Now that the rumor of Sarah Palin’s support of a Patrick J. Buchanan presidency has vanished into the febrile blog archives, there remains one aspect of her candidacy said to strike Jewish voters as eminently un-kosher (apart from her right-wing politics, that is).
The Wasilla Bible Church, of which Palin and her now fully recognizable family are low-key parishioners, last month allowed a man by the name of David Brickner to speak for half an hour. Brickner is the current executive director of Jews for Jesus, a bizarre but amusing marketing brand of evangelical Christianity, whose main purpose is to proselytize Team Chosen, most annoyingly when we’re on our way to work.
Taking the Nazarene to be the corporeal part of a triune God goes against one rigid admonition in Deuteronomy, and so any claim Jews for Jesus make on behalf of an authentic Judaism is laughable at best. The group was founded in 1973 in San Francisco by a Baptist minister named Martin Rosen, who was born Jewish (probably just for the jokes) but then converted to Christianity at the age of 17. Martin changed his name to Moishe (how’s that for authenticity?), founded his schismatic church, and proclaimed that anyone of Jewish heritage was eligible to hear the “good news.”
According their mission statement, Jews for Jesus wish to “make the Messiahship of Jesus an unavoidable issue to our Jewish people worldwide,” which is sort of like saying Marx wanted to make capitalism an unavoidable issue to the international proletariat. Not that they wish you to forsake your Hebraic heritage. Jews for Jesus sprinkle their pamphlets — which they helpfully call “broadsides” — with Yiddish and Hebrew, they celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and they carry fun little animation sequences on their website that have nothing to do with any discernible form of salvation. “How cultured are you?,” asks one cartoon quiz. “I thought I was an Olympic superstar,” laments another. It’s the kind of spam your mom might forward you on a slow news day.
“Jews for Jesus” actually began as a hippie spiritualist slogan in the 60s, and there is something at least superficially lovey-dovey, as opposed to sulfuric, about their “outreach.” Or maybe that’s because no one who has encountered a genuine Jew for Jesus takes him terribly seriously. As with the Guardian Angels, the group is most famous for its eye-catching apparel: missionaries wear t-shirts bearing silly renderings of their logo, thus guaranteeing befuddled expressions on passersby in cities like New York and Miami, where they preach to young and old tribesmen alike. Poor, sheltered friends visiting from out of town often ask me if Jews for Jesus is the name of a punk band they should catch before quitting Manhattan.
In fact, the outfit does have a musical ensemble. It’s called The Liberated Wailing Wall, and Larry Kroon, the pastor at the Wasilla Bible Church, credits their transcendent rhythms with his entry into holy orders. Odd and incredible though that may seem, it’s not what bloggers found so disturbing about Brickner’s sermon before the Alaskan congregation. Amid the shalom-ing and doughy self-deprecation — to which the McCain camp has confirmed that Sarah Palin was a party, albeit an unreceptive one — Brickner suggested that a Palestinian who murdered dozens of people with a bulldozer acted out of divine “judgment” for the rampant faithlessness of Israeli Jews. This has long been the rote evangelical rationalization for bloodshed and misery in the holy land.
(See Pat Robertson’s claim that Ariel Sharon succumbed to a coma-inducing stroke as a result of his forcible removal of messianic settlers from the West Bank, an act retrograde to the establishment of Greater Israel. Then see Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in which that doyen of smiling, house-building liberalism, Jimmy Carter, recounts his first visit to Israel in the 1970s, whereupon he asked Golda Meir if she wasn’t concerned that the secular nature of her Labour government wasn’t again tempting the wrath of the Almighty.)
Jews have never particularly welcomed Christian advice about the necessity to amp up the faith, yet that hasn’t stopped Christians from offering it when they can.
Still, anyone who has read the 7-page transcript of Brickner’s remarks — and it is worth reading in full — will notice at once the big-tent hucksterism of his true mission. The paragraph I’m surprised didn’t receive more media attention was this one:
I want to encourage you to stop at the literature table after the service; that has a lot of free material as well as some not-so-free stuff. Since I was here last time, we produced this DVD, called “Forbidden Peace,” which tells the story of how Israelis and Arabs are coming to faith in Jesus, and then being reconciled together through the power of His love. And we’re seeing that happen in the ministry of Jews for Jesus. And so we want to encourage you to be involved, to support us in the offering if God should lead you; but most importantly, to recognize what’s happening there right now, I believe, is the fulfillment of God’s promises. And I say that with some fear and trepidation, because I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, and I work for a non-profit organization.
