c. 1996 Religion News Service

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

(UNDATED) Aron Lustiger, the son of Polish-Jewish parents, was born in France 70 years ago. Today, he is Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Paris.

William Joseph Walsh, the son of Irish-Catholic parents, was born in Baltimore more than 50 years ago. Today, he is Rabbi Ariel Walsh, the leader of Congregation Beth Israel-West in Cleveland.

The cardinal, whose father was murdered at Auschwitz, converted to Christianity as a teen-ager during the Nazi occupation of France. Late in life, Walsh understood that Judaism was his spiritual home and the rabbinate was his calling, leaving a successful career as an engineer.

The two men’s religious odysseys are clearly different, but they represent something new on the religious landscape.

Increasing numbers of people are making private choices about their religious identities. And while not every convert becomes a priest or a rabbi, this trend is certain to accelerate in an era in which mass communication allows us to easily move from one world to the next.

In earlier times, members of a particular religious group usually communicated with one another through”insider”languages such as Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, or Arabic. They were language many outsiders didn’t know or didn’t want to know.

But today, everyone has almost instant access to everyone else’s language, literature, publications, sermons, teaching materials and ideas. While many religious communities still live in wary isolation from one another, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the physical and psychological walls of separation that once separated Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and a host of other communities.

In certain countries some religions are still official or favored, but there is a growing impatience with such arrangements. In Europe and North America especially, the spiritual ghettos that once kept believers separate are crumbling. In their place is an emerging free market of religion. As the spiritual journeys of Lustiger and Walsh so dramatically demonstrate, even birth into a specific religious community no longer guarantees one’s ultimate spiritual identity.

Many traditional religionists are upset, and even frightened, by this situation, and they long to re-create the good old days, when religions were contained within strict boundaries. Such nostalgia is understandable, and in today’s open marketplace of religious ideas, the traditionalists will continue to attract devoted adherents.

But traditionalists are not the only ones challenged by individual conversions; it is an issue for the entire religious community. Competition among faiths may now be the norm, but it must be a healthy competition, free of coercion, manipulation and duplicity. Religious groups will not attract newcomers through the power of the state or through psychological coercion. Real conversion happens only when an authentic religious path is freely chosen.

Competition is good, but competition must be fair. And religionists must refrain from targeting members of any other religious group for conversion. That is why a resolution recently approved by the Southern Baptist Convention calling for conversion efforts aimed at Jews is a wretched throwback to the bad old days of coercion and spiritual arrogance.

Special missionaries and conversion gimmicks that target Jews are doomed to failure. They have always failed, and they always will.

As a vocal critic of that resolution, I offer Southern Baptists some unsolicited tips on how to successfully attract converts:

_ Emphasize the ethical and moral qualities of individual Southern Baptists.

_ Talk about the spiritual richness of Southern Baptist families.

_ Explore the unquenchable prophetic thirst for social justice that includes the eradication of all forms of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism.

_ Acknowledge that when the Southern Baptist faith is freely offered in the crowded public square, it must compete with other faiths, including Judaism, that are also vying for newcomers.

But most of all, Southern Baptists must recognize that it is the hand of God, not the orchestrated goal of a denomination, that guides an individual to his or her ultimate choice of faith.

The same hand that transformed Aron Lustiger into a Catholic intellectual and mystic is the same hand that guided William Joseph Walsh into Judaism.

That divine guidance continues to propel us all on our spiritual journeys. God does indeed work in mysterious ways.

MJP END RUDIN