by Zev Chafets
Mikey Weinstein was undeterred by this. In October 2005 he filed a federal lawsuit against the air force. He alleged that his sons—one a recent graduate, the other still at the academy—had been subjected to anti-Semitic slurs by evangelical cadets.
The air force reacted to this charge by withdrawing permission from its chaplains to evangelize “unaffiliated” personnel. This incensed Congressman Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, who asked President Bush to issue an executive order guaranteeing First Amendment rights to military chaplains—including the right to pray in their own words. Congressman Steve Israel of Long Island retaliated by calling for a commission to study religious coercion in the military.
The air force, caught in the middle, issued new orders, cautioning superiors not to give their troops any religious messages, overt or subtle. At the same time, it dropped its interim ban on prayer at staff meetings and other officially sanctioned events. The ADL called this a “significant step backwards,” while the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) applauded it.
At this point, the head of the NAE, Reverend Ted Haggard of Colorado Springs, and Mikey Weinstein entered into a fraught correspondence that soon became public. Haggard wrote:
In some nations, under the banner of freedom of religion, they limit religious speech to anyone but the already converted. To limit freedom of religion, speech, or the press under the guise of freedom of religion, speech, or the press happens often. That’s what we’re facing with your efforts. But I’m confident authentic freedom will prevail. I think I have a higher view of adults to manage freedom of religion, speech, and the press. I don’t believe government supervision is necessary except in extreme cases (Christian or Islamic religious speech used to incite violence, etc.), and that in fact freedom and goodness increase in any society that takes the risk of embracing First Amendment ideas. No doubt, some would rather have government-supervised religion, press, and speech, because it does provide comfort to those who think government supervision of expression is beneficial to their cause, but I think we’ve proven worldwide that, in most cases, individual freedom is better than increased government regulation.
My concern, though, as I expressed on the phone to you, is not exclusively the American issue, but the global struggle for the advancement of representative government, civil liberties, and fundamental freedom. It is my view that both Christian and Jewish leaders would be wise to unite together to protect those who are threatened with extermination and death. If Jewish and Christian believers in America remain fractured, we’re going to lose too much worldwide. Instead, Christian and Jewish believers need to become friends and work together….
I don’t want to get into an e-mail discussion. I just wanted you to know that I’m constantly involved in trying to protect Israel and other international Jewish interests, and find it difficult to defend Jewish causes around the world and, at the same time, have men like yourself trying to use increased government regulation to limit freedom here at home.
This invitation to join Haggard in a Judeo-Christian alliance inspired an outraged retort from Weinstein.
“Men like yourself”??…“your efforts”??…Ted, you have absolutely no idea as to what “religious freedom” actually means, apparently!!…I’ll, too, not do this via e-mail, but suffice it to say that I wholeheartedly reject en toto your patently ridiculous assertions that me and mine are somehow “hurting” your feelings and trying to restrict your religious freedoms…your baseless whining and illogical and twisted view of the First Amendment (and utterly warped view of the other relevant and germane parts of our Constitution—see Clause 3 of Article 6!) is not remotely surprising as, without a scintilla of a doubt, you subscribe to the tortured, pedestrian tripe that this wonderful nation’s long-standing “tolerance of diversity” is nothing more than evincing “Intolerance of the majority”…how dare you try to assert that me and my supporters are making it more difficult for you to fight “global anti-Semitism!!!!!…(“with friends like you, eh??!!)…in other words, you exhibit a boundless hubris in trying to posit that, because we take a firm stand against you and yours, we are, thus, endangering your noble national and international efforts to “protect” me, my family, my people and what??…all of the rest of world Jewry too!!??…that unbridled, sanctimoniously triumphant and callous position is nothing less than pitiably shameful, Ted…and you know it, too!!!…shame, Ted, shame on you for that!!!…please think what you just said to me!!…that is quite beneath contempt…even for you!!!…“we” don’t depend upon ’ol Ted to be our worldwide protector.
THE FALL OFFENSIVE against evangelical Christianity wasn’t coordinated, but it did reflect Jewish public opinion, especially following the reelection of George W Bush. Foxman tried to parlay the mood into a common front by inviting Yoffie and some other Jewish leaders to a summit meeting in late 2005. Only a few turned up, however, and the meeting produced no results. Some who attended thought Foxman had gone too far already. Others simply didn’t feel like serving in Abe’s army.
A few prominent evangelicals reacted to the attacks from the Jews with anger and threats. Donald Wildmon, leader of the American Family Association and a longtime Christian Zionist, was blunt. “The more he [Foxman] says, ‘You people are destroying this country,’ you know some people are going to begin to get fed up and say, ‘Well, all right then. If that’s the way you feel, then we just won’t support Israel.’”
This concern was shared by Professor Charles Dunn, dean of the School of Government at Regent University. “We have a tradition in this country,” he told me. “We get along.”
