Syncretism or struggle: The case of Messianic Judaism

Religion has often been pictured by sociologists and anthropologists as an integrative force. The "grand theories" of Peter Berger, Hans Mol and others rarely pictured religious communities as riven by internal conflicts and contradictions of their own, save those that mirrored differentiation in social structure.;Some consider Messianic Judaism, the largely American religious movement combining American Jewish and Spirit-filled Protestant forms of worship and belief, as just such a holistic, syncretistic group, blending the best of both worlds in an unproblematic package. However, this religious group is far more complex than this image would indicate. Messianic Jews seek to construct and maintain a new thing, "Messianic Jewish identity," out of these two very powerful and often contradictory cultural contexts. This struggle is exacerbated by the Messianic Jewish claim to an ongoing Jewish identity despite their belief in Jesus as Lord and Savior.;This ethnographic study of an important congregation in the Messianic Jewish movement analyzes the "heterglossia," the struggle of different languages, in the perceived homogeneous expression of Messianic Jewish identity, thus calling into question overly harmonious models of religious syncretism and religion in general. The study also examines what emerges from this struggle. Is the congregation "Jewish," as it claims, despite disavowal from the American Jewish community? The group challenges American Jewish concepts of identity by the ironic answers to that question.