RNA RELIGION COMMENTARY OF THE YEAR: Gibson, 2011
STORY NO. 1
'Blood Libel' and Sarah Palin
Christian Conservatives' Infatuation with Judaism
Politics Daily
Published Jan. 12, 2011
When Sarah Palin invoked the "blood libel" charge in lashing out against critics, she was destined to spark controversy given the long, fraught history of that myth, which for centuries has been used by Christians to justify anti-Semitism and the brutal persecution of Jews.
But the phrase also recalls one side of the double-edged affinity that American conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, have for Judaism and modern Jews. It is an embrace the Jewish community often appreciates, especially when it comes to supporting Israel. On other issues, however, Jewish leaders might prefer that evangelicals maintain a safer distance.
Palin's use of the "blood libel" accusation was an example of overreach. The analogy is certainly in keeping with a growing trend among many conservatives to see themselves as an oppressed minority -- just as the Jews have been throughout much of the last 2,000 years. But it can strike Jews as a kind of expropriation of their own painful history, and an attempt to make a false historical equivalency -- Christian conservatives in 21st century America are not Jews in 12th century England.
"When Governor Palin learns that many Jews are pained by and take offense at the use of the term, we are sure that she will choose to retract her comment, apologize and make a less inflammatory choice of words," Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, said Wednesday.
In her remarks posted on the website Vimeo, Palin said violent acts, such as the shootings in Arizona, "stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them." She said the media "should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn."
Hank Sheinkopf, a Jewish New York-based Democratic political consultant, told Politico use of the term was "absolutely inappropriate."
Even some conservatives were taken aback. Jennifer Rubin, who penned a lengthy critique of American Jewish antipathy to Palin in Commentary magazine a year ago, tweeted Wednesday morning that the "blood libel" usage shows she is "inflam[matory]" and "not serious."
The "blood libel" phrase arose in the Middle Ages when European anti-Semitism was on the rise. It refers to rumors circulated among Christians that Jews were sacrificing Christian babies and children to use their blood to make matzo bread at Passover. The charges were patently absurd but they grew out of the longstanding charge of "deicide" against the Jews, that is, that the Jews were responsible for killing Christ. And they were enough to spark brutal pogroms and create policies targeting Jews.
That model of persecution is appealing for many contemporary conservatives in that it reinforces their self-image as the underdog in America's political wars and as the victims of an overbearing secular and liberal culture. In fact, the popular conservative blogger and professor Glenn Reynolds used the "blood libel" analogy in a Wall Street Journal article on Monday from which Palin may have drawn inspiration.
Much the same dynamic has also been at work with the rising use of Nazi metaphors by the right, notably since the 2008 campaign and the election of Barack Obama. In that view, Obama is Hitler, Democrats and liberals are "fascists," and any disagreeable new policy or op-ed column augurs a coming "Holocaust" or pogrom.
Of course when Jews see those examples deployed so casually in the contemporary context it can cause a visceral counterreaction born of the trauma of personal experience of the actual Holocaust.
A more ambiguous trend is the enthusiastic new strain of "philo-Semitism" that many American Christians are displaying.
Conservative believers in particular have gone from rejecting all things Jewish to celebrating "Christianized" Passover seder meals or wearing tallit, the traditional Jewish prayer shawl. There are Christian bar mitzvahs, and there is even a growing trend toward appropriating Yom Kippur, the most sacred day on the Jewish calendar, for a Christian day of atonement. And Sarah Palin and other evangelical women increasingly like to compare themselves to Queen Esther, the Jewish beauty from the Book of Esther who saves her people from destruction.
At the same time, Jews have also watched as Christian conservatives, such as Texas pastor John Hagee, have become Israel's greatest supporters. That backing -- financial as well as spiritual -- is often born out of a belief that Israel's refounding is a sign of the imminent Second Coming of Jesus in an apocalypse that will center on Jerusalem and will convert some Jews to Christianity while eliminating the rest.
Still, any reservations about so-called Christian Zionism are usually subsumed by the geopolitical reality that Israelis live in a dangerous neighborhood and need all the friends they can get.
Moreover, American Jews have good reason to kvell about America's openness to all things Jewish. President Obama likes to quote the Hebrew bible as much as he does the Gospels, and Moses is enjoying a renaissance as "America's prophet," as author Bruce Feiler calls him.
Research shows that Americans look more favorably on Judaism than on any other religion (Mormons and Muslims are at the bottom of the scale) and the evidence is everywhere.
