“When a maniac is at the door, feuding brothers reconcile.”
—Peter Kreeft—
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The exact origin of the term “Judeo-Christian” is a matter of debate. Some scholars suggest the word was invented in the early 19th century (to describe a now-defunct Christian denomination that had appropriated Jewish rituals and holidays). Others insist it was invented in the 1930s (as part of a U.S. government effort to distinguish ‘the American way’ from fascism). Still, another group of scholars hold that the term was invented in the 1950s (as part of a U.S. government effort to combat communism), while a minority group of scholars maintain that “Judeo-Christian” didn’t gain real traction until as late as the 1980s (when President Ronald Reagan frequently employed the expression in his speeches).
But regardless of its origin and motive, in 2025 the term “Judeo-Christian” is about as popular among the religious right as celery sticks at a pizza party. This is because a small but particularly loud and influential segment of the religious right has an annoying allergy to coalition building.
Rightwing religious Jews (who won’t ally with Christians out of suspicion that said alliance would eventually culminate in attempts to convert them) don’t like the term “Judeo-Christian” because… well… they don’t like the idea of their religion sharing a hyphen with a religion that—in their mind—is entirely separate and idolatrous.
Radical traditionalist Catholics (who won’t ally with Jews because of good ol’ fashioned medieval antisemitism, and won’t ally with Protestants due to bitterness over the Reformation) don’t like the term “Judeo-Christian” because the only group they dislike more than Protestants are Jews.
And “Christian Nationalist” Protestants (who also won’t ally with Catholics due to * checks notes * bitterness over the Reformation) don’t like the term “Judeo-Christian” because the only group they dislike more than Catholics are Jews.
Incidentally, none of these people are particularly good at organizing real formidable opposition when mobs of leftwing activists and violent men from Islamic countries come a’knockin. Each little group likes to silo themselves off and think they can take on (and take down) liberal cultural degeneracy and migrant crime all by themselves. Rejecting a massive cavalry of thoroughbreds, they ride into battle as a small pathetic cluster straddling shetland ponies. Folly.
Extremely sectarian people are useless. Actually they’re worse than useless, because most of the time they actively try to prevent interfaith political coalitions from forming, rather than going away and keeping their disagreements to themselves.
In opposition to these people (complete and unabashed), I would like to defend both the term “Judeo-Christian” and the aspiration behind the term: which is for Jews and Christians to grow close to one another, and find common cause at a time when both groups are under attack by the same enemies.
Wokeism & Islam
Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 was celebrated by conservative, libertarian, and even a few centrist pundits as being the “end of woke”. And by this, they meant the end of an aggressive zeitