National Prayer Breakfast For Israel: Lowered Decibels

By Catherine M. Willford

The National Prayer Breakfast, organized by the Memphis-based Religious Roundtable, has been held for eight years as part of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) annual convention in Washington, DC. Traditionally, it has served two functions. It is an opportunity for Christian Zionists to, "in prophetical solidarity with our Jewish brethren, affirm the importance of the state of Israel, and unite against those forces of darkness who wickedly assail them and their beloved state." It also provides a platform from which congressional and government officials can vie with each other in proclaiming their unconditional support for "our strategic ally, the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel."

The National Prayer Breakfast also serves a third, unintended purpose. It functions as a crystal ball, providing a preview of future players in the political game of "Let's see who can love Israel the most." It's also a proving ground for new catch phrases and code words to rationalize the strategy of cooperation between the pro-Israel lobby and the religious right.

For a reporter who attended the Feb. 1, 1989, prayer breakfast, as well as a private briefing for NRB attendees at the Israeli Embassy, and similar events in 1987, the differences in attendance, speakers, and focus were striking. They point to a weakening, or shift, in the rock-solid 1980s alliance between Christian Zionists and the pro-Israel lobby.

1987 Breakfast Offered AU-Star Lineup

In 1987, at the "Sixth National Prayer Breakfast in Honor of Israel," attendees filled a large ballroom. There were four tiers of speakers and honored guests on the dias. They included four presidential hopefuls: former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Rep. Jack Kemp, Gov. Pierre (Pete) Dupont IV, and Sen. Albert Gore. The keynote speaker was Attorney General Edwin Meese. The mood was emotional and exultant. Prime Minister Shamir spoke to the assembled via satellite on a massive TV screen, urging Christians to come see the Holy Land as "tourism is completely safe."

By contrast, the 1989 event, soberly billed as "The Eighth Annual Roundtable Prayer Breakfast: To Pray for America-The Peace of Jerusalem-The Nations of the World," attracted some 350 attendees. Two long conference tables easily accommodated all of the speakers.

There was not a single speaker from any branch of the US government. Even the Israeli ambassador didn't come. The crowd's energies were as unfocused as the billing. The available literature included a proposal to boycott Proctor and Gamble products for sponsoring a soap opera with a homosexual character, pamphlets on Christian-Zionist groups, and an envelope for donations to the defense fund of keynote speaker Oliver North.

Introducing North, Ed McAteer of the Religious Roundtable said, "There's a government higher than man's government—it's God's government ... Like Martin Luther King, if Oliver North broke laws, it was for a higher good." (The comparison seemed strained since the Rev. King willingly accepted imprisonment for publicly defying what he believed to be unjust laws. Col. North seems to be threatening to jeopardize national security to avoid imprisonment for secretly breaking what he believed to be unjust laws.)

North, however, was in good spirits for a man en route to his second day in court. Speaking on the theme "Semper Fidelis," motto of the Marine Corps, he called upon nations and individuals to exhibit faithfulness to "those basic values that have made this country what it is ... and to our friends."

"We do little to reassure anyone when we can accept the clever, twisted lies of the greatest archterrorist, Yasser Arafat," North told the group. More than a third of the audience left after North's speech.

Conspicuously absent in 1989 were speakers such as those in 1987 who represented moderate Baptists, main-line Christians, and a wider variety of Jewish groups. In 1989, a proclamation calling for the administration to abandon dialogue with the PLO and any policy requiring Israel to relinquish "Judea, Samaria, and Gaza" was signed by hard-line groups like Americans for a Safe Israel, Herut Zionists of America, the International Christian Embassy, and the Religious Roundtable.

Factors Behind Shift

Factors in the drop in attendance, disappearance of congressional involvement, and weakened focus probably include the intifadah, scandals in the American fundamentalist world, and the end of the Reagan administration. But if these account for the absence of Christian and Jewish moderates, the Christian Zionists themselves seem oblivious to the human rights abuses in the territories.

The intifadah has not changed their belief in their own political interpretations of passages in the books of Ezekiel and Revelations which, they feel, demand the founding of the state of Israel and the building of a third Temple on Mt. Moriah as a precursor to Armageddon and the Second Coming. In fact, the people at my breakfast table prayed for a swift end to the intifadah, or at least that Americans would understand Israel's "pain."

Although the Christian Zionists have not been irreparably weakened by the scandals involving their fellow fundamentalist travelers Jim and Tammy Baker and Jimmy Swaggart, they have been made unattractive and unsavory to mainstream Americans, religious and secular. As for the significance of the end of the Reagan era, a number of Reagan staff members and confidants, and apparently President Reagan himself, were adherents of dispensationalist/Armageddon theories. (Much of this is documented in Grace Halsell's Prophecy and Politics, published by Lawrence Hill and available through the American Educational Trust.) President George Bush is a practicing Episcopalian, and not given to doomsday faith.

Coalition Weakening

So, the declining attendance at the prayer breakfast held in conjunction with the convention of the National Religious Broadcasters may mark the end of the pro-Israel lobby's fruitful decade of coalition with Christian Zionists throughout the 1980s. With an administration less sympathetic to religious extremists and a public perception of some high-profile fundamentalists as laughingstocks, the lobby will almost certainly distance itself from the Christian Zionists to concentrate on re-activating contacts and influence with main-line Christian churches. Only the right-wing fringes of the old coalition, involving organizations such as those that called upon the administration to abandon dialogue with the PLO will remain as allies.

An annual feature at the NRB convention is the private briefing held at the Israeli Embassy. At this year's briefing participants were shown a film produced by the Israeli Defense Forces called "The Strategic Equation," featuring maps which showed the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza as already annexed to Israel. Thomas Dine, executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), criticized Greece for its "failure to uphold Western values" in conjunction with the release of a terrorist suspect. And a speaker described a new Prophetic News Network, to be headquartered in Jerusalem and Southern California, to counter secular media" which deny Israel "balanced treatment."

For this writer, there was another significant change in ambience. At the 1987 briefing, I had asked an Israeli official what I considered one or two fairly innocuous questions. At the close of the briefing, as I was gathering up my notes, an Israeli Embassy employee came up to me and said, "You're a very clever young lady." When I just smiled, he continued, "You know, it never pays to be so clever."

My questions this year illicited no such comments.

Catherine Willford, the circulation director for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, is a free-lance journalist.