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ADL’s Foxman Warns of
Efforts to Christianize
America.
But
TT’s Lapin Warns of
Friendships Shattered by Efforts to Secularize
America.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin
Toward Tradition.
NEW YORK - Institutionalized
Christianity in the U.S. has grown so extremist that it poses a
tangible danger to the principle of separation of church and state and
threatens to undermine the religious tolerance that characterizes the
country, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham
Foxman, warned in his address to the League's national commission,
meeting in New York City over the weekend. (Haaretz
Newspaper,
Israel.)
We Jews aren’t chic any longer. Not too
many people care for Jews these days. Europe, including
England, makes
little secret of how it feels towards Jews. If possible, they care
even less for
Israel. All
Moslem countries, more than a billion angry people frequently at one
another’s necks, are magically unified over hatred for Jews and
resentment over that little patch of sand in the Middle East which
Jews turned into a country. Much of Africa and most of
Russia feels the
same way. Hate the Jews.
It is very challenging for a small group
of people to survive with no friends.
But wait! There is one group of people
who unconditionally love Jews and the
Land of
Israel. These
people are called Christian conservatives. They are made up of
Catholics, and Protestants, Baptists and Lutherans and many others.
Although theologies differ widely, they all share a deep conviction
that God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on
Mount Sinai. They all fervently
believe that in so doing, God presented humanity with a blueprint for
life. Needless to say, these views should be shared by every Jew
committed to his faith.
Yes, I know that some may have their own
reasons for their friendship. However I ask you to remember that
Jewish morality dictates we judge others by their actions not by what
we believe lies in their hearts. Sometimes I am not too sure of what
lies in my own heart, let alone in the hearts of others. We leave God
to peer into other’s motivations and we are called to judge other
people by how they act. And the overwhelming majority of Christian
conservatives in
America act with
astounding goodness, generosity, and friendship.
A common understanding of the Bible, its
promises and its directions, lies at the foundation of the special
friendship the Christian Right has for Jews. Most Jews are profoundly
grateful to have such faithful friends during a period when events are
echoing frightening times of the past.
It is a remarkable thing, this
friendship. Very different theologies, very different histories and
backgrounds, and even different visions of the future, yet a shared
recollection of our Biblical past assures the present in an atmosphere
of trust and amity.
Into this delicate relationship strides
an extremist demagogue whose intemperate denunciations this past
weekend threaten to destroy friendships between Jews and Christians.
The director of the ADL, one of the
large Jewish organizations in
America, attacked
Christianity as an intolerable threat to religious tolerance. He
denounced several famous Evangelical organizations by name accusing
them of wishing to implement their Christian worldview. He demonized
Christians and assured his audience that “they intend to Christianize
all aspects of American life…their vision of
America
is far different from ours.” (Just imagine what would happen to a
Christian leader talking thus about Jews!)
Mr. Foxman has yet to apologize for how
wrong were his dire predictions of what Mel Gibson’s Passion would
bring in its wake. Yet off he goes again defaming the only people
left on the face of the planet who actually love Jews.
There is one reliable rule that most
people learn in grade school: If you consistently bully your friends
and treat them disrespectfully, pretty soon you won’t have any friends
left.
Leaving aside the fascinating analysis
of the pathology that makes a Jew alienate our best and only friends,
maybe the attack itself needs to be refuted.
The ADL has been attacking Christianity
now for over ten years. It began with an embarrassing book the ADL
published in 1994—The Religious
Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America. It
has never let up. Given the ADL’s obsessive preoccupation with
Christians, anyone would think that on their way home from church
every Sunday, most Christians engage in robbing and raping, mugging
and murdering any Jews reckless enough to be out on the streets. Is
it possible that this organization, originally founded to protect
Jews, cannot find any greater threat to Judaism than
America’s
conservative Christians. Or is it possibly the threat they
legitimately pose to secular liberalism that really bothers the ADL?
If so, why pose as a Jewish organization? It would be more honest to
identify as an activist arm of the Democratic Party.
This may be a good time for me to expose
the five slanderous lies surrounding
America’s
most misunderstood movement:
1) The
Christian Right wishes to impose a theocracy on America.
A hint for those of you out there
planning on imposing a theocracy: In order to succeed, you would
first need to subvert the entire United States Constitution. A word
to the rest of you worried about a theocracy—if the Constitution goes,
you have far bigger problems than a theocracy.
Who really does have a record of forcing
their values down the throats of everyone else? Over the past forty
years life in
America
has been made indescribably more squalid, expensive, and dangerous.
Mocking moral standards and vulgarizing the culture has brought to any
teenager’s ears the throbbing rhythms and hideously violent lyrics
that would have brought a blush to the face of a convict in 1960.
