Get Washington Jewish Week Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories We do not share data with third party vendors. Free Sign Up. Although there is not necessarily one definition of the term among conservatives who use it, they often mean the fundamental values of Western society that, they believe, come from both Judaism and Christianity.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, an author and frequent political commentator, also uses the term. Boteach argued that the principles of democracy, for example, stem from the biblical principle that everybody is created equal. Moline, on the other hand, argued that the term does a disservice to interfaith dialogue and cooperation. But Judeo-Christian soon fell out of fashion among liberals. It became a rallying cry during the Cold War as a proxy for Western values that were fighting atheist Communism.
In the s, the evangelical Rev. Jerry Falwell then played an important role in popularizing the phrase Judeo-Christian, according to Goldman. Nevertheless, the cultural significance of the phrase continued to grow. The term was commonly used in the s in the so-called culture wars over abortion and same-sex marriage and remains popular among evangelical conservatives today. Boteach acknowledged that the term is sometimes used in an exclusionary way, and he pushed back against those uses of the term.
On the other side of the debate, Goldman argued that particularly when conservatives like Bannon use the term, it is used to exclude Muslims. In an essay for the Religion Dispatches , Goldman also quoted Maimonides, the medieval Jewish scholar, to suggest that it is wrong to discuss a shared Judeo-Christian tradition.
In response to the challenge that Judaism and Christianity have often been in opposition, Lapin responded that it is important not to dwell on old religious conflict.
I just stumbled upon this article. It is interesting, but also puzzling. Of course, Christianity has a theology about Jesus that is not accepted by Jews. But the teachings of Jesus are in the main-stream of the Pharisees at the time, with perhaps a few exceptions.
Jesus certainly taught values right out of the Torah and the Prophets. That is more than enough to speak of a Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet I would caution against thinking that Judeo-Christian language on the religious right has nothing to do with Jews and Judaism. The movement has from the beginning steered clear of anti-Semitism and enthusiastically supported the State of Israel. To that extent at least, it cannot be accused of using "Judeo-" as merely a fig leaf for a Christianist agenda.
It is a different God, and I believe a very evil and a very wicked religion. Virgil Goode, a Virginia Republican, achieved some notoriety by publicly criticizing the decision of the first Muslim elected to Congress to take his oath of office by placing his hand on a Qu'ran — a position he justified in an op-ed titled "Save Judeo-Christian Values. Moving forward, in the irrepressible Tony Perkins said on his Washington Report, "We are a nation that was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, that's the foundation of our nation, not Islam, but the Judeo-Christian God.
I'd just make two points. First, there is in such language the setting up of a clash of civilizations between the Judeo-Christian on one side and the Muslim on the other — a clash that, unsurprisingly, is mirrored in the ideology of al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups.
And second, in service of that end, the Christian right has been at pains to declare that Muslims do not have the same God as Judeo-Christians. This is a complicated subject that I do not propose to get into in the time I have left, except to note that for conservative evangelicals it was anything but innocuous for Larycia Hawkins, a tenured political science professor at Wheaton College, to have posted on Facebook that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
So far as the rhetoric of the religious right is concerned, the Judeo-Christian stands in direct opposition to the Abrahamic.
Just as "Christian" had served as a fascist cue for hostility to Jews in the s, so has "Judeo-Christian" become an emblem of evangelical hostility to Muslims in the post-cold war era. Let me turn, finally, to the latest twist in Judeo-Christian civilizational conflict; namely, Bannonism. Steve Bannon has for some time been an evangelist for "the Judeo-Christian West," in his conception of a value system as well as a place. Here's how he described it in a talk he Skyped into a meeting of the conservative Catholic Human Dignity Institute held at the Vatican in the summer of So I think the discussion of, should we put a cap on wealth creation and distribution?
It's something that should be at the heart of every Christian that is a capitalist — "What is the purpose of whatever I'm doing with this wealth?
What is the purpose of what I'm doing with the ability that God has given us, that divine providence has given us to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth? I think it really behooves all of us to really take a hard look and make sure that we are reinvesting that back into positive things. But also to make sure that we understand that we're at the very beginning stages of a global conflict, and if we do not bind together as partners with others in other countries that this conflict is only going to metastasize.
Notice that there's no evidence of support for either government regulation of wealth or the kind of private charity customarily advocated by religious conservatives. The "positive things" capitalists should be "reinvesting" in, we know from Bannon's other work, is investment in economic activity at home.
Such "enlightened Capitalism" — investment presumably undertaken voluntarily against pure bottom-line calculation — he believes to be the result of Judeo-Christian values that have been under assault in the West for several decades. Not that we, America, can go it alone. National "partners" are needed. The Judeo-Christian West is threatened from the inside by global elites and from the outside by "Islamic Fascism" and, even more, by Chinese-dominated East Asia.
Taken down to essentials, this vision consists of economic nationalism joined to a simplified version of Huntington's conception of the "clash of civilizations. The Judeo-Christian liberal West won. To train an intellectual cadre, he is setting up an Academy for the Judeo-Christian West in a former monastery outside of Rome.
The potential role of Bannonism in the emergence of a transnational rightist ideology needs to be taken seriously. During the s, "Judeo-Christian" came into American public discourse as a way of opposing Fascist anti-Semitism. After World War II, it became the watchword of an America standing for human freedoms against communism.
With the rise of the religious right, it was transformed into a synonym for traditional sexual mores and, later, into a shibboleth for Islamophobia. In Bannonism, it has been made into the underpinnings of populist economic nationalism — of neo-fascism in our time.
In the hands of its protagonist, it has become the watchword for what it was pressed into service to attack. This is not a happy evolution.
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. In his Bowers concurrence , Burger embraces the exceptionalist position of the new religious right.
Seven years later, in Lawrence v. Conservatives interpreted the same idiom in narrower, exceptionalist terms to argue that only Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism could inoculate American society from the dangerous viruses of Marxist secularism and excessive pluralism.
The one fundamental concept that completely and ultimately separates Communist Russia from the democratic institutions of this country [is our] Judeo-Christian civilization. Read: Atheists are sometimes more religious than Christians.
Remarkably, Eisenhower was one of the first to flag the problematic nature of Judeo-Christian. In a fascinating letter written in , Ike cautions his brother on his use of the phrase:.
I think you could still point out the debt we all owe to the ancients of Judea and Greece for the introduction of new ideas. Some conservatives recognized the problem with their own language at the time.
By the same token, liberals saw how the phrase might be strategically mobilized for the cause of civil rights. In a speech, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. It relegates persons to the status of things. Read: Martin Luther King Jr. Privileging religion would not end well for American Jews and other religious minorities, they argued. True religious freedom required separation of government from faith.
Beginning in the s, as the new religious right ascended in American politics and immigration and post-civil-rights liberalism reshaped the American left, Judeo-Christian became closely tied to the American right. As liberals retired the term, conservatives doubled down on it.
The phrase appears with regularity in rhetorical attacks on Islam and the progressive left, in attempts to restrict immigration and LGBTQ rights, and in arguments in favor of religious freedom that would collapse the wall of separation between Church and state.
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