What it means to be a ‘Jew of No Religion’ — it’s not what you think

I’m thrilled that atheist/agnostic, nonreligious Jews like me seem to be growing in numbers. I’m concerned, though, that our full set of values is not made apparent by the new Pew Research survey of American Jews.

Pew splits the community between “Jews by Religion” and “Jews of No Religion.” It suggests an increase among Jews of No Religion to 27 percent of all Jewish adults, up from 22 percent in their 2013 survey, with a whopping 40 percent among Jews ages 18-29.

I was not surveyed. But had I been, I would’ve had a tough choice with the screening question used to make that determination. Pew asked, “What is your present religion, if any?”

I’m strongly Jewishly identified and want to be counted as a Jew. But I’m equally vocal about my atheism and humanism, and in some ways, those are the more marginalized identities in American society and need greater representation. Had I checked “atheist,” I certainly would have answered affirmatively to the follow-up question, “Aside from religion, do you consider yourself Jewish in any way (ethnically, culturally, family background)?” A yes to that would’ve included me among Jews of No Religion.

Unfortunately, most of the questions posed by this survey will portray Jews of No Religion as “less than,” when compared with Jews by Religion. On average, Jews of No Religion are less Jewishly educated, less synagogue affiliated, less ritually practicing, less emotionally attached to Israel, place less emphasis on being Jewish or belonging to the Jewish people, care less about having Jewish grandchildren, and have fewer Jewish friends than Jews by Religion.

This narrative of “less than” emerges because Pew only measured activities and values cared about by the organized Jewish community and not necessarily by the broader Jewish population.

For example, one question not asked is how strongly Jews believe in the universal equality of all people. One indicator that Jews of No Religion would average “more than” Jews by Religion on universalism is the way we enact that value through our family configurations: Nearly 80 percent of married Jews of No Religion are intermarried (married to spouses who aren’t Jewish), and nearly 60 percent of Jews of No Religion were raised by intermarried parents.

As an intermarried Jew, I see universalism as a positive value. Most of the organized Jewish community is not universalist in approach, though, it is particularistic. And thus, the conflicting narrative.

I’m strongly Jewishly identified and want to be counted as a Jew. But I’m equally vocal about my atheism and humanism.

Pew found the individual rate of Jewish intermarriage remaining at a sky-high 72 percent of non-Orthodox Jews over the past decade. While the report does not share the outcome of such a rate, the result is that today in America, among households with at least one married Jew, there are hundreds of thousands more intermarried than so-called “in-married” (two Jewish spouses) households. A case can therefore be made that universalism is a Jewish value! Which may be one reason why affiliation rates with synagogues and other Jewish organizations remain low. Can the organized Jewish community better appeal to Jewish universalists?

Diversity is another value I believe in. Along with being religiously intermarried, I’m interracially married; my wife is from Japan and our kids are mixed race. While the American Jewish community is still overwhelmingly white, Jews of No Religion are more than twice as likely as Jews by Religion to live in multiracial households. That’s something to celebrate! Jews of No Religion also have twice the rate of LGBTQ+ individuals than Jews by Religion.

While demographic studies can’t measure such things, I’m confident that Jews of No Religion are living their lives just as ethically as Jews by Religion. The great challenge to all religions in our increasingly secular world is the growing recognition that being religious doesn’t automatically make you a better person (and neither does being atheist).

We know that Jews don’t need religion to be good, because the Pew survey demonstrates that even among Jews by Religion, religious belief is significantly weaker than Americans in general. Pew asked whether you believe “in God as described in the Bible,” and only 33 percent of Jews by Religion said yes. While most Jews do believe in some “other higher power or spiritual force,” if that force is not a God that makes specific commandments about how to behave, why are most Jews good? I’d argue it’s their humanistic values, even if they’ve never heard the word humanist before.

It’s humanism — the innate human ability to make decisions based on reason, knowledge, empathy and consideration for what’s best for most people — that fosters the liberal political approach among most American Jews. For example, Jews overwhelmingly support gay marriage and LGBTQ equality. That was not dictated to us from on high, and it wasn’t even the case a few decades ago. It is because of our growing humanism and despite our religious tradition that Jews have come to those conclusions.

So then why still be Jewish at all? That’s the question that some Jews of No Religion already have clarity about, with our continued Jewish identity and participation. For me, it’s about empathy fostered from being part of an at-times marginalized minority, even as I benefit from unsought white privilege. It’s about knowing where I fit into the grand timeline of human history, and a fascination with the unique Jewish story. And it’s about family and celebration.

The organized Jewish community could be providing this and more to the Jews of No Religion it currently is not reaching, but first there must be a recognition and acceptance of the different — yet equally valid — set of values we hold. We’re not “less than.” Our differences can be celebrated equally, if only the communal umbrella were stretched wider.

What’s a ‘Jew of no religion’? 3 American Jews open up about their non-religious identities

Jesse Wilks had a bar mitzvah — just not a religious one.

His parents raised him in a secular home in New York City but still instilled him with a strong sense of Jewish identity. His mother — who worked for the Workers Circle and is now on the editorial board of the left-wing Jewish Currents magazine — hosted holiday dinners, minus the religious prayers. Instead of attending Hebrew school at a synagogue, Wilks grew up going to a “shule,” or non-religious school that taught him Yiddish.

The pattern continued with his coming-of-age ceremony, which gathered family and friends at a synagogue he never attended.

“It did not involve a Torah reading but instead involved picking any topic related to Judaism that interested me, and then working with a tutor … doing research and basically reading the equivalent of a 13-year-old’s paper” during the ceremony, he said. He chose to explore social justice in Judaism and Jewish history, with a focus on labor movements.

Now a 34-year-old architect living in Philadelphia, Wilks does not believe in God and defines himself explicitly as atheist — but also Jewish. That makes him squarely a “Jew of no religion” according to the survey of U.S. Jews released last week by the Pew Research Center.

As it did in 2013, Pew researchers broke American Jews into two broad categories: “Jews of religion” and “Jews of no religion.” People in the second group, the researchers wrote, “describe themselves (religiously) as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, but who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish, and who still consider themselves Jewish in any way (such as ethnically, culturally or because of their family background).”

Out of the survey’s 3,836 total respondents, 882 identified as Jews of no religion, suggesting that nearly a quarter of American Jews — 1.5 million people — fall into the category.

Becka Alper, a 2021 study co-author, said the term captures a large and diverse part of the Jewish community that can’t be summarized by other terms such as “cultural Jews” or “ethnic Jews.”

“It really wouldn’t be sufficient to simply ask people about their religion and categorize [only] those who said Jewish as Jews,” she said. “We’d be missing a really big and important part of the Jewish community, those who are Jewish but not namely or at all as a matter of religion.”

Critics of the term say it draws a distinction where there should be none. “The fact that 24 percent of ‘Jews of no religion’ own a Hebrew-language prayer book should give us pause,” Rachel B. Gross, a professor of Jewish studies at San Francisco State University, wrote in an essay for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the study was released.

Gross argues that the study’s categories reflected a division that makes sense to Christians, but not in Judaism, where practice has always shifted over time.

“American Jews continue to find meaning in emotional connections to their families, communities, and histories, though the ways they do so continue to change,” she writes. “Expanding our definition of ‘religion’ can help us better recognize the ways in which they are doing so.”

That argument resonated with three “Jews of no religion” who talked about their Jewish identities. Here’s what they had to say.

‘I feel Jewish every day’

Certain things trigger Wilks’ sense of Jewishness — for instance, watching the Netflix show “Unorthodox,” about a woman leaving her Chasidic community in Brooklyn. While most days Wilks’ knowledge of Jewish customs, rituals and history stays in the “background” of his mind, “Unorthodox” brought it to the “foreground.”