There are now three Jewish justices on the United States Supreme Court, for example (and six Roman Catholics, and no Protestants for the first time ever), prompting liberal blogger Philip Weiss to argue that "Jews are the new WASPs." Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, whose shooting last Saturday led to criticism of Palin and her counterattack, was the first Jew elected to Congress from Arizona. And the new star forward of the NBA's New York Knicks, Amar'e Stoudemire, said after making a pilgrimage to Israel last summer that he is a practicing Jew "spiritually and culturally" and he keeps kosher. Stoudemire, an African-American, undertook the pilgrimage after learning his mother was Jewish.
But even as American Christians discover their Jewish side (and the Jewishness of Jesus, which is a welcome development) they can still trip over age-old sensibilities by rummaging around in an ancient tradition while looking to take home something cool that suits their own needs.
"Perhaps Sarah Palin honestly does not know what a blood libel is, or does not know of their horrific history," said David Harris, president of the National Jewish Democratic Council. "[T]hat is perhaps the most charitable explanation we can arrive at in explaining her rhetoric today."
On the other hand, whether Palin understands the history of blood libel, she may have made the case for her critics by invoking that example.
"It's not just inappropriate, it's profoundly ironic," Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, tells USA Today. "By making this comparison and playing Jew in the picture, the person endangered by a blood libel, she admits that the words people use can have deadly impact."
"I'm not giving her a free pass. It was a poor and hurtful analogy," Hirschfield said. "But clearly, she's affirming exactly what her critics charge."
STORY NO. 2
Converts vs. 'Cradle Catholics'
Are believers-by-birth less motivated witnesses?
Wall Street Journal
Published Sept. 16, 2011
Do converts to the faith make better evangelists than "cradle Catholics"? Pope Benedict XVI seems to think so. Christians since childhood should "ask forgiveness," the pope told a group of his former theological students recently, "because we bring so little of the light of [Christ's] face to others, and emanate so feebly the certainty that he is, he is present and he is the great and complete reality that we are all awaiting."
But are Catholics "by birth"—or any believers raised in a religious tradition—indeed less-convincing witnesses, or less motivated, than are converts? Do they have a greater responsibility to live up to the tenets of the faith since they have known Christ from their earliest years? And are they a bigger disappointment to the Mother Church—and the world—when they come up short?
Benedict himself would certainly qualify as a "cradle Catholic." Joseph Ratzinger was born at home, early on the morning of Holy Saturday in April 1927, into the all-encompassing Catholic culture of small-town Bavaria. Within a few hours of his birth, the infant's mother bundled him up and trudged through an early spring snow to have him baptized at the village parish—the first step on a long but in some ways commonplace life of faith, at least in that day and age.
"I am a perfectly ordinary Christian," he once said of himself, with characteristic modesty. Yet it's hard to argue that Joseph Ratzinger, now the pope, has been anything less than enthusiastic in preaching the gospel. He entered the seminary while still an adolescent and rose from priest to cardinal to pope.
But is that enough? Over the past 2,000 years, two narratives have competed in the Christian imagination: the ideal of the child raised in a Christian home, growing steadily in faith and virtue, and that of the repentant soul whose clamorous conversion leads heaven to rejoice more than over 99 of the righteous.
The conversion of St. Paul is the defining template—the onetime persecutor of the faith struck blind until he comes to see the light, and going on to become the greatest evangelist of all, the so-called second founder of Christianity. Then there's the pagan-turned-believer Augustine, whose memoir of conversion becomes the inspiration for countless other converts.
The conversion narrative has obvious dramatic appeal, and sociologists of religion have not been immune to the influence of anecdote over data. William James famously distinguished between the "once born" (those raised in a faith) and the "twice born," and he had a clear preference for the latter.
Yet conversion is a double-edged sword. The zeal of newfound faith can be little more than a superficial emotionalism that makes for great theater—especially in today's reality-television culture—but does not endure. Or zeal can tip into fanaticism, as we have seen all too often, undermining a faith (and its public image) by overreaching.
Conversions can also be routine, and Americans today are switching religions so often that the coin of conversion may have become devalued. A study by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life found that Americans who have switched faiths or joined a faith are only slightly more religious in belief and behavior than those who remained in the faith of their childhood. For example, while 62% of nonconverts say religion is very important to them, the number only rises to 69% among converts. Half of converts (51%) attend worship services at least once a week, compared with 44% of nonconverts. And so on.
