Imagining Judeo-Christian America

Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy

K. Healan Gaston

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226663999
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

"Judeo-Christian" is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country's religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.

PART ONE

The Genesis of America’s Judeo-Christian Discourse

1

From Hebraic-Hellenic to Judeo-Christian

THE ROOTS OF A DISCOURSE

At the dawn of the twentieth century, virtually all Protestant Americans regarded their nation as “Christian”—by which they meant Protestant. Although the Catholic and Jewish populations were expanding rapidly, due to the massive influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants that accompanied industrialization, these stirrings of change in the religious landscape had barely touched the collective self-conception of the Protestant majority. Evidence of growing religious diversity could be seen; cross-confessional skirmishes over Bible reading in the public schools, surprisingly common in the late nineteenth century, produced interfaith initiatives in several cities. At the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the World’s Parliament of Religions dramatized the range of religious diversity at home and abroad. But these were isolated examples, perceptible to the astute observer but easily ignored by those disinclined to see changes afoot. Within decades, the acceleration of such trends would remake many Americans’ sense of their nation’s religious identity. But in 1900, the idea that America was a “Judeo-Christian” nation and stood in the vanguard of “Western civilization” would have been unfathomable. Indeed, such claims would have been literally meaningless to all but a handful of Americans. Those key terms had not yet taken on their modern meanings in American public culture.

This all changed dramatically, especially in educated circles, by World War II. In the 1930s, cultural leaders increasingly saw the United States as the torchbearer of “Western civilization” rather than the product of a rebellion against Europe. Among most Protestant Americans, Europe had long been synonymous with hidebound traditionalism and fixed classes. By the 1930s, however, American thinkers increasingly perceived a singular “West,” defined by a shared set of ethical and perhaps religious principles. Such intellectual constructions of the West strongly influenced the cultural contours of Judeo-Christian discourse in the United States.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ongoing disputes in Europe over Christianity’s historical roles bequeathed to Americans important resources—terms, concepts, dichotomies, taxonomies—for analyzing questions of religious difference and religion’s role in society. American scholars then crafted their own accounts of the religious dimensions of Western history. By World War II, some had begun to rework these cultural materials into versions of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” that provided a usable past for a nation with distinctive demographic characteristics and cultural and theological divides. Not simply a liberal response to fascism or increased demographic diversity, the emergence of America’s Judeo-Christian discourse also involved the articulation of new standards of theological and political authenticity—standards strongly shaped by the New Deal at home and totalitarianism abroad.

The Nineteenth-Century Dialectic of Hebraism and Hellenism

The term “Judeo-Christian” had been around for decades before it took on its modern meaning in the 1930s and 1940s. Its sporadic original uses reflected pressing problems of identity and belief that also shaped a series of other, related concepts. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries featured a vigorous discourse on the relationships between religion, nationality, and civilization that would eventually pull the term “Judeo-Christian” into its orbit. This discourse on the cultural character of the West, which Americans joined by the 1870s and 1880s, later gave “Judeo-Christian” its familiar meaning, as thinkers proposed various ways of defining Western civilization and differentiating it from other civilizations.1

The leading conceptual resource in the earlier period was a distinction between “Hebraic” and “Hellenic” elements of Western culture that recurred throughout the late nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century European thinkers focused intently on Christianity’s Hebraic past. The study of the Hebrew language had played a key role at Protestantism’s inception, after centuries in which the medieval church evinced little interest in the ancient Hebrews. The Reformers’ concept of sola scriptura inspired them to learn to read Scripture in the original Hebrew, in search of its true meanings. In the nineteenth century, as Christianity lost its grip as a taken-for-granted framework of absolute truth, many Protestant scholars and church leaders sought to renew its cultural force by again looking to its earliest iterations as a source of ethical guidance and spiritual energy. The painstaking philological work through which nineteenth-century scholars tracked the historical origins of biblical texts reflected a broader search for a kind of religious fountain of youth that could reinvigorate Europe’s Christian spirit. As in the Reformation period, this focus on the early church led once again to the ancient Hebrews.2

Nineteenth-century arguments over Hebraism intersected with new ways of thinking about social dynamics. Much of the era’s discourse on human differences rejected the individualism and universalism of the Enlightenment period and focused instead on the collective forms of identity—especially nations, religions, and civilizations—that mediated between individuals and humanity as a whole. The nation-building and colonial projects of the nineteenth century imparted a deep sense of portent to scholarly work on such questions. Above all, the existence of Jewish populations in self-professedly Christian nations was a primary concern. Modern nationalism portrayed Europeans as separate and essentially homogeneous peoples, but also as Christian peoples. In this view, each people possessed a unifying spirit that manifested itself in a tightly integrated linguistic and cultural tradition and thus shaped literary productions and folklore, as well as religious beliefs. European nationalism redoubled the pressure on Jews to assimilate culturally, and eventually to convert to their nations’ dominant versions of Christianity. Throughout Central Europe especially, where national unity had not yet been achieved and the Jewish presence was strong, Judaism represented a pressing problem for nationalist and Christian leaders alike.3

