ESSAY: The Christian Right and Its Demonizers

National Review, April 3, 2000 by Norman Podhoretz

WHO'S afraid of the religious Right? Not I. And yet, as a "New York intellectual," I am precisely the type of person who is supposed to be trembling with apprehension at the baneful influence conservative Christians have gained within the Republican party and, through it, on the nation as a whole.

Of course, though to the manner born, I am not a typical New York intellectual. Most members of my breed are situated somewhere left of center, and I have long since migrated to a position on the other side of the political divide. Yet even the tiny handful of my former fellows who so much as barely tolerate my apostasy, at least in certain of its aspects, still taunt me with a classic piece of black humor: "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

The "that" in the case of this "Mrs. Lincoln" refers to the alleged extremism and bigotry for which John McCain recently attacked Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. That speech may have destroyed McCain's chances of beating George W. Bush in the presidential primaries. And yet he was only saying out loud what is believed by vast numbers of the non- Republicans-independents and crossover Democrats-on whom he had been counting to carry him to the nomination.

Why then did the speech do him damage? The answer is that any gains he may have made with these voters could not compensate for the losses he sustained among others who, whether religious or not, are not strict secularists. In fact, even many Catholics seem to have resented McCain's assault on Robertson and Falwell, since they took it as an attack on the role of religion in general in our politics. On this point, the old sectarian animosities were trumped by a growing tendency among Catholics and Protestants to view seriousness about "traditional values" as more important than the specific theological etiology of that seriousness.

But not, I would be willing to bet, among Jews. Now, like many New York intellectuals (though not quite so many as is often imagined), I am Jewish. This makes my attitude doubly untypical. Indeed, a good guess would be that an even higher percentage of American Jews in general than of New York intellectuals (Jewish or not) are afraid of the Christian Right.

As Jews, my coreligionists are responding in part to inherited-and well- grounded-ancestral anxieties over the prevalence of anti-Semitism in conservative Christian circles. Never mind that, in the justly celebrated quip of Irving Kristol (a New York Jewish intellectual who preceded me in the political migration from left to right), Christians in America today are less interested in persecuting Jews than in marrying their sons and daughters. This undoubtedly poses a threat to what has come to be known as "Jewish continuity." But it is surely a benign one compared with the experience of the past, when Christian hostility toward Jews more often took forms ranging from discrimination to forced conversion, expulsion, and murder.

Never mind, too, that the charges of anti-Semitism which have been made against Pat Robertson are unsustainable. True, he has written a few off- the-wall things about an alleged conspiracy between Freemasons and Jewish bankers to take over the world in the 18th century. It is also true that he has sharply criticized "Jewish intellectuals and media activists" of today for playing a part in "the assault on Christianity."

Yet unlike the crackpot theory about the 18th century, his charge against the intellectuals and media activists of Jewish origin cannot so easily be dismissed. (It is important to recognize, however, that these particular persons tend to be the ones who have been described as "non- Jewish Jews.")

Furthermore, with regard to the concerns of present-day "Jewish Jews," Robertson has been a staunch friend. He has supported Israel through thick and thin; and when the Soviet Union still existed, he contributed large sums of money to help Jews emigrate. Would that all Christians were so anti-Semitic.

Irving Kristol has a brother-in-law, a scholar named Milton Himmelfarb, who is the author of an even more famous quip, for which he is much too rarely given credit: "American Jews live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans." Himmelfarb's great witticism was born out of his analysis of Jewish political habits. In studying the statistics, he found that members of every other religio-ethnic group invariably shifted from the Democratic to the Republican ranks as they became more prosperous. Jews, by contrast, stubbornly remained as liberal as they had been when living in poverty even after they climbed up what Benjamin Disraeli-born Jewish but later to become a Christian and a conservative-called the "greasy pole" of success.

The explanation for this anomaly is very complex, but a major component is undoubtedly the conviction among Jews that the less influence Christians exert over American public life, the more secure the Jewish position will be. In liberalism, which has as one of its principal dogmas the most rigid possible separation of church and state, lies the best protection against efforts to "Christianize" the United States and thereby to turn them into "second-class citizens." Or so Jews have persuaded themselves.