By Rod Benson
Is there such a thing as Judeo-Christian values”? The term “Judeo-Christian” is a relatively modern expression. Judaism and Christianity are distinct religious traditions, and political appeals to “Judeo-Christian values” may obscure their differences or distinguish supposedly authentic members of Western society from outsiders. Yet it does not follow that Judaism and Christianity possess no significant shared moral inheritance. The useful question is what the expression describes, what it conceals, and what political work it performs.
Origin of the term
The expression “Judeo-Christian values” is modern, although the religious traditions and moral resources it names are ancient. Its origins must be distinguished from those of the adjective “Judeo-Christian.” An early documented occurrence appears in a letter written by the Anglican missionary Alexander McCaul on 17 October 1821, where “Judæo Christian” described a proposed community of Jewish converts to Christianity.
This missionary usage differed substantially from the contemporary idea of Judaism and Christianity as continuing, distinct traditions possessing shared moral commitments. The nineteenth-century occurrence therefore establishes the adjective’s early history, rather than the origin of its current ethical and political meaning. Nor does the available evidence justify attributing the exact phrase “Judeo-Christian values” to a single inventor.
The expression acquired its recognisably modern meaning chiefly during the 1930s and 1940s, particularly through American interfaith efforts to counter antisemitism and promote a more inclusive national identity. Jewish and Christian leaders, including those associated with the National Conference of Christians and Jews, appealed to a shared religious inheritance to challenge narrowly Protestant accounts of American belonging. This language affirmed the participation of Jews and Catholics while encouraging cooperation across religious differences. Shalom Goldman’s historical account
Explicit ethical usage was present by 1939, when George Orwell referred to “the Judaeo-Christian scheme of morals.” His wording illustrates the emerging moral meaning, but does not establish that he coined the exact expression “Judeo-Christian values.” The distinction between an early documented usage and an identifiable act of coinage remains essential. Account of Orwell’s usage
During the Cold War, appeals to a Judeo-Christian inheritance became increasingly important in distinguishing American democracy from officially atheistic communism. Language that had supported interfaith inclusion also provided a religious account of national identity, raising questions about the standing of people outside the traditions it named.
In subsequent decades, the terminology became prominent in conservative political rhetoric and disputes over religion, secularism and public morality, although its use was never confined to a single political constituency. Its history thus involves changing and contested purposes rather than one stable meaning. The central distinction is between the antiquity of Jewish and Christian moral resources and the modern construction of “Judeo-Christian” as a collective public identity. Recognising the latter does not negate the former, but requires scrutiny of claims made in its name. K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America
What the expression means
Four ideas should be distinguished: tradition, values, heritage and genealogy. To speak of a single “Judeo-Christian tradition” suggests more theological unity than exists. To say that Judaism and Christianity share scriptures, moral concepts and historical roots is a more modest and defensible claim. A tradition implies a continuing community of interpretation and practice; values are moral commitments that may be shared across traditions; heritage describes what has been received historically; genealogy traces how ideas and practices developed.
Arthur A. Cohen’s influential 1969 essay, “The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition,” attacked the tendency to collapse two independent faiths into a synthetic religious tradition. His objection remains significant. Christians do not have unilateral authority to incorporate Judaism into a convenient account of Western civilisation. Yet the language of shared inheritance had also served constructive purposes. Jewish organisations as well as Christian leaders had used such language around the Second World War to combat antisemitism and affirm Jewish inclusion. Its history complicates both its defence and its dismissal.
Shared roots, enduring differences
There is no single Judeo-Christian theology. Judaism and Christianity differ profoundly over Jesus, Messiah, incarnation, Trinity, Torah, covenant and salvation. Christians have also frequently interpreted Judaism merely as the incomplete precursor of Christianity. Such supersessionism becomes especially problematic in light of the Holocaust and the centuries-long history of Christian antisemitism. Responsible Christian theology should affirm Judaism as a living tradition with its own integrity, rather than as the theological prehistory of the Christian faith.
Christianity did not simply emerge from what we now call rabbinic Judaism. Early Christianity and emerging rabbinic Judaism developed from the diverse Jewish world of the late Second Temple and post-Temple periods, although along markedly different trajectories. The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 transformed that history, but both traditions developed and differentiated over subsequent centuries.
