Paul Ryan is making headlines in the campaign’s closing hours by saying that President Obama’s policies pose a threat to Judeo-Christian civilization. Ned Resnikoff reports:
Two days before the election, Paul Ryan made an urgent appeal to evangelical supporters, claiming that President Obama’s policies lead down a “dangerous path” which is contrary to “Judeo-Christian values.”
“It’s a dangerous path,” said the Republican nominee for vice president during a public “tele-town hall” hosted by the evangelical Faith and Freedom Coalition. “It’s a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty, and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us such a great and exceptional nation in the first place.”
Matt Yglesias comments, “To me ‘Judeo-Christian values’ means ‘we don’t care about religious minorities but we’d like Sheldon Adelson’s money.’”
What does it means to speak of “Judeo-Christian civilization”? Congressman Ryan is right to note recent assaults on the specific religious bodies whose stories and rites stand at the heart of our culture. Some, like Yoram Hazony in his “Biblical Case for Limited Government,” have even offered sophisticated (if in the end limited) arguments for why a restricted role for government is itself a Judeo-Christian value. Yet the phrase “Judeo-Christian” is not primarily political but rather theological in meaning. It is a way of insisting on the indispensability of God’s chosen people in a properly balanced and fully flowering Christian civilization.
Perhaps the most provocative recent challenge to the idea of Judeo-Christian civilization came from Columbia University’s Richard W. Bulliet in his book “The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization.” Bulliet points out that the relationship between Jews and Christians was typified by conflict as much as by cooperation. The civilization we’ve been calling Judeo-Christian is really Islamo-Christian, he says:
To the best of my knowlege, no one uses or has ever used the term ‘Islamo-Christian Civilization.’ Moreover, I would hazard the guess that many Muslims and Christians will bristle at the very idea it seems to embody, and other readers will look suspiciously at the omission of “Judeo-” from the phrase. I can only hope that they will withold judgment until they have considered my “case” for introducing the term. [ . . . ]
The term ‘Islamo-Christian civilization’ denotes a prolonged and fateful intertwining of sibling societies enjoying sovereignty in neighboring geographical regions and following parallel historical trajectories. Neither the Muslim nor the Christian historical path can be fully understood without relation to the other.
Central to Bulliet’s briefly sketched thesis is the idea of “parallel historical trajectories.” Of course liberals think all societies are headed toward secular modernity (and Bulliet shares some of those hopes) but he is also clear-eyed about the way that modernity can be disaggregated and reconstituted, for example by a religious terrorist group that very astutely exploits mass media.
Yet this modernizing hope isn’t enough to support the idea of a specifically Islamo-Christian civilization because it sees all civilizations as following parallel historical tracks. How, then, might we refine Bulliet’s claim that there is a particular historical trajectory Islam and Christianity share?
One possibility is to acknowledge the particularity of liberalism and modernity: Both are very specific cultural products of Latin Christendom. They are not a generic human birthright that any man or woman could extrapolate from a state of nature or original position. We should not expect each civilization to react in the same way when it encounters modernity: Some might be more allergic, others more sympathetic. One will end up shedding much of its traditional past, another may be able to hold on to a great deal of its inheritance while absorbing new technologies and ideas.
If Bulliet is right (and on this he surely is) that there is a deep kinship between Islam and Christianity characterized by exchange of ideas as much as by clash of arms, Islam should be particularly well situated to absorb Western, Christian modernity on specifically Muslim terms. Islamic civilization has borrowed so heavily from Christian civilization (and vice versa) that it should be much better situated than, say, Hinduism and Buddhism to enter modernity without breaking ties to its own past. The longstanding intertwining of Muslim and Christian DNA is Islam’s bridge to a future that, we might be forgiven for acknowledging, was born in Christian Europe.
For all of Islam’s much publicized agonies in absorbing modernity, it remains a much more potent force on the global stage than any faith other than Christianity. We cannot finally predict if and how Islam will adjust to, say, historical-critical scholarship or political liberalism. But it is much more likely to follow Christianity’s path of adjustment and growth than one of withdrawal and decline. Even if we cannot follow Bulliet in speaking of an “Islamo-Christian civilization,” we can and should acknowledge Islam as a sister civilization deserving of more sympathy and respect than usually is accorded it.
Yet Christianity depends on Judaism in a way it never has or will on Islam. Christian civilization withers and dies without the Jewish people, that living sign of God’s promise to bless all men. It becomes either an abstract, universal liberalism or post-Christian nationalism, both with anti-Semitic tendencies. And so we might say that the only true Christianity is Judeo-Christianity. As much as I might want to sharpen and qualify Ryan’s use of the phrase, I hope it doesn’t drop out of our political vocabulary altogether.
November 5th, 2012 | 2:59 pm
Yet the phrase “Judeo-Christian” is not primarily political but rather theological in meaning. It is a way of insisting on the indispensability of God’s chosen people in a properly balanced and fully flowering Christian civilization.
I don’t really think it is a theological term, but if it is, it’s a Christian theological term. Jews certainly don’t see Christianity as the full flowering of Judaism.
Wikipedia has two statements that seem very relevant to me:
and
It seems to me that when Paul Ryan speaks of “Judeo-Christian values,” what he is really talking about is conservative Christian values, not values Jews and Christians share in common. Obama got somewhere around 70% to 75% of the Jewish vote in 2008, and while he may have slipped somewhat, it will still be stunning if Obama does not get significantly over 50% of the Jewish vote tomorrow. Apparently most Jews don’t think Obama is a threat to “Judeo-Christian values.”
