To the Editor:
Key 73 [“The Conversion of the Jews,” by Marshall Sklare, September] never posed a serious threat to Jewish life. That it was seen by American Jews as a “Jewish issue” says far more about the dynamics of Jewish institutional politics than it does about Key 73. That is too bad, not only because of the very considerable damage that was done to Jewish-Christian relations, but primarily because the hysteria that was engendered deflected attention from serious problems that affect the vitality and integrity of American-Jewish life in ways that even the most intensive Christian conversionary efforts never could.
When I stated publicly nearly a year ago that those who saw Key 73 as a serious threat to Judaism were misinformed and unduly alarmist, professional Jewish ecumenists went into paroxysms of rage. (See “Christian Evangelism and Jewish Responses: An Exchange,” Congress Bi-Weekly, February 9, 1973.) Today, everyone agrees that Key 73 was a massive failure. Among Christians, “It seems to have produced nothing more than a giant yawn,” according to the United Methodist Reporter, a supporter of the effort. Ironically, what little notoriety Key 73 achieved resulted from the misguided Jewish attacks. According to Dr. Theodore A. Raedeke, executive director of Key 73, these attacks helped their cause. . . .
It is important to understand, however, that the reason Key 73 presented no threat to Jewish interests is not because it would not succeed, but rather because it was never intended as “an organized missionary campaign directed at Jews,” as Mr. Sklare inaccurately asserts.
The primary and overwhelming purpose of Key 73 was not the conversion of Jews, nor even proselytism as such, but rather a heightening of the religious consciousness of Christians by emphasizing the evangelical dimension of Christianity, i.e., the importance of belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus for individual salvation. Key 73 was marked by a broad ecumenism; it enjoyed the sponsorship of the large majority of Protestant groups, including most mainline denominations, as well as a large number of Catholic dioceses. This fact alone should suggest to any knowledgeable observer that proselytism could not have been a major factor, for otherwise Key 73 would have turned into a bloody internecine battle among its many sponsors.
Mr. Sklare is misinformed again when he writes that Jewish religious bodies—Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform—“were unanimous in condemning the development.” While it is true that these bodies joined the major community-relations agencies in expressing concern about the impact that Key 73 might have on Jewish life, they did not condemn Key 73. In a policy statement issued by the Synagogue Council of America, they declared unanimously that the challenge of Key 73 “cannot be met by opposing efforts of the Christian community to advance its religious ideals.” They added that “the real danger to Jewish survival stems not from the gains of other religious communities, but from the erosion of Jewish religious commitment.”
Far more important than Mr. Sklare’s misunderstanding of Key 73 are the issues raised by his treatment of the Christian conversionary impulse. The historical determination to counter Christian proselytism directed at Jews does not imply, as Mr. Sklare seems to take for granted, that all Jews are offended by a Christian theology that does not grant the legitimacy of the Jewish covenant. There are those who maintain that the demand that Christians recognize the validity of Judaism for Jews implicitly grants a Jewish legitimacy to Christian theology. Judaism constitutes a denial of the central Christian mystery and its notion of salvation. It cannot at one and the same time reject Christian theology while demanding that it be reformulated to accommodate the legitimacy of Judaism.
Furthermore, we tend to overlook the fact that the Christian conviction that Christianity is a fulfillment of Judaism parallels a traditional Jewish conviction that Judaism is a fulfillment of Christianity, ideologically if not chronologically, and that Christianity must ultimately give way to Judaism.
That religious faith is conducive to such abrasive theological differences will no doubt disturb those who prefer to think of religion as an admirable force for progress, democracy, and mental health. In this connection, Mr. Sklare’s assertion that the persistence of the missionary movement is seen by American Jews as “imputing a status of inequality that is contrary to the American ideal” is most revealing. The proposition that theology should conform to “the American ideal” brings to mind the good-will bromides and the religious relativism that characterized the interfaith movement of the 50’s, when the melting pot metaphor reigned supreme. What the early interfaith activists had in common was the conviction that it is un-American to take religious faith so seriously as to allow it to make for any real differences.
