Thread by @genezubovich

I wrote this article two years ago. Every few months someone on the right invokes "Judeo-Christianity" in some strange or awful way and this piece makes the rounds again on twitter because it explains how the term became associated with the right.

aeon.co/ideas/the-stra…

This time it was Ben Shapiro calling the Catholic Notre Dame Cathedral a pillar of the Judeo-Christian tradition and Western Civilization

It is ironic that the term, which was invented in the 1930s as an anti-Nazi measure meant to create a more pluralistic United States, has now become the province of the right.

I would change a couple of things were I to rewrite it again today. I would make the case more strongly that Judeo-Christianity was not a Cold War invention (as many still believe). Also, as @SWGoldman rightly points out, I don't treat Will Herberg's ideas with enough subtlety.

But most of all: I would show that Jews (along with liberal Protestants) played a very important role in promoting the term in the 1930s. A common misconception on twitter is that Judeo-Christianity was invented by Christians to tether Judaism to Christianity. That's wrong.

For example, Roger William Straus wrote in 1939: "It is essential for the preservation of Judeo-Christian principles" for Jews, Protestants, and Catholics to unite against the Nazis. (Straus, Religious Liberty and Democracy, 1939)

I doubt that this will be the last time controversy erupts about Judeo-Christianity. But in the future the reference point for these debates should be Healan Gaston's forthcoming book (coming out with @UChicagoPress this October).

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…