Christian Proselytizing Rests on a Foundation of Christian Hegemony & Privilege

Since 2022, I have seen television commercials selling Jesus as part of the “He Gets Us Campaign” sponsored and funded by several donors, including Hobby Lobby co-founder David Green and others, many who wish to remain anonymous. The campaign was originally overseen by The Servant Foundation, which is no longer involved.

The most recent installment of “He Gets Us” profiles John Cash singing his “Personal Jesus.” But I often wonder why some Christian denominations and organizations need to promote their religion. Why, for example, would Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons walk the streets and go door to door to sell their interpretations of Jesus’s message as if they were selling cosmetics or vacuum cleaners?

Why would the “He Gets Us Campaign” advertise on television like capitalist corporations selling pharmaceuticals, automobiles, or house gutter screening that limit clogging?

Do they not trust that their product is sufficient enough to simply attract others rather than having to actively promote (proselytize)?

Imagine the U.S. in our post-9/11 age, and Muslims went door to door to proselytize Islam? How might many people respond? How would you respond if you are not a follower of Islam?

Just the act of wearing a head covering for a Jew, a Muslim, or a Sikh in the United States is an act of courage. For example, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported an incident in which a Muslim woman wearing a hijab (the garment many Muslim women wear in public) took her baby for a walk in a stroller, when a man driving a truck nearly ran them over.

The woman cried out, “You almost killed my baby!,” and the man responded, “It wouldn’t have been a big loss.”

Individuals have targeted Sikhs and Hindus as well. National attention focused on the severe beating of Rajinder Singh Shalsa in New York City, and the fatal shooting of Sikh gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi in Mesa, Arizona. It is widely assumed that Sikhs are targeted because they wear turbans, which the public imagination equates with Muslims, which equates to “terrorist.”

The latest repugnant and shameful incident was directed against a Muslim woman in New York City on April 26 of this year by orthodox pro-Israeli Jews who shoved her and threw objects striking her in the head. CAIR has called for the police department to pursue hate crimes charges against members of the mob.

Would the mob have stalked and attacked this woman had she been wearing a large Christian cross around her neck? Most likely not since Christians have social privileges that followers of other religions and non-believers simply do not have in the United States.

While the historical Jesus was a righteous prophet who promoted love, peace, understanding and acceptance of differences wherever he traveled, unfortunately many of his followers have misused his message to condone some of the worst evils imaginable, including religious wars, forced conversions, theft of land and resources, colonization, and death.

Though some people consider Christian proselytizing as going out to offer others the “gift” of Jesus, many of us either consider it as an annoyance, or, in my case, see it as a form of oppression.

Recently, I ordered 20 kitchen cabinet pulls of green glass Jadeite like those hung in the 1930s and 1940s, manufactured from the company Rowdytown. I was delighted when they arrived, and I tore open the box and counted all 20 of the shiny objects. I was distressed and very angry to find also in the box a four-page folded pamphlet asking on the front page, “Are you on the right road?”

It turned out to be a Christian proselytizing missive sent along with the product. It discussed the necessity of following the Ten Commandments and warned of the obligation of taking Jesus into one’s life:

“The good news is: He [God] provided a way for you to be forgiven. He sent HIs Son, Jesus Christ, to take your punishment…The day of salvation is today. Don’t put it off. Confess your sins to God…put your trust in Jesus to save you….”

Not so long ago, I received without my solicitation another unwanted “gift” in the mail. That time it was an entire book written specifically for Jews who needed to “know the right way.” I wrote the sender:

“Hey Tom Cantor,

If Jesus were so wonderful, you wouldn’t have to promote him through the mail like a free sample of toothpaste or garbage bags. Instead, people would come flocking to him on their own by attraction. I’m a proud Queer Jew, unlike you, and I don’t need your Christian hegemonic propaganda in the form of your unsolicited book Changed. It’s too bad that your rabbi father was so abusive to you and to all five of his wives. But that was not because of his Judaism as you imply.

Warren (proud Queer Jew) Blumenfeld”

That was my response to the author who shipped his book unsolicited to my home address based specifically and solely on my supposed Jewish last name. I assert this because when polling several neighbors on my street, none of the others received the book.

I have been targeted directly by Christian proselytizing for being Jewish many times in my life. Yes, we all have Jehovah’s Witnesses and young male Mormon missionaries ring our doorbells (and figuratively push our buttons), but many of us have been consciously targeted based on our secular or religious “otherness” as we stand outside the confines of Christianity.

In fact, I received a brochure in the mail sent to my home from a group calling itself “Messiah Today” out of Waverly Hall, Georgia, insisting that I must “see the truth,” in their terms.

 The brochure went on to argue that,

“If you reject Jesus, you do so not because the facts are lacking, but out of a choice not to believe the valid evidence. It is not so much that you cannot believe, but that you will not believe. Whether you will admit it or not, Jesus is the Messiah on whom your eternal destiny rests.”

 And yes, I was the only house on my street to have received this brochure.

Institutions

Leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) came under intense scrutiny in 2012 when Elie Wiesel, renowned author and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who survived the German Holocaust, publicly requested that Republican presidential candidate and member of the Mormon Church, Willard Mitt Romney, advise his denomination immediately to abandon its practice of posthumously baptizing Jews, many of whom the Nazis ruthlessly tortured and killed during World War II.

The LDS Church often performs these baptisms by proxy for the supposed purpose of “saving” Mormon ancestors and members of other faith communities who did not receive baptism while alive. The Church does so without the authority of the deceased’s family members.

An Israeli genealogist discovered the practice back in 1994. She went on to discover that other prominent Jews suffered similar humiliation, including Anne Frank, Albert Einstein, the parents of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion.

Her discovery at the time provoked justifiable indignation within the Jewish community, and following arbitrations between Mormon and Jewish leaders, led to an agreement in 1995 in which the Mormon Church committed to stop all posthumous baptisms of Jews, excluding those who were direct ancestors of Mormons.

Throughout millennia up to the current era, some Christians have represented the Jewish religion — and by implication, the Jewish people — as an immature or intermediate developmental religious stage on the way to Christianity, the so-called advanced, mature faith, and the Jewish Bible as only a prelude to the eventual coming of Jesus and the Christian testaments.

Charles Darwin, in his pioneering book The Origin of Species, published in 1859, posited an evolutionary theory of plant and animal development. Though Darwin himself did not assert this, some of Darwin’s successors known as “Social Darwinists” extended his ideas to theorize that Jews and the Jewish religion were throwbacks to earlier stages of religious and human development, and even that Jews were not fully human.

Within Darwinian theory we find the concept of continuity and advancement, from animal to human, from savage to civilized. A supposed “Darwinian” model, published in the German magazine Der Schlemiel in 1904, depicted in a four-staged horizontal drawing how the underdeveloped immature Chanukah menorah, symbolizing Judaism, “evolved” ultimately into the highly developed mature Christmas tree, symbolizing Christianity (even though Christians appropriated the symbol of the lighted tree from Paganism).

Hitler and the Nazis used “racial arguments” as the cornerstone of their policies and considered Jews (and most people of color, including people of African descent, and also people with disabilities) as descendants from inferior “racial strands.” Hitler claimed that Germany lost World War I because of their internal enemies: the Jews, who had “polluted” the so-called “Aryan” race.

For me, this is no simple disagreement, but rather, a fight against oppression, and a fight for social justice.