We have come a long way since those days, and the melting-pot metaphor has given way to the notion of pluralism. Interestingly enough, the newest argument against missionary efforts is that they endanger American pluralism. It is a superficial argument, however, and it does not stand up under examination. Freedom of religion and of speech implies minimally that everyone has the right to propagate his views in the public marketplace of ideas, and to seek converts to his views—provided this is done by democratic means. Religious proselytising poses no more of a threat to pluralism than does political proselytising.
It is true, as Mr. Sklare notes, that Abraham Joshua Heschel sought to persuade Christians to abandon missionary efforts directed at Jews. He asked Christians to consider whether they would really prefer to live in a world in which there are no Jews. He insisted that he would not prefer to live in a world in which there were no Christians.
There is no doubt that Heschel spoke for many Jews, but, on this subject at least, he did not speak for all Jews. And while Heschel was one of the great Jewish theologians of modern times, his argument against conversion has more poetic beauty than theological force. For the Christian hope is indeed a world in which “there is neither Jew nor Gentile,” neither Muslim nor Buddhist. Furthermore, Heschel argued that Christian missions are unnecessary only in the case of Jews. One must admit that there is a certain partisanship to a sensitivity which cannot bear to see a world without Jews, but can accommodate itself to a world without Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, etc.
It seems that even Heschel felt compelled to follow up his question to Christians by establishing a parallelism of Jewish sentiment about a world bereft of Christians. This underscores a very special danger that inevitably emerges when the question of the salvific status of Judaism in Christian theology, or of Christianity in Jewish theology, ceases to be an internal theological issue and becomes a subject of negotiations across faith lines. In such negotiations, each side expects comparable “concessions” from the other. While such give-and-take may make for good public relations, it makes for bad theology. Of course, I would readily take my chances with a Heschel. It is an entirely different matter, however, when secular Jewish organizations involve themselves in this area.
The role of community-relations agencies in interfaith activities is a highly problematic one for other reasons as well, although this is not the place to deal with this problem. Suffice it to say that the interreligious enterprise involves fundamental questions of faith, questions that should not be subject to the manipulations of community-relations specialists: there are areas of life that simply do not lend themselves to their assumptions.
This argument may be (and has been) challenged on the ground that there are many issues which religious organizations—primarily, though not exclusively, the Orthodox—refuse to discuss with Christians precisely because they involve questions of faith. By contrast, the community-relations organizations have no such inhibitions.
The obvious answer is that only those who take questions of faith seriously will insist that certain issues are too sensitive and too “theologically private” for interfaith discussion. Only those for whom questions of faith are ultimately trivial will say that there isn’t a subject that cannot be programmed for the dialogue. The reticence of the Orthodox—however one may feel about it—is clearly the result of religious considerations. The complete openness of the secular agencies is clearly a function of their secularism.
Which brings me to my final point—the issue of secularism. Not the least of the damage that was done by ill-founded Jewish attacks on Key 73 is the reinforcement they provided for the already widely-held Christian impression that Jewish interest in Christianity is confined to the growth of liberal attitudes in it; and that if these attitudes foster a secularism that undermines Christian faith, Jews are not much concerned.
Even more distressing are the implications of this insensitivity to the onslaughts of secularism for the future of Jewish life. A measure of the irrelevance of the obsession with the conversionary aspect of Key 73 is the fact that for every Jew who converts to Christianity because of the persuasiveness—or the deceptiveness—of a Christian evangelist, there are probably at least a hundred who are lost to Judaism because of the indifference and hostility to religion that are bred by the pervasive secularism of modern life.
The most striking fact to emerge from Mr. Sklare’s article is the utter failure of Christian missions to the Jews, even under the most propitious circumstances. His article is also a literate and sensitive evocation of traditional Jewish response to the threat of shmad. I think he would agree, however, that, given the realities of Jewish life today, we are badly served by the kind of obsessive preoccupation with Christian missionary intentions that has characterized the activities of some Jewish organizations in recent months.
