Robert Tracinski, over at The Intellectual Activist (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/the_secular_right.html), takes up an issue most of us don’t like to talk about, possessing as it does the potential for an ugly internecine squabble. Being secular and right should not be an oxymoron, any more than being Jewish and Republican. I’m all those things, and I exist.

As a Jewish Republican, I welcome evangelicals’ support for Israel, as should everyone who’s not an anti-Semite. Jewish Democrats, however, hear “faith” and think “KKK.” They’re wrong; they’re out of date; but we consign those voters to ice floes when we let our leaders and our spokespeople trot out their Christianity on all occasions. Take the “war on Christmas” – please. Turning December 25 into “the holidays” was one of the best things to happen to American Jews (not to mention Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians and Ba’hais) in the last sixty years. I’d love to send our servicepeople a Spring basket – but when it’s called an Easter basket, I take my hand off the phone. Intelligent, well-educated talk show hosts lose listeners like me in droves when they discuss New Testament theology or Chronicles of Narnia. It’s inside baseball at its dreariest.

Robert Tracinski of the The Intellectual Activist (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/the_secular_right.html) takes up an issue most of us don’t like to talk about, possessing as it does the potential for an ugly internecine squabble. Being secular and right should not be an oxymoron, any more than being Jewish and Republican. I’m all those things, and I exist.

As a Jewish Republican, I welcome evangelicals’ support for Israel, as should everyone who’s not an anti-Semite. Jewish Democrats, however, hear “faith” and think “KKK.” They’re wrong; they’re out of date; but we consign those voters to ice floes when we let our leaders and our spokespeople trot out their Christianity on all occasions. Take the “war on Christmas” – please. Turning December 25 into “the holidays” was one of the best things to happen to American Jews (not to mention Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians and Ba’hais) in the last sixty years. I’d love to send our servicepeople a Spring basket – but when it’s called an Easter basket, I take my hand off the phone. Intelligent, well-educated talk show hosts lose listeners like me in droves when they discuss New Testament theology or Chronicles of Narnia. It’s inside baseball at its dreariest.
I am not trying to be harsh. I’d like to think I speak for thousands, if not millions, who have figured out by now that the Democratic party doesn't have its interests at heart. Nonetheless, they continue to vote blue, terrified that if they vote their conscience (not to mention their pocketbooks), storm troopers will come bursting through the door and separate us into lines. Most American Jews have had little, if any, face-to-face contact with evangelicals. The preconceptions have been formed by parents and grandparents who remember housing tracts and country clubs and businesses and universities where we were not admitted till the sixties; by the MSM’s and Hollywood’s kneejerk pigeonholing, in which only cranks and hicks were Christians; by their expensive educations (“four legs good! Two legs bad!”); and by their social circles, which although they may be multicultural and polyethnic share one trait in common: detestation of the “fundamentalist” “religious right.”  

And things do happen …sometime in the 1990s a stone-sober partygoer told my husband he would “give him all the money in [his] wallet” if said spouse would consent to read the New Testament.  Okay, okay, one nut at a party .. but this is how most Jews see Christians, evangelical amazed-by-grace Christians: humorless, one-tracked proselytizers who hear “Jew” and think “money.”

The secular Jews can be part of the secular right. They should be, and they might be, if we who have already, heh, passed over can convince them that Republicans are not all “a bunch of Pat Robertsons,” as I once heard a friend say. The secular Jews, and the secular right, will return the GOP to office in 2008, if we have the simple good sense to pick a nominee people want to vote for. Put Rudy Giuliani in the big tent, and watch it expand.