This anxiety about persistent religious differences lurked just below the surface of vigorous scholarly exchanges over the chronology and meaning of early Christian history. Questions about Christianity’s relationship with Judaism at the moment of the former’s origin stood in for larger concerns about the contemporary relationship between Christianity, Judaism, nationalism, and European civilization. What did it mean that Christianity had grown from a Jewish matrix? When had a distinctively Christian religion emerged out of Judaism? Did that emergence signal a total rejection of Judaism by the early Christians, or could one see significant continuities? And what, precisely, differentiated Judaism from Christianity? The meaning of the Hebrew Bible became a battleground as religious thinkers layered new questions about the historical origins and contemporary meanings of Christianity onto late-Enlightenment debates about faith and reason. Scholars studied ancient languages, developed new theories of history, and proliferated schemes for classifying religions, peoples, races, and civilizations. The Protestants who led the charge hoped to use empirical evidence about primordial Christianity’s character to rebuild the social unity of medieval Christendom on the foundation of Protestant voluntarism and moralism. With an eye toward imperial ventures and the loosely related missionary enterprise, they also sought to explain why Christianity could and should spread around the globe.

Two distinct but potentially overlapping ways of understanding the role of Hebraic ideas in Western civilization took shape in the nineteenth century. One was exemplified in the writings of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whose complex taxonomy of religious systems became a key reference point for arguments about Christianity and Judaism as well as an important link between the discourses of theology and nationalism. Hegel advanced the “supersessionist” argument that Judaism had played a necessary role in the development of Christianity but no longer represented a vital force in the modern world, having fulfilled its historical destiny in the distant past. Many Europeans followed Hegel in reducing the meaning of Judaism to its historical contribution to Christianity, ignoring the fact that it survived as a living religion and implicitly endorsing a close link between Christianity and the modern state. To Hegel, Christianity represented “a spiritualized Judaism,” a Judaism made absolute and universal. By fulfilling Judaism’s promise, Christianity had rendered modern forms of Judaism obsolete. As the historical criticism of the Bible emerged in Germany, Tübingen School founder F. C. Baur embedded Hegel’s analysis in the early history of the church by arguing that Christianity had taken its mature form only when the universalism of Paul and his followers replaced the legalistic and nationalistic orientation of Peter and the Jewish Christians.4

Meanwhile, the British cultural critic Matthew Arnold argued that Western culture represented a compound of two ancient strands, namely, Hellenism and Hebraism. This distinction, which was susceptible to an extremely wide range of meanings, appeared time and time again in the cultural disputes of the era. Some theorists of Hellenism and Hebraism held that Western civilization required the elevation of one component over the other. Arnold, for example, sought to boost the Hellenic content of British culture in the face of what he saw as a dominant Hebraism, while other Christian writers decried the emphasis on Hellenistic rationalism. Still others contended that Western civilization required a delicate balance between Hebraic and Hellenic elements. Speaking implicitly to questions of national identity and political organization, these seemingly abstract arguments about the relationship between Hebraism and Hellenism also functioned as practical claims about the cultural basis and educational forms required to sustain Western modes of social order.5

Scholars have identified Arnold’s canonical 1869 work Culture and Anarchy as the leading antecedent to the language of Judeo-Christianity. There, Arnold addressed concerns about culture and democracy similar to those that animated early-twentieth-century American commentators. With the aristocracy fading, he argued, the middle class was destined to rule and to assimilate the working class. Yet the workers would reject the leadership of the middle class, he feared, if it failed to take over from the dying aristocracy “those public and conspicuous virtues by which the multitude is captivated and led—lofty spirit, commanding character, exquisite culture.” Arnold traced prevailing cultural values such as industriousness and acquisitiveness to Hebraism’s legalistic emphasis on ensuring proper “conduct and obedience” through the rigid enforcement of “strictures of conscience.” The middle class, he argued, could truly fill the aristocracy’s shoes only if it instead embraced Hellenism, a capacity “to see things as they really are” that was underwritten by “spontaneity of consciousness.” According to Arnold, restoring a greater quotient of Hellenism to the British cultural milieu would satisfy “the need in man for intellect and knowledge, his desire for beauty, his instinct for society, and for pleasurable and graceful forms of society.”6

