"The strange, short career of Judeo-Christianity"

"The term ‘Judeo-Christian’ supposedly recognises the deep and ancient common heritage of Protestants, Catholics and Jews. The idea would have sent shivers down the spine of Puritans, who saw a diabolical Catholic ‘Papism’ lurking around every corner. Such a shared heritage would have been news to the authors of Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution, which required office-holders to ‘acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration’, and which effectively banned Jews from public office.

The phrase ‘Judeo-Christian’ first became popular in the late 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt began trying to mobilise Americans against Nazism. So Judeo-Christianity was actually popularised to oppose the anti-Semitism of another predominantly Christian nation. FDR’s repeated recourse to religion in public addresses set him apart from his predecessors, who preferred civic principles."

 

https://aeon.co/opinions/the-strange-short-career-of-judeo-christianity?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4/26/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

This is interesting to know. The rest of the article is about the political history of the term through the rest of the 20th century, but it feels like much too pat a narrative for some reason, so I am hesitant to pull more to this blog.