(Rabbi) Henry Siegman
Synagogue Council of America
New York City
_____________
To the Editor:
I certainly hope that no one connected with Key 73 had any intention of making “any significant breach in the wall between Church and State.” On that point, Marshall Sklare and COMMENTARY readers might be interested in the following statement, which was accepted by the American Baptist National Key 73 planning committee:
. . . We Baptists rejoice in the witness to religious freedom of our own particular tradition, affirming that faith cannot be forced and that persons should always be free to follow where they believe truth leads them. In our pluralistic nation we need constantly to emphasize the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” We claim freedom to witness to the truth and love of God as made known to us, always insisting on the rights of others to do the same.
In a zeal to testify to the faith that is the source of life and salvation to us, we often fall short in relating to those of other faiths with love and understanding. Tragically, this has all too often been true in our past and present contacts with Jews, with whom we have so much in common, biblically and historically, despite distinctive differences.
We respect and benefit from the continued witness by Jews to the one holy and transcendent God who continues his covenant with them, for the “gifts and call of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29).
The failure of the Christian churches to follow Christ fully and to live wholly in his spirit in our dealings with the Jews has led to distorted readings of New Testament passages, and has contributed to the sad history of anti-Semitism and to the immense tragedy of the Nazi Holocaust.
Our devotion to religious freedom and our respect for the rights of other religious communities are rooted in the life and work of Jesus Christ who invited and persuaded persons but did not coerce or take unfair advantage of them. We believe it is inappropriate for Christians to single out Jews as Jews (or indeed to single out any racial or ethnic group as such) for special evangelistic attention. . . .
Robert T. Handy
Union Theological Seminary
New York City
_____________
To the Editor:
. . . If, as Marshall Sklare correctly emphasizes, the Christian missionary movement to the Jews is not and never has been a significant factor in the defection of Jews from their faith, why devote ten pages of COMMENTARY to beating a dead horse?
As a sixty-seven-year-old Christian who spent more than forty years in and around big-city journalism, who has traveled extensively throughout the world, I have known personally but one Jewish convert to Christianity, a rather unimpressive character who happened to be associated with some obscure Reformed Church mission. Among my fellow Christians, active and passive, not only do I not recall ever having heard the subject discussed, I am not even aware that any of them knew the movement existed. My hunch is that one way or the other, they couldn’t care less.
For years, the Christian missionary movement has been in a general decline, most sects having difficulty manning their outposts. The consensus among those who think about it at all is that missionaries have killed more subjects than they have confirmed, a stigma hardly calculated to attract many young recruits except those few who are willing to prostitute their services for a free ride to some exotic strand.
But militating most potently, now as always, against any ground-swell of Jewish defection to Christianity is the fundamental and unmitigated incompatibility of the faiths, a tradition of “theological enmity,” as Arthur A. Cohen has called it (The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition).
It seems to me that the best way for the Jews, or any other potential victims, to meet whatever vestigial threat of Christian conversion may persist, is to ignore it rather than to objectify with scholarly rehash an activity that never amounted to a hill of beans to begin with.
H. T. Rowe.
Ridgewood, New Jersey
_____________
To the Editor:
There seems to be an underlying feeling of regret in Marshall Sklare’s article . . . that Jews are subject to missionary activity, some feeling that they oughtn’t to be, that such activity isn’t legitimate. As a practical matter, evangelical attempts can’t be prevented, but equally important, why should they be? . . . Where opinions differ, people generally try to get one another to see things their own way, whether the issue is political, economic, social, scientific, or religious. Why should Jews expect to be exempt from this process? . . .
Robert Carlen
New York City
_____________
To the Editor:
. . . In the past, according to Marshall Sklare, missionary methods were crude, but now more sophisticated tools arc being used and hundreds of young people are lost to the Jewish community every year. . . . The missionaries are certainly active: they go from door to door, they turn up on school campuses, they produce television shows, and sponsor “Hanukkah celebrations,” to name just a few of their activities.
