{"id":157,"date":"2011-01-23T17:01:34","date_gmt":"2011-01-23T17:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/what-wrong-with-the-judeo-christian-tradition.html"},"modified":"2011-01-23T17:01:34","modified_gmt":"2011-01-23T17:01:34","slug":"what-wrong-with-the-judeo-christian-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/what-wrong-with-the-judeo-christian-tradition.html","title":{"rendered":"What’s wrong with the Judeo-Christian Tradition?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Religion Dispatches, Shalom Goldman is the latest Jewish writer to try to kill off<\/a> “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Inspired by a new “Judeo-Christian Voter Guide<\/a>,”
\nhe resuscitates the claim that the phrase does little more than paper
\nover the long history of Jewish-Christian animosity, subordinating
\nJewish distinctiveness to ecumenical public relations. <\/p>\n

In a study<\/a>
\npublished over a quarter-century ago, I traced this claim as far back
\nas 1943, but its prime exponent has been the late author and publisher
\nArthur A. Cohen, whose 1969 Commentary<\/i> article<\/a>,
\n“The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition” (redone in his 1970 essay
\ncollection of the same title) blacklisted the term, at least in certain
\ncircles. The article, which Goldman persists in calling “brilliant,” is a
\npiece of agit-prop that fundamentally misconstrues how the JCT came
\ninto common usage. Goldman doesn’t do much better.<\/p>\n

Cohen asserted
\nthat the tradition “as such” originated among the German higher critics
\nof the Bible, whose aim was to “de-Judaize” Christianity even as they
\nacknowledged its Jewish roots. But no such usage exists in German
\nbiblical criticism. “Judeo-Christian” was first commonly employed in
\nmid-19th-century English and French accounts of Christian origins. The
\n“Judeo-Christians” were those early followers of Jesus who wished to
\nrestrict their messiah’s message to the Jews, and insisted that all who
\nfollowed Jesus also follow Jewish law. They lost out, of course, to Paul
\nand his compadres–the non-Judeo<\/i>-Christians.<\/p>\n


\nSo far as I
\ncan tell, it was the French who first used “Judeo-Christian” to refer
\nmore generally to the Western religious tradition. Tellingly, this
\nextended usage appears to have caught on at the time of the Dreyfus
\nAffair in 1899. Anti-Dreyfusards, convinced that defenders of the Jewish
\nofficer were part of an anti-Catholic conspiracy, began referring
\ndarkly to their opponents as a “Judeo-Masonic-Protestant coalition<\/a>”
\nor “syndicate.” Dreyfusards like Anatole France responded by
\ncharacterizing Western religious values and outlooks not as “Christian”
\nbut as “Judeo-Christian” (e.g. “the old Judeo-Christian cosmogony,” p. 199<\/a>). <\/p>\n

In
\na word, opposition to anti-Semitism was the key factor in explaining
\nthe rise of “Judeo-Christian” as a term of general cultural import.
\nDuring the late 1930s, anti-Fascists in both France and the United
\nStates took up the term at a time when “Christian” had become a code
\nword for anti-Semitic organizations on the Fascist right. Indeed, the
\nleast attractive aspect of the Jewish critique of the phrase is the
\ncharge that “Judeo-Christian” signals a Christian desire to absorb and
\ndenigrate Judaism. On the contrary, it served precisely as a rebuke to
\nthose who wanted to exclude Jews and eradicate Judaism. Theologically,
\nJudeo-Christian language was not merely ecumenical happy talk; it was
\nused by neo-orthodox thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr, who wanted to
\nemphasize the Hebraic (prophetic) side of their faith over Hellenic
\ntheological categories.<\/p>\n

There is, to be sure, no little irony in
\nthe fact that, over the past generation, the phrase has been so
\nfervently embraced by the religious right. To understand how this could
\nhave come about, you have to follow the JCT through its service as an
\nanti-Communist shibboleth during the Cold War, and its rejection in the
\ncounterculture of the 1960s.There’s no doubt that, so far as the folks
\nbehind that new voter guide are concerned, “Judeo-Christian” is just
\ncode language for their own conservative understanding of Western
\nreligious values. That said, it should not be doubted that when, say,
\nthe new governor of Alabama allows as how his only brothers and sisters
\nare Christians, it’s useful to be able to remind him that his own
\nreligious tradition is actually Judeo-Christian.<\/p>\n

There’s
\nalways been something peculiar in the claim that belonging to the same
\ntradition means that you’ve always gotten along fine. No one would say
\nthat the heretics of Late Antiquity or the High Middle Ages (Arians,
\nDonatists, Waldensians, etc.), didn’t belong to the Christian religious
\ntradition, much less that the Catholics and Protestants who fought each
\nother to a standstill in Early Modern Europe didn’t. Islam has been
\ncalled a Judeo-Christian heresy, and Mormonism could as well; crusades
\nand jihads and excommunications don’t erase genetic identity. After all
\nthe politic rhetoric is over, there’s more than sufficient common ground
\nbetween Judaism and Christianity to justify the idea of a
\nJudeo-Christian tradition. That’s probably why, in this era of increased
\nawareness of non-Western religions, the term has grown in popularity<\/a>, notwithstanding Cohen et al. <\/p>\n

\"JudeoChristian.png\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Religion Dispatches, Shalom Goldman is the latest Jewish writer to try to kill off “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Inspired by a new “Judeo-Christian Voter Guide,” he resuscitates the claim that the phrase does little more than paper over the long history of Jewish-Christian animosity, subordinating Jewish distinctiveness to ecumenical public relations. In a study…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat's wrong with the Judeo-Christian Tradition? - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/what-wrong-with-the-judeo-christian-tradition.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What's wrong with the Judeo-Christian Tradition? - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Over at Religion Dispatches, Shalom Goldman is the latest Jewish writer to try to kill off “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Inspired by a new “Judeo-Christian Voter Guide,” he resuscitates the claim that the phrase does little more than paper over the long history of Jewish-Christian animosity, subordinating Jewish distinctiveness to ecumenical public relations. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}