Conversion Therapies

To survive, Jews must remain alert - and wary of false reassurances from others who claim to have our best interests at heart. People who say they know better than we do what those are pose a particularly serious danger.

Their conversionary efforts in this spirit dovetail with other brainwashing routines that support destructive, supremacist agendas.

For centuries, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches aimed at converting Jews to Christianity. They used a carrot-and-stick approach. The carrot: you go to heaven after this life. The stick: forswear your religion and accept ours or we’ll humiliate/rob/dispossess/rape/murder you - followed by eternal hellfire in the world to come.

Missionary activity to convert Jews was enshrined in churches’ liturgies; forced conversion was forbidden in church doctrine but often carried out brutally.

Early during my rabbinate, while living and working in an Ohio town on the northeast edge of the American Bible Belt (from my front window I often saw horses and buggies of Amish folk trotting down the street), I was subjected to a milder although still repugnant form of soul-saving arm-twisting when a local Mennonite minister-cum-insurance-agent came to my office ostensibly with the aim of having us get better acquainted and - to my astonishment - proceeded to evangelize, urging me to accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior.

I was shocked, bemused, offended, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. He thought he had every right to act this way.

I pretty quickly showed him the door.

Since Vatican II1, liberal Christians, taking their cue from the Catholic church, have stopped trying to do that. They know their religious doctrine shaped a culture of contempt which fed into modern antisemitism and led to the Holocaust.

Embarrassed by the legacy of Jew-hatred encouraging them to coerce and bully us into abandoning our faith and become Christian, they understand how theological anti-Judaism makes for bad moral optics, so conversion attempts are off limits.

For Conservative Evangelical Christians, it’s a different story (as my encounter with the above-mentioned clergyman shows). And besides continuing the deplorable tradition of pressuring Jews to convert, Fundamentalist zealots target another group as well.

Anti-LGBTQ+ activists invented a pseudoscientific concept, “conversion therapy,” which mimics legitimate protocols and usages in the field of psychology. (Conversion therapy parallels the equally phony concept, in the field of physics, of “creationism” or “intelligent design,” which makes the silly argument that science confirms a literal reading of the Bible’s Creation story.)

Conversion therapy’s main premise: Gayness is a psycho-social disorder curable through faith-based therapeutic measures. Responsible medical practitioners and other health care professionals warn: Conversion therapy is seriously harmful.

There’s a tremendous irony here. The American Psychological Association, which debunks conversion therapy and correctly points out its dangers2, is implicated in another perverse proselytization enterprise, one that fosters antizionist incitement.

Rebecca Harris of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law characterized “decolonizing therapy” as “a pathologizing of Zionism and Jewish identity”3. The notion being: Jews who stand with Israel can be mentally reprogrammed to reject it and stand with its enemies; what’s involved in essence is a program for “the erasure of Jewish identity”4.

Which brings us back to the wretched annals of Christian proselytizing.

Liberal church leaders who pride themselves on having atoned for their religion’s abuses have in their official pronouncements joined the latest chorus of defamation that is antizionism. They’ve merely exchanged an old form of Jew-hatred for a new one. While no longer aiming to turn Jews into Christians, these Christians still want us to be something different from what we are.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) - a large umbrella organization of mainly mainline Protestant denominations espousing broadly ecumenical, generally liberal views - a year ago boldly proclaimed, in a statement published online, “We recognize and denounce the system of apartheid imposed by Israel on the Palestinian people, in violation of international law and moral conscience.” More cautious but no less self-righteously judgmental in tone is an observation that “…Israel’s military campaign in Gaza…may constitute genocide5.”

Genocide involves explicit, systematic intention to destroy a nation or ethnic group in whole or in part. Israel’s actions toward Palestinians never have fit that definition; Hamas’s actions toward Israel always have. WCC’s statement makes no mention of Hamas!

These inflammatory allegations - of genocide and apartheid - bring up, according to the Movement Against Antizionism, which characterizes antizionism as an anti-Jewish hate movement, two of three “constitutive libels” essential to antizionist ideology (the third being “colonizer”6).

Liberal Christianity has not let go of the belief that Jews must convert but, joining forces with antizionists, converted an arrogant religious stance into the secular currency of Palestinianism7.

I am certain most liberal Christians who pontificate about Israel’s alleged atrocities and demand for it to change its behavior sincerely believe they’re a therapeutic influence, a force for healing, promoting Jewish people’s best interests, doing God’s work, the same as their medieval forebears did in scolding Jews about their sinfulness for stubbornly refusing to negate Judaism and embrace Christianity’s supersessionist orthodoxy.

Jewish people, keep your eye on the ball: The conversionary compulsion aimed at us hasn’t disappeared. It’s just recalibrating.