And when he traveled to Berlin during college, he felt his Jewishness turn to visceral vulnerability, in an uncomfortable way.

“I couldn’t walk around and get out of my head that, you know, if I had been there 70 years before, I would have been murdered. And that colored my entire visit there,” he said. “And that was surprising to me that, you know, that my Jewish identity rose and bubbled up there.”

That experience mapped to one finding in the Pew study: 75 percent of American Jews overall said that “remembering the Holocaust” was important to their Jewish identity, including two thirds of Jews of no religion.

On the other hand, Pew found that while 60 percent of American Jews say they are strongly or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel, only a third of Jews of no religion described such an attachment. Wilks said he never thinks about the country, where he is entitled to citizenship because of his Jewish lineage.

Right now, he is still figuring out what kind of Jewish identity he wants in his life as an adult. Growing up, his mother projected a strong sense of non-religious Jewish identity built on her family history, as a descendant of secular Jewish socialist activists from Eastern Europe.

But now living apart from her, and being married to a non-Jewish woman, Wilks feels more disconnected from Jewish culture. (Jews who are married to people who are not Jewish identify three times as often as Jews of no religion, according to Pew.)

Wilks admitted he would be forced to deal with the issue more head on if he had kids, but he and his wife aren’t planning on having any.

Mandy Patinkin, bagels and a preteen existential crisis

In contrast, Sophie Vershbow knows exactly who she is: an atheist cultural Jew.

The 31-year-old social media manager who works for one of the “big five” publishing houses in New York has a deep connection to Jewish culture. She pointed to two things off the top of her head she feels a particular affinity for: actor Mandy Patinkin,and bagels.

Patinkin is an Emmy and Tony winner who became a minor icon this year for weaving Jewish and social justice themes together on social media. People like him in pop culture create a sense of community for other Jews, Vershbow said, and help familiarize non-Jews with Jewish culture.

That’s something the born-and-bred New Yorker said she realized was needed after she left the city for Hamilton College in upstate New York. Jews make up close to 15 percent of the population of New York City, where she grew up in the Chelsea neighborhood. While Hamilton’s student body was still far more Jewish than the general U.S. population, both the college and the surrounding area felt decidedly non-Jewish to her.

“I called my mom and I was like, ‘What just happened?’ And she goes ‘Sophie, what percent of the country do you think is Jewish?’” Vershbow said.

When it comes to religion, she describes participating in holidays — she still does some of the big ones with her parents, such as Passover and Chanukah — as “going through the motions,” because she doesn’t believe in God. She grew up attending a Reform synagogue but had an early existential crisis of sorts, just before her bat mitzvah — “a pre-teenage change of heart,” in her words.

“I realized that I didn’t believe in God. Sort of the same way that you figure out you don’t believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.”

Her love of Jewish food (she’s extremely excited to be living near Zabar’s on the Upper West Side these days) is straightforward. Bagels on Sundays, latkes on Chanukah, kugel around Yom Kippur — that’s something she sees herself instilling in her kids, if she has any in the future.

Vershbow said she sees no contradiction in her identity — and that being Jewish is at the center of it.

“I think that’s an amazing thing about Judaism, for so many people in my own life, it seems to be pretty acceptable in a lot of communities to say: ‘I don’t believe in God, but I am Jewish.’ And these can perfectly coexist within me. And they’re not conflicting.”

Dropping the deity, for decades

With decades of grassroots and congressional politics experience under her belt, 89-year-old June Fischer can rail off an endless list of accomplishments. She has been a delegate from New Jersey in every Democratic National Convention since 1972; she has worked on Joe Biden campaigns since 1974, including his successful presidential run.

She’s also on the board of her local Jewish community center and in 1990 was a founding member of the National Jewish Democratic Council (now the Jewish Democratic Council of America).

But despite that portion of her resume, she’s not affiliated with a synagogue — showing that the “Jews of no religion” category is not a 21st-century invention.

Fischer grew up in Weequahic, the section of Newark that Philip Roth made famous in his many novels based there. In fact, she graduated from high school with Roth, after sitting next to him in homeroom class for four years.

When she was 15, she went to see Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s first vice president, give a speech. She caught the politics bug because of his inspiring performance — not because of any sense of Jewish morality ingrained in her. “I was smitten,” she said.

Although the National Jewish Democratic Council, which she characterized as a liberal response to the AIPAC lobby, and many of the politicians she’s worked with dealt often with Israel-related issues, Fischer is not a zealous follower of the news in Israel.

And holiday dinners were — and still are for her — more about sticking to tradition than observing religious ritual.

“I do the traditional things, without the deity, as I say,” she said on the phone from her home in Clark. “I’m an atheist, I guess. But I’m fiercely, fiercely traditionally Jewish.”

—JTA News and Features

THE RELIGION CORNER: Coming Out of the Pandemic — Clearness or Confusion?

It seemed pretty clear last week when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent out a press release announcing that people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 no longer need to wear masks or physically distance — whether indoors or outdoors, in most circumstances.

“We have all longed for this moment when we can get back to some sense of normalcy,” the CDC’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said during her weekly media briefing on May 13. “Based on the continuing downward trajectory of cases, the scientific data on the performance of our vaccines and our understanding of how the virus spreads, that moment has come for those who are fully vaccinated.”

However, in the real world, from where I see it, half of Americans will have to slow-walk this news. It feels like we are in a state of confusion. I began to think about the day I walked into Panera Bread to order some breakfast, forgot to put my mask on because I was fully vaccinated, and the bakery clerk said, “Ma’am, you must wear a mask for service!” I had let my guard down and was beginning to feel like my old self again — I was fully vaccinated, and my two-week waiting period was over.

Here is where the “state of confusion” comes in. None of us have the mark of our vaccination written on our forehead; therefore, who knows for sure who has been vaccinated or who has not?

After hearing the news last week, personally, I felt excited, ready to do just as the press release said — throw all of my masks in the trash and live life just as I did before the pandemic. That doesn’t seem to work. It appears that we will have to slow-walk this mask business, just like we did when we were finally convinced to start to wear masks.

First lady Jill Biden was speaking for millions of women when she said she went shopping to find a pink mask to match her outfit. I have black masks with orange bling to match my orange suede designer heels; I have black masks with my radio show logo! Just as we all finally began to settle into the idea of mask-wearing, now they tell us we can take them off. Eventually, our brain goes along with whatever we tell it over and over! Now, we must begin to tell ourselves, it’s time to get back to normal.

The confusion didn’t stop there. During my Zoom sorority conference last weekend, a couple sorority sisters were wearing masks, after the big announcement. During several telephone conversations, friend after friend told me they are planning to continue to wear their masks, and one was a pastor. My chapter members said they are not ready for face-to-face meetings just yet. They’re worried the person next to them may not be vaccinated.

Waiting to see if there may possibly be another major outbreak of COVID-19, yet again, is real. They are afraid they may get caught up and suddenly find themselves sick unto death. We have been told that once we get the vaccine, we are considered safe, so why are there so many naysayers?

This is all so new, I can understand the fear. I’m beginning to feel the same way, too. Here is where our faith must kick in, though. Scripture tells us to “walk by faith, not by sight.” Matthew 8:26 says: “And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm.”

Regardless of what the Bible says, we are not perfect, and that doesn’t mean we do not have faith — it is the human side of us, and I understand.

Lyndia Grant is a speaker/writer living in the D.C. area. Her radio show, “Think on These Things,” airs Fridays at 6 p.m. on 1340 AM (WYCB), a Radio One station. To reach Grant, visit her website, www.lyndiagrant.com, email lyndiagrantshowdc@gmail.com or call 240-602-6295. Follow her on Twitter @LyndiaGrant and on Facebook.