Back then, a family lived an enviable middle-class lifestyle on one
salary. Today, high taxes, regulatory costs, and feminist propaganda
have forced mothers into the workplace. Abolishing the Biblical idea
of people being capable of evil, crime is now understood in terms of
social problems. The result is a sharply diminished sense of safety
and security. Forget city parks at night; we worry about children
surviving a day at the local public school with its metal detectors
and ludicrously unarmed guards. So who has more successfully forced
its values down our throats? I think the record speaks for itself.
For Christian leaders to encourage
conservative Americans of faith to vote for like-minded candidates is
of course no different from Jewish leaders ardently having encouraged
all Jews to vote for the Gore-Lieberman ticket in 2000 because “Joe is
a Jew.” Secularism is as much a belief system as is Christianity and
secularists who work to elect secularists shouldn’t complain when
Christians try to elect Christians to public office. There is a good
old-fashioned word for this activity and it is not theocracy. It
is—democracy. Every group in
America practices
it. Christians should be able to do so too without being demonized by
a Jewish organization.
2) The
Christian right believes all who disagree with them are going to hell.
Even if some believe this, so what?
Does our Constitution guarantee freedom of belief only to
secularists? I am always amused by those who are most indignant that
some Christians have this belief but are themselves secularists who
firmly announce their disbelief in heaven or hell in the first place.
Why should they care if someone else believes they are going somewhere
they don’t believe exists? Go figure.
For me personally, it bothers me not at
all that many of my Christian friends believe I am headed to hell.
Frankly I am deeply grateful to be living among such wonderful
Christian neighbors who do absolutely nothing to accelerate my arrival
there. Does the phrase “Spanish Inquisition” mean anything to you?
For most Christians I know, it is not so
much a belief as it is a genuine concern for my spiritual future. I
appreciate that concern amidst ongoing friendship and generosity to me
though I remain a firmly committed Orthodox Jew. It was not always so
for Jews in other countries during the past two thousand years.
Israel’s
safety belt is undoubtedly
America’s Bible belt
and I am sure that
America
has provided history’s safest and longest lasting haven for Jews, not
in spite of, but precisely because of her deep Christian conviction.
Christian belief, no matter how
difficult for non-Christians to accept, poses no threat to anyone. On
the contrary, it has turned out to be the source of blessing for all
who cherish the freedom and tranquility of the
United States of America.
The same George Washington who wrote “May the children of the stock of
Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the
goodwill of the other inhabitants” was a George Washington who was a
deeply religious and very conservative Christian.
One way for the descendants of Abraham
to merit the goodwill of our Christian neighbors would be to stop
Jewish organizations from endlessly insulting and attacking our
friends.
3)
Christian conservatives are anti-Semitic and racist.
This might be a good opportunity for me
to point out the sheer evil of accusing someone of an undefined
crime. You see, with no definition of the crime, it is impossible for
the accused to defend himself. Think about it for a moment….do you
know the definition of anti-Semitism? See, it isn’t so simple. Is it
hurting Jews or their property? That doesn’t need the term
anti-Semitism—it is already a crime called assault or vandalism. And
in any event, is that really what they are accusing Christian
conservatives of doing? I think not.
Does ant-Semitism mean harboring a
dislike for Jews in one’s heart? Do we really want to criminalize
thought? What about the old liberal disdain for “thought police?”
I do believe it might be time already
for some Jewish leaders to abandon their Sharpton-tactics and
graciously shelve the term anti-Semitism. It has become nothing but a
bludgeon to silence dissent and cause resentment. When Jewish leaders
accuse good and decent Christians of anti-Semitism because they oppose
wholesale abortion and homosexual marriage, it is more of an
indictment of the Jews hurling the epithet than it is of the victims.
The problem is that many Jews, having
abandoned the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, have embraced the
alternative faith of secular liberalism. In do doing, they adopt the
misleading equation that Judaism=Liberalism. Believing that the
values of Judaism have nothing to do with the clearly expressed wishes
of God in the Torah, they mistakenly assume that the values of Judaism
are congruent with those of secular liberalism. Thus anyone who
loathes the values of secular liberalism surely must hate the values
of Judaism since they are the same. Therefore, any conservative is,
by definition, an anti-Semite.
It thus becomes the holy duty of
organizations like the ADL, originally formed to fight bigotry and
anti-Semitism, to fight religious conservatives. This is tiresome,
anachronistic, and just plain wrong. This is an error with
potentially tragic consequences and it should stop.
I can only tell you that I regularly
deliver speeches to audiences, often of thousands, for the very
organizations listed by the ADL in its latest anti-Christian
diatribe. I do so as an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and on the dais I wear
the same black yarmulke I wore during my Torah studies in yeshiva. I
talk of the same Biblical values I was taught in that yeshiva. After
the speech I frequently enjoy a dinner brought by the organizers with
considerable trouble and expense from a kosher restaurant, often from
another city. I am received with enthusiasm and genuine warmth. If
this be anti-Semitism, my grandfather in
Europe would surely have welcomed it.
