(RNS) — In the civil war taking place on the right over antisemitism, classic Christian opposition to Judaism is now on the table.
This week, for example, Washington Post columnist Jason Willick looked at how Tucker Carlson has been pointedly criticizing the Hebrew Bible. He’s “shocked by the violence in it, and shocked by the revenge in it, the genocide in it” and emphasizes that “Christianity alone — alone, unique” — claims that people should be treated as individuals and not as members of a collective. Willick writes, “The former Fox News host is targeting a distinctively American, 20th-century concept: The Judeo-Christian consensus.”
As someone who has been studying the use of “Judeo-Christian” in American public discourse for over 40 years — and thanks for the shout-out, Willick — I can say with confidence its usage has come full circle. Here’s a thumbnail sketch.
In the late 1930s, liberal Protestants began to employ “Judeo-Christian” as a way of indicating their opposition to antisemitism at a time when “Christian” had become code for anti-Jewish in fascist organizations with names like “Christian Front” and “Christian Aryan Syndicate.” During World War II, the West’s enduring values began to be described as “Judeo-Christian,” rather than merely “Christian.”
During the Cold War and in the wake of the Holocaust, the idea that America was defending those values against what was termed godless communism became an article of America’s civil religious faith. “We meet at a time when the Judeo-Christian faith is challenged as never before in all the years since Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees,” the Rev. Daniel A. Poling, the president of the Military Chaplains Association of the United States, declared in 1952.
As the 1960s rolled into the 1970s, however, “Judeo-Christian” began to seem like a tired cliché, a bad excuse for Cold War overreach, especially in Vietnam. And it was an inadequate description of America’s actual religious diversity — at least as far as liberals, who had at one time championed the term, were concerned. Into the breach stepped the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The founder of the Moral Majority, aiming to create an organization that at least appeared to include a religiously diverse membership, began regularly referring to “the Judeo-Christian ethic” as the foundation of American values.
By the mid-1980s “Judeo-Christian” had become the watchword of the religious right, unchallenged among social conservatives as shorthand for their social agenda. In the first Trump administration, sometime presidential strategist Steve Bannon incorporated it into his own global concept of civilizational conflict.
“I want the world to look back in 100 years and say, their mercantilist, Confucian system lost,” he told The Economist shortly after leaving the White House in 2017. “The Judeo-Christian liberal West won.”
But since then, an exclusivist Christian vision of the national future has led to an open rejection of “Judeo-Christian” by significant figures on the religious right.
“This is not a ‘Judeo-Christian’ Movement,” declared self-described Christian nationalists Andrew Torba and Andrew Isker in their 2022 tract, “Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide to Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations.” In his 2023 book “Mere Christendom,” the prominent pastor Douglas Wilson, who likewise describes himself as a Christian nationalist, writes that there is “no such entity as the Judeo/Christian religion” and calls the Judeo-Christian tradition “a device used by secular man to get Christians and Jews to drop or mute their [transcendental] claims.”
The old-time Christian opposition to Judaism is not the same as antisemitism. But as part of an ideology that seeks dominion over nations, it provides antisemites like Nick Fuentes and Carlson with the theological justification they need. Whatever one thinks of “Judeo-Christian” as an intellectual construct, its rejection by Christian nationalists is evidence enough of its efficacy as a barrier to Jew-hatred.
Resigning from the board of the Heritage Foundation this week after its president refused to retract his video defense of Carlson, in the wake of the latter’s softball interview of Fuentes, Princeton University professor Robert P. George wrote on Facebook, “My hope for Heritage is that it will be unbending and unflinching in its fidelity to its founding vision, upholding the moral principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the civil principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.”
Good luck with that.
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