Church of Scientology Los Angeles Launches Monthly East Hollywood Neighborhood Cleanup

With pandemic restrictions predicted to end in June, Church of Scientology Los Angeles helps make East Hollywood safe with a series of monthly cleanups.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, May 19, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ — As Los Angeles inches back to normal and the economy continues to open, on Saturday 15 May a team of Volunteer Ministers from the Church of Scientology Los Angeles helped make East Hollywood more inviting for neighbors and visitors with the first of a series of monthly cleanups.

The volunteers collected 22 bags of trash and power washed stretches of sidewalk just a few blocks from the Scientology Church. With three major hospitals, numerous shops, takeouts and restaurants, and the Barnsdall Art Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, nearby, the volunteers decided to take the initiative to make the area clean and safe.

“This is a great neighborhood to live and work in,” said Susanna Johansson, public affairs director for the Scientology Churches of Greater Los Angeles. “We invite anyone wishing to help to join the next neighborhood cleanup on June 12.”

Volunteers receive a t-shirt and snacks and are invited to take part in a get-together after the cleanup to thank them for their hard work.

The next community activity organized by the Church of Scientology Los Angeles is a drive-thru food giveaway at 4800 West Sunset Blvd. on Saturday, May 29, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. It is held in partnership with the Guatemala Chamber of Commerce. All are welcome.

The iconic headquarters of the Church of Scientology of Los Angeles is designed to provide the ideal facilities for Scientologists on their ascent to higher states of spiritual freedom and to serve as a home for the entire community and a meeting ground of cooperative effort to uplift people of all denominations.

HWPL WARP Office Comparison of Scriptures Meeting: Making the DPCW a Bridge between Religion and Peace Law

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America Faces a Perilous No Religion Culture

If the culture is to survive and flourish, it must not be severed from the religious vision out of which it arose — Russell Kirk

The United States exists because of its culture, whose essence is deeply religious.

In his “Memory and Identity,” St. John Paul II reminds us that, “Man lives a really human life thanks to culture… Culture is a specific way of man’s ‘existing’ and ‘being’… Culture is that through which man, as man, becomes more man, is more.”

Man cannot be fully understood without Christ and religion.

In his unforgettable speech in Communist-occupied Poland in Warsaw on June 2, 1979, the late Pope explained, “Man cannot understand who he is, nor what his true dignity is, nor what his vocation is, nor what his final end is.

“He cannot understand any of this without Christ… Therefore, Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography… The history of people. The history of the nation is above all the history of people. And the history of each person unfolds in Jesus Christ.”

America teeters at the end of an era.

Cultural revolution destroys our tradition, history, education, manners, customs, and life-giving tradition. Books have given way to television.

Telephones have replaced face to face conversation. Social media have taken over our life.

Consequently, a crisis of family has enveloped us.

With values and morals at the crossroads, our country faces social and individual disintegration. Critical race theory divides the people and dismantles America.

In his famous “The Great Liberal Death Wish,” Malcolm Muggeridge warns us: “So we press on through the valley of abundance that leads to the wasteland of satiety, passing through the gardens of fantasy; seeking happiness even more ardently, and finding despair ever more surely.”

According to America’s preeminent 20th century philosopher Russell Kirk, “To most observers, T.S. Eliot among them, it has seemed far more probable that we are stumbling into a new Dark Age, inhumane, merciless, a totalist political domination in which the life of spirit and the inquiring intellect will be denounced, harassed, and propagandized against: Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ rather than Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ of cloying sensuality.”

Democratic freedom of liberal society, ostensibly so vaunted by our elites, often translates into attacks on religious belief. God and truth are fingered as putative threats to liberty. For many secularized, our culture has no connection with the love of God.

As Eliot argues: “Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negative: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its own chaos.”

Be ready for this and learn how to push back. The truth is that culture is deeply and irrevocably intertwined with faith. Religion gives meaning to life and provides the framework for a culture.

Therefore, it’s impossible without religion to understand the contribution of the United States of America to the development of men who pass through this land. It is impossible to understand America, its history and culture, without God. The exclusion of religion from this One Nation under God of ours is a hostile act against man.

Our future remains unknown. Yet, the believers hope for a sign from God.

Our nation experiences many cunning passages and dark corridors now but the past shows there are miracles that unexpectedly can reverse the course of history.

By a great effort of the people’s will our culture could be reanimated, faith resurrected, and religion boosted with new found strength.

But again, all remains in the hands of God.

Finally, as the most remarkable historian Christopher Dawson aptly avers in his “Religion and Culture,” “the events of the last few years portend either the end of human history or a turning point in it. They have warned us in letters of fire that our civilization has been tried in the balance and found wanting — that there is an absolute limit to the progress than can be achieved by the perfectionment of scientific techniques detached from spiritual aims and moral values. . . .

“The recovery of moral control and the return to spiritual order have become the indispensable conditions of human survival. But they can be achieved only by a profound change in the spirit of modern civilization.

“This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture which has existed at every age and on every level of human development.”

Amen to that.

In the end, I venture to remind you individuals will respond by God. And nations are made up of individuals.

Without individual faith, there will be no collective resurrection of America.

Monika Jablonska is an author of “Wind from Heaven: John Paul II, The Poet Who Became Pope.” Her next book on Saint John Paul II is forthcoming in 2021. She is a lawyer and a literary scholar living in Washington D.C. Read Monika’s Reports — More Here.

Justin Welby, the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury

Introduction:

The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby is the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury.

As the head of the 85-million member Anglican communion across the world, he is the spiritual leader of the Church of England and a network of churches historically linked to that institution in terms of its beliefs, methods of worship and organizational structures.

A former oil executive and member of the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British Parliament, Welby is thoroughly modern and progressive in his outlook. His meteoric rise to leadership comes at a time of contentious debates over gay marriage and women bishops, inspiring hopes that he will be able to use his personal charm and ecclesiastical power as well as political connections to reconcile the conservative and liberal camps within the Anglican Church.

Welby made history when he was enthroned on March 21, 2013, at the age of 57, by a female cleric, Archdeacon of Canterbury Sheila Watson. It was a culturally diverse event that featured Punjabi music, African dancers and Anglican hymns.

“There is every possible reason for optimism about the future of Christian faith in our world and in this country,” Welby said in his sermon, adding his vision: “The Church transforms society when it takes the risks of renewal in prayer, of reconciliation and of confident declaration of the good news of Jesus Christ.”

It’s a vision that is echoed in Welby’s three key priorities. According to the Church’s official website, these are Evangelism and Witness; Prayer and Renewal of Religious Life; and Reconciliation. Besides supporting women bishops, he has condemned profiteering energy companies and pledged to put payday loan companies out of business by allowing credit unions to operate in church halls. His toughest challenge, however, still lies ahead—persuading his Anglican flock to love thy gay neighbor.