At the same time, Arnold found much to admire in the Hebraic quest for justice. And he readily admitted that innovation could go too far, especially in the ethical realm, where a focus on creativity rather than rectitude produced hedonism and anarchy. In morality, among other areas, civilization could not do without the balancing force of Hebraic legalism. Describing Hebraism and Hellenism as “rival forces . . . dividing the empire of the world between them,” Arnold argued that Christianity offered a perfect synthesis of the two, providing the needed corrective for any European culture that had become unbalanced. Indeed, one of Arnold’s primary claims in Culture and Anarchy was that a state church was preferable to religious voluntarism or secularity, because the religious establishment would preserve the cultural basis for middle-class rule. As we will see, many American users of the Judeo-Christian language likewise assumed that Christianity neatly balanced the genius of Hebraism with the resources of Hellenism and thus needed to play a central role in a democratic culture.7

The German philologist-turned-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s contributions to late-nineteenth-century debates on religion and civilization also foreshadowed the mature discourse of Judeo-Christianity. Arnold had worried about the problem of embracing cultural innovation without undermining existing ethical standards. Nietzsche, by contrast, identified those ethical standards as the major obstacle to human freedom. In setting himself against the entire tenor of Western culture, Nietzsche identified a body of “jüdisch-christliche” ethical principles as that culture’s foundation. He defined Western civilization as essentially Judeo-Christian in character. Nietzsche’s writings, especially On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) and The Antichrist (1888), described Western culture as an outgrowth of a Jewish-Christian heritage that he portrayed as a set of basic ethical ideals rather than a comprehensive body of doctrines.8

The French thinker Ernest Renan, a lapsed Catholic and a leading student of Semitic languages, illustrated perfectly how the nineteenth-century development of the “higher criticism,” which placed Jesus in a secular narrative of history, reflected deep concerns about the relations, past and present, between Judaism and Christianity. As a philologist, an interpreter of the historical Jesus, a student of world religions, and a theorist of nationalism, Renan stood at the intersection of virtually all of the paths of thought that later converged in the concept of a “Judeo-Christian tradition.”9 His Life of Jesus (1863) championed the empirical study of Christ’s life and the text of the Bible. It also challenged Albrecht Ritschl’s claim that the emergence of Christianity had entailed the ascendance of Pauline (i.e., Hellenic) ideas over Jewish ones. Instead, Renan argued, Christianity had synthesized Hellenic and Hebraic strands into a new and uniquely successful whole. The German-Jewish writer Abraham Geiger responded sharply the following year, insisting that Jesus had been Jewish and that whatever value Christianity possessed lay in its Hebraic core of monotheism, which had been swamped by a destructive, Hellenistic paganism as Christianity evolved. But Renan still held out for a Christian Jesus, even though he placed Jesus in a direct line of descent from the Hebrew prophets. In response to challenges by Geiger and others, Renan embarked on his massive, five-volume History of the People of Israel (1887–93), which helped establish the conception of a dual Hebraic-Hellenic heritage for Europe. Renan, like Arnold, insisted that Christianity perfectly melded the two strands comprising Western civilization.10

At the same time, Renan reinforced the supersessionist claim about Judaism’s relation to Christianity. His History of the People of Israel described the contribution of Judaism to Western civilization as purely historical: The Hebrew prophets, after midwifing Christianity by injecting a fierce passion for justice into Hellenic thought, had retired to the sideline as their offspring flourished. Renan described Western civilization as a “framework of human culture created by Greece” but infused with “the trace of Israel.” The Greeks, he elaborated, had provided “our science, our arts, our literature, our philosophy, our moral code, our political code, our strategy, our diplomacy,” and even “our maritime and international law.” In only one area had the Greeks fallen short: They lacked the moral fervor that gave Western society its inner fire. As Renan put it, the Greeks “despised the humble and did not feel the need of a just God.” Fortunately, he went on, the “ardent genius of a small tribe established in an outlandish corner of Syria” had perfectly filled “this void in the Hellenic intellect.” Armed with the needed passion for righteousness, Greek culture had gone on to its successful historical career as Western civilization. Meanwhile, “having given birth to Christianity, Judaism still continues to exist, but as a withered trunk beside one fertile branch.” Renan concluded, “It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism, its glory and the fulness of its evolution.”11

The supersessionist view of Judaism as a necessary but bygone element in the formation of Christianity took hold just as an emerging “world religions” framework was teaching Europeans to think of themselves as the inheritors of a civilization shaped by both Jewish and Christian principles. In the 1870s and 1880s, prompted in large part by the so-called discovery of Buddhism, the emerging world religions discourse defined Western civilization in essentially religious terms. Indeed, it helped to crystallize the modern understanding of the term “religion” itself, for which European forms of Christianity served as the model. Buddhism challenged prevailing European views in two important ways. First, the widespread belief that Buddhism was atheistic raised the prospect that morality and virtue might be possible without belief in God. Meanwhile, Buddhism also seemed to share Christianity’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Dreaming America, Deciphering Judeo-Christianity
• PART 1   The Genesis of America’s Judeo-Christian Discourse
• PART 2   Secularism and the Redefinition of Democracy
• PART 3   From Tri-faith to Multireligious America
• Bibliographic Essay
• Notes
• Index