September 15, 2023, would have been my grandfather’s 107th birthday. Born in Western Pennsylvania in the early twentieth century, he was one of the kindest people I ever knew. He was also a World War II veteran who came home briefly on leave when my mom, his first of two daughters, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1945.
photo provided
Leonard Persky in uniform while serving in the Army during World War II.
After the war, he owned a series of businesses in the Pittsburgh area: a bar, a bowling alley, a bar in a bowling alley, and, at the end of his life, he was a real estate agent. A devoted husband and father, beloved by anyone who ever met him, he was an upstanding American. And he was a Jew: a member of the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh where his wife, my grandmother, worked as the assistant to three successive rabbis from the 1970s to the early 1990s; where my baby cousin was Bat Mitzvahed; and where members of our extended family were killed on October 27, 2018.
This year, Friday, September 15, is also the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The holiday marks the start of the Days of Awe, a period when we ask those we’ve harmed for forgiveness and which concludes with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day on Jewish calendar.
Also this year in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, at the Spooky Nook sports complex,
Image of sword hilt from a social media advertisement for "The Gospel at War."
September 15 is the start of the Mid Atlantic Reformation Society's Future of Christendom 2023 conference. The advertisements for this event—titled “The Gospel at War”—feature no crosses, unless you count the one made by the hilt of the sword that figures prominently in the visuals. The conference promises “concise messages for our culture from a biblical worldview,” and sessions such as “The Gospel at War with Feminism,” “The Gospel at War with Art,” “The Gospel at War with the Yellow Bus [public education],” and “The Gospel at War with the Military.” There will also be a formal debate on whether “Gay Christian” is an “acceptable identity for a member of Christ’s Church.”
I hope this event is as upsetting to my Christian friends as it is to me. But it likely won’t scare them as deeply as it scares me.
The conference promises “concise messages for our culture from a biblical worldview,” and sessions such as “The Gospel at War with Feminism.”
I want to be clear: I support free speech and the safe practice of one’s own faith. And it should be noted that other religions are not singled out in the material promoting this event; gay people, feminists, teachers, and artists, however, are. I fear for all of these people. And, as a Jew in Lancaster County, I’ve had to learn to read between the lines the same way that I’ve had to learn to decipher the hidden anti-semitism in cryptic tattoos and bumper stickers.
The most worrying part of the conference is that it promises to teach attendees “to promote and advance God’s Kingdom in better and more effective ways.” Make no mistake, advancing God’s Kingdom, to people who claim to own the one and only “Biblical worldview,” means, at best, converting my family, and at worst . . . well, my family knows what that looks like, too.
My grandfather fought for this country, in a real war. He fought to protect our democracy and with it our right to free speech and freedom of religion. But I’d like to think he fought for our safety, too—the safety of his family and for all people who live in this nation. People who see the United States as a Christian nation—meant for only those who follow their version of a “Biblical worldview”—are fighting a war they invented to make us all less safe.
My grandfather fought for this country, in a real war. He fought to protect our democracy and with it our right to free speech and freedom of religion.
Lancaster County is a hotbed for white Christian nationalists. It has been reported on over and over. And while not everyone here believes that my family should be “converted,” too many adopt a laissez-faire attitude about the slippery slope we face. That’s why a group of people has been trying to encourage local school boards to adhere to the federally mandated separation of church and state in both the letter and the spirit of the law. That’s why another group of people has been trying to encourage local non-profits to exert their considerable influence to make community events and leadership development programs free from organizations and people who bring to the table harmful religious ideologies. People like me can’t sit and talk with people who don’t think we should exist. The same goes for my friends and family in the LGBTQ+ community. When I tell you that Christian hegemony threatens my family, I am not being hyperbolic, I am speaking my truth. I know where Christian hegemony leads.
All four of my grandparents were first generation Americans born in the early part of the twentieth century. Their parents came to Western Pennsylvania to escape the pogroms of their Eastern European homelands. My great-grandfather was turned away by the U.S. government because, as he remembered it, “too many Jews” were arriving on these shores, but he made his way here anyway—after a stop in, of all places, South Africa. If my grandfather, Leonard, were still alive, celebrating with my family here in Lancaster on Erev Rosh Hashanah, would he recognize the country he fought for? Or would it remind him of the places his parents fled?