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Call-in radio show takes its toll on Jewish scholar Exposure to other faiths broadens and strengthens his views on religion, life

Robert Di Veroli

11/30/91

The San Diego Union-Tribune

TRIBUNE; 1,2,3

Page A-9

(Copyright 1991)

Ten years as host on a Los Angeles religious call-in radio program "has changed my life," says Jewish scholar Dennis Prager .

"The day that you acknowledge, that you realize that there are people of other religions whom you consider to be as intelligent as you, as good as you and as religious as you, you will never be the same again," says Prager, a religious Jew.

Exposure to people of other faiths, he says, has made it impossible for him to retain any sense of "exclusivity" or to be theologically narrow. "It changes you emotionally and theologically," Prager said in an interview. "I am no less a believing Jew for all of this, ... but it's been a broadening experience."

Prager, host of the 10-to-midnight Sunday "Religion on the Line" show over Los Angeles radio station KABC, was in San Diego to address a recent convention of church youth workers sponsored by Youth Specialities Inc. of El Cajon.

Prager, 43, credits the show with helping him understand what Victor Frankl, a Nazi Holocaust survivor, meant when he said that after Auschwitz "there are only two races in the world -- the decent and the indecent." The cause of the decent, Prager suggested in an interview, would be advanced by a philosophy he calls ethical monotheism, based on the premise that God exists, that God demands his creatures act morally and that if God does not exist, right and wrong become matters of mere personal preference. The consequence of rejecting God, Prager contends, is a moral relativism that makes good and evil a matter of personal opinion and leads to the moral chaos of secularism.

"Ethics without God leads to evil," he says. "Ethics and God have to be linked ... ethics without God will fail."

Prager fears much of the world is nevertheless becoming secular, a development he says will produce a "soulless, value-free people" even though there is but one God and one standard of right and wrong for all cultures.

"There may be and I believe there are many ways to get to God theologically, but there are not many ways to get to God morally," he says. "That's what it's about."

His appearance at the evangelical-oriented Youth Specialities convention, Prager said, was evidence that Jews and Christians are natural allies in the war against secularism.

"The battle in our world is not between Jews and Christians but between the religious and the secular," Prager told about 2,500 at the Town & County Convention Center.

"It is between those who stand for something that is eternal and those who don't stand for anything that's eternal. That's where it is. "We have a battle. You and I have a battle and it isn't with each other. I fear for our civilization. I fear for America. I fear for the West." Prager said that instead of the one true God of Judaism and Christianity, much of modern society has embraced art, education, love, law, reason and other false gods as their "highest value," adding: "God is our only God. Anything else we hold to be the highest value becomes a false God and leads to evil."

Not even education ensures moral behavior because "wisdom begins with the fear of God," Prager said.

"The only people in the Western world who believed in Marxism were the intellectuals," he said. "You had to go to college to figure out why Stalin was OK. If you never went to college, you had a very simple view. You knew the man was a mass murderer."

In the interview, Prager named the American Civil Liberties Union as another secularizing force in American society.

"I believe in separation of church and state," he said, "but I don't believe in separation of religion and society. The ideal in America is not a secular America. It's a secular government. What's secular in America is the government, not the church."

He said he's frightened when speakers like Jeane Kirkpatrick get shouted down by hostile students at American universities because "Nazism started at the universities, not among the rabble in the streets." For Prager, much of the press and other media are secular.

"The secular media take an extremely patronizing view of the world of religion, a view that says religion is at best a harmless form of alchemy and at worst a source of the world's greatest evils, not willing to confront the fact that more people have been killed by anti-religious ideology -- Nazism and communism, specifically -- than all the religions combined," he says.

Again on the media: "The media often talk about religious fanatics but never secular fanatics. A religious fanatic is one who can never have enough religion. A secular fanatic is one who can never have enough secularism."

Prager also touched on abortion, "safe sex," evangelicals and other issues. On abortion: "Many if not most abortions are not moral, but legally a woman should have the right to choose to have one because I don't believe abortion is murder. But I'm grateful to Christians who have raised the issue because society has become too cavalier about abortion. "I distinguish a lot between moral and legal, which is why I can be pro-choice and anti-abortion. I don't want to make illegal everything I hold is immoral. I think adultery's immoral, but I don't want to make it illegal. I would like to be free to educate people that it is immoral, though."

On safe sex: "It's interesting that the only conclusion the media draw from the Magic Johnson tragedy is that safe sex is what you should teach rather than non-promiscuous sex. Forget morality, but it would strike me as a very bizarre conclusion to draw.

"It's OK to have sex with thousands of people as long as you have a condom? I might argue that having sex with thousands of people is a problem in and of itself. It's a moral problem. It's a human problem and it's a health problem."

On the charge that evangelicals are a threat to the American way of life: "Evangelicals have been the single greatest source of saving America because they have confronted America with the excesses of secularism in ways that others have not."

On euthanasia: "Prolonging life for the sake of prolonging it is immoral. We don't need to take heroic means to prolong life. People should be able to request that other means be used not to keep them alive." On Jews for Jesus: "Theologically it's an oxymoron. Either you're a Jew or you're a Christian." In his book "Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism," Prager says a Jew may be an agnostic, but not an atheist. "As Elie Wiesel said, a Jew may love God or he may fight with God, but he may not ignore God," Prager said.

On people who pick and choose their religious beliefs: "I love pick and choose. It's the people that don't pick and choose that I'm worried about. I have no problem with picking and choosing. I want people to be serious Christians and serious Jews. How they define that is up to them."