In His Own Words
“I think this is the most extraordinary moment of choice in my lifetime. It’s a choice. We had a choice in 1945 in Western Europe and the better choice was taken to seek reconciliation, peace, democracy and freedom. That led to what in France was known as Trente Glorieuses, the thirty glorious wonderful years. I think we have a choice now of a default option, which is that the most powerful and the richest in our societies re-establish things much as they were before the pandemic. Or we can choose — and we have that real reality now — to redevelop our societies with much more emphasis on human dignity, on human equality, without shutting down the economy or adopting particularly unpleasant measures, but in seeking a much more humane society that reflects the Christian roots of Europe.” — Archbishop Justin Welby, responding to a question in a March 30, 2021 interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica about how to fix the global inequality starkly highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Because of history, we are one of the largest landowners in the country. Collectively, we hold over 200,000 acres of land as well a large stock of historic and many other buildings. But more than that, with 12,500 parishes and 18,000 clergy, we have a committed and continuing presence in every community in this country. We incarnate Christ’s promise of love and hope, not just through our worship services, but by offering foodbanks, debt advice centers, night shelters and much much more. Worship reaches people online. There is precedent also for the Church’s involvement in housing — from almshouses to housing associations, the church has for centuries been involved in the provision of decent places to live. We do not do this to be ‘nice’ — we are not an NGO with a pointy roof. We do this because we believe that Christ commands us to love our neighbor. The Church can and should make a substantial contribution to the housing crisis, using our resources well to serve others. That is why I have submitted a motion to the Church of England’s General Synod, calling them to recognize that ‘addressing housing need and strengthening communities is an integral part of the mission and ministry of the Church of England.’” — Archbishop Justin Welby, speaking to the House of Lords on March 24, 2021, about the need for a long-term housing strategy in Britain.

“Today Christians celebrate with faith and certain knowledge that Jesus was raised from the dead. While I disagree with Prof Alice Roberts of the Humanists, I thank God that we live in a country where she can speak freely.” — Archbishop Justin Welby, in an April 4, 2021, Easter Sunday Twitter message, referring to Alice Roberts, a biological anthropologist and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham, who evidently neither believes in the existence of God nor in the resurrection of Jesus. On April 2, 2021, Roberts tweeted: “Just a little reminder today. Dead people — don’t come back to life.” (It was unclear whether she was denying the belief in life after death or urging dead people not to come back to life.)

“We can go on as before Covid, where the most powerful and the richest gain and so many fall behind. We have seen where that left us. Or we can go with the flooding life and purpose of the resurrection of Jesus, which changes all things, and choose a better future for all.” — Archbishop Justin Welby in April 4, 2021 Easter Sunday sermon to Britons at the Canterbury Cathedral.

“The overwhelming generosity of God to us should inspire the same by us, in everything from private acts of love and charity to international aid generously maintained. We have received overwhelmingly, so let us give generously.” — Archbishop Justin Welby in April 4, 2021 Easter Sunday sermon to Britons at the Canterbury Cathedral, where he criticized the British government’s plan to reduce its international aid, even as a global pandemic rages.

“For the Royal Family and the millions who have themselves suffered loss, we can know that the presence of Christ will bring peace, and the light of Christ will shine strongly, and it is in that light that we can strengthen one another with eternal hope.” Archbishop Justin Welby paying tribute to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh at his funeral April 17, 2021.

“The lion of our time has many faces, some of them modern, many of them as old as the church itself. The lion, as I say, has many faces, but they are not the faces that we see around us.” — Archbishop Justin Welby, in his 2020 address to the General Synod, the Church of England’s General Assembly and legislative body, highlighting what he believes are the dangers of social media platforms.

“In one of the climactic passages of the New Testament, Paul says to those who follow Christ that their ‘love must be genuine, that they hate what is evil and hold fast to what is good.’ He asks them to ‘serve the Lord,’ exhorting them to ‘rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.’ None of this is easy. Especially not at the moment. But it is our calling.” — Archbishop Justin Welby, in a November 1, 2020, letter jointly written to the clergy of the Church of England following yet another pandemic-related lockdown ordered by the government across the United Kingdom

“We don’t want people to lie, to act with cruelty, or to use religious jargon in a way that ontologically results in some epistemological confusion — to use some religious jargon … it’s the golden rule that Jesus Christ talks about: treat others as you would like to be treated.” — Archbishop Justin Welby, speaking in 2019 to Nicola Mendelsohn, the European head of Facebook, about so-called alternative facts and the poisonous nature of social media.

“The scale of waste in this country is astonishing. As a nation we discard about 15 million tons of food a year, at least four million thrown out by households.” — Archbishop Justin Welby, quoted in a 2014 Reuters article about an opinion piece he wrote in The Mail on Sunday, in which he observed he was more shocked to see the hungry in Britain than the plight of those starving in parts of Africa.

The Stories Others Tell

“With an astonishing range of understanding and a perspective both global and granular, Justin Welby identifies values that are true to our heritage and fertile for our hope. … Archbishop Ramsey once told priests to be ‘with God with the people on your heart;’ … Archbishop Welby is with God with the nation on his heart, and the result is rigor and compassion in equal measure.” – The Rev. Dr Sam Wells, vicar of St.-Martin-in the-Fields, an Anglican church in Westminster, London, in his review of Archbishop Justin Welby’s 2021 book Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope.

“Welby exhibits a remarkable sense of humility and a genuine self-deference. This arises in part from his own honest opinion of himself; when invited to write a letter to his 14-year-old self, he started like this: ‘Dear Justin, You are rarely good at anything, a fact you know well and worry about. But don’t worry — it does not measure who you are.’ It offers a small window into someone who has genuinely wrestled with issues of achievement and self-esteem, who is very aware of inner struggles but who has managed not to allow these to hobble him. And it means he is able to speak his mind on an issue — and apologize if he has got it wrong, which is both refreshing and endearing.” — Theologian, author and speaker Ian Paul, in a 2014 book review of a noted biography Archbishop Justin Welby: Risk-Taker and Reconciler.

A Life in Brief

Archbishop Justin Welby was born on January 6, 1956, in London. His parents — Gavin Welby and Jane Welby (née Portal) — divorced when he was three years old. The young Welby had a fraught childhood, not least because both his parents were alcoholics.

Welby studied at Eton College and at Trinity College, Cambridge — both elite institutions that are believed to have played a pivotal role in his spectacular 2013 rise to lead England’s top church. After graduating in 1978 with a master’s degree in history and law, he worked as a financial executive in the petroleum industry, initially for Elf Aquitaine, a French corporation, and later for Enterprise, a Houston, Texas-based company.

Welby left the corporate world in 1989 and entered the seminary. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a diploma in theology from St. John’s College, Durham, revealing a talent for issues surrounding banking and corporate ethics as well as conflict resolution and reconciliation. His 1992 diploma dissertation, which later became a significant pamphlet, was titled “Can Companies Sin?”

Welby is the author of several critically acclaimed books, the latest of which is a revised and expanded 2021 edition of Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope, initially published three years earlier. “The fundamental message of that book remains as urgent as ever,” notes the work’s publisher, Bloomsbury, adding: “Welby has taken fully into account the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and all the social and political unrest that has ensued. … Here is a radical vision for 21st-century Britain.”

Achievements We’ll Remember

1992: Welby begins his clerical service by being ordained as a deacon in the Church of England’s Coventry diocese.

1993: He becomes a priest.

1995-2000: Welby serves as rector of St. James Church in Southam, and St. Michael’s and All Angels in Ufton, revitalizing both churches and expanding their congregations.

2002-2007: Welby serves as a canon and subdean of Coventry Cathedral where he also co-directs the cathedral’s International Center for Reconciliation. He works with Anglican missions, often under the threat of violence, to help resolve conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.

2005: Welby helps negotiate a peaceful settlement between Shell Oil Company and the Ogoni tribe of Nigeria against the background of allegations that Shell had polluted local groundwater and conspired with the Nigerian military to violently suppress protests. He also holds frequent meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and plays a key role in the reopening of the Anglican Church in Baghdad.

2007: Welby becomes dean of Liverpool Cathedral, England’s largest cathedral. He substantially expands the cathedral’s outreach to the poor and to asylum seekers, while continuing his overseas reconciliation work as well as writing on a range of ethical and financial issues.

