Spiritual Politics.

THE FIFTY-YEAR TRADITION

IN Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II, Mark Silk has written a two-hundred-page history of a single word: "Judaeo-Christian."

To hear him tell it, the Judaeo-Christian tradition is nearly fifty years old now. He seems to agree with my friend the sociologist John Murray Cuddihy, whom he quotes, that the term is a sentimental piece of "ecumenist public relations" expressing "the cultural and theological illiteracy of our times."

The term gained currency among liberal Protestants and Jews during the pre-war struggle against Nazism, serving to help forge a sort of theological popular front, then gained even wider currency for similar reasons during the Cold War. Silk follows the term's winding career with a sharp and witty narrative. He explains the motives, mostly benign, that inspired its coinage and use, but he is unmistakably skeptical of the supposed tradition it represents.

Of course he is not the first to find the whole idea problematic. Many have. At a time when most Christian and Jewish leaders were becoming preoccupied with interfaith good will and with endowing America with an "adhesional" (as opposed to exclusivist) civil religion, the Boston Jesuit Leonard Feeney insisted literally that outside the Church there is no salvation --an ancient formula everyone else was bent on softening. One of Feeney's followers even saw impending damnation in the fact that Notre Dame's football team included Protestants. Feeney was finally excommunicated.

Dozens of familiar and once-familiar characters parade briskly through Silk's pages: Reinhold Niebuhr, Fulton Sheen, Henry Luce, Paul Blanshard, the young Billy Graham, Adlai Stevenson, Cardinals Spellman and Cushing, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Harvey Cox, Bishop Pike, the Berrigans, Jerry Falwell. Silk ably sketches the controversies that engaged them, spicing the story with pungent quotations. Here's Feeney's tart description of an interfaith meeting: "a place where a Jewish rabbi, who does not believe in the divinity of Christ, and a Protestant minister, who doubts it, get together with a Catholic priest, who agrees to forget it for the evening."

Silk knows the words well, but he misses some of the music. At times he uses labels--"right-wingers," "cold-war rhetoric"--to dispose of large realities he'd rather not deal with or extend empathy to. It would have been a better story if he'd given all his characters equal weight. That "cold-war rhetoric" is only fully intelligible if you're aware of what American Christians were aware of at the time: the ferocious Communist persecution of Christians. Silk hardly mentions it. But liberal anti-Nazi rhetoric would sound just as overheated to someone who didn't know what Hitler was doing over there.

Even more seioulsy, Silk seems to miss the central evasion of Judaeo-Christianity: its buried tenet that Jesus Christ is unnecessary. He had become a scandal to the Christians, so some of them tried to rebuild religion around social action and political activism--more or less worhty things, but always secondary, in Christian tradition, to the business of salvation. The ecumenists tended to talk as if Jesus had come for the purpose of improving Judaeo-Christian relations.

Feeney, Silk notes darkly, "had a particular thing about Jews." He was recently reincarnated in the person of Bailey Smith, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who is renowned for having said that "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." Silk, to his credit, gives the whole passage, in which Smith actually said (apropos of interfaith religious political rallies), "With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew. For how in the world can God hear the prayer of a man who says that Jesus Christ is not the true Messiah?"

Which shows that Smith was sensitive to the shock he was giving to ecumenist manners. But, like Feeney, he would rather be accused of talking bigotry than make nonsense of his own faith. He later described himself as "pro-Jew" (I think he meant to say "philo-Semitic"), but insisted, "Jews have an argument with me because they have an argument with the New Testament." Time and again he tried to soften the offense without compromising the essential point.

It's a touching episode, illustrating as it does that while Christianity is a religion, Judaeo-Christianity is nothing more than a code of etiquette. Not that that makes it utterly despicable. Even Dr. Johnson acknowledged that polite cant has its place: "My dear friend, clear your mind of cant.... You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don't think foolishly."

Silk, as I say, seems to agree with Cuddihy that Jews shouldn't be taken in by "the Judaeo-Christian tradition." He's right. And neither should Christians. There are ways to find common ground without the tyrannizing sentimentalism that demands that other people reach our conclusions from their premises.