IN THIS section last week, Canon Rod Garner gave some clarity to that opaque and divisive word “woke” (Analysis, 7 March). He did so in the context of the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference, which sought to criticise “wokery” in defence of the West and its “Judaeo-Christian” heritage.
That word — “Judaeo-Christian” — so often encountered in the company of Big Serious Nouns (“heritage”, “culture”, “civilisation”, “values”) merits equal attention. It is much, and increasingly, used today, by those who want to defend it (the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, for example, talks a great deal about it); those who argue that it is just an Islamophobic dog whistle; and those who think that the very term is meaningless.
As with all abstract, socially loaded words, the truth about it is complex. Its origins lie in the early 19th century and are, not surprisingly, theological. The fact that the OED’s first recorded use of the term relates to a mission to the Jews points toward some of its moral ambiguities.
For the next century, it was used only rarely, and mirrored a growing awareness, through biblical scholarship, of Christianity’s Jewish origins. By the 1930s, however, as anti-Semitism exploded and German Christians did little or nothing to prevent it, liberal and neo-orthodox Protestants in the United States began to use the term as a mark of solidarity. It was a small step in healing the centuries of the Church’s poisonous anti-Jewish rhetoric, theology, and violence.
Most, if not all, American Jews approved, and, during the Second World War, annual gatherings of scholars at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York helped to legitimise the term. The term “Judaeo-Christian” became a means of bringing together heretofore disparate religious groups — Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish — in a slightly less WASPish America.
Having gained credibility, the word was repurposed after the war. “We meet at a time when the Judeo-Christian faith is challenged as never before,” the President of the Military Chaplains Association of the United States, the Revd Daniel Poling, said in 1951. The threat was, of course, godless Communism, and Judaeo-Christianity was recruited to stand for everything — political freedom, the dignity of the human, the rights of the individual, recognition of a transcendent order — that was denied in, and to, the people of the USSR.
IT WAS not simply a right-wing trope. As early as July 1939, reviewing a biography of Stendhal, George Orwell had written of “the Judaeo-Christian scheme of morals”. A quarter of a century later, Martin Luther King, Jr, proclaimed, in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: “One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for . . . the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage.”
Judaeo-Christianity was not the property of any political wing, nor was it always used positively. In his (in)famous 1967 article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”, the historian Lynn White blamed “the Judeo-Christian dogma of creation” for the West’s history of environmental exploitation.
The term’s popularity was waning, however. The intensity of Cold War fears had faded by the end of the 1960s, by which time some writers, such Arthur Cohen, in his book The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, were arguing that not only was the term an invention, but it was one that effectively erased the differences between Judaism and Christianity, usually at the cost of the former. Even if there was a “Judeo-Christian heritage”, what on earth was “the Judeo-Christian faith”? The term fell into abeyance, but only briefly.
With Communism on the wane, religious America was faced with a new set of enemies: moral relativism, sexual deviance, and the like. From the early 1980s, Moral Majority leaders picked up the phrase and sent it into battle against liberals, just as their parents had against communists. Jerry Falwell, Senr, for example, in his 1980 book Listen America!, praised the refusal of the state of Alabama to participate “in any conference that did not establish traditional Judeo-Christian values concerning the family”.
FORTY years on, this is more or less where we are today: hence ARC’s use of “Judaeo-Christian”, as a bulwark against “wokery”. I have no great desire to praise or to bury ARC, and I share some of their concerns regarding the impact of hyper-liberalism on family, culture, and society (though those concerns do not appear to stretch to its impact on economics, where it is equally harmful). Some form of correction is overdue.
But big, sweeping, abstract concepts are dangerous things, and “Judaeo-Christian” is no exception. The word’s history reminds us that it can exclude just as much as include. That is clearly how some are using it today. Mr Bannon, for example, is crystal clear that Judaeo-Christianity, for him, is a rallying cry against Islam. The attempt to bring together Jewish and Christian outlooks is commendable, but honesty compels us to ask what exactly is being unified. It is not doctrine or practice: Christians and Jews believe and do different things, for cogently different reasons.
If, conversely, we are talking about a unification of that oh-so-vague word “values”, then we need a coherent reason that we should not stretch Judaeo-Christian further, all the way to “Abrahamic”, maybe. If, for example, the values that we are talking about include a commitment to the family, to the dignity of the individual, and to belief in the holiness of God, then there is no good reason to exclude Muslims from the party.
The challenges posed by words such as “Judaeo-Christian” are, ultimately, unresolvable. After all, some believers will say, why stop at Abrahamic? Many of those values are also cherished by dharmic believers; so we should extend further. The problem of terminological expansion in the interests of inclusion, however, is that it is always purchased at the cost of precision and clarity.
Ultimately, you have to stop somewhere. Words simultaneously include and exclude, and that cannot be helped. The lesson that we should draw, particularly when deploying complex, shifting, and powerful words such as Judaeo-Christian, is that, if we use them, we should do so with caution and generosity.
Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos.
