Listen to any religious-right pundit discuss the intersection of governing and faith, and you’ll likely hear them refer to Judeo-Christian values. The term Judeo-Christian was first coined in the 1930s by liberals seeking to combat anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism in the United States, but by the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives who sought to increase the influence of Christianity in government had begun to claim the term as their own.
It is a patently false assertion that the United States was founded as a Judeo-Christian nation, and our founding fathers deliberately created a secular government for the republic, yet today many conservative politicians distort history by promising a return to Judeo-Christian government. These politicians likewise label many of their socially regressive policies as rooted in Judeo-Christian faith traditions. Take Focus on the Family (FOTF), for example, a fundamentalist Christian advocacy organization with a public policy approach self-described as “drawn from the wisdom of the Bible and the Judeo-Christian ethic.” Under this guise of Judeo-Christian values, FOTF opposes same-sex marriage and LGBTQ equality, staunchly lobbies against abortion and reproductive freedom, and promotes creationism and abstinence-only sex education. In seeking to build political support for these policies, FOTF uses the term Judeo-Christian to insinuate that their positions enjoy support from Christians of all denominations and Jews, but in fact, polling indicates that American Jews are overwhelmingly socially progressive.
According to 2015 data from the Pew Research Center, 81% of American Jews are accepting of homosexuality, 77% support same-sex marriage, 83% are pro-choice, and 81% believe in evolution. The Jewish community in the United States is consistently and vocally supportive of progressive social movements, and right-wing Christian organizations’ use of the term Judeo-Christian to suggest otherwise is inaccurate, problematic, and offensive to American Jews.
In addition to the inaccurate portrayal of Jewish values, a Judeo-Christian approach to governing is contrary to the constitutional separation of church and state, and exclusionary to those Americans of other religions and of no religion. The First Amendment’s protections of religious freedom and secular government have allowed Judaism to thrive in the United States, and American Jews must fight to protect these protections for the benefit of all religious minorities and Americans of no faith, including the nearly 1 in 4 American Jews who are not religious.
As fundamentalist Christian organizations increase their barrage of faith-based legislation targeting LGBTQ families, reproductive freedom, and science-based education in state legislatures around the country, it is incumbent upon Jews to stand up for secular government and oppose these efforts, and to demand that their proponents abandon the pretense of Judeo-Christian values, deliberate framing to mislead the public into believing that the Jewish community supports such regressive proposals. We do not.
Lincoln Dow is the Community Organizer/Program Coordinator of Jews for a Secular Democracy, a pluralistic initiative of the Society for Humanistic Judaism. He is also a member of the Secular Student Alliance’s Board of Directors and a politics student at New York University.
