Related articles and links |  1 of 4

Right after George W. Bush was elected President, David Harris asked members of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), "How many of you voted for Bush?" After an uncomfortable silence, a smattering of hands went up among several hundred people.

Such results do not surprise Harris, who is executive director of the AJC. He regularly asks fellow Jewish leaders, "How can we expect evangelical Christians to support our concerns if we support none of theirs?"

That mindset is changing. In May 2001 AJC leaders invited Bush to their annual meeting. The President told an attentive audience about his faith in Christ, his intolerance of religious bigotry, and his faith-based foreign policy. One AJC leader observed, "The wellspring of Bush's decency is his faith."

In June the AJC board informed staff members that relations with evangelicals were to be freer and more open—not cautious and defensive. "These people [evangelicals] are my neighbors and friends," one board member said. "I won't insult them by treating them with reserve and caution."

This developing realignment of the AJC provides strong evidence that the outspoken coalition of pro-Israel American Jews and evangelicals reflects a deeper and longer-lasting change in relations between largely conservative evangelicals and their mostly liberal Jewish counterparts.

"I sense a new appreciation on the part of AJC and other Jewish groups for evangelicals," said the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land, who serves on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom with the AJC's Felice Gair. "There is a difference in attitude. They have gotten to know evangelicals better. They are less threatened by evangelicals."

The American Jewish Committee, with 120,000 members and associates, is one of the preeminent nonreligious Jewish organizations in the world. Billing itself as "the oldest and most influential national Jewish organization," the AJC publishes the respected magazine Commentary. But the organization also has a track record as one of the strongest opponents of politicians or judges who are conservative evangelicals.

Orthodox Jews were, perhaps, the first to warm up to evangelicals, a reflection of their common conservative theological and political views. Liberal Jews, however, were at odds with evangelicals and opposed most conservative evangelical initiatives, including prayer in public schools, abortion restrictions, and faith-based legislation.

The AJC's first rapprochement with evangelicals came in the 1970s, when its interreligious director Marc Tannenbaum started meeting with evangelist Billy Graham. "It turned into a friendship," Harris said.

Those early conversations between Graham and Tannenbaum planted a seed for a new way of thinking. "We are proud of those first steps," Harris said.

In a series of theological discussions that followed, from 1975 to 1984, evangelicals and AJC leaders became better acquainted, but the dialogues collapsed.

Jewish leaders routinely would snub messianic Jewish believers at other interreligious meetings. Paige Patterson, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote a series of letters in 1999 to Gedale B. Horowitz, president of the Jewish Community Relations Council. Patterson insisted that a messianic Jew be part of any Jewish-Christian dialogue. The dialogues stopped.

"There was only so much theological agreement possible," Jewish evangelist Mitch Glaser said. "One of the ground rules for the dialogues was that Jewish believers in Jesus were not to be invited as participants."

next page... |  1 of 4

share this page

October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10