” said Rabbi Yehiel Poupko of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. “Aren’t there enough unchurched Americans for them to evangelize?”
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Jews are more comfortable with efforts to convert non-Jews to Judaism; in his Houston speech last month, Yoffie urged the conversion of non-Jewish spouses of Jews.
The two faith groups may move warily toward mutual acceptance through more efforts to understand each other’s theology and culture.
“There are 52 million evangelicals,” Poupko said, “and it’s high time we got to know them.”
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AP-NY-12-08-05 0620EST
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