The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Civilization

The phrase “Judeo-Christian” sounds ancient, as though it were carved into the bedrock of Western civilization. In truth, it is a linguistic prosthesis invented in the twentieth century to disguise a fracture as a foundation. It is a term of political utility, not theological truth — a slogan that converts centuries of antagonism into a story of alliance. The phrase pretends to describe continuity; it actually conceals contradiction.

Judaism and Christianity are not cousins but estranged worlds. Judaism rests on revelation through law. Christianity rests on salvation through faith. Judaism insists that God is utterly one. Christianity insists that the One is a Trinity. Judaism denies that any man can be God; Christianity begins with the assertion that one man was. Between these two affirmations yawns the deepest metaphysical gulf in Western religious history.

The Jewish covenant at Sinai is perpetual, binding, and juridical. The Christian covenant at Calvary is redemptive, final, and mystical. One commands deeds; the other promises grace. The God of Israel demands obedience to commandments; the God of Christ demands belief in his son. The Hebrew prophet denounces injustice in this world; the Christian apostle speaks of a kingdom not of this world. They share names, texts, and geography, but not the same cosmos.

The earliest Christians knew this, which is why they claimed not to continue Judaism but to replace it. Paul’s epistles are explicit: “We are justified by faith apart from works of the law.” The old covenant, he wrote, was a ministry of death; the new covenant was a ministry of the Spirit. Christianity was born as an act of theological de-Judaisation. The word “Old Testament” itself is a verdict of obsolescence — a declaration that God’s first contract has expired.

The Jewish sages responded in kind. In the Talmud, the followers of Jesus were classified as heretics who violated Torah. The Shema — “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” — left no room for divine sons. The very concept of incarnation was blasphemy. For rabbinic Judaism, Jesus was neither savior nor prophet but symptom — one more charismatic rebel against the Law. To call this relationship “Judeo-Christian” is like calling fire and water “a partnership.”

For nearly two millennia, Christians regarded Jews as a rejected people. Justin Martyr, in the second century, told Jewish interlocutors that their covenant had been revoked. John Chrysostom called synagogues “brothels” and “dens of demons.” Augustine taught that Jews should not be killed but preserved in suffering as witnesses to Christian truth — a living museum exhibit of divine punishment. This was not hatred born of misunderstanding but doctrine born of theology.

The alliance imagined by the phrase Judeo-Christian did not exist through the Crusades, the Inquisition, or the Reformation. It did not exist when popes forced Jews into ghettos, when Christian mobs massacred them in Mainz and Worms, when Martin Luther demanded their synagogues be burned. It did not exist when European Christendom branded Jews as Christ-killers or when kings expelled them from England, France, and Spain. If the two faiths shared anything, it was a long and bloody history of exclusion.

Only in the twentieth century did this change — and not for reasons of theology but survival. In the 1930s, as fascism rose in Europe, liberal Protestant ministers and Jewish leaders in America sought a common moral language to oppose Nazi paganism. They coined the term Judeo-Christian to express unity against a new barbarism that rejected both Testaments. The phrase was meant to heal a wound; instead, it anesthetized it.

After World War II, the phrase migrated from pulpits to politics. The Holocaust had exposed the moral bankruptcy of Christian Europe. To rebuild legitimacy, the West needed a new civil religion — one that included the Jews it had nearly annihilated. The “Judeo-Christian tradition” was born as an act of moral laundering. It retroactively rewrote history: the same civilization that had expelled, ghettoized, and slaughtered Jews now claimed them as its spiritual partners.

During the Cold War, Judeo-Christian civilization became a slogan of the American empire. It was wielded not against antisemitism but against atheism — specifically, “godless communism.” In this new ideological war, religion was not a matter of faith but a banner of identity. The term allowed Western democracies to define themselves as moral, theistic, and free in contrast to the secular, materialist East. Presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan invoked “Judeo-Christian values” as code for capitalism, nationalism, and anti-Marxism.

This was not theology; it was marketing. The phrase served to baptize political ideology in religious vocabulary. It implied that democracy, property, and patriotism were the fruits of a shared biblical heritage. It sanitized colonial history and justified moral hierarchy. It turned religious difference into patriotic unity — a linguistic alliance forged in Washington, not Jerusalem.

Yet the contradictions never disappeared. Christianity could not fully reconcile with Judaism because its central dogma depended on supersession — the claim that Christ replaced the Law. Nor could Judaism embrace Christianity without surrendering its monotheism. The postwar phrase “Judeo-Christian” solved this problem by abolishing theology altogether. It fused the two religions not through doctrine but through abstraction. They no longer shared a God; they shared “values.”

But what values? The prophets of the Hebrew Bible thundered against kings and injustice; the Gospels preached forgiveness and poverty; the political rhetoric of “Judeo-Christian values” celebrates wealth, punishment, and war. When American leaders invoke the phrase, they rarely quote Amos or Isaiah. They mean family, flag, free market — a civic trinity wrapped in scripture’s aura.

The irony deepens. The same Christian civilization that for centuries accused Jews of deicide now invokes “Judeo-Christian heritage” to exclude Islam and secularism. The phrase functions as a gatekeeper of civilization: it draws the border of belonging. During the Cold War it separated the West from the Soviet Union; in the twenty-first century it separates the West from the Muslim world. Its real purpose is not inclusion but exclusion. It is a cultural password that admits some and bars others.

