A few months later, in another ad in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Toward Tradition proclaimed that “a country that turns away from God will unwittingly lower its defenses” and asserted that “a religious America is a safe America.”
Although not as active in politics anymore, Lapin lectures before Christian audiences around the globe, posts endorsements on his website from a who’s who of the evangelical Christian world – including Pat Robertson, John Hagee, and James Dobson – and hosts a daily television show on the Christian TCT channel.
Explaining why he entered moral politics, Lapin told The Jewish Press that “[A]s the years went by, I realized that most Christians in America were deeply baffled how the people who stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai could be the same people aggressively promoting such matters as abortion, homosexual marriage, and the widespread growth of pornography. I realized that somebody needed to help them see a difference between Jewish values and the things that many Jews do.”
Another motivation that drives people like Lapin is the conviction that a more religious America will benefit Jews. “Europe is an extremely good model of what happens when secularism wins,” Lapin said. “Anti-Semitism is an inevitable accompaniment of secularism, and Nazism and communism are essentially the ultimate expressions of liberalism. I think America is better served by a religiously vibrant Christianity.”
In an interview with James Davison Hunter, author of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, Rabbi Levin made a similar point, invoking the behavior of Jewish travelers in Europe:
Rabbinic legend has it that the Jew should watch the wagon driver closely as he passed a church. If the driver made the sign of the cross the Jew should continue on the journey; if he didn’t…the Jew should ask to be dropped off right there. Why? It was believed that if the driver manifested enough of a religious feeling to make the sign of the cross…odds were he would be safe. If the driver didn’t show any religious devotion, the risk of being manhandled later on in the journey was much greater. That’s my attitude toward a Christian majority in America. When you have a secular society, you have the rapists and the muggers and the family breakers and you have what is happening today.
An increasing number of Jewish figures have been echoing this argument in recent decades.
In 1997, the prominent neoconservative Elliott Abrams wrote a book, Faith or Fear, arguing that it behooves Jews to work with conservative Christians. “[T]he calculation that a religious America endangers Jews is false and should be abandoned,” he contended.
In a Toward Tradition pamphlet, David Klinghoffer observed that the most “ambitious hope” of the Christian Right, after all, is only “to return America to the way it was, morally, in the 1950s” – and “American Jews…seemed to survive the 1950s fairly well.”
Abrams argues that while “Jews as individuals may prosper in an increasingly secular America…no religious community can.”
Already in the 1950s and ‘60s, some Jewish thinkers warned of the dangers of a secular society. It is “in the interest of the American Jewish community,” wrote Professor Michael Wyschogrod, “that America remain a God fearing nation.” Professor Jacob Petuchowski put the matter more bluntly:
Life in the medieval Christian world…certainly was no bed of roses for the Jews. But Jews fared infinitely worse in those modern societies from which the God of Abraham and of Jesus had been banished. If Jews cannot forget the Middle Ages, they owe it to themselves to remember the most recent past too. One could argue…that the very self-interest of the Jews is at stake in preventing the United States from becoming a totally godless society.
