Key to Conversion

Last month some 150 denominations and other groups of North American Christians opened a yearlong evangelical campaign called Key 73. The participants range from Kansas City Roman Catholics to the Canadian Home Bible League. Their slogan: "Calling our continent to Christ." Although the drive so far seems to be mainly a matter of a television special, publicity and local evangelizing, a recent article in the evangelical fortnightly Christianity Today avowed that Key 73's goal is to give "every person in the U.S. and Canada a real chance to say yes to Jesus Christ and to become a dependable member of his church."

Some persons have already taken the opportunity to say no to Key 73 in emphatic and sometimes angry terms. They include some prominent U.S. Jews who consider the campaign to be a retrogression to pre-ecumenical Christianity. But Jews themselves are divided on the issue.

Rabbi Solomon Bernards of the Anti-Defamation League leveled one of the most thoroughgoing criticisms in the Christian Century last month. Bernards questioned the "monolithic undertones of this effort that aims at a completely Christian America." The campaign fostered "triumphalism," he charged, citing one prediction that Christians could convert the entire world within two years. Moreover, mass evangelical efforts inevitably employ "simplistic theology [and] emotional appeals," and tend "to disparage and downgrade other faiths and value systems."

Another rabbi, however, Henry Siegman of the Synagogue Council of America, warns against taking "the alarmist view" of Key 73. Writing in the current issue of the American Jewish Congress's Congress Bi-Weekly, Siegman doubts "that any significant number of Jews will be won over to Christianity by Key 73. Those few who will convert will do so because we have allowed Jewish life to become so secularized, so emptied of transcendent meaning, that some of our children will turn to Christianity and to other faiths in order to fill a terrible spiritual void."

Siegman goes so far as to suggest that an "intensely Christian environment can in fact make for a more traditional Jewish community"--an argument that provokes an outraged response from Ecumenist Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum in the same magazine. The U.S. has already had just such an intensely Christian environment, Tanenbaum points out, in the days when evangelical Christianity and American nationalism were considered synonymous. In that situation "Jews were second-class citizens, denied the right to vote and hold public office."*

A number of groups involved in Key 73 have decided to avoid the issue altogether. The Richmond, Va., clergy association, for instance, expressly ruled out proselytism of Jews, directing its efforts only to "inactive and unchurched people in the Christian community." Such moves would have been hailed by the late and eminent Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel, who last week got in a posthumous word on the proselytism question through a television interview taped just before his death in December. It was Heschel whose persuasive efforts at the Vatican helped win Roman Catholics away from trying to convert Jews. "If there are some Protestant sects who still cling to this silly hope of proselytizing [Jews]," he said, "I would say that they are blind and deaf and dumb."

* Tanenbaum refers to Colonial America and the early decades of the Republic. Though the Constitution guaranteed equal rights on a federal level, Jews were barred in some states from voting, and in more from holding office, well into the 19th century.

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