Liberal Jew Finds Evangelicals Not All Bad

By Mark Hoerrner

It's a case of "walk a mile in my shoes."

Mark Pinsky grew up as a liberal Jew and had a horrible perception of evangelical Christians. But the perception was simply that-he'd never really spent any time with evangelicals at all. He accepted what he read, what he saw on television and what he heard on the radio.

But after some independent investigation, Pinsky came to a startling revelation: they were people just like him.

A product of an ethnically-diverse upbringing, Pinsky attended Duke University and later graduate school at Columbia University. He managed to land a journalism job writing for the Los Angeles Times. In 1995, Pinsky left the Times to join the Orlando Sentinel as its religion writer.

His work and private life suddenly seemed to intersect with evangelical Christians and he made a discovery. What he had understood to be true for years turned out to be mostly hogwash. His day-to-day activities brought him in close proximity with local evangelicals and he learned that they all had different opinions about how life was supposed to be lived.

Thus, Pinksy saw the idea for a book. The result is A Jew Among Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed. The book makes a number of assumptions and some staunch observations about the intersections that occurred in his live.

"To an evangelical, not much of this is new," he told Crosswalk.com. "But for people in the blue states I think it is new. What I provide is a perspective for those in blue states who are unfamiliar with (evangelicals) and who might listen to someone who, in his own words, is a left-wing Jew from Jersey who was raised in the suburbs himself."

He then makes an analysis.

"If you accept the premise that evangelical Christianity is the successor to the fundamentalist movement of the 1920s and '30s-it was largely rural and small-town and a working-class movement-then today the center of gravity has shifted and is now largely suburban. It's a modern suburban movement," he said. "My people came to the suburbs from the cities, whereas evangelicals, their roots are on the farm and in smaller towns."

He noted that the stance on intelligent design, for example, is not that different for Jews and Christians.

"How can all these people believe the earth is 6,000 years old?'' he said, suggesting that creationists place less of a premium on higher education. "Most of the evangelicals in my neighborhood want their kids to get into the University of Florida, and Duke or Princeton. From my faith, the Jews for hundreds of years have subscribed to intelligent design, that it's based entirely in science but also that God started all this."

The book goes on to chronicle first-hand accounts of what he observed during his odyssey into the evangelical mind.

Luckily for the evangelicals, what Pinsky found was not the prejudice that he'd grown up with, but something of an understanding of his fellow man.