This, logically enough, intensified during the Eisenhower Administration. “Judeo-Christian” gained further traction during the Cold War-“Judeo-Christian” America opposed godless Communism. A marker in academic usage (motivated by respect for Jewish sensitivities): The old division of history-B.C./A.D.-“before Christ”/”anno Domini”-replaced by “BCE”/”CE”-“before the common era”/”common era.” An intellectual marker: In 1955 Will Herberg published a very influential book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, in which he proposed the sociological thesis that this tripartite religious identification has been replacing previous ethnic identities (Swedish-American, Italian-American, and Jewish-American having become a still loose merger of religious and ethnic identity). An institutional marker: The National Conference of Christians and Jews was founded in 1927, a pioneer interfaith organization combatting anti-Semitism (it persists under an even more inclusive name). The position of Jews and of Judaism in America has changed dramatically since then-socially, politically and culturally. ![]() A memorial chapel (originally located in the Brooklyn Naval Yard) was opened in a ceremony addressed by President Truman. This act of heroism was celebrated in the press, in books, in a motion picture, and even in a postage stamp. The four chaplains, who had vests on, took them off and gave them to others. As the evacuation proceeded, the supply of vests gave out. Four army chaplains-two Protestants, one Catholic, and one Jew-were busy trying to help soldiers get onto the deck and then to get them into lifeboats. Most of the passengers were still trapped below deck as the ship was rapidly sinking. The icon refers to a real event that occurred in 1943: A ship carrying American troops to Europe was torpedoed by a German submarine. The “Four Chaplains” became a heroic icon of this postwar understanding of America’s “soul” and its relation to American Jews. Even the mildest expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice (say, in jokes told in upper-class country clubs) inevitably evoked associations with the horrors of the Holocaust. war effort by the same token it deligitimated the genteel anti-Semitism which still persisted here and there in WASP America. Since hideously barbaric anti-Semitism was the core ideology of the Nazi enemy, the term “Judeo-Christian” served to describe the moral quality of the U.S. ![]() World War II was an important turning point in the unfolding drama of American pluralism. George Washington eloquently expressed this ideal in his letter to the synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, and in his farewell address asserted that religion and morality provide “indispensable support for political prosperity.” At the time it was clear which religion he had mainly in mind: It was above all Protestantism which, in the words of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (a Roman Catholic), had created “a nation with the soul of a church.” These words were written in 1922 by then the massive arrival of Catholic and Jewish immigrants had made it much less clear which church had given its “soul” to the country. When factual pluralism coalesced with the ideal of religious freedom, the new nation adopted the latter as one of its core values, enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. The Puritans tried in Massachusetts, the Anglicans in Virginia, but these projects failed because of the ineradicable heterogeneity of the immigrant population. ![]() ![]() Even before independence the British colonies in North America were religiously diverse compared with Europe and most of them gave up on projects to set up state churches. Rosenhagen places this relatively recent shift from “Judeo-Christian” to “Abrahamic” in the wider context of the expanding religious pluralism in American society. On December 9, 2015, The Christian Century published an article, “One Abraham or three?”, by Ulrich Rosenhagen, a Lutheran theologian at the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions of the University of Wisconsin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |