Since I started getting active on Twitter in early 2024, I’ve come across many on the New Christian Right, or whatever we might be called, who are not fans of the phrase Judeo-Christian, to say the least. It upsets them because it seems to make Christianity a part of Judaism, or confuses Christianity with Judaism, or misses the point that Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism. I’m not exactly sure, but these are my best guesses. They are, also to say the least, not fans of modern Israel, or the dispensationalism that believes Isreal is still part of God’s redemptive plan. Their animus toward the phrase never sat well with me, and I tended to see it as making something out of nothing. Then I saw this short post from Joel Webbon on Twitter:

Judeo-Christianity is a pernicious false religion.

And this was my response:

Joel, technically it’s not a religion at all, and nobody is claiming it is. People who use it don’t use it as a noun as you do, but as an adjective.

The phrase reflects an ethos, a tradition born of Judaism and it’s fulfillment in Christianity. It’s fine far as it goes, except many people using it assume the myth of neutrality is true, and do not believe a nation should be Christian. That’s what we should focus on, not that Judea-Christian is a religion.

Joel’s statement made me realize the heart of their problem with the phrase was thinking it’s affirming a mixed religion that is not Christianity. I believe dispensationalism has contributed to this because dispensationalists really do believe modern Judaism and the nation-state of Israel are in effect part of the Christian religion and its ultimate eschatological fulfillment. In fact, what’s going on in Israel now is, according to the dispensationalists, part of God’s fulfilling his Old Testament covenant promises to Israel. This is why they will tell us to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” and why they seem to have unqualified support for the nation of Israel. It’s almost as if Israel can do no wrong, whereas people like Joel seem to believe Israel can do no right. I’m in the unenvious position of being somewhere in between these positions.

I was wondering when the term “Judeo-Christian” was first used, and so of course asked Grok:

The term “Judeo-Christian” was first used in the early 19th century. Its earliest known appearance is in an 1821 letter by English writer Joseph Wolff, referring to a “Judeo-Christian” community in the context of religious conversion. The term gained broader usage in the 20th century, particularly in the United States, to describe shared ethical and cultural values between Judaism and Christianity.

That goes back much further than I would have guessed. I suspected it wouldn’t have been used until Israel became a nation in 1948, and the dispensationalists were saying, “See, we told you so!” But there is no doubt since Israel became a nation, and then a stable ally in the Middle East, that phrase became common among conservatives and Christians. I have no problem with it, and I don’t think any Christian should, mainly because it’s an accurate description, as I said to Joel, of the ethos or traditions America inherited at its founding.

Was the Jewish Religion Significant in America’s Founding?
The simple answer is yes, but of course through the lens of a thoroughly Protestant, dominant Calvinistic, culture. The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s was a powerful influence on the social and political life of Americans for it drove the implications of Christianity deep into the American consciousness. Given this move of God’s Spirit was antiauthoritarian and democratic, the Crown would not have been happy about it. Robert Curry in his book, Common Sense Nation, agrees, saying “the Great Awakening prepared the way for the American Revolution in too many ways to be counted.” Pulpits across America, influential in a way modern Americans can’t comprehend, were aflame with justifications for liberty and revolution.

I have a book on my shelf called Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805, and it clocks in at just shy of 1600 pages. As I’ve dipped into it over the last ten or so years, many of the sermons are based on Old Testament texts. Christians themselves saw Judaism as integral to building a Christian nation, but of course in a Christian context of fulfillment. We also know that the founders quoted from the Bible more than any other book or thinker, modern or ancient, and Deuteronomy was the book they quoted from most. They also didn’t see Jewish religious practice in any way inimical or contradictory to the spirit of America’s experiment in Republican government. The issue, it appears to me, comes down to religious liberty, and if that concept is consistent with the idea of a Christian nation. America’s founders apparently didn’t think so. Before we explore religious liberty in more detail, let’s look at how George Washington, our first president and arguably the man who made America possible, saw that liberty in practice.

Washington visited Rhode Island in 1790 to acknowledge the state’s recent ratification of the Constitution and to promote passage of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.  When he visited Newport he met a delegation of citizens who read him messages of welcome. One of those citizens was Moses Seixas, the warden of the Touro Synagogue in Newport. Remarkably, Seixas in his welcome would use words Washington quoted verbatim in a letter back to the congregation. Seixas gave thanks to “the Ancient of Days, the great preserver of men” that the Jews, previously “deprived … of the invaluable rights of free Citizens” on account of their religion, now lived under a government “which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Speaking of all American citizens possessing alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship, Washington writes:

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

For Washington and the founders, one of our “inherent natural rights” as Americans was to worship as we please, which could not be considered mere toleration. Freedom of conscience was an inviolable right of all Americans of whatever religious persuasion. I’m sure they would have some ambivalence at the breadth of cultural and religious diversity in America today, but it’s reasonable to believe the same attitude Washington had to the Jewish worshipers in his day would apply to others in ours.