Even educated young Jewish people are not able to answer when they are bombarded with missionary propaganda and biblical quotations. And what does the Jewish community do? . . . At the beginning of Key 73, when some Jewish leaders tried to speak out, they were told they were overreacting. . . . According to Mr. Sklare, the best available publication is The Missionary at the Door—Our Own Uniqueness, prepared by Rabbi Benjamin Segal. Yet although I am interested in this subject I did not know of this publication. Jewish organizations have not . . . been active enough to send a booklet like this to every Jewish home. There is definitely more zeal among Christian fundamentalists. . . . Little wonder, then, that Mr. Sklare, at the end of his article, is apparently resigned to the fact that Key 73 and Christian evangelism will remain with us. But if every Jew, young and old, were well-informed and knew how to answer the missionaries, we would not have to worry, and the evangelists, as well as the “Hebrew-Christians,” would give up.
Heinz Hartmann
Syracuse, New York
_____________
To the Editor:
. . . I have no cause to disagree with the conclusions drawn by Marshall Sklare on the general consequences of Jewish missions. I do, however, wish to add that the arguments he uses to question this work are drawn from “liberal” sources, while much of the support for Jewish missions comes from fundamentalists who are dismissed by Mr. Sklare as anachronisms and potential threats to the accommodations made by those who espouse toleration and acceptance. I have argued elsewhere (“Fundamentalism, Prejudice, and Missions to the Jews,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, Volume 5, No. 1) that the American Board of Missions to the Jews, and other organizations like it, may in actuality be working in a parallel fashion to the more liberal religious ideologies, by preaching a toleration and understanding for Jews to a population relatively untouched by the liberal presence.
Of course Jews may view the work and the existence of these missions as questioning their legit/?/, even though they have been and remain notoriously unsuccessful. However, some attention ought to be given to the potential consequences of this work for those who are the strongest supporters of the Jewish mission enterprise I think the . . . usual arguments among Jews about this work fail to note its impact on those religious outsiders, the fundamentalists, who arc within the physical but not the value boundaries of a pluralist society.
Robert E. Blumstock
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
_____________
Marshall Sklare writes:
It is apparent from the last paragraph of Rabbi Siegman’s letter that his quarrel is not with me but with what he terms “some Jewish organizations.” He hesitates to name these organizations, but to those acquainted with Jewish communal affairs it is clear that he is seeking to combat the influence of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, and secondarily that of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisor Council.
Rabbi Siegman would have the Synagogue Council of America displace the “professional Jewish ecumenists,” as he terms the officials of the groups named above. I take no position on this matter—all that I would urge upon Rabbi Siegman is that he exercise restraint in statements on Jewish communal policy Thus it is doubtful that he best serves the Jewish community at large by designating the old-line groups as “secular Jewish organizations,” and by characterizing their work as “the manipulation of community-relations specialists.”
As long as Jews live in a Gentile world, community-relations specialists will be needed they perform a vitally important role on behalf of the minority groups for whom they speak. As a consequence, it would be well to seek to understand how community-relations specialists have arrived at the policies which they pursue. There may well be alternative policies which might be more advantageous for Jews. Such policies, however, should be argued on their merits rather than by pointing a finger at rival Jewish organizations and questioning their legitimacy.
Since Robert T. Handy is a distinguished scholar of American religion, the fact that he feels that the statement of the Baptists is important enough to deserve quotation assumes special significance. The statement does indeed reflect a sensitivity to the problem of Christian missionary efforts aimed at Jews—a sensitivity which was absent before the Holocaust.
H. T. Rowe underestimates the scope of the Christian missionary effort directed toward Jews. The effort has persisted since Colonial times and has constituted a significant aspect of the home-mission work of American Protestantism. The history of the effort is largely unknown; I could do little more than hint at its scope.
Although it is true that this effort has been less than successful, Mr. Rowe should realize that the reaction of Jewish leaders has not been determined either by the success or by the failure of Christian missions; they have been concerned, rather, with what such evangelism implies about the Jewish role in American society, as well as the status which it accords to Judaism. That is why the Jewish reaction is not simply an instance of oversensitivity, as Robert Carlen implies.
