Jews, Conservative Christians Defuse War of Words : Dialogue: After meeting for five hours, more than 30 leaders agree that angry rhetoric is harmful. ADL report critical of Christian right ignited the dispute.

Jewish and conservative Christian leaders came together over a kosher lunch on Capitol Hill this week and agreed to a cease-fire in the escalating war of words they have waged since last spring’s Anti-Defamation League report on the Christian right.

After five hours of dialogue behind closed doors, the leaders agreed that the angry rhetoric coming from both sides poses a greater threat to the nation’s declining moral health than their differing social and political viewpoints.

Participants said they agreed to disagree, without maligning each other on such issues as school prayer and abortion, and to try to find values shared by both sides.

They also agreed to respect each other’s right to participate in the political process.

“We established the line between differences and disdain,” Phil Baum, national director of the American Jewish Congress, said after the meeting.

Forest Montgomery, counsel for the National Assn. of Evangelicals, said “our real concern is, and should be, what is happening to our culture. We can disagree without rancor.”

More than 30 Christian and Jewish leaders attended what was billed as the first such large-scale gathering of its kind. Organizer Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president of the Chicago-based International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, said the meeting was put together because of the “crisis situation that has been dividing the two communities.”

“It was a very, very positive day,” said the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Liberty University chancellor and ex-Moral Majority leader. “It was a beginning of a beginning.”

The ADL report released in June--titled “The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America”--accused evangelical and fundamentalist Christian leaders of using “a rhetoric of fear, suspicion and even hatred” in their quest for political power.

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The report called the Christian right “exclusionist” and a threat to American democracy, pluralism and religious freedom. “At times,” the report said, “their rhetoric reflects hostility to Jews and Jewish concerns.”

The report drew immediate fire from Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, singled out by the ADL as the Christian right’s most influential organization. The Christian Coalition said the report was filled with fabrications and half-truths “reminiscent of the political style practiced by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.”

Christian Coalition officials accused the ADL of using “reckless charges of anti-Semitism” for political reasons.

The charges and countercharges prompted a slew of articles in Jewish and Christian publications, and the rhetoric became increasingly heated as the November elections neared.

Many participants at this week’s meeting said they were apprehensive about the session because of the growing tension between the two sides, but they were put at ease by the willingness of both sides to back away from confrontation.

ADL National Director Abraham Foxman and Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed attended this week’s meeting, held in the Senate Hart Office Building.

Foxman said after the session that “the report stands.” He acknowledged the “pain” it had caused conservative Christians, but said Jews also feel pain when they hear Christian right leaders call the United States “a Christian nation.”

Foxman also said the ADL might not have issued the report had more open communication existed between the two communities--such as that established in this week’s meeting.

Reed said “in a general sense, the Christian Coalition remains dedicated to an ongoing dialogue with the Jewish community and finding areas of mutual concern . . . in a way that is respectful.”

Reed called the ADL report “a painful and unfortunate episode in the history of Jewish-Christian dialogue. It is my hope such an episode will never be repeated.”

Although the ADL report precipitated the round of verbal warfare between the two communities, meeting participants agreed that the issues separating them long predate the report.

“We came to this table with our baggage, with our historical pain, with our anxieties,” said Eckstein. “This meeting was held against a background of 2,000 years of fratricide.”

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According to meeting participants, discussion ranged from the political issues of the day to the explanation of religious language. School prayer--opposed almost across the board by most Jewish groups but favored by many conservative Christians--was mentioned several times, Eckstein said, in discussions described by one participant as “testy.”

The Rev. Richard Land, executive director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, said participants agreed that although “this nation is not a secular society,” it was also “a society of religious pluralism” that allowed for disagreement on issues such as school prayer.