Christianity is profoundly Jewish in origin and remains unintelligible without Israel and the Jewish Scriptures. Jesus and his earliest followers were Jewish; his Scriptures were Israel’s Scriptures. The central vocabulary of Christian theology—creation, covenant, holiness, sin, righteousness, mercy, Messiah, kingdom and resurrection—arose within Israel’s religious world. Christianity incorporated Israel’s Scriptures into its canon and interpreted them christologically, sometimes in ways Judaism emphatically rejected. Difference and dependence therefore coexist.
Paul’s image in Romans 11 remains salutary. Gentile Christians are imagined as wild branches grafted into Israel’s cultivated olive tree and warned not to boast over the natural branches (Rom 11:17–24). Whatever Christians conclude about church and Israel, this account of Gentile inclusion excludes triumphalism. Christianity cannot acknowledge its origins faithfully while denying its permanent indebtedness to Israel and Israel’s ancient religious traditions.
Shared values are not exclusive possessions
The ethical overlap is substantial. Genesis grounds human dignity in humanity’s creation in the image of God (Gen 1:26–27). Torah repeatedly demands justice for the stranger, widow, orphan and poor. The prophets condemn corrupt rulers, economic exploitation and religious observance divorced from justice. Micah’s summons to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic 6:8) belongs to Jewish Scripture before it becomes a Christian text. Jesus’ two great commandments draw directly on Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. The Christian ethic of neighbour-love is inconceivable apart from its Jewish inheritance.
Shared convictions do not establish exclusive ownership. A Jewish or Christian account of human dignity can be theologically compelling without implying that outsiders cannot recognise or defend human worth. Nor does the presence of an idea in Scripture demonstrate that modern institutions developed directly or exclusively from it. Historical influence, theological justification and contemporary moral validity are different questions. These require, respectively, evidence of transmission, theological argument and engagement with the claim itself. A religious genealogy can illuminate a moral commitment without conferring a monopoly over its meaning or practice.
The language of values also risks detaching ethics from the practices that give it substance. Sabbath, prayer, study, worship, almsgiving and hospitality do more than illustrate abstract principles: they help form people capable of living by them. Jewish and Christian communities may endorse similar moral commitments while locating them within different accounts of covenant, obligation, grace and communal life. Their convergence need not amount to an identical ethical system. Interfaith cooperation can pursue shared responsibilities without reducing either faith to a lowest common denominator.
“Values” can also conceal internal disagreement. Neither Judaism nor Christianity possesses a simple, uncontested checklist of political principles. Biblical texts contain debates and tensions concerning kingship, violence, wealth, outsiders, law, gender, property and political authority. Christian history encompasses pacifists and crusaders, abolitionists and slaveholders, monarchists and democrats, socialists and capitalists. Jewish ethical and political thought likewise contains centuries of vigorous internal argument.
Alasdair MacIntyre speaks of a living tradition as an historically extended argument. Traditions are not static containers of propositions. They are communities in which people argue across generations about the meaning of inherited texts, practices and goods. Political rhetoric becomes historically dubious when a selective collection of twenty-first-century policies is presented as though Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul and two millennia of Jewish and Christian interpreters all endorsed the same political platform. “Judeo-Christian values” can too easily become a retrospective label attached to convictions generated by much more recent political debates.
A tradition’s moral resources must also be distinguished from its adherents’ conduct. The existence of biblical arguments for justice does not establish an uninterrupted history of just institutions. Equally, religious complicity in oppression does not exhaust the ethical possibilities of religious faith. The presence of both abolitionists and slaveholders within Christian history makes the problem unavoidable: the same broad inheritance has been interpreted to support incompatible practices. A credible account must explain those conflicts rather than assign every achievement to authentic religion and every failure to its betrayal. Traditions should be judged partly by their capacity to acknowledge wrongdoing, hear those harmed and reform their common life.
