Somebody says “Judeo-Christian values” in a speech and the room nods, because the phrase sounds old, like it came down the mountain with the tablets. Yet it’s about ninety years old, assembled in America for a specific political job. Over time it’s been reassigned to a new job every couple of decades, and it names a shared religion that nobody has ever practiced.
Lie is a word I usually try to avoid, and this one earns it. So let’s get into the Judeo-Christian lie without whitewashing any of the three religions involved.
The Phrase Was Repurposed in the 1930s
Before the twentieth century, when scholars wrote “Judaeo-Christian” they meant the first generation of Jewish followers of Jesus, the people in Jerusalem who kept the Sabbath and the food rules and thought the messiah had shown up. It was a historical label for a group that lost and disappeared. It belongs to a time when what we now call Christianity was still a sect inside Judaism.
The modern meaning was manufactured in the United States between the wars. Interfaith groups founded in the 1920s wanted a way to argue that Jews belonged inside American life while antisemitism was respectable in clubs, universities and the press. During the war against Germany the phrase became a way of saying what America stood for and what it stood against. In the 1950s it got pointed at the Soviet Union, which is the decade Congress put “under God” in the pledge and “In God We Trust” on the money. By the 1980s the religious right was using it against secularism, feminism and the courts. After 2001 the boundary moved again, and the thing on the far side of the line became Islam.
The line keeps getting repurposed to mark who’s inside.
One God with No Partners, and Everything That Follows
It doesn’t take a PhD to see which one is the odd one out as far as the nature of God goes. How much more fundamental can it get?
God is one, with no partners, no offspring and no human form. Prayer goes straight to that God with nobody standing in between. There are no statues, no paintings of God, no images of the divine in the room where people pray. There’s a body of law covering food, washing, sex, money, mourning and the calendar, and the religion’s scholars are lawyers working out how that law applies. Boys are circumcised. The founder stays a man, a messenger who dies like everyone else and gets no worship. The one and only God stays the God of Moses.
On the neighbor’s side, God becomes a man to walk on the surface of the Earth, is born, eats, dies, and is worshipped in that human form. The churches over there are full of images of him, his mother and his saints, and for most of that religion’s history kneeling in front of those images has been ordinary practice. The central weekly act involves eating him. The food laws were discarded, circumcision was discarded, and the holy day was moved. Its scholars spent centuries working out the internal arrangement of God’s nature, a question the other two consider settled by the first sentence of the creed they’d actually sign.
A Religion You Do and a Religion You Believe
The gap gets wider when you ask what makes someone a good member.
In Jewish practice and in Muslim practice, the answer is largely about conduct governed by law: what you eat, when you pray, how you wash, what you owe, how you treat contracts and neighbors and the dead. Both built enormous legal literatures, both produced competing schools of interpretation, and in both the respected figure is the one who knows the law and can reason from it.
Christianity resolved this early and in the other direction. The law was declared finished as a requirement, human beings were held to be incapable of earning anything, and the thing that saves you became belief in what somebody else did on your behalf. That’s why Christian history runs on creeds and councils and heresy trials, arguments about what you must affirm, while the other two run on legal opinions, arguments about what you must do.
You can see why the two law-shaped religions recognize each other. A kosher kitchen and a halal kitchen are two answers to the same question. A church potluck isn’t answering that question at all.
One Book, Two Opposite Religions
The usual defense is the shared scripture. Christians and Jews both have the Hebrew Bible, so surely there’s one tradition there.
The books are arranged in a different order, the collections don’t match, and the reading protocols are opposed. Jewish practice reads that text through the rabbinic material built on top of it, which is where the law lives and which Christianity rejects wholesale. Christian practice reads the same text as a set of coded predictions about a man who shows up in the sequel, a reading Jewish interpreters have rejected point by point for two thousand years. Then Christianity added a second collection that overrules the first on the very points that organize Jewish life.
Two religions can hold the same book and get opposite religions out of it, which is what happened. Meanwhile the Quran treats the earlier scriptures as messages from the same God given to the same line of prophets, and fills in stories from both Jewish and Christian material. Sharing a shelf with someone doesn’t make you the same household.