2012: Welby serves on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. He advises legislators on corporate ethics issues and assists in an investigation of banking standards in the aftermath of a scandal surrounding the manipulation by major British banks of worldwide interest rates.

2013: Welby becomes the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury, succeeding Rowan Williams, whose tenure was marked by a widening theological rift between traditionalists and reformists within the Anglican Church over the issues of the ordination of women and openly gay bishops as well as same-sex marriages.

2019: Under Welby’s direction, the Church of England announces social media guidelines aimed at countering “alternative facts” — the first such step ever taken by the historic institution. Welby outlines the campaign’s three precepts—truth, kindness and welcome.

The Church He Serves

The Church of England — The Anglican Church

Considered something of a fusion — or a middle way — between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, the Anglican faith is the third-largest Christian denomination in the world, after the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches.

Despite its global communion, Anglicanism does not have a worldwide juridical authority, and each province governs itself. The Archbishop of Canterbury, in the United Kingdom, is however, the Anglican Communion’s spiritual leader and “focus of unity.”

The foundational prayer book of Anglicanism is The Book of Common Prayer, first authorized for use in the reign of Edward VI of England. It was first published in 1549 and underwent considerable revision in 1552, with minor revisions in 1559, 1604 and 1662 . It is the first prayer book to include complete forms of service for daily and Sunday worship in English. Considered one of the great works of literature, the book has influenced the English language as well the liturgies of other Christian denominations, especially marriage and burial rites.

Politics, religion and Pew

Everyone knows that in order to keep peace in polite company, religion and politics should be avoided. But the two are intertwined in the Pew Research Center’s new report, “Jewish Americans in 2020.” One finding even suggests that, among Jews, politics is becoming the new religion, as a majority of Jews said it is more important for future grandchildren to share their political convictions than to marry someone who is Jewish.

Despite that jolt, the new study mostly refines the conclusions of Pew’s earthshaking 2013 study that brought to the Jewish world the concept of “Jews of no religion” and established that more Jews (73 percent) say that remembering the Holocaust is more important to being a Jew in America than observing religious law or any other factor.

Among the significant takeaways from the study is that Orthodox Jews are growing as a percentage of American Jewry, and that they are growing apart from the rest of the Jewish community. One sign of that divergence is the Orthodox community’s increasing support for the Republican Party.

Historian Tevi Troy posits that based upon the results of the Pew study, the mystery of why Jews “live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans” — which is to say that Jews are generally wealthy but identify with groups who have attained far less of the American dream — has been solved, since the study “shows that secular Jews vote like other secular, highly educated, and urbanized populations” — Democratic. But the new mystery, according to Troy, is why Orthodox Jews, who live primarily in blue states in proximity to liberal Jews, “live near hipsters but vote like Mormons.”

Pew calls these changes “religious divergence.” Jews ages 18-29 have the highest share (17 percent) identifying as Orthodox of any age group, as well as the highest share (40 percent) identifying as Jews of no religion — a seeming movement in that age bracket to the edges of Jewish identity.

At the same time, the Jewish community has become more diverse and more accepting of Jews of color, LGBTQ Jews and intermarried families. And in the area of intermarried families (with numbers continuing to rise among non-Orthodox communities), there are some interesting findings. For example, if Jewish babies is your goal, Pew reports that nearly all in-married Jewish couples are raising their children as Jews. But, at the same time, the fear that children of intermarriage are lost to the Jewish people appears to be less of a concern. Pew found that more than two-thirds of children of intermarriages are being raised with some Jewish identity, ranging from a fully Jewish upbringing to “partly Jewish.”

Pew found 7.5 million Jewish adults and children in the U.S., up from 6.8 million in 2013. Some are already contesting that number. But no matter what our numbers, the report shows that the Jewish community was right to leap into a period of introspection and experimentation after the explosive results of Pew’s 2013 study. We need to do the same thing in reaction to this year’s results.

Science Future Glorious; Religion – Why Bother?

This piece was reprinted by OpEdNews with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Science Future
Glorious;

Religion -
Why Bother?

(Daylight
Atheism – 5/17/21)

By James A. Haught

In an 1820 letter to Portuguese
scholar Correa de Serra, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“Priests of the different
religious sects” dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of
daylight.”

Jefferson saw the clash between religion and
science clearly. Ever since his day, science has achieved astounding benefits
for humanity, while supernatural faith has provided little.

In Jefferson’s
time, human life expectancy averaged in the 30s (mostly because of horrible
child deaths). Today, life is near 80, thanks chiefly to medical
science.

I was born in 1932 in a little
Appalachian farm town with no electricity or paved streets. Horse wagons were common. My privileged parents had gaslights and
running water – but most farm families had kerosene lamps and outdoor
privies. Conditions were little
improved from medieval times. Since
then, science has sent American life skyrocketing.

Just before World War II, penicillin
and antibiotics were developed – and they eventually cut world deaths
enormously, saving millions of lives.

In the 1940s, Arthur C. Clarke and a
few other science writers saw that, if an object was rocketed into space at
just the right speed, 22,000 miles above Earth’s equator, it would fall into
an orbit exactly matching the planet’s rotation, so it would remain “fixed”
in the sky, usable to bounce communication waves. Now more than 1,000 such satellites fill
the sky.

Discovery of the double-helix DNA
molecule in 1953 explained life, evolution, biology, and unleashed new fields
of health.

Exploring the solar system has become
so common that a private firm does it, and human stations on the moon and
Mars seem likely.

<

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Bengaluru: Religion no bar for warrior who gives dead final adieu

BENGALURU: The worst of times seems to bring out the best in some human beings. Mohammad Ibrahim, a 44-year-old entrepreneur from Bengaluru, who has been performing the last rites of Covid-19 victims whose families are unable to make it to the funeral, is a living example.
Ibrahim has performed the last rites for at least 30 Covid-19 victims in accordance with Hindu and Christian traditions and per wishes of bereaved families. In one case, he not only performed the last rites, but also immersed the ashes in the Arkavathy river.
“Everybody deserves to be sent respectfully. If I perform the last rites of a person from another religion, that does not change my religion. I do it because I want to help,” Ibrahim said.
One of 30 volunteers with Mercy Angels, the NGO, Ibrahim says he has lost count of the number of Covid victims he has laid to rest or cremated. “There are times when I’ve done last rites for 3-4 people in a day. At this point we really don’t care what people may think about this. We are doing this for those who are in helpless situations. Families which couldn’t make it to the cemetery or crematoria or who are infected themselves, are all very appreciative and thankful for the work we do and that’s what matters,” Ibrahim said.
Ibrahim has also been providing food for the underprivileged since the first wave and has also doubled as ambulance driver.
He says his family is unaware of his Covid work. His entire family, including his two children and 78-year-old mother tested positive a few weeks ago. “I was worried sick for my family, yet I tried helping others for the two weeks I was at home isolating,” he said.
Ibrahim is a director of a large eatery chain and distributes nearly 3,000 packets of food to those in need from the restaurant. He said some packets are even sent via Dunzo. “Although the cost of sending food via Dunzo is more expensive than the food itself, it would be wrong to expect a hungry person to understand this,” he said. “I have converted one of my cars into an ambulance. I ferry people to the hospital, testing centres and vaccine sites at any time of the day,” the RT Nagar resident said.
Ibrahim has also learnt to collect swab samples and occasionally helps paramedics at testing sites.

