c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ Harvard University Law School was the scene of a recent interreligious and interracial conference on the current state of religion and civil rights in the United States that was both surprising and discouraging.

Surprising because nearly every conference speaker _ regardless of whether they where political activists, clergy, academics, lawyers or social ethicists _ invoked the name of either the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Discouraging because it was clear that neither the Christian nor Jewish communities have come close to producing worthy successors to these two moral giants who were so prominent during the 1960s civil rights struggle.

Even though King was assassinated 30 years ago in Memphis _ the anniversary of that terrible act is April 4 _ and Heschel died in 1972, their forceful ideas and stirring words dominated the entire meeting at the law school.

The Rev. Robert M. Franklin, president of Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Center, the nation’s largest black seminary, called King a”genius”who drew upon the best of religious and American political sources to break the back of racist laws in the United States.

Franklin said:”No one was more skilled than Dr. King at interweaving the great and noble ideas from varying symbolic traditions.” Professor Reuven Kimelman of Brandeis University made a similar evaluation of his seminary teacher, Rabbi Heschel:”… Jewish and American ideals, especially when expressed prophetically (by Heschel), so converge that one reinforces the other.”Racism for Heschel was”the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason”and a form of blasphemy against God, said Kimelman, who is also a rabbi.

Many of the conference speakers recalled their 1960s civil rights activities with warm nostalgia and a poignant remembrance of things past.

I vividly remember participating in a 1964 voting rights demonstration in Hattiesburg, Miss. Our group included rabbis and Protestant ministers from around the country. During those years, there were numerous coalitions of blacks and whites, Christians and Jews who marched together, went to jail together, and lobbied the U.S. government together in support of strong civil rights legislation.

In the ’60s, the anti-civil rights forces were usually easy to identify because they often wore Ku Klux Klan sheets, assaulted demonstrators with water hoses and dogs, or attempted to block civil rights legislation in Congress.

But just as generals make the understandable mistake of re-fighting the previous war, so, too, civil rights activists and religious leaders frequently commit the same error by failing to recognize that both the times and the issues have dramatically changed.

Today, it is no longer a question of voting rights or public accommodation. Instead, class, economics and technological education are now priorities on the current civil rights agenda. Speaker after speaker at the Harvard conference reported that King’s dream of a”beloved community”based on full civil rights, equal opportunity and mutual esteem seems farther away than ever.

In fact, Robin W. Lovin, the dean of Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, lamented that many Protestant leaders have consciously devalued the concept of a”civic community”and have shifted away from the welfare of the general society by emphasizing only”the Christian community.” Lovin said that some theologians believe”that social equality is a poor substitute for the genuine acceptance found in Christian love and … the whole concept of rights is a bad idea in the first place.” Much of the classic civil rights language of the past has either been given new meaning in the 1990s or completely distorted. To be opposed to numerical quotas in hiring and education and to be for non-discrimination in the work place are standard civil rights positions. They are so commonplace that one conference speaker wryly noted that both President Clinton and David Duke, the one-time Louisiana Klan leader, could probably support such positions but for completely different reasons.

Near the end of the conference, a speaker rhetorically asked:”At which doors would King and Heschel stand today if they were still alive?” During their lifetimes, the two men often stood at the doors of city hall, the court house, the state house and the White House demanding equality for all Americans.

Today, King and Heschel would be pressing government officials for full implementation of the civil rights legislation adopted 30 years ago. But they would also need to stand in some new doors _ such as banks, multi-national corporations and, most important of all, the technological training centers preparing tomorrow’s elite to run the world.

What finally emerged at Harvard was the realization that we, the spiritual heirs of King and Heschel, will have to open those new doors ourselves.

IR END RUDIN