Are Christian Nationalism and Religious Liberty Compatible? The Secular Myth of Neutrality
The answer to that question very much depends on what you mean by religious liberty, which for Christians is not as easy a question to answer as you might think—unless you’re a secularist. Unfortunately most Christians are indeed secular. In fact, most Christians and conservatives are liberals, who believe in a kind of pluralism based on the secular myth of neutrality.

According to this myth, there is no preferred religion because secularism welcomes all religions equally. The public square is a place where God is unwelcome, persona non grata. Christianity gets a seat at the table just like any other religion, be it Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or atheism, but no religion, including Christianity, gets privileged status. I’ll briefly address this below, but I’ve dismantled this myth here previously, many times actually, but the concept of religious liberty today is a thoroughly secular concept that wasn’t fully accepted in America until the glorious 1960s. That’s when the post-World War II consensus of neutrality took over and the privileged status of Christianity was, well neutered. It would be some years before Christianity was treated as a threat to all that is good and decent and right, but in the Biden years that’s exactly where we were, in law and culture. Then Trump 2.0. Mind you, secularism and the myth is still alive and well, but Christianity is no longer the whipping boy it was when woke was king.

The question in a nation with a Christian self-conception is how much latitude in religious practice we allow. Complete carte blanche, do whatever you want? Should Satan worship be allowed? Animal sacrifice? Drug induced “worship”? Only the most radical secularist libertarian would argue that no lines should be drawn; the question is what and where. You’ll notice I said a nation with a “Christian self- conception.” Up until those 1960s most Americans would have said yes, we are a Christian nation. They wouldn’t have obsessed with details, or panicked over, God forbid, a possible theocracy. Every nation in the West prior that time had a Christian self-conception. Just watch the coronation of King Charles in May of 2023, and see how steeped England still is at some level in its own Christian self-conception. At every other level, it is radically secular. All the assumptions that run every aspect of societies in the West are secular. This is slowly changing as nationalist-populist movements with Christian awareness are growing throughout the West, not least in the unashamed Christianity the permeates the Trump administration. That would not have been on my bingo card!

I won’t solve the question of religious liberty in America in such a short space, but it’s something Christians need to discuss and debate and maybe even come to some agreement on as, God willing, Christianity again becomes dominant in America. Getting rid of secularism in the church would be a good start, in fact an essential start. If we can’t convince our brothers and sisters in Christ that neutrality is a myth, then a Christian America is a pipe dream. I know, most see this as the longest of long shots, but I don’t. Secularism is dead, as I argue in detail in my latest book, Going Back to Find the way Forward, and something needs to fill that societal vacuum it leaves as it whimpers away in its exposed futility.

I often use the Berlin Wall as a metaphor for secularism. It appeared so strong and impenetrable, so enduring. Almost everyone except a very few, including Ronald Reagan, thought the Berlin Wall wouldn’t be going anywhere in our lifetimes. In fact, when Ronnie told Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in Berlin in June 1987, I thought, now you’ve really lost it, Ronnie! That ain’t happening. Two and a half years later it did. The reason is that its strength was an illusion. An empire built on lies cannot endure, and secularism is a lie, every bit as much as East Germany was. Why is it a lie? Because it assumes societal neutrality is possible; it is not. Let my quote some thinkers who make the point. R.J. Rushdoony in his book Politics of Guilt & Pity says of the impossibility of neutrality as an undisputable fact:

Modern thinkers to the contrary, law is a product of metaphysics, a cultural expression of a basically religious fact. The contemporary avoidance of metaphysics is by no means its elimination. Men do not dispense with metaphysics merely because they refuse to discuss it.

