[Mb-civic] Among Evangelicals, A Kinship With Jews - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Among Evangelicals, A Kinship With Jews
Some Skeptical of Growing Phenomenon

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 8, 2006; A01

DANVILLE, Va. -- Everyone who worships at the Tabernacle quickly learns 
three facts about its deeply conservative pastor. He comes from a broken 
home. He rides a canary-yellow Harley. And he loves the Jews.

There is some murmuring about the motorcycle. But the 2,500 members of 
this Bible-believing, tradition-respecting Southern Baptist church in 
southern Virginia have embraced everything else about the Rev. Lamarr 
Mooneyham.

Out of his painful childhood experiences, Mooneyham, 57, preaches 
passionately about the importance of home. Out of his reading of the 
Bible, he preaches with equal passion about God's continuing devotion to 
the Jewish people.

"I feel jealous sometimes. This term that keeps coming up in the Old 
Book -- the Chosen, the Chosen," says the minister, who has made three 
trips to Israel and named his sons Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. "I'm a 
pardoned gentile, but I'm not one of the Chosen People. They're the 
apple of his eye."

Scholars of religion call this worldview "philo-Semitism," the opposite 
of anti-Semitism. It is a burgeoning phenomenon in evangelical Christian 
churches across the country, a hot topic in Jewish historical studies 
and a wellspring of support for Israel.

Yet many Jews are nervous about evangelicals' intentions. In recent 
weeks, leaders of three of the nation's largest Jewish groups -- the 
Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Union for 
Reform Judaism -- have decried what they see as a mounting threat to the 
separation of church and state from evangelicals emboldened by the 
belief that they have an ally in the White House and an opportunity to 
shift the Supreme Court.

"Make no mistake: We are facing an emerging Christian right leadership 
that intends to 'Christianize' all aspects of American life, from the 
halls of government to the libraries, to the movies, to recording 
studios, to the playing fields and locker rooms . . . from the military 
to SpongeBob SquarePants," the ADL's national director, Abraham H. 
Foxman, said in a Nov. 3 speech.

Julie Galambush, a former American Baptist minister who converted to 
Judaism 11 years ago, has seen both sides of the divide. She said many 
Jews suspect that evangelicals' support for Israel is rooted in a belief 
that the return of Jews to the promised land will trigger the Second 
Coming of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and mass conversion.

"That hope is felt and expressed by Christians as a kind, benevolent 
hope," said Galambush, author of "The Reluctant Parting," a new book on 
the Jewish roots of Christianity. "But believing that someday Jews will 
stop being Jews and become Christians is still a form of hoping that 
someday there will be no more Jews."

The result is a paradox -- warming evangelical attitudes toward Jews at 
a time of rising Jewish concern about evangelicals -- that could be a 
turning point in the uneasy alliance between Jewish and Christian groups 
that ardently back Israel but disagree on much else.

The Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, chairman of the evangelical American Family 
Association, warned in a Dec. 5 radio broadcast that Foxman was "in a 
bind" because the "strongest supporters Israel has are members of the 
religious right -- the people he's fighting."

"The more he says that 'you people are destroying this country,' you 
know, some people are going to begin to get fed up with this and say, 
'Well, all right then. If that's the way you feel, then we just won't 
support Israel anymore,' " Wildmon said.

Philo-Semitism is far from universal among the 60 million to 90 million 
U.S. adults who identify themselves as born-again or evangelical 
Christians. But it has strong roots, not only in the Hebrew scriptures 
shared by both faiths but also in the belief that today's Jews and 
Christians have common antagonists, such as secularism, consumerism and 
militant Islam.

In his sermons, Mooneyham returns again and again to God's promise to 
Abraham in Genesis 12: "I will bless those who bless you, and curse him 
who curses you."

It is a theme echoed in many conversations at the Tabernacle, a plain 
red-brick church in a community that has seen one factory after another 
close, yet where the congregation made a Christmas offering of $25,000 
to help pay for the immigration of Russian Jews to Israel.

"I believe everyone in this church felt it was the best thing we've ever 
done with missionary money, to help the Jewish people go home," said 
Dorothy Pawlowski, 72, who tithes to the church.

