Jews and the Crisis of the Religious Right in America
By Ron Duncan Hart
Is America in crisis? The religious right is telling us that we are. It is true that there is a crisis in religious circles. The number of adults identifying as Protestants has dropped from 69 percent in 1948 to 34 percent today. Membership in mainline churches has dropped in half, and the members who do remain attend church less frequently. Americans increasingly identify as secular rather than religious. Immigration is at an all-time high, bringing people who are not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. In reaction to this decline in traditional Christian identity, immigration, and secularism, ultra-conservative nationalist groups have surged to the fore.
Ronald Reagan was one of the first politicians to define this as a problem, and his 1980s campaign slogan to “make America great again” was a call linking America’s greatness with Christian exclusivity. Over the next forty years his coalition linking power, religion, and capitalism combined to win six out of ten presidential elections. In the process it spawned a series of ultra-nationalist Christian organizations, such as the secretive Ziklag, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, First Liberty Institute, and the American Center of Law and Justice among others.
During those years America has been in a transition. It is no longer the WASP country that it was in the early days of the Republic. The first dent in this dominance occurred with the massive immigration between 1880 and 1920 when America encouraged Europeans to come and help settle the West that had been recently conquered from Mexico and Native American tribal groups. Jews and Catholics responded by the millions along with Protestants. By 1920 that immigration combined with the secularism of the “roaring twenties” led to a resurgence of ultra-nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Their pressure led to the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1924 that ended the wave of Jews, Catholics, and Asians from entering the country. In 1965 a new immigration law re-opened immigration for those groups. Beginning with the prosperity of the 1990s, immigration has surged anew in our country, and we are in a resurgence of ultra-nationalism, once again reacting to the growth in immigration and secularism.
Western civilization is defined by Christianity, which has made valued contributions in art, architecture, thought, and moral leadership over the centuries. On the other hand, there is a centuries long fundamentalist track in Christianity in which nationalist movements have time and again used the cloak of “faith” to camouflage intolerance and discrimination against non-WASP people. Today, most mainstream Christian churches respect the freedom of religion for Jews and other non-Christian people, and they support the pluralism that defines our country. That respect for the religious rights of non-Christians falls into question for some fundamentalist Christian organizations which believe they have a right, even an obligation, to establish their beliefs as the law of the country at large.
A look at one of those organizations, Ziklag, can help clarify the goal of groups that hope to institute their “Christian” principles in America. Ziklag is made up of wealthy, ultra-conservative Christians, including the Green family owners of Hobby Lobby, the Uihlein family of Uline, and the owners of Jockey among others. The fact that the leaders of Ziklag are business magnates signals a link between capitalism and nationalism that work together under the guise of Christianity. They share the goal with other groups to establish Christian control over key areas of American life.
Ziklag and other groups hope to staunch the ebbing of Christian life in America by establishing their religious beliefs to “save” the country. Healthy religious belief can cure many ills, but a wealthy minority group promulgating its beliefs on the majority of the society is not democratic. To impose one set of values on a diverse society with vastly different life experiences seems to be religious absolutism and appears to be contradictory to what Jesus, the Jew, taught. In reporting for ProPublica, authors Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey wrote that the Ziklag group sees themselves in a spiritual battle with the powers of darkness, defined as those who do not accept their beliefs.
In their campaign to re-make American society in a fundamentalist Christian mold, Ziklag is spending millions of dollars to influence voters. Kroll and Surgey report that Ziklag funds conservative groups working on the election process, pastors and churches with campaigns to get out the religious vote, and groups focused on issues of transgender and parental rights. They are also challenging the eligibility of millions of voters in swing states among groups who do not vote with them and encouraging getting out the vote among groups who do vote with them.
The goals of Ziklag and others in this cohort of Christian nationalist groups include gaining control of seven dominant spheres of American public life, namely the arts and media, business, church, education, family, government, and science and technology, called “Seven Mountains”. Their plan is for Christian leaders to control each of these spheres of influence and use them to direct Americans toward what they believe to be a “biblical” lifestyle. They have set goals for the conquest of each of these areas. For example, in the entertainment industry, 80 percent of movies produced with a G or PG rating would have to meet their Christian standards. They want to allow prayer in schools, make home schooling a fundamental right, display the Ten Commandments in public places, and outlaw abortion among other goals, establishing the supremacy of their beliefs in the country.
In my research in an evangelical community in Atlanta at the end of the Jim Crow period, I heard preachers advocating a Christian takeover of the federal government to re-establish the Jim Crow era segregation in the schools and restore Bible reading and prayer as a daily part of school life. They were reacting to the crisis in their society at that time, and they saw their world as falling apart. They also wanted television and movies to be governed by Christian norms, and they were against immigration and women’s liberation, highlighted by their opposition to abortion rights. They spoke of the need to have a strongman ruler to impose Christian values in government, and I heard Hitler and Stalin mentioned as leaders who had gotten things done. Even today, Hitler is being portrayed by some ultra-nationalists as the good guy, not the villain of World War II.
The American crisis of sacred versus secular has never been resolved. Televangelists such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart along with Ronald Reagan brought it onto the national stage a half century ago, and the current Christian nationalist movement seems to be a continuation of that long unresolved conflict. Imposing fundamentalist Christian values on Jews, who are not Christian nationalists, would be as unacceptable as the Spanish Inquisition. Would Jews be relegated to an inferior minority status, as they were in much of European history? St. Augustine argued that Jews should be allowed to live in Christendom as an inferior minority because they would be a living testimony of the terrible consequences for people who do not accept Christianity.
When a group defines itself as “Christian”, it is assuming an aura of righteousness. But, when I see a political campaign, like this, camouflaged in religious terms, I remember the history of injustice toward Jews in the name of Christianity over the centuries. Some people argue, “No problem, fundamentalist Christians are strong supporters of Israel. Jews do not need to worry.” I agree that they are valued and even passionate supporters of the Israel that contemporary Jews have built. But, if they want to convert American Jews into fundamentalist Christians and coop Israel as a Christian nation, as some fundamentalists state, Jews would not agree with that.
While Christian nationalists have a plan to re-make America in their image, nationalism cloaked in faith has never ended well for Jews. From the Russian pogroms to the Nazi Holocaust and the anti-Jewish violence of the American KKK people have tried to purify their lands by suppressing or eliminating Jews as undesirable. The power of fundamentalist ultra-nationalist groups in our society today is intimidating. I have experienced that power to cancel and suppress discussion of my research on this topic, but I do not believe that is the American way.
For centuries religious freedom in America has been the light on the hill for Jews fleeing pogroms and deadly expulsions. For the most part, Americans have extended open arms to the millions of immigrant Jews who have helped build this nation. In 1883 the great Sephardic poet, Emma Lazarus, whose Portuguese Jewish family found that freedom and safety in America, wrote the poem “The New Colossus” praising American openness and opportunity. It was placed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"[
Would that America of yore continue to be the light on the hill of democracy and religious freedom if ultra-conservative nationalist groups were to promulgate a sectarian orthodoxy on the richness of our religiously diverse and pluralistic society?
Ron Duncan Hart is the author of "Evangelicals and MAGA: The Politics of Grievance a Half Century in the Making." He is a cultural anthropologist and award-winning author on religion and tolerance. He is a former Dean of Academic Affairs and University Vice-President, and is the founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Tolerance Studies.
Gloria Abella Ballen, co-founder of the Institute for Tolerance Studies, is an artist and author creating award-winning books as well as working in other media, including painting, drawing, graphics, and silverwork. Visit at abellaballen.com.
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