March/April 2009-Opinion

Learning to Love Evangelicals
marshall breger

One important misconception about evangelicals and Jews is that the only thing they have to talk about is Israel. This may be the case for right-wing Jews who want evangelicals to support their vision of Eretz Yisrael ha-shlema. For them it is an instrumental and intrinsically asymmetric relationship: The evangelicals want to “love” the Jews, and the Jews hold their noses while accepting the evangelicals’ “absolute love.”

The truth is that despite the Jewish community’s reputation as progressive and open-minded, its perceptions of evangelicals are based largely on caricature. The vast majority of American Jews, according to University of Maryland professors Mark Uslaner and Mark Lichbach, view evangelicals in an extremely negative light. In addition to major differences on social issues, many Jews won’t work with evangelicals because they worry that as devout Christians they have a religious duty to spread the “good news,” often understood as a commandment to convert Jews.

But these prejudices poorly reflect the stippled nature of the evangelical worldview. The “Israel can do no wrong” Christian Zionism of John Hagee, the 68-year-old pastor of San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church, does not reflect the views of a majority of America’s 50 to 75 million evangelicals. John Green, an expert on religion and politics at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, estimates that the evangelical movement is split down the middle between “traditionalists”—who comprise what is known as the Christian right—on one side and more flexible “centrists” and “modernists” on the other. Last year, a group of evangelical leaders published “An Evangelical Manifesto: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment,” urging the faithful to expand their concern “beyond single issue politics.” Evangelicals have certainly not flagged in their commitment to the so-called “social issues,” opposing abortion and homosexuality. However, many have expanded their focus from “culture war” battles to issues of social justice, global warming and world peace.

Consider Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, who, at Barack Obama’s request, gave the invocation at his inauguration. Warren is a strong social conservative committed to traditional evangelical views on homosexuality and abortion. But he is also a leader in the fight against AIDS in Africa and in efforts to combat poverty worldwide. If President Obama can reach across the aisle to an evangelical, surely the American Jewish community can do so, too.

There has, in fact, been considerable “engagement” between evangelicals and Jewish groups on subjects far afield from the Holy Land. But it has remained largely under the radar, and stereotyping in the mainstream Jewish community has prevented broader, healthier collaboration. Throughout the 1990s, Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee joined with the National Association of Evangelicals and the Christian Legal Society in the battle over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That effort was designed to override Justice Antonin Scalia’s 1990 decision in Employment Div. Dept. of Human Resources v. Smith, which found laws that have a negative impact on religious expression to be constitutional, as long as they have a valid secular purpose.

Cooperation in the fight for domestic religious freedom was quickly followed by work on issues of international religious freedom. Evangelicals worked with the Religious Action Committee of Reform Judaism on the International Religious Freedom Act (1998), the Sudan Peace Act (2002), and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (2000).

Although the second intifada helped push many Jewish groups into the arms of “Israel, right or wrong” evangelicals, most Jews remain fearful, even as the evangelical community grows more nuanced and offers a greater range of perspectives on contemporary issues. Today, unlike in the early 1990s, when only about 15 percent of evangelicals held college degrees, a rising number are college educated. As The New York Times notes, “Over the last 40 years, evangelicals have pulled closer in income and education to mainline Protestants in the historically affluent denominations.” Indeed, the evangelical population at Ivy League schools is growing exponentially.

We must also remember there are numerous groups—like those that participate in the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington—that place a premium on reconciliation (after all, it’s what Jesus advocated) and consequently a relationship with the Palestinians. In fact, 52 percent of evangelical pastors support the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza—and pastors tend to be further to the right than their constituents.

The increasing diversity in the evangelical community was confirmed, at least in part, by the 2008 presidential election. Although John McCain received 73 percent of the evangelical vote, Obama nonetheless fared five points better among white evangelicals than did John Kerry in 2004.

Obama’s embrace of Rick Warren should serve as a sign that it’s time to move beyond the notion of evangelicals as a monolithic flock of ignorant, rural “hicks.” The Jewish community should not shy away from a wide-ranging relationship with the evangelical world. To do so, it will need to demonstrate a willingness to work with evangelicals on more than a tactical level. Whatever their political and theological differences, what can ultimately unite Jews and evangelicals is the shared belief that we are all stewards of G-d’s bounty while we inhabit this earth.