Coalition tries to mend Jewish relations - Christian Coalition

Christian Century, April 26, 1995

In an April 3 speech Christian Coalition executive director Ralph E. Reed Jr. made his strongest pitch yet in an effort to find common ground between conservative Christians and mainstream jews. But in his address to some 200 members of the Anti-Defamation League, a leading Jewish civil rights agency, Reed's acknowledgment that conservative Christians have been insensitive toward jews received a mixed reaction.

"Religious conservatives have at times been insensitive and have lacked a full understanding of the horrors experienced by the Jewish people. I must also acknowledge that not all who share our [Christian] faith have demonstrated a sympathy for the burden of this history," said Reed, whose religious-based political group claims some 1.5 million members. Reed's speech and responses to questions that followed evidently were intended to heal past differences between conservative Christians and mainline Jewish groups, such as the ADL, over such church-state-separation issues as school prayer.

The ADL audience response to Reed was restrained. Only once - when he voiced support for Israel's insistence that Jerusalem remain fully under its control - was Reed interrupted by applause. The ADL and the Christian Coalition began mending fences last November at a closed-door Washington meeting also attended by a host of other Jewish and conservative Christian leaders. The coalition recently placed full-page advertisements in leading Jewish community newspapers urging the U.S. to recognize jerusalem as Israel's official capital - a long-cherished goal of pro-Israel activists in Washington.

In his talk Reed said "some segments of the Christian community" share a "measure of culpability" for the "unfathomable pain" Jews suffered during the Holocaust. In addition, he contended that he supported complete and inviolable" separation of church and state and that it was "wrong" for some Christians to call the U.S. a Christian nation or to say God does not hear the prayers of Jews - a reference to comments made in 1981 by Southern Baptist leader Bailey smith. "No child of any faith" should be "forced by government to recite a [school] prayer with which they disagree," Reed said.

Reed's remarks came at a time when Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition's head, has been embroiled in a controversy in the pages of the New York Review of Books concerning his sympathy for anti-semitic texts. In a February 2 review-of Robertson's 1991 book The New World Order, Michael Lind, a senior editor at Harper's magazine, argues that Robertson's work relies heavily on notoriously anti-Semitic works, including the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Robertson denied Lind's findings in letters to the New York Times on March 4 and 5. However, in the April 20 NYRB Georgetown University scholar Jacob Heilbrunn highlights the parallels between Robertson's work and several books whose chief claim is that the world's political-financial structures are controlled by an international conspiracy in which Jewish bankers are among the secretive few who pull the strings. Both Lind and Heilbrunn note that Robertson assiduously avoids using the word "Jew" in The New World Order; nevertheless, Heilbrunn concludes, Robertson "has exhumed and embellished some of the most poisonous anti-semitic canards in European history."