It may be tempting to assume these conflicting impulses arise from Trump’s idiosyncrasies, but they are in fact rooted in long traditions. As K. Healan Gaston shows in her magisterial and beautifully written new book, Reimagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy, Americans have long articulated their thinking about politics and religion through their comments on Judaism. Few expressions capture this dynamic better than “Judeo-Christianity,” whose surprising history Gaston brilliantly traces through the words of countless intellectuals and politicians over the past 80 years. Even though this concept ostensibly encapsulates an ancient spiritual tradition that stretches back to Moses and Jesus, it is a recent invention. Coined by writers in the 1930s, it became popular during World War II and the Cold War, when Americans embraced the claim that their democracy stemmed from a “Judeo-Christian heritage.” Yet Judaism’s place in this political-spiritual complex was often ambiguous. While some used the term to empower the Jewish minority and call for religious pluralism, others invoked it as a cover for a very specific Christian (and mostly evangelical) agenda, especially on education and abortion. Some thinkers on the radical right even rely on it while spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Reimagining Judeo-Christian America therefore powerfully shows how the language of inclusion can be appropriated to promote exclusion. As the radical right increasingly usurps liberal concepts like freedom of speech and diversity of thought to promote sexism, racism, and religious bigotry, does the left have an answer?
Though Judeo-Christianity is a term commonly heard today, until fairly recently it would have sounded strange to most Americans. In the early twentieth century, commentators would have struggled to depict Judaism and Christianity as part of joint spiritual or political traditions. Protestant elites in particular conflated their own churches with progress and democracy and dismissed Judaism (alongside Catholicism and Islam) as a “backwards” belief system that fostered authoritarianism. Yet the Great Depression, Gaston shows, attenuated this antagonism, especially after its shockwaves transformed democratic regimes like Germany’s Weimar Republic into dystopian dictatorships. Prominent thinkers like Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued that if the United States’ fragile democracy was to avoid a similar fate, its people had to recognize their indebtedness to a “Judeo-Christian” heritage. The rule of law and political freedom, Niebuhr and others claimed, stemmed not from the Enlightenment’s individualist, scientific, and utopian ethos, but from a spiritual commitment to human dignity and justice shared by both Judaism and Christianity.
The use of this term, which conveniently dismissed American anti-Semitism as foreign, exploded in the 1940s, appearing in thousands of essays, books, and speeches. As Americans mobilized against “totalitarian” Germany and Japan, and later the “godless” Soviet Union, appeals to Judeo-Christianity allowed Americans to define the United States as uniquely committed to human dignity and the virtuous defender of religious pluralism. Dwight Eisenhower famously proclaimed in 1953 that “our form of government” was rooted “in the Judeo-Christian concept.”