Dunn is a thoughtful man with a Ph.D. in political science who once served as chief of staff to the New York Republican senator Charles Goodell. “I know there are Jews who fear that we are in favor of a Christian theocracy, but they are just wrong,” he said. “Jews mistrust us because they don’t understand us. Their mistrust is misplaced. Restorationists are a tiny minority. We evangelicals don’t look to the government for our salvation. There are some Jewish leaders, like Abe Foxman, who seem to want enemies. I’m not predicting a backlash, but there could be one. It’s possible that in the future some evangelical leaders might say, ‘Hey, we’ve bent over backwards to be friendly with you. We’re tired of you always attacking us. Enough is enough.’ Only mutual respect will prevent anti-Semitic idiots from ever gaining strength. Abe Foxman isn’t in that exact same category, but the animus is there.”
Jerry Falwell, on the other hand, was dismissive. “I know Abe Foxman,” he told me. “When we meet he acts like I’m his long-lost brother. Then he goes out and attacks evangelicals as a means to raise money. Abe lacks integrity. I have zero respect for him. After his last tirade, Jewish leaders called me and said, ‘Don’t pay attention to that damn fool.’ I don’t care how Abe Foxman feels about me, I support Israel because God commands me to.”
IN THE SPRING of 2006 Kevin Phillips published American Theocracy. Phillips, billed with some exaggeration as “America’s premier political analyst,” dedicated his book to “the millions of Republicans, present and lapsed, who have opposed the Bush dynasty and the disenlightenment of the 2000 and 2004 elections.”
American Theocracy was embraced by the Jewish secular elite. Here was an indictment of rampant evangelical constitutional encroachment written not by a rabbi or Jewish leader but by a former Republican Christian.
But Phillips’s warning about theocracy was no more serious than Rudin’s. He defined theocracy as “some degree of rule by religion,” a meaningless criterion by which every society this side of Norway is a theocracy. In the real world theocracies are nations ruled by religious leaders (the Cambridge Dictionary definition) who impose their interpretation of holy texts on their fellow citizens, by force if necessary. Iran is a theocracy. The United States certainly isn’t.
In fact, as Falwell noted, the United States has been moving in the opposite direction for more than two hundred years. The original colonies had state religions. A hundred yea
rs ago there were laws against shopping or playing ball on the Christian Sabbath. In my father’s lifetime, the government outlawed alcohol for Christian reasons. In mine, abortion and homosexuality were illegal, condoms were kept behind the counter, and you had to go to an Elks Club smoker to see films of women with naked breasts. When I left for Israel in 1967, sit-com couples slept in separate beds and you couldn’t say “damn” on the radio. When I came back to visit, less than ten years later, I barely recognized the United States. On my first night I fell asleep with the TV on. In the morning, half-awake, I heard Phil Donahue discussing oral sex with a group of housewives and nearly fell off the couch.
Phillips himself admits that the current level of evangelical political action is a reaction to this almost unbelievable change in public morality and discourse. “When [religion] was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public square,” he wrote, it was “a mistake that unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal counterreformation that in some ways is still building.”
Whether militant secularization has been a mistake or not is a matter of opinion. But the charge that the United States is, or is becoming, a theocracy is just silly. It is especially silly for Jews who (correctly) regard Israel as a democracy; the Jewish state comes much closer to being a theocracy than the United States.
Very simply, the United States is too large and too well built to be in any danger from theocrats. The country is protected by its Constitution, its federal system, and its national traditions. The work of separating the religiously conservative from the culturally secular has, for the most part, been done by history, propinquity, and common sense. There is room to accommodate everyone. As Professor Dunn says, people get along. American religious controversies—and certainly the fight between liberal Jews and evangelicals—are mostly theoretical, and to a large extent, contrived, a way to rally voters or raise funds.
Obviously there are real issues. Abortion, gay marriage, prayer in school—these are all serious points of contention. But if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion will still be legal in the states that want it. Civil unions for gay couples are already available in many places, and gaining. In the era of private schools, vouchers, and de facto segregation in public education, prayer in the classroom is more often than not a matter of local option. In Detroit I once met a high-ranking school official who customarily sent out letters signed, “Yours in Christ.” When I pointed out that the Constitution bars that sort of language, the official just laughed and said, “In America, maybe. Not here.”
It is also worth remembering that evangelical Christianity, unlike Islam or Judaism, has no book of laws. There is no born-again sharia code or halachic legal system. Restorationists like Rushdoony are forced to fall back on the Old Testament. And my experience with the political rabbis of Jerusalem makes me confident that, as long as Americans love bacon and eggs, Friday-night football, and sexy movies, there’s very little chance of an Old Testament regime taking hold in the United States.
IN EARLY 2006, in the midst of the anti-evangelical campaign, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan invited Yechiel Eckstein to debate Rabbi David Saperstein, head of Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center in Washington, D.C. Saperstein, who has worked with Eric Yoffie for decades, is a legendary lobbyist with a fine pedigree; his father, Harold Saperstein, was one of the first American rabbis to come out against the war in Vietnam. Saperstein has spent his life at the center of left-wing causes, and he is a part of the progressive establishment: a member of the board of the NAACP and People for the American Way and a co-chairman of the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty. He’s even married to a National Public Radio producer. He is, in short, the very model of a liberal reform activist.
