During one of his recent confrontations with congressional Democrats, Donald Trump made a stunning comment about the United States’ Jewish population. How could Jewish voters overwhelmingly support the Democratic party, he groused, when it included prominent critics of Israel like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar? When American Jews voted for those politicians—or other members of the same party—who “hate Israel and hate Jewish people,” they must be ignorant or, still worse, “disloyal.”

IMAGINING JUDEO-CHRISTIAN AMERICA: RELIGION, SECULARISM, AND THE REDEFINITION OF DEMOCRACY by K. Healan Gaston University of Chicago Press, 360 pp., $25.00

While commentators rushed to dissect these ugly words, they could hardly agree on their meaning. Was Trump trafficking in long-standing anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jewish “dual loyalty”? Or was he highlighting his ironclad support for Israel’s security, a major priority of AIPAC and several other Jewish organizations? Indeed, since he assumed office, the president has been a master of sending mixed messages on Jewish matters. While he praised the neo-Nazis who in 2017 chanted in Charlottesville “Jews will not replace us” as “very fine people,” he has also cast himself as a firm supporter of Israel by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. This ambiguity is especially striking when compared to his unvarnished hostility towards other minority religious groups. The Trump administration’s raw Islamophobia, after all, is something that the president never seeks to balance in either rhetoric or policy.

It may be tempting to assume these conflicting impulses arise from Trump’s idiosyncrasies, but they are in fact rooted in long traditions. As K. Healan Gaston shows in her magisterial and beautifully written new book, Reimagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy, Americans have long articulated their thinking about politics and religion through their comments on Judaism. Few expressions capture this dynamic better than “Judeo-Christianity,” whose surprising history Gaston brilliantly traces through the words of countless intellectuals and politicians over the past 80 years. Even though this concept ostensibly encapsulates an ancient spiritual tradition that stretches back to Moses and Jesus, it is a recent invention. Coined by writers in the 1930s, it became popular during World War II and the Cold War, when Americans embraced the claim that their democracy stemmed from a “Judeo-Christian heritage.” Yet Judaism’s place in this political-spiritual complex was often ambiguous. While some used the term to empower the Jewish minority and call for religious pluralism, others invoked it as a cover for a very specific Christian (and mostly evangelical) agenda, especially on education and abortion. Some thinkers on the radical right even rely on it while spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Reimagining Judeo-Christian America therefore powerfully shows how the language of inclusion can be appropriated to promote exclusion. As the radical right increasingly usurps liberal concepts like freedom of speech and diversity of thought to promote sexism, racism, and religious bigotry, does the left have an answer?

Though Judeo-Christianity is a term commonly heard today, until fairly recently it would have sounded strange to most Americans. In the early twentieth century, commentators would have struggled to depict Judaism and Christianity as part of joint spiritual or political traditions. Protestant elites in particular conflated their own churches with progress and democracy and dismissed Judaism (alongside Catholicism and Islam) as a “backwards” belief system that fostered authoritarianism. Yet the Great Depression, Gaston shows, attenuated this antagonism, especially after its shockwaves transformed democratic regimes like Germany’s Weimar Republic into dystopian dictatorships. Prominent thinkers like Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued that if the United States’ fragile democracy was to avoid a similar fate, its people had to recognize their indebtedness to a “Judeo-Christian” heritage. The rule of law and political freedom, Niebuhr and others claimed, stemmed not from the Enlightenment’s individualist, scientific, and utopian ethos, but from a spiritual commitment to human dignity and justice shared by both Judaism and Christianity.