When inclusion becomes exclusion
The expression has performed different political functions. Especially from the 1930s and 1940s, language of a shared Judeo-Christian inheritance acquired an important inclusive function in the United States, where some religious and civic leaders employed it against antisemitism and older Protestant definitions of national identity. During the Cold War it was increasingly incorporated into a broader contrast between the religious West and officially atheistic communism. In still more recent political rhetoric, “Judeo-Christian civilisation” has sometimes been invoked to distinguish Western identity from Islam. A term may include in one setting but exclude in another. Its political meaning cannot be settled simply by identifying its first use.
Islam further complicates the category. If “Judeo-Christian” denotes monotheism, Abrahamic ancestry, creation, revelation, moral accountability, prayer, charity, divine judgement and concern for justice, Islam shares many of these characteristics. Profound differences remain among these traditions. But contemporary rhetoric can sometimes minimise Jewish-Christian differences in order to construct a common civilisation while maximising Christian-Muslim differences in order to place Islam outside it.
That asymmetry should make Christians cautious. Why are some theological differences treated as compatible with a common civilisation while others become evidence of civilisational incompatibility? The answer may sometimes tell us more about contemporary politics than about theology. Extending the label to “Abrahamic values” would broaden the circle, but would leave the underlying problem unresolved if it continued to make religious ancestry a test of civic belonging. People outside all three traditions remain entitled to equal respect and participation.
Criticism must nevertheless preserve the distinction between misuse and every possible use. Jewish-Christian cooperation against antisemitism, poverty or religious persecution need not rest on a fictional theological unity. It can arise from communities consciously bringing different reasons to a shared task. The most defensible use of “Judeo-Christian” is thus specific, limited and open to correction by the people it names. It should identify an actual relationship or area of convergence rather than presume Jewish agreement with a Christian political project.
Inheritance without entitlement
The better historical conclusion is neither that “Judeo-Christian values” describe a timeless and homogeneous civilisation nor that the expression refers to nothing real. Judaism and Christianity have common ancestry, intertwined histories, overlapping scriptures and substantial areas of ethical convergence. They also possess profound and continuing differences. Acknowledging the first does not require denying the second.
Indeed, Christians may need to resist the idea of a single “Judeo-Christian tradition” precisely because they have learned to take Judaism more seriously. Genuine friendship does not require the abolition of difference. Post-Holocaust Christian theology should acknowledge both Christianity’s permanent indebtedness to Israel and Judaism’s right to define itself rather than be assigned a supporting role within a Christian narrative.
Such recognition has practical theological precedents. The Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra aetate (1965) acknowledged Christianity’s spiritual bond with the Jewish people, encouraged mutual understanding and repudiated antisemitism. Its significance lies partly in bringing shared inheritance together with obligations concerning teaching, encounter and the treatment of living Jewish neighbours. It illustrates how an appeal to common roots can support self-examination rather than civilisational self-congratulation. Without resolving every theological question, the declaration connects inheritance with accountable relationships. Nostra aetate, §4.
When someone invokes “Judeo-Christian values”, we should ask which values are intended, which texts and communities support that interpretation, whether the people named recognise themselves in it, and what follows for those outside the category. An appeal to mercy, truthfulness and the protection of vulnerable people invites discussion about shared responsibilities. An appeal that treats religious or cultural ancestry as a qualification for full belonging requires a different response. Its moral credibility depends on content and consequences, not inherited prestige.
A shared moral vocabulary
What does this mean for Australian society? Even if Jewish and Christian sources have contributed substantially to Western and Australian moral culture, does that make Australia a “Judeo-Christian nation”? And what place remains for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Indigenous spiritual traditions, secular humanists and Australians who profess no religion?
Historical contribution does not by itself confer political entitlement. Citizens need not inherit the same faith, or accept the same account of national origins, to possess equal standing in a common political community. In Australia, an adequate account must also take Indigenous spiritual traditions seriously in their own right, rather than treating them as a preface to a national story that begins with European Christianity.
The decisive issue is not the origin of Australia’s moral vocabulary, but how citizens with very different accounts of the good can inhabit a common political community without demanding either religious conformity or the privatisation of faith.
Rev Dr Rod Benson is General Secretary of the NSW Ecumenical Council and a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia serving at North Rocks Community Church in Sydney.
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