Forbidden Peace can be yours for an unprohibitive $15.75…
Are Jews for Jesus anti-Semitic? Yes, if only because they represent the most ridiculous face of a gaining evangelical tendency that seeks to eliminate true Judaism as a religion. Acting as advance PR agents for this disturbing, neo-medieval movement are what are known broadly as “Messianic Jews” or “Hebrew-Christians,” who target members of chiefly Conservative and Reform congregations (the Orthodox are famously immune) and try to convince them that Jesus is the savior of mankind and that acceptance of him is the only true path to heaven. (Guess where Hebrew-Hebrews are bound?)
The Southern Baptist Convention, which is the second largest religious body in the United States following the Catholic Church, has openly acknowledged its renewed interest in domestic missionary work. Imagine a chiliastic Comintern recruiting Messianic Jews to do its not-so-clandestine fieldwork.
Two overriding theological anxieties have energized the Southern Baptists. The first is that ecumenism, or the belief in the equality of all monotheisms, is a cultural toxin in this country; the second is that Jews will serve as Christ’s ablest messengers leading up to Armageddon, and, as foreordained in the Book of Revelation, 144,000 of them will perish in the all-consuming war that precedes it.
Jeffrey Goldberg chronicled the rise of the new conversion-minded Christianity in a 1997 New York Times Magazine article, in which he quoted one James Sibley, then the designated missionary to Jews on behalf of the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. Here is how Sibley explained the legitimacy of his enterprise:
”Following the Holocaust, a lot of Christian denominations began to back off of evangelism toward the Jews. … There was a feeling that they shouldn’t continue to bother the Jewish people anymore, that they had suffered enough. But this was an overreaction on the part of Christians — sort of a guilty conscience — because as terrible as the Holocaust was, it will fade into insignificance in comparison to God’s future judgment. There will be the Holocaust of all people who don’t accept Jesus. The Nazi Holocaust shouldn’t be a reason for us to stop bringing the Good News.”
How do you suppose that plays in Dade County?
Of course, even evangelicals who don’t make creepy plays for the hearts and minds of Abraham’s early brood are not beyond suspicion, despite their well-documented, and eschatologically motivated, support for the state of Israel. This is because so many leading American Christians are converted Jews. The most influential among them is Marvin Olasky, editor-in-chief of World Magazine — the Time of Protestant fundamentalism — and the man responsible for entering “compassionate conservatism” into our political lexicon.
Olasky, who served as spiritual adviser to George W. Bush when he was still governor of Texas, says he was an atheist and a practicing Communist up until the day he discovered a Russian-language Bible in a hotel room in the Soviet Union and proceeded to exchange the God that failed for the one that polled better. Olasky is too smart and sophisticated to preach conversion, but he has had an active hand in eroding one respected wall of separation: “faith-based initiatives” would be inconceivable without him.
Another evangelical power broker is Robert Schenk, an ex-flower child of Jewish parentage, who used to blaze up at anti-Vietnam War rallies in his hometown of Grand Island, New York, before discovering the kind of bohemian New Age church that Tom Wolfe so deftly parodied in his essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Schenk is now an ordained minister and the founder of Faith and Action, a self-described “missionary outreach program” centered in Washington, D.C., whose goal is to “[b]ring the Word of God to bear on the hearts and minds of those who make public policy in America.”
Faith and Action has distributed copies of the Ten Commandments to members of Congress (Joe Lieberman is a proud recipient), and Schenk was a vociferous defender of the Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore’s ill-fated decision in 2003 to install the Sinai tablets on the courthouse steps.
So while Jews for Jesus may be only the ludicrous fringe of a wide and variegated Christian field, for understandable reasons they inspire fear and mistrust in non-Christian religious minorities. Jews are worried enough as it is about their dwindling numbers; the only time they preach conversion is in cases of intermarriage. The old missionary’s homily about “reaching just one person” may be a comfort to adherents of the New Testament, but to the targets of their zeal, it’s cause for panic.
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