Eckstein started the discussion by making his familiar argument: Christian Zionists, motivated by the biblical covenant between God and the Jews, are reliable friends. There was a scattered applause, but most of the audience was audibly skeptical. An elderly couple next to me, wearing his and his earrings, looked at each other and said, simultaneously, “Bullshit.” People nearby laughed and nodded.
Saperstein, whose debating style is as peppery as Eckstein’s is bland, readily agreed that evangelicals are great supporters of Israel. But he made it clear that this wasn’t his priority. He was most concerned by domestic political matters, and he asserted that the evangelicals are motivated by a sense of divine commandment. “They still believe their covenant is the one true way to heaven,” he said. Saperstein wasn’t making a competing religious claim; Reform Judaism doesn’t really believe in an afterlife. What bothered him was the evangelicals’ presumption, as well as their taste in federal judges and their desire to repeal the cultural attitudes of the 1960s.
Saperstein won the audience that night; there’s no way that a liberal loses an argument to a conservative at the 92nd Street Y. Saperstein was talking to his own people, New Yorkers whose political consciousness was shaped between Selma and Woodstock. They longed for 1969; they didn’t want to believe it was really 1938. But the scoffing wasn’t quite so confident as it would have been five years ago, before 9/11. In fact, five years ago, Yechiel Eckstein wouldn’t have been invited to the YMHA.
AFTER 9/11, SOME things American Jewish liberals had long ignored became harder to miss. The Arabic translation of Mein Kampf was a Middle Eastern bestseller. The Palestinian turndown of a two-state solution at Camp David made it clear that the clash between Israel and the Arabs was not simply a dispute over territory. Islamic heads of state began publicly declaring that the Jews controlled the world in some sort of Zionist plot. Once, the Arab and radical Islamic regimes had contented themselves with denunciations of Israel. Now they were increasingly clear that they regarded not “Israel” but “Jews” as the enemy.
Only a week before Abe Foxman issued his warning against evangelical encroachment, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, gave a speech of his own. The occasion was the start of Iran’s “World Without Zionism Month.”
“God willing,” the Iranian president said, “with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism.” Ahmadinejad followed up a few days later with a pledge to wipe Israel off the map. Actually, he was simply repeating the official policy of the Islamic republic, a goal first enunciated by the Ayatollah Khomeini. What made Ahmadinejad’s declaration newsworthy was the realization that he was far along—much further than American intelligence had previously guessed—on the path to acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Israel was in real danger. And not just Israel. Ahmadinejad declared that there had been no Holocaust, that it was all a big Jewish trick designed to steal land that rightfully belonged to the House of Islam.
The Bush administration took Ahmadinejad seriously and aimed its diplomacy at hauling Iran into the Security Council—a necessary diplomatic prelude to sanctions or something stronger. But Bush went beyond that, with an unprecedented pledge to use American military might to defend Israel.
Publicly, at least, Israel turned down the offer. Its strategic doctrine has always been that it would defend itself. Privately Israeli leaders were grateful, and told the president so. But liberal American Jewish activists reacted with discomfort. Word circulated that Bush’s willingness to defend Israel might be a ploy to start another war in the Middle East, or a Rovian gambit to garner Jewish votes. David Elcott spoke for many when he said, “I don’t want this fight to be between Israel and the Iranians. This has nothing in particular to do with Israel. The Iranians threaten Turkey and other countries, too.”
The Iranians do threaten a lot of other countries, but obliterating them isn’t high on their agenda. Tehran obsesses over two great enemies, the Big Satan in Washington and the Little Satan in Jerusalem (they would say Tel Aviv), both of which—in the Iranian view—are controlled by Jews. Jews are the declared enemy of the Islamic republic, whether David Elcott likes it or not.
And not just of the Islamic republic. Today, it is unmistakable that Jew-hatred is the lowest common denominator of radical Islamic politics. Like mafia families, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and the rest are bound together in loose and shifting ties of affinity, different in their ethnicity and ideology, but with a common commitment to jihad. They may fight over turf like the Genoveses and the Bonanos, and squabble over arcane matters of theology—but they share a common enemy—the West in general, the United States and Israel in particular, and especially the “Elders of Zion” who run the world for the benefit of the infidels. Sometimes the links are concrete, in a foot-bone-connected-to-the-ankle-bone sort of way. Hezbollah (which is made up of Shiite Arabs) is the proxy army of Iran (which is a Persian country) in Lebanon and abroad. In 1994, according to American and Israeli intelligence, Hezbollah agents, acting at the behest of the Iranians, blew up the Jewish center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding 240.
Hamas is neither Persian nor Shiite. It is a Palestinian Sunni Muslim organization. But it has close ties with Tehran and has trained with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Hamas Charter, adopted in 1988, states explicitly that the group is a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which it calls a “universal” organization. Hamas explicitly rejects any solution to the Palestine problem except holy war and absolute victory over Israel. It considers Jews around the world to be the enemy.