Protected: Academy for Jewish Religion California To Ordain and Graduate 10 Jewish Leaders

Top Stories

Bad Religion announce Decades livestream shows

Bad Religion have announced that they will be playing more “Decades” livestream shows. There will be four shows in total with each focusing on a decade of their career. The shows will be livestreamed from The Roxy in Hollywood California on the NoCap platform each Saturday in June at 2pm PT. June 5 will focus on the 1980s, June 12 will focus on the 1990s, June 19 will be the 2000s, and June 26 will be the 2010s. The shows will also include interviews and behind the scenes footage. Bad Religion last released Age of Unreason in 2019 via Epitaph Records.

Religion is impeding our progress as a country

The Member of Parliament(MP) for Assin Central constituency, Kennedy Agyapong, has indicated a number of factors that have become a hindrance to the progress of the country.

According to the business mogul, the progress of the country is being impeded by the perception of Ghanaians with religion and the mentality, as well as attitude towards work, making foreigners taking over the businesses and the markets in the country.

Speaking in an interview on Asempa FM’s “Ekosiisen” Afternoon Show, Kennedy Agyapong intimated that foreigners like Indians and Lebanese as well as other nationals have the right attitude and mentality for business, unlike Ghanaians who out of religion don’t even want to open their shops for business on Sundays.

Giving a scenario he witnessed in Kumasi one Sunday after attending a wedding, he said that he could not find any Ghanaian shop opened that Sunday apart from “Omotuo” [Rice Ball] joints, but found Palace and Melcom Shops belonging to Lebanese and Indians respectively opened for business around 12:30 pm.

He bemoaned the way Ghanaians do not find it needful to apportion time for everything they do even on Sundays as they could have opened their shops for business after church and not leave the Sundays’ sales for the foreigners alone.

“I keep saying that religion is impeding progress in this country, and after you say fix it. Everybody including myself should fix our attitudes and mentality. This is what I saw in Kumasi and I had time to count the Ghanaian shops which were closed, and I told the people around me why the Indians and the Lebanese will continue to make money in this country, because all the Sunday sales will go to these two foreign companies because all the other shops belonging to Ghanaians are closed,” he bemoaned.

“Why is it that Christians go to church on Sunday and so they will not open their shops, but if the Indians and the Lebanese who are not Christians open their shop on Sundays, they rush to go there to buy something they need,” he wondered.

“Our attitude towards work and our perception with religion are the hindrance to our progress. I don’t have any problem when someone goes to church but we need to apportion time for everything you do. After church, they go to the Tuo Zaafi joint to eat. Are they, therefore, saying that the people who prepared Tuo Zaafi are the devil’s incarnate? I am trying to draw your attention to why Ghanaians don’t seem to be succeeding.”

He, however, mentioned another hindrance to the success of Ghanaian businesses to be poor management.

“Another hindrance to our progress in the business sector is poor managers handling Ghanaian companies. I am sorry to tell you the truth that if you establish a company and hand it over to a Ghanaian to manage it for you, the person will bring the company down, but if you give it to a foreigner to handle, the business flourishes,” he mentioned.

“All the companies that are succeeding in the manufacturing and retailing are owned by the Chinese, Indians, Lebanese, British and other nationals. Because of our poor mentality and attitudes, we are always seen as underdogs, doing labourer work in our own country and the foreigners have taken over the juicy positions in the private sector,” he added.

What’s a ‘Jew of No Religion’?

By Gabe Friedman

Jesse Wilks had a bar mitzvah — just not a religious one.

His parents raised him in a secular home in New York City but still instilled him with a strong sense of Jewish identity. His mother — who worked for the Workers Circle and is now on the editorial board of the left-wing Jewish Currents magazine — hosted holiday dinners, minus the religious prayers. Instead of attending Hebrew school at a synagogue, Wilks grew up going to a “shule,” or non-religious school that taught him Yiddish.

The pattern continued with his coming-of-age ceremony, which gathered family and friends at a synagogue he never attended.

“It did not involve a Torah reading but instead involved picking any topic related to Judaism that interested me, and then working with a tutor … doing research and basically reading the equivalent of a 13-year-old’s paper” during the ceremony, he said. He chose to explore social justice in Judaism and Jewish history, with a focus on labor movements.

Now a 34-year-old architect living in Philadelphia, Wilks does not believe in god and defines himself explicitly as atheist — but also Jewish. That makes him squarely a “Jew of no religion” according to the survey of U.S. Jews released last week by the Pew Research Center.

As it did in 2013, Pew researchers broke American Jews into two broad categories: “Jews of religion” and “Jews of no religion.” People in the second group, the researchers wrote, “describe themselves (religiously) as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, but who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish, and who still consider themselves Jewish in any way (such as ethnically, culturally or because of their family background).”

Out of the survey’s 3,836 total respondents, 882 identified as Jews of no religion, suggesting that nearly a quarter of American Jews — 1.5 million people — fall into the category.

Becka Alper, a 2021 study co-author, said the term captures a large and diverse part of the Jewish community that can’t be summarized by other terms such as “cultural Jews” or “ethnic Jews.”

“It really wouldn’t be sufficient to simply ask people about their religion and categorize [only] those who said Jewish as Jews,” she said. “We’d be missing a really big and important part of the Jewish community, those who are Jewish but not namely or at all as a matter of religion.”

This chart from the study shows the researchers’ thought process behind the categories and questions. (Pew Research Center via JTA.org)

Critics of the term say it draws a distinction where there should be none. “The fact that 24% of ‘Jews of no religion’ own a Hebrew-language prayer book should give us pause,” Rachel B. Gross, a professor of Jewish studies at San Francisco State University, wrote in an essay for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the study was released.

Gross argues that the study’s categories reflected a division that makes sense to Christians, but not in Judaism, where practice has always shifted over time.

“American Jews continue to find meaning in emotional connections to their families, communities, and histories, though the ways they do so continue to change,” she writes. “Expanding our definition of ‘religion’ can help us better recognize the ways in which they are doing so.”

That argument resonated with three “Jews of no religion” who told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about their Jewish identities. Here’s what they had to say.

“I feel Jewish every day”

Certain things trigger Wilks’ sense of Jewishness — for instance, watching the Netflix show “Unorthodox,” about a woman leaving her Hasidic community in Brooklyn. While most days Wilks’ knowledge of Jewish customs, rituals and history stays in the “background” of his mind, “Unorthodox” brought it to the “foreground.”

And when he traveled to Berlin during college, he felt his Jewishness turn to visceral vulnerability, in an uncomfortable way.

“I couldn’t walk around and get out of my head that, you know, if I had been there 70 years before, I would have been murdered. And that colored my entire visit there,” he said. “And that was surprising to me that, you know, that my Jewish identity rose and bubbled up there.”

That experience mapped to one finding in the Pew study: 75% of American Jews overall said that “remembering the Holocaust” was important to their Jewish identity, including two thirds of Jews of no religion.

On the other hand, Pew found that while 60% of American Jews say they are strongly or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel, only a third of Jews of no religion described such an attachment. Wilks said he never thinks about the country, where he is entitled to citizenship because of his Jewish lineage.

“I feel zero connection to Israel. To me, it’s the same [as] any country that I haven’t visited,” he said.

Right now, he is still figuring out what kind of Jewish identity he wants in his life as an adult. Growing up, his mother projected a strong sense of non-religious Jewish identity built on her family history, as a descendant of secular Jewish socialist activists from Eastern Europe.

“[I]t’s hard for me to articulate what role [Jewishness] plays in my life,” says Jesse Wilks. (Via JTA.org)

But now living apart from her, and being married to a non-Jewish woman, Wilks feels more disconnected from Jewish culture. (Jews who are married to people who are not Jewish identify three times as often as Jews of no religion, according to Pew.)

Wilks admitted he would be forced to deal with the issue more head on if he had kids, but he and his wife aren’t planning on having any.

“There’s no question I feel Jewish every day and would always identify myself as that. But I don’t know, it’s hard for me to articulate what role that plays in my life,” he said.