Oh, did I mention that many of the
pastors making up the Christian Right are themselves black Americans?
Of course, to many of the racial demagogues on the Secular Left, any
black who becomes a conservative has renounced his blackness. I am
accustomed to this because a representative of the Jewish Federation
of a large west coast city recently told a friend of mine that “Rabbi
Lapin isn’t a real Jew because he is friends with those Christians.”
I estimate that at least ten percent of most every audience I address
is African American. The charge that the Christian Right is racist is
made exclusively by people whose antagonism is exceeded only by their
ignorance.
4)
Christian conservatives are poor, uneducated, and easy to command.
This allegation was first made by
Washington Post journalist
Michael Weisskopf in a front page story on February 1st,
1993. In reality, average annual income for Christian conservatives
is well above the national average. Furthermore, the average net
worth of conservative Christian families rockets ahead of the national
average especially when corrected for age and income. This shouldn’t
surprise anyone because the values of thrift and industry that build
net worth are among the values encouraged by Biblical faith. Finally,
the bountiful generosity in the form of charitable donations made by
America’s
religious conservatives in any year exceeds the gross domestic product
of many nation members of the United Nations.
Most of the nation’s hundreds of
Christian colleges, with their rigorous academic standards, routinely
outperform state universities. Christian home schoolers win the
national spelling bees year after year. In a 2003 article entitled
God on the Quad, the
Boston Globe described how
well Christian Evangelical students are doing on
New England’s liberal elite university
campuses.
As for easy to command, well Evangelical
judicial nominee Harriet Miers was forced to withdraw her nomination
precisely because America’s religious conservatives are not easy to
command.
5) The
Christian right is anti-Scientific.
This charge emerges from secular
America’s docile
homage to the doctrines of
Darwin. Wise and educated
people today realize that the borderline between cutting-edge science
and religious belief is fuzzy. One need only examine the work of
cosmologist Stephen Hawking, British scientific philosopher Antony
Flew, or Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder to hear the language of
theology. Only propagandists and ideologues think that
Darwin ended the discussion.
The truth is that two incompatible
beliefs can account for mankind’s presence on the planet. The first
is that God created us in His image and placed us here. The second is
that through a lengthy process of unaided materialistic evolution,
primitive protoplasm became Bach, Beethoven, and the Beatles.
Many scientists, including the 40% who
are religious according to a
University of
Georgia study cited
by the New York Times
in February of this year, accept the first view. Many scientists
accept the second view and some scientists await further evidence.
The issue is hardly cut and dried because a great deal of modern
science flows as much from scientific philosophy as it does from
laboratory experiment. This is particularly true of non-replicable
science such as that dealing with cosmology and origin of the universe
questions.
This leaves only one question: Are
secular liberals or Christian conservatives more dogmatic and
closed-minded? To any fair-minded person, the answer is startlingly
simple. It would be tough to find a single Christian high school,
college, or university in the nation that does not treat Darwinian
evolution seriously. However, it would be even tougher to find a
single public high school or secular university that grants a
respectful hearing to intelligent design, let alone a religious view
of creation.
It is also only on secular campuses that
truth is frequently suppressed in the interests of political
correctness.
If science means being open to all
ideas, judging those ideas on the basis of evidence rather than
belief, and withholding judgment in the absence of evidence, there can
be no doubt at all. Christian conservatives are far less
anti-Scientific than others.
In conclusion, I am sure that the ADL’s
Mr. Foxman cares for the Jewish people as much as I do. It is just
that he has a radically different way of expressing it. To me, his
frequent anti-Christian outbursts are incomprehensible and I am sure
they jeopardize the future of Jews in
America and
ultimately, Jews everywhere. He, no doubt thinks much the same about
my views.
In a spirit of respect for both him and
for the traditional Jewish commitment to the truth and to open
discussion that I am sure we share, I invite Mr. Foxman to a public
debate on this topic. Let us debate one another in order to determine
the direction for the future. Does Jewish survival lie with a fervent
secularism that ceaselessly snaps at the heels of Christian America or
does it lie within political alliance with those people who stand firm
for the values God imparted to the Jews at the foot of Mount Sinai
just over three thousand years ago. One way is right and the other is
wrong. Which is it? A debate could help expose the true answer.
C’mon Mr. Foxman, let’s do it.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin,
an Orthodox Rabbi in Seattle,
Washington, is author of
Thou Shall Prosper,
America's Real War
and
Buried Treasure
,is President of Toward Tradition and hosts
his own
television and radio shows.
Toward Tradition is America's leading bridge-builder between Jewish
and Christian communities; spanning the divide between Christians and
Jews by sculpting ancient solutions to modern problems in areas of
family, faith, and fortune. Visit us on the web at:
www.towardtradition.org
To schedule an interview with Rabbi
Daniel Lapin, contact Rachael Whaley at (800)
591-7579--------------------------------------
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