November 5th, 2012 | 3:23 pm
I have never understood objections I have heard to the term “Judeo-Christian”. To object, one must change the meaning to be something like “composed only of Jews and Christians”. Yet, I have always understood the phrase to refer to historical roots, particularly of the culture. The idea that Western secular culture is independent of those roots is absurd. Western secular culture can be more readily defined by what it shares with those roots than what it rejects, even though it is what it rejects that distinguishes it from current Jews and Christians. Too often, it is what we accept without thinking that is invisible to us, so that what we reject comes to the fore. I do not believe that “liberal secular culture” even exists as more than a construct of the moment. I’ve seen too many pieces of that construct change drastically just in my lifetime. The construct is a source of experiments not of answers. And those experiments are swept under the rug when they fail.
November 5th, 2012 | 9:01 pm
While this subject is fascinating and needs to be developed more, read here what Robert Spenser, of Jihad Watch, has to say about Bulliet’s musings in the Middle East Quarterly of Spring 2006:
Bulliet contends that Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis and “Islamophobia” are obscuring the common heritage that Christians and Muslims share. Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, he says, have impinged upon one another and influenced each other for centuries and cannot be understood in isolation from one another; an adversarial relationship is not a constant of history and is unnecessary today.
Bulliet, like so many other followers of Edward Said, condemns those who hold that a clash of civilizations is upon us for pronouncing “against Islam the same self-righteous and unequivocal sentence of ‘otherness’ that American Protestants once visited upon Catholics and Jews.”
There is a fundamental inconsistency at the heart of this work: Bulliet recommends that instead of trying to bring Western values to the Islamic world, Westerners should cultivate respect for Islamic values. Then he confidently predicts that the coming decades will see new democracies flowering all over the Islamic world, without considering in any depth the fact that significant numbers of Muslims see democracy itself as a Western import, alien to Islam and unwelcome as a replacement for Shari‘a law.
Bulliet’s confidence that secularism will ultimately take root in the Islamic world despite its failure to do so up to now is rooted in his contention that Islam will eventually go through the same stages of development as did the Judeo-Christian tradition. In attempting to make his case, however, he hastily and superficially glosses over significant differences between the traditions—particularly the absence of a secular/sacred distinction within Islamic tradition. Likewise, he ignores or dismisses as “Islamophobic” analyses of just how deeply rooted within Islamic history and thought is a contempt for and adversarial relationship with non-Muslim traditions and cultures. Yet if his irenic vision is to become reality, Muslim reformers will have to acknowledge and confront these aspects of Islamic tradition, not deny or downplay their existence.
November 5th, 2012 | 11:25 pm
At the end of the day, it makes more sense to speak of a ‘Judaeo-Islamic’ civilization, given both the commonalities between Muslim and Jewish Orthopraxis and the the profound influence that Islam had on Medieval Jewish culture, e.g. Maimonides….
November 6th, 2012 | 8:28 am
It is an example of ethnocentrism to predict that the “Islamic world” will follow the same trajectory as the European-American civilization. Muslims may like our televisions and jeans; but there is a lot in America and Europe that is less than attractive–more lessons of what to avoid than magnets to modernity. What is more, the Islamic world many have more difficulty separating the good from the bad in Western Civilization as we would have it by our own lights.
Most Muslims have nothing but contempt for Christianity. Most Christians regard Islam as an inferior religion–both primitive and barbaric. If angels flew over the earth and one religion or the other disappeared, adherents of the surviving religion would think it is so much the better for humanity.
We have to look at each religion as it is rather than how we want it to be.
November 6th, 2012 | 11:46 am
[...] Does It Make Sense to Speak of Judeo-Christian Civilization? – Matthew Schmitz, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
November 6th, 2012 | 5:39 pm
At Regensburg Pope Benedict addressed questions apparently only His Holiness had the courage (guts) to ask. Out of all the Western world he has been the only one who was willing to publicly pose the question concerning religion and violence. The Pope was defending the foundation truth that “God is Logos, Reason.” This is not simply the result of enculturation or the “hellenization of Christianity” but is something that is always and intrinsically true. Not acting according to reason is contrary to the nature of God.
By using a medieval Byzantine Emperor in the C14th he raised an issue that still exists and there has been a failure to confront Islam on an intellectual basis. “Is violence justified on grounds of religious purpose? “. The Emperor was able to engage his Muslim interlocutor by appealing to a shared, natural human reason and its ability to apprehend the truths of God.
As the Pope summarized, the Emperor was able to articulate “the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.” He continued: “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. …… The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”
The internal problem for Muslims is that some Muslims say that there is no relation between Islam and violence while others do claim that violence is used to foster their cause. It has been suggested that 15- 25 % of the total Muslim world population support the notion of the legitimacy of violence both in principle and in the Koran. It is not enough to repeat endlessly that Islam is a religion of peace while not explaining the the violence that comes from the depth of their faith.
It’s true that we cannot “finally predict if and how Islam will adjust to, say, historical-critical scholarship or political liberalism.“ (The Pope’s) ’option’ (vis a vis his address at Regensburg) in favor of inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue between the Muslim world and the Western. is unequivocal.
Dialogue is not an option but a vital necessity and Benedict took a stab at laying it out for them how this can be accomplished. In other words, he invited them to ‘start talking.’
November 7th, 2012 | 5:46 am
[...] Some people are objecting to the notion that we have a “Judeo-Christian” civilization, arguing instead that what we have is an “Islamo-Christian” civilization. See Does It Make Sense to Speak of Judeo-Christian Civilization? » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog. [...]
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