(July 4, 2026 / JNS)
The phrase “Judeo-Christian values” is meant to sound like bedrock. It is invoked as shorthand for the moral foundations of Western civilization and the American republic. But the phrase is not ancient. It is modern, political and far less innocent than its defenders suggest.
That does not make the underlying intuition expressed by the phrase false. Jewish ideas helped shape the West. Ethical monotheism, the supremacy of law over rulers, the dignity of the individual and the prophetic critique of power all entered the moral vocabulary of Europe and America through Judaism. No serious account of Western civilization can deny that inheritance.
Writers like JNS senior contributor Melanie Phillips and Josh Hammer are right to insist on this point. They argue, in somewhat different ways, that Western civilization rests on a Jewish-Christian civilizational foundation and that the West’s Jewish roots remain indispensable to its survival.
“Judeo-Christian values” does more than acknowledge Jewish influence; it converts influence into fusion. It takes a long, complicated record of borrowing, divergence and conflict, and repackages it into a seamless civilizational inheritance. In doing so, it compresses big theological differences into a convenient cultural brand.
The term itself is also much newer than its rhetoric implies. In its familiar American form, the phrase “Judeo-Christian” rose to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s as liberal Protestants, Catholics and Jews sought a common vocabulary to fight against fascism and antisemitism. The phrase hardened during the Cold War into a slogan that could counter “godless communism.” When Dwight Eisenhower declared in 1952 that the American system rested on “the Judeo-Christian concept,” he was using a political idiom of his era, not invoking a timeless consensus.
That matters because the phrase is the product of a difficult history. For most of the last two millennia, Jews were not treated as equal partners in Christendom’s moral project. They were more often tolerated outsiders, subject to periodic exclusion, coercion and persecution. As scholar Malka Simkovich has observed, the phrase “Judeo-Christian” elides a painful history marked by a profound power imbalance between Jews and Christians.
That is the first problem. The second is theological. “Judeo-Christian values” implies a shared moral and religious tradition. In practice, it often resolves in favor of Christian assumptions on which Judaism and Christianity remain fundamentally divided: covenant, law, redemption and the Messiah.
Critics of the phrase have long argued that it expresses a supersessionist logic, treating Judaism as a precursor fulfilled by Christianity rather than as an autonomous and continuing faith. Arthur A. Cohen called the “Judeo-Christian tradition” a myth because theological opposition cannot honestly be recast as a single shared tradition.
The political consequences of this are no longer abstract. Texas now requires public school classrooms to display a state-prescribed version of the Ten Commandments, using language drawn from the King James Bible associated with the Protestant tradition rather than Jewish formulations.
That is precisely how “Judeo-Christian values” rhetoric is weaponized. The language sounds inclusive, but the policy is not. The “Judeo” vanishes in the implementation, while Jewish identity is invoked to give a Christian text broader cultural legitimacy. This mutes the distinctiveness of Judaism itself.
As the phrase is used today, “Judeo-Christian values” rarely functions as a neutral description of intellectual history. More often, it serves as a boundary marker, defining who belongs inside the moral community of “the West” and who stands outside it.
None of this denies the real connection between Judaism and Christianity, or the immense Jewish contribution to the American experiment. It simply demands precision. If the point is to describe Jewish sources of Western law, ethics and constitutional thought, that can be done directly. Slogans are not substitutes for history.
The phrase “Judeo-Christian values” was formulated as an attempt to express solidarity in a dark time. In contemporary use, it too often obscures Jewish distinctiveness, launders a painful past and turns a serious civilizational argument into a partisan talking point. That should be reason enough to retire it.