Theologians who take history seriously have long exposed the term’s fraudulence. Arthur Cohen, in The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, argued that the phrase disguises irreconcilable differences under a veil of sentiment. Jacob Neusner wrote that Judaism and Christianity “do not share a common tradition; they share a common scripture interpreted differently.” Mark Silk called it “a twentieth-century invention to meet twentieth-century anxieties.” All three understood that the term’s function is political camouflage — a symbol of unity invented by those who need it most.

Even within Christianity, the adoption of the term reveals unease. After the Holocaust, theologians confronted the moral abyss of their own tradition. The Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate in 1965 finally absolved the Jews of collective guilt for Jesus’s death — a reversal nearly two thousand years overdue. Yet even this act of repentance did not erase the underlying logic of supersession. It merely softened its expression. The new rhetoric of “shared heritage” replaced contempt with condescension: the Jews were now elder brothers, tolerated but still unconverted.

What emerged, therefore, was not reconciliation but rebranding. The “Judeo-Christian tradition” became the civil religion of the post-Christian West. It allowed societies losing faith to claim continuity with their past while quietly replacing belief with nostalgia. The churches were emptying, but the phrase was full of emotional power. It offered moral legitimacy without theological commitment — religion without revelation.

In America, this hybrid faith became the moral soundtrack of empire. The phrase “Judeo-Christian” was recited in congressional prayers, presidential speeches, and military ceremonies. It implied that God blessed not only Israel and the Church but also the Pentagon and Wall Street. It gave the Cold War a sense of divine continuity, as though nuclear deterrence were part of the Sermon on the Mount. It converted geopolitics into theology.

Yet beneath this rhetoric lies a deeper philosophical crisis. The modern West invokes “Judeo-Christian” values precisely because it no longer believes in revelation. The word God has become metaphor; the word faith has become posture. The phrase survives as a fossil of belief, a comforting echo in a secular age. It is the ghost of religion pressed into the service of ideology.

What began as a theological rupture has ended as a cultural brand. “Judeo-Christian” now appears in textbooks, think-tank papers, and media commentary, where it functions as a synonym for “Western.” It is used to defend everything from free markets to military interventions. The irony is complete: a phrase meant to overcome prejudice now justifies power.

The truth, however, refuses to vanish. Judaism remains what it always was — a religion of law, memory, and this-worldly justice. Christianity remains what it always claimed to be — a religion of grace, faith, and other-worldly redemption. The first seeks holiness through obedience; the second seeks salvation through belief. Their scriptures overlap but their cosmologies collide. No amount of political rhetoric can fuse them into one.

History, too, bears witness against the myth. When Europe expelled its Jews, it was Christian Europe. When pogroms erupted in Russia, it was Christian mobs that shouted “Christ-killers.” When Hitler rose, he borrowed centuries of Christian contempt and baptized it in race. Even after Auschwitz, Christian theologians had to reinvent their own moral vocabulary to explain how a civilization calling itself Christian could build death camps beside cathedrals. The phrase “Judeo-Christian civilization” emerged not as an inheritance but as an apology.

And yet the illusion persists. It persists because it flatters. It tells the West that its moral order is ancient, that its values are sacred, that its politics are divinely sanctioned. It replaces the messy history of conquest and colonization with a sanitized story of moral unity. It gives the heirs of empire a conscience they have not earned.

But language has memory. Words may serve politics, yet they cannot erase the logic of their origins. “Judeo-Christian” is a euphemism for forgetfulness. It is the moral camouflage of a civilization that can no longer tell the truth about itself. It stands as the last act of Christian theology in secular form — the baptism of amnesia.

To speak honestly about Western civilization is to admit that it is not Judeo-Christian but post-Christian. It is a civilization built upon the ruins of both synagogue and church, sustained now by reason, science, and humanism — the very forces once condemned by priests and rabbis alike. The Enlightenment, not the Exodus, made the modern West free. The rights of man were not delivered from Sinai but reasoned out in Paris and Philadelphia.

The myth of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” survives because it gives a disenchanted world the illusion of moral roots. It is a sentimental bridge between disbelief and memory. But bridges built on nostalgia eventually collapse under the weight of history. Judaism and Christianity cannot be reconciled by propaganda any more than reason can be reconciled with revelation. Between them stands two thousand years of theology, blood, and truth — a chasm too deep for slogans to cross.And so the phrase endures, repeated by politicians and pundits who need its music more than its meaning. But to those who remember the past, it rings hollow. It is not a creed; it is an echo. The civilization that calls itself “Judeo-Christian” no longer believes in God — only in the usefulness of belief.

Citations

Arthur A. Cohen, The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition (Harper & Row, 1970).

1. Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition,” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1984).
2. Jacob Neusner, Jews and Christians: The Myth of a Common Tradition (Wipf & Stock, 2001).
3. Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford University Press, 2011).
4. John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Harvard University Press, 2012).
5. Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964).
6. Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
7. Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2008).
8. Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Fortress Press, 1976).
9. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford University Press, 1985).