Mandy Patinkin, bagels and a preteen existential crisis

In contrast, Sophie Vershbow knows exactly who she is: an atheist cultural Jew.

The 31-year-old social media manager who works for one of the “big five” publishing houses in New York has a deep connection to Jewish culture. She pointed to two things off the top of her head she feels a particular affinity for: actor Mandy Patinkin, and bagels.

Patinkin is an Emmy and Tony winner who became a minor icon this year for weaving Jewish and social justice themes together on social media. People like him in pop culture create a sense of community for other Jews, Vershbow said, and help familiarize non-Jews with Jewish culture.

That’s something the born-and-bred New Yorker said she realized was needed after she left the city for Hamilton College in upstate New York. Jews make up close to 15% of the population of New York City, where she grew up in the Chelsea neighborhood. While Hamilton’s student body was still far more Jewish than the general U.S. population, both the college and the surrounding area felt decidedly non-Jewish to her.

“I called my mom and I was like, ‘What just happened?’ And she goes ‘Sophie, what percent of the country do you think is Jewish?’” Vershbow said. “I studied the Holocaust in college, and learning about our history and how much we’ve been persecuted certainly makes me feel more connected to [my Jewish side]. And makes me feel like it’s important to carry these things on.”

But when it comes to religion, she describes participating in holidays — she still does some of the big ones with her parents, such as Passover and Hanukkah — as “going through the motions,” because she doesn’t believe in god. She grew up attending a Reform synagogue but had an early existential crisis of sorts, just before her bat mitzvah — “a pre-teenage change of heart,” in her words.

“I realized that I didn’t believe in God, and was like, I’m not going to go ahead and do my bar mitzvah. This doesn’t feel right to me,” she said. “Sort of the same way that you figure out you don’t believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. It didn’t really work for me.”

Her love of Jewish food (she’s extremely excited to be living near Zabar’s on the Upper West Side these days) is straightforward. Bagels on Sundays, latkes on Hanukkah, kugel around Yom Kippur — that’s something she sees herself instilling in her kids, if she has any in the future.

“I don’t think you have to go to temple for it to be passing [Judaism] down to your kids,” she said. “But if one ever said, you know, ‘Mommy, I want to go check it out, I want to see, I will certainly take my kids to temple and show them.”

Vershbow said she sees no contradiction in her identity — and that being Jewish is at the center of it.

“My family is Polish, Russian, all of that, but … I don’t feel personal connection to any of that. I feel a connection to the American Jewish experience. And that is a huge part of my identity,” she said. “But I think that’s an amazing thing about Judaism is that, for so many people in my own life, it seems to be pretty acceptable in a lot of communities to say: ‘I don’t believe in God, but I am Jewish.’ And these can perfectly coexist within me. And they’re not conflicting.”

Dropping the deity, for decades

With decades of grassroots and congressional politics experience under her belt, 89-year-old June Fischer can rail off an endless list of accomplishments. She has been a delegate from New Jersey in every Democratic National Convention since 1972; she has worked on Joe Biden campaigns since 1974, including his successful presidential run (and became a close friend of his); she worked in the offices of former Sen. Jon Corzine and current Sen. Robert Menendez.

She’s also on the board of her local Jewish community center and in 1990 was a founding member of the National Jewish Democratic Council (now the Jewish Democratic Council of America).

But despite that portion of her resume, she’s not affiliated with a synagogue — showing that the “Jews of no religion” category is not a 21st-century invention.

Fischer grew up in Weequahic, the section of Newark that Philip Roth made famous in his many novels based there. In fact, she graduated from high school with Roth, after sitting next to him in homeroom class for four years.

When she was 15, she went to see Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s first vice president, give a speech. She caught the politics bug because of his inspiring performance — not because of any sense of Jewish morality ingrained in her. “I was smitten,” she said.

Although the National Jewish Democratic Council, which she characterized as a liberal response to the AIPAC lobby, and many of the politicians she’s worked with dealt often with Israel-related issues — Biden and Menendez both specialize in foreign policy — Fischer is not a zealous follower of the news in Israel.

And holiday dinners were — and still are for her — more about sticking to tradition than observing religious ritual.

“I do the traditional things, without the deity, as I say,” she said on the phone from her home in Clark. “I’m an atheist, I guess. But I’m fiercely, fiercely traditionally Jewish.”

Misuse of religion can lead to violence

There’s no question that the misuse of religion leads to intolerance and bloodshed. No major religion is immune. Yet, the politicisation and weaponisation of religion is a potent tool. It allows entrenched power elites to instigate war and violence. Often the price is the slaughter of the defenseless by heavily armed state and non-state actors.

The fact is that the moral side of religion – peace, tolerance, and compassion – is easily eclipsed once politics and conflict enter the mix. Instead, the dark side of religion – intolerance, murderous wars, and hyper-nationalism – takes hold. The cover of religion, unfortunately, is used to incite the fired-up faithful to wreak murderous havoc. Instigating intra-religious or internal strife are age-old tactics used by power elites in history.

The call to Christians in Europe by Pope Urban II in 1905 to fight a holy war against Muslims was a deadly nexus between religion, politics, and war. The Pope’s cry of “God wills it!” launched the campaign to reclaim Jerusalem. It was an early fusion of religious passion and opportunistic politics. Urban’s real intent was to use the Crusades to extend the territorial power of the church and create a church monarchy. In the First Crusade’s ultimate act, the conquest of Jerusalem, some 3,000 people were killed. Both Muslims and Jews, in an act, are described as religious cleansing.

Christianity’s long tryst with the manipulation of religion ended after the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. Religious and nationalist strife during the war had merged to devastate central Europe. The reduction in religious conflicts in the West is mainly because of the reduced influence of the Church on the affairs of the state. And the increasing power of secular democratic institutions.

But the secular abuse of religion didn’t end. The United States weaponised Buddhism and Islam in South-East Asia and Afghanistan. It was an integral part of its anti-communist campaigns. And Soviet Russia, Tito’s Yugoslavia, and China oppressed and killed millions to create Godless societies. It was part of the bid by totalitarian states to impose state-sponsored atheism. The adverse legacy of these actions continues to haunt parts of the world today.

These days the lethal mix of virulent nationalism and religious fundamentalism has shifted to the Middle East and South Asia. It is blended with the exercise of power and politics. And competing nationalism based on religion-based ideologies poses a significant threat to peace.

The conflicts have worsened with struggles for power and conflicting claims on the land. As long as Kahanists and Hamas extremists control the narrative there will be no peace for Israelis and Palestinians. Similarly, Hindus and Muslims can’t live in lasting peace until the excesses of Hindutva and Islamism are checked.

After the 9/11 atrocities in New York, the West placed its focus on combating Islamic extremism. It put its checkered past of abusing religion conveniently behind it. The rampaging hordes of the Islamic State (ISIS) in the Middle East butchering civilians, the Taliban blowing up girl’s schools in the AF-Pak region, and murderous Jihadi violence in Europe made the headlines. It lent credence to the Western notion that Islam as a religion is out of control with few redeeming features.

Muslims’ intolerance to different points of view is primarily blamed for the animus between Islam and the West. Yet like Jewish and Christianity fundamentalists, Islamists believe in total fealty to God’s truth. Islamists also negate freedom of conscience and worship. Fellow and non-believers who deny divine revelation are subject to Islamist violence.

The fact is that Islam is facing similar challenges that Judaism and Christianity had great difficulty overcoming. There is a rigid religious conviction that false faiths are unacceptable. Islam, like other religions, is also going through a critical phase where revisionist thinking is disallowed. And a significant minority of Muslims see violence against revisionists as a divinely ordained duty.