Other recent studies show that, contrary to popular belief, sudden conversions like St. Paul's represent only a small portion of all religious transformations, and that the "crockpot" model of a steadily developed spiritual insight is more common and may be more effective in building up a stable religious community than the "microwave" version of rebirth.
"Sudden conversion might be good for morale and motivation, but the emotional instability and lack of knowledge of the sudden convert endangers the continuity of a group," Alan F. Segal wrote in his study, "Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee." "Building a stable community necessarily involves a strong educational program. Even persons who themselves were sudden converts often attempt to socialize their children via gradual conversion processes."
The truth is, as the sociologist of religion Peter Berger has long noted, that religion today is a choice, and we are all converts to one degree or another, choosing among a variety of religious experiences rather than having them given to us, as in days of old. Whether converts do that better than "cradle Catholics"—or whether, as is often the case, that is a distinction without a difference—both categories of believers are bound by the same vocation. Both are as responsible for the success or failure of the church's witness.
STORY NO. 3
Antiabortion analogy is flawed but popular
Religion News Service
Published Nov, 3, 2011 in The Christian Century
Is legalized abortion akin to the Nazi Holocaust? The analogy is a standard talking point among abortion opponents, and a new half-hour video by a prominent Christian apologist has gone viral by making the comparison more explicit and graphic than any antiabortion sound bite on the evening news.
But the success of the video and the popularity of the argument raise the broader question of whether comparing legalized abortion to the Holocaust—or to slavery, another widespread analogy—is logical and legitimate, even if it is effective.
The new Internet movie is called 180, a title meant to signal that viewers will do a U-turn from their previous support for abortion rights. In many respects, it's a standard piece of propaganda in the culture wars.
The video was produced by Ray Comfort, a controversial evangelical Christian from New Zealand who announces at the start of the video that he is Jewish, though in fact his father was a gentile and he was raised without religious instruction. Comfort became a born-again Christian in his early twenties.
For the first half of 180, Comfort interweaves chilling clips of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi death camps with street-level interviews of young people who display fairly predictable ignorance about the Holocaust (and much else). He then pivots to make a connection between what he's told them about the attempted genocide of the Jews and modern-day legalized abortion.
Scales fall from eyes and minds are miraculously changed, at least in Comfort's careful, if self-serving, editing. "What's a pretty good documentary could have been even stronger without the fools early on," as Christianity Today's Mark Moring put it.
But middling reviews and even blistering criticism are hardly going to sink 180. The Holocaust analogy is so powerful that opponents of abortion don't need to examine it very closely, while supporters of abortion rights simply dismiss it out of hand without really refuting it.
So what is wrong with the comparison? The most obvious and common objection is that it deeply offends Jewish sensibilities, even more so when abortion foes use the power of raw numbers to argue that abortion is actually worse than the Holocaust.
"Nearly 60 million Americans have been slaughtered by abortion, and that's ten times the amount of Jews who died under the Nazis," argued Comfort in responding to critics like Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who said those who compare the Holocaust to abortion "prove that they do not know what the Holocaust was."
For a number of antiabortion critics, the problems go beyond respecting the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Instead, they say the analogy has holes that undermine the credibility of campaigns against abortion and can ultimately harm the movement's ability to make its case to the wider culture.
One major flaw in the Holocaust logic, they note, is that the U.S. government is not mandating that women have abortions—unlike the Third Reich, which ordered the extermination of Jews and other classes of people. "At this point in time, neither state nor federal governments require pregnant women to kill their unborn children, regardless of the women's circumstances or the unborn children's condition," Teresa Collett, an antiabortion advocate who teaches at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, has written in critiquing the Holocaust comparison.
"To employ the language of constitutional law, abortions are not state actions, unlike the imprisonment and killing of the Jews by the Nazis," Collett wrote in an exchange on the topic at Mirror of Justice, a popular blog on Catholic legal theory.
Another problem is that even if one considers abortion to be murder, it does not automatically make women who have abortions murderers. "The mothers who choose abortion often feel as though they have no other choice, and admittedly, the choices they face often are not easy ones," Robert Vischer, another law professor at St. Thomas, argued in the Mirror of Justice debate.
"I do not think that choosing to kill their unborn children is the answer, but choosing that answer does not make them the moral equivalents of the Nazis, and neither does our government's willingness to permit them that choice."
In a widely cited 2008 essay in Commonweal magazine, a liberal Catholic periodical, Cathleen Kaveny, who teaches law and theology at the University of Notre Dame, noted several other problems with the analogy.