Disintegrating the Hyphen: The “Judeo-Christian Tradition” and the Christian Colonization of Judaism

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.5.1.0073
• Pages: 73-91
• Published date: 01 October 2019
• Date: 01 October 2019
• Author: Robert O. Smith
• Subject Matter: Judeo-Christian,Settler Coloniality,Supersessionism,Capitalism,Cold War

ReOrient 5.1 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

Briarwood Leadership Center (Argyle, Texas)

DISINTEGRATING THE HYPHEN: THE “JUDEO-

CHRISTIAN TRADITION” AND THE CHRISTIAN

COLONIZATION OF JUDAISM

Robert O. Smith

Abstract: Jewish dissent to the concept of a “Judeo-Christian Tradition” reveals it to be a

political assemblage offering conditional, incomplete access to structures of white, west-

ern Christian power. While the concept offers pragmatic benefits to Jews, it does so at the

expense of Jewish distinction from Christian beliefs and purposes and to the exclusion

of Islam and Muslims. The supersessionist foundations of the “Judeo-Christian” concept

inspire and perpetuate Christian settler-colonial domination of Jews and Judaism. Desta-

bilizing this concept promotes new levels of liberative dialogical engagement, moving us

beyond present systems of theological, political, and economic injustice.

Keywords: Judeo-Christian, Settler Coloniality, Supersessionism, Capitalism, Cold War

American Christian historian Martin Marty has written of the “Judeo-Christian

Tradition” that “One may believe in it, live in it and die for it, but still not be quite

sure what it is” (Marty 1986: 858). The ubiquity of references to the “Judeo-

Christian Tradition” in contemporary political discourse in the United States and

Europe makes the concept difficult to understand and its genealogy difficult to

trace (Harvey 2016). While there are earlier, more technical, uses of the phrase in

European discourse, the origins of the term’s current sense can be located within

American theopolitics surrounding World War II.

My intention with this article is to trace not the genesis and genealogy of the

“Judeo-Christian” concept, but to identify a tradition of (primarily Jewish) dissent

to that concept. The approach is limited, for the most part, to debates within the

United States; the “Judeo-Christian” consensus that developed within US Cold

War discourse, however, has been exported via populist movements throughout

the North Atlantic (van den Hemel 2014).

My purpose—writing as a cis-gendered heterosexual light-skinned American

Indian male Protestant Christian from the United States who is deeply commit-

ted to liberative forms of inter-communal (including inter-religious) relations in

this era which manifests the interlocking injustices of 1492, the Shoah, and the

74 REORIENT

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

Nakba—is to promote what Gil Hochberg calls “greater suspicion toward the

active role played by the third party—the Christian West—in bringing together

and setting apart Semites in the service of Western-Christian interests, which tend

to remain invisible, given that they are the norm” (Hochberg 2016: 213).

Within that critical context, however, one cannot lose sight of why many Jews,

especially in the mid-twentieth century, would actively welcome even imperfect

positive expressions of Jewish–Christian relationship. Certainly, Jews preferred

Christian efforts toward more positive relationships over the Antisemitism and

fascism of prominent Americans like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh or the

activities of the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund. Even with its pragmatic benefits,

Jewish dissent to the concept of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” reveals it to be a

political assemblage offering conditional, incomplete access to structures of white,

western Christian power. This recognition informs possibilities for transformative

reconfigurations of popular power on a global scale.

The Outstretched, White Christian Hand

Gene Zubovich locates the genesis of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” in 1930s

America, when, in response to growing fascism, “a spirit of national unity”

publicly welcomed “Jews and Catholics . . . as junior partners in the coun-

try’s national life.” This welcoming spirit was a hallmark of politically liberal

American Protestantism. Resisting this “encroaching pluralism,” the National

Association of Evangelicals, in 1947 and 1954 “introduced the Christian amend-

ment into Congress: ‘This nation devoutly recognises the authority and law of

Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of all nations, through whom are bestowed the

blessings of Almighty God.’” Along with this evangelical resistance, the fact that,

as Zubovich notes, the “Judeo-Christian” concept was “popularised to oppose the

anti-Semitism of another predominantly Christian nation [Germany]” indicates

the fundamental instability of the term (Zubovich 2018).

Mark Silk’s oft-cited analysis of how the “Judeo-Christian Tradition” devel-

oped in the United States also focused on its foundations in the 1930s and 1940s

before neo-orthodox Christian theologians brought it to full flower in the 1950s.

After the United States ended that period of flirtation with fascism and prepared

to enter the war, says Silk, “‘Judeo-Christian’ . . . became a catchword for the

other side. In its 1941 handbook, Protestants Answer Anti-Semitism, the left-

liberal Protestant Digest described itself (for the first time) as ‘a periodical serving

the democratic ideal which is implicit in the Judeo-Christian tradition.’” As he

opened the Hebrew Union College 1942–1943 academic year, Julian Morgenstern

proclaimed, in strikingly Hegelian terms, that “Today we realize, as never since