Politicians and the clergy have a license to foment bigotry, fears, and suspicions of others. It is based on faith, religion, or spiritual practices. Often it is disempowered and disenfranchised masses who are used to commit murder and mayhem on the dangerous issue of blasphemy.

Such is the expressive battle cry of religion that it is hard to defeat. Even the huge military superiority enjoyed by secular and totalitarian powers has failed. Ending the misuse of religion will remain a fruitless exercise as long as power elites profit from politicising and weaponising religion. And religious extremism will continue to thrive as long as religion is used to gain religious legitimacy and sustains political ideologies.

Faith in unity, Malerkotla backs district decision in one voice – ‘It’s about development, not religion’

Even as the second Covid wave muted Eid festivities this year, a box of sweets still quietly found its way from Malerkotla’s Aqsa Masjid to the town’s Laxmi Narayan temple with the message ‘Chand Mubarak’.

The mandir and masjid have shared a common wall for decades in Malerkotla’s Somsons Colony. And for years, their caretakers have greeted each other without fail on Eid and Diwali. The tradition has remained unbroken through the pandemic.

In the colony where Hindu and Sikh families are in majority, Aqsa Masjid caretaker says the community has never faced any issue.

Few kilometres away at Talaab Bazaar, prasad from shops of several Muslims owners is offered by devotees at the Hanuman temple.

At the historic Gurdwara Haa Da Naara Sahib, devotees irrespective of their faiths, prepare langar every day for Covid patients – something they have been doing since the pandemic started.

At Malerkotla, which is the only Muslim majority town in Punjab with over 90,000 Muslims, 28,000 Hindus and 12,800 Sikhs as per 2011 Census, the gurdwaras, mandirs and masjids intersect each other’s path in almost every street, but people of this town have always imparted some crucial lessons in peaceful co-existence.
Laxmi Narayan Mandir and Aqsa Manjid in Somsons colony of Malerkotla, share a wall. (Express Photo)
So on Eid, as CM Captain Amarinder Singh declared Malerkotla as Punjab’s 23rd district of Punjab, it was a decision welcomed by all irrespective of their faith. Miles away, Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath found fault with it and tweeted, “Any distinction on the basis of belief and religion is contrary to the basic spirit of the Constitution of India. Presently, the formation of Malerkotla (Punjab) district is a reflection of the divisive policy of the Congress.”

Questioning the UP CM’s premise of divisiveness, Chetan Sharma, the priest of Laxmi Narayan temple, questioned: “If a medical college and hospital will come up in Malerkotla, will only Muslims get treatment there showing their ID cards? No, that hospital will be for all, be it Hindu, Muslim or Sikh. We, the people of Malerkotla, want development and better facilities for our town. If it is becoming a district, then facilities that will come along will be for all, not just Muslims. Our local MLA, Razia Sultana, had promised before polls that Malerkotla will be made a district. Everyone here is happy with this decision.”

He added: “Few days back on Eid, our neighbouring Aqa Masjid sent us a box of sweets like every year. We share a common wall but we have never allowed any political issue to disturb harmony here.”

The caretaker of the mosque, Mohammad Shabbir, said:”Temple management always coordinates with us during Ramadan. It is Hindu-Sikh dominated colony but we have never faced any issue, instead everyone respects masjid too. A district would mean that we don’t have to travel to Sangrur for basic works. There is nothing related to a specific religion here,” says Mohammad Shabbir, caretaker, Aqsa Masjid.

The unique social fabric and communal harmony of Malerkotla town has passed several tests through history — be it the Partition when Muslims here chose to stay back and there was no communal violence, the Babri Masjid demolition and the most recently, the Ayodhya case verdict in November 2019 — when the town was turned into a fortress with heavy police security, but no untoward incident was reported. It was only in June 2016, when the holy Quran was allegedly desecrated, its pages found strewn in streets, that an angry mob had resorted to an arson at the house of then SAD MLA Farzana Alam, wife of former DGP Izhar Alam. That incident had happened ahead of the 2017 Punjab Assembly polls.

SAD had then blamed Congress for “pre-planned attack” and conspiracy, but Razia Sultana, currently Malerkotla MLA from Congress (wife of retired DGP Mohammad Mustafa), had refuted allegations. Later, police had named AAP MLA Naresh Yadav (from Delhi) as an accused in Quran desecration, but he was later acquitted by the court.

As Punjab approaches another Assembly election, the Congress government’s decision to make Malerkotla a district may has raised the hackles of UP CM, but his tweet has been met with criticism from locals and political leaders alike.

Farzana Alam (67), former local SAD MLA, once an ally of BJP, said, “A district is never made on the basis of religion, but only when it is actually needed. It has not been done just to make Muslims happy. It would mean development for people of Malerkotla.”

“People of Malerkotla have never really listened to outsiders who have tried to instigate or destroy their peace,” she said on Yogi’s tweet.

Standing as a testimony of Malerkotla’s communal harmony is Gurdwara Haa Da Naara Sahib, which was built by Sikh community as a tribute to erstwhile ruler of Malerkotla Nawab Sher Mohammad Khan, who had raised his voice (‘Haa Da Naara’) against brutal execution of Chhote Saahibzaade (youngest sons of Guru Gobind Singh — Zorawar Singh (9) and Fateh Singh (6) – by Nawab of Sirhind, Wazir Khan.

Head priest at the gurdwara, Narinder Singh (47), said, “Nawab Sher Mohammad Khan had objected to the execution of Chhote Saahibzaade and said that their fight was with Guru Gobind Singh, not his small children. He had refused to take revenge from children. Even as he could not stop kids from being bricked alive in a wall, he had walked out and given ‘Haa Da Naara’ in their support. Later, the last ruler of Malerkotla– Ifthikar Ali Khan had given land to Sikh community to build this historic gurdwara as a tribute to Sher Mohammad Khan. The ‘Quila Mubarak Manzil’ is located closely to the gurdwara,” he added.

“People who do not know about the glorious history of Malerkotla should not interfere. Now that it will become a district, people like us won’t have to go to Sangrur which is 35 km away for small works. We even have to pay toll tax for travelling from Malerkotla. Since the pandemic started, people here irrespective of their religion, are helping in preparing langar at the gurdwara which is delivered for Covid patients. There is hardly any person here who is unhappy about Malerkotla becoming a district,” said the gurdwara priest.

Yogi’s comments have even invited sharp reactions from his own party colleague Union Minister Som Parkash and Aam Aadmi Party MP Bhagwant Mann.

Sangrur MP and AAP state president Bhagwant Mann said, “Who is Yogi Adityanath to comment on Malerkotla? This town has a special place in the heart of every Punjabi. In 1947, not a single Muslim migrated from Malerkotla. We got the regional passport office opened here because people here travel to Mecca-Madina and Pakistan often. To make Malerkotla a district is an administrative decision which will bring development hopefully. The town still does not have good educational institutions for both boys and girls beyond Class 12. The government senior secondary school for boys still does not have something as basic as commerce stream. We should focus on development for people of Malerkotla, not their religion. Yogi should keep his seeds of hatred for somewhere else and first handle UP,” said Mann.

Government has announced setting up of a medical college in name of Nawab Sher Mohammad Khan for Rs 500 crore, a government college for girls, a police station managed by women staff only and restoration of Mubarak Manzil Palace for the new district.

BJP MP and Union Minister Som Parkash had tweeted, “I congratulate people of Malerkotla and thank Chief Minister ji for declaring Malerkotla as a district… It is a rich tribute to the Nawab of Malerkotla who protested execution of two Sahibzaade… Malerkotla is a symbol of communal harmony…”

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