Metaphysics is a word coined by Aristotle. He wrote a work about the physical world called Physics, which is basically his observations of the physical world. He then wrote a book called The Metaphysics, which is “beyond” or “after” physics, his study into the underlying nature of things. He calls this “first philosophy,” a study of being, of the fundamental principles and causes of all things. In other words, it’s the opposite of secular because God and spiritual things are metaphysical, and law inevitably flows from how we see ultimate reality. In the secular world, our Creator is the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection by random mutation, or chance. Man makes his own rules, his own laws, there is no meta-physics. Those are modern man’s fundamental assumptions. Yes, as Rushdoony says, they cannot be escaped:

Vishal Mangalwadi in his wonderful book, The Book That Made Your World, states an unalterable fact of existence:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

This includes its laws. We can have either a secular nation (or Islamic or Hindu, etc.), or a Christian nation. Whatever that “final source of authority” will determine the nature of that society and it’s culture. In a secular society it is man, the ultimate fulfillment of which is the state, which means there is no recourse beyond the state, and thus tyranny is inevitable.

Liberty of Conscience and Religious Liberty
We can’t discuss religious liberty without considering liberty of conscience, and those two should never be confused. Even in ancient Israel, the theocracy all modern people seem to fear, foreigners were mostly part of the moral and ceremonial lives of the Hebrews, but they were never forced to believe anything. Yet I often hear people claim that a Christian America would be a theocracy like ancient Israel, and people would be forced to believe in Christianity. No they wouldn’t because God never forces people to believe anything, and neither should we. In fact, if you look at Jesus in the gospels, he goes out of his way to get people not to believe in him! He was not interested in making Christianity easy, and often went out of his way to make it hard. But Jesus was not interested in establishing a government but in saving the world. He left the government stuff to his followers once he left the scene for good, and gave us the deposit of his presence in the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

The idea of a liberty of conscience in Western culture, and in fact the entire world, comes from Martin Luther’s confrontation with the establishment of his day. He declared that his conscience was captive to the Word of God, and that “it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” Those who were insisting he recant, or else, could care less about his conscience. They had societies to run and couldn’t allow every person to willy nilly believe whatever they wanted. Who knows what kind of societal chaos would follow if that were allowed. Luther was a dangerous precedent, and he had to be stopped. Gutenberg’s Press made that a futile endeavor, but we come to the wrong conclusion if we think liberty of conscience and religious liberty are synonymous. The former is absolute because God has not given us the right nor the power to coerce human thought. The totalitarians of the 20^th century learned that the hard way, speaking of the Berlin Wall. Having said that we come back to lines.

Most Christians and conservatives have been completely indoctrinated into the secular zeitgeist. This spirit of the times in which we’ve lived for the last hundred years tells us America has always been a secular nation. In fact, even Christian historians like Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden claim America’s Founders were primarily Deists and Unitarians and “not in any traditional sense Christian.” That quote comes from their book, The Search for Christian America, and one gets the impression they did not find it. In fact, America was in every sense a Christian Nation, even if it was not overtly enough for some of us.

I go back to the phrase I used above, a Christian self-conception. For most of our history, everything about the beliefs and worldview of almost all Americans was Christian. Christian morality, God’s law, the Bible, all were relevant to daily life and the life of government. As is often pointed out, nine of the thirteen colonies had established churches, and they had a religious test for public office. If a man didn’t affirm certain Christian doctrines, he wasn’t allowed to run for office. Nobody saw that as anti-American, or a violation of our modern secular dogma of the “separation of church and state.” Nobody. That isn’t to say we should do the same thing today, only that Christianity was never seen as inimical to the liberty established at America’s founding. In fact, contrary to what most everyone believes today except we “Christian nationalists,” is that Christianity is the foundation and requirement for true religious liberty. Secularism always and everywhere will lead to tyranny and totalitarianism.

Having said this, we must realize that every government and society draws “religious” lines. A “Judeo-Christian” society will not draw the same lines as a Christian society, but lines will be drawn. They always are and always will be. I’ll say it again: Neutrality doesn’t exist. Everything allowed or promoted affirms a worldview, and dismisses others. It’s just the nature of things. Since most of us like America and living in a representative republic, that means we at some level have to convince our fellow citizens about what those lines need to be. We can pass laws that are unpopular, but those will not be enforced unless the people embrace them. The current illegal immigration crisis is a good example. The vast majority of Americans hate it no matter how much leftists and Democrats lie about it. Ultimately, the American people have to be on board or things don’t happen.

The mission, should we choose to accept it, is to first convince our Christian brothers and sisters that the secular nation driven myth of neutrality is a Satanic lie. The American people won’t be convinced until the church is. The myth sounds good on paper, but it always leads to tyrannical results. While a result of hundreds of years of cultural change, the myth of neutrality is primarily a product of what’s come to be called the “Post World War II Consensus.” Thankfully, this consensus is falling apart as populist nationalism and the Great Awakening are moving around the world. Making America Christian Again will allow us to one day escape secularism and practice true religious liberty and freedom of conscience.