And it is a message being passed to the next generation. On Thursday 
nights, J.J. Vogltanz, a deacon, uses a Christian textbook to lead his 
three home-schooled children in science experiments designed to 
illustrate Bible verses. One of the first things he taught them about 
Jesus, he said, was that "he was a Jew."

Asked whether he also taught his children that the Jews rejected Jesus, 
Vogltanz, 34, paused. "I'm not sure it's constructive to assign blame," 
he said.

Mark A. Noll, a professor of Christian thought at Wheaton College, a 
center of evangelical scholarship in Illinois, said evangelicals are 
beginning to move away from supersessionism -- the centuries-old belief 
that with the coming of Jesus, God ended his covenant with the Jews and 
transferred it to the Christian church.

Since the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church and some Protestant 
denominations have renounced supersessionism and stressed their belief 
that the covenant between God and the Jewish people remains in effect.

Evangelicals generally have not taken that step, but "among what you 
might call the evangelical intelligentsia, questions of supersessionism 
have come onto the table," Noll said. "It's in play among evangelicals 
in the way that it was in mainline Protestantism and Catholicism -- but 
wasn't among evangelicals -- 30 or 40 years ago."

At Fuller Theological Seminary, an evangelical training ground in 
Pasadena, Calif., President Richard J. Mouw hosted a kosher breakfast 
for 20 rabbis a week before Christmas. "More and more, we're inviting 
Jews as guest lecturers," Mouw said. "We're looking at rabbinic 
literature and how we can better understand the Bible through rabbinic 
eyes. That's a real push for us."

Jacques Berlinerblau, a visiting professor of Jewish civilization at 
Georgetown University, said the rise of philo-Semitism in the United 
States has led Jewish scholars to look back at previous periods of 
philo-Semitism, such as in Amsterdam in the mid-17th century. He said 
revisionists are increasingly challenging the standard "lachrymose 
version" of Jewish history, questioning whether persecution has been the 
norm and tolerance the exception, or vice versa.

Still, some Jews think that philo-Semitism is just the flip side of 
anti-Semitism.

"Both are Semitisms: That is, both install the Jews at the center of 
history. One regards this centrality positively, the other regards it 
negatively. But both are forms of obsession about the Jews," said Leon 
Wieseltier, a Jewish scholar and literary editor of the New Republic.

The Southern Baptist Convention, to which the Tabernacle belongs, passed 
a resolution in 1867 calling on its members to convert Jews and renewed 
that call as recently as 1996. Its former president, Bailey Smith, 
declared in 1980 that "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew," 
and it currently supports about 15 congregations of messianic Jews, who 
are popularly associated with the organization Jews for Jesus.

So Mooneyham has a ready answer for Jews who doubt his motives: "I think 
they have a right to be suspicious of just about everybody, given the 
history."

He also has a personal story. The pivotal moment of Mooneyham's 
childhood came at age 7 when his parents, in the middle of a divorce, 
took him and his three sisters to a church parking lot in Burlington, 
N.C., and parceled them out to relatives for a few weeks. Those few 
weeks turned into years. The family never came together again.

Nearly 45 years later, the pastor was watching television before a 
Sunday morning church service when he came upon an infomercial by Rabbi 
Yechiel Z. Eckstein, founder of a group called the International 
Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Eckstein was standing in Israel with 
an elderly woman from Russia who said she was finally home.

"She started crying, he started crying, and I started crying," Mooneyham 
said. "Then I said, 'Lord, help me, because I'm really going to throw my 
congregation a curveball today. We're going to help Jews -- we're not 
going to witness to them, we're just going to help them. Because I know 
what home means.' "

Since that day five years ago, according to Eckstein, the Tabernacle has 
sent more than $175,000 to the fellowship, which has a donor base of 
400,000 Christians and has contributed more than $100 million to Israeli 
causes.

"I can only say that what we've done should speak for itself, because 
we've given and we've asked nothing in return," Mooneyham said. "And 
that's the way it will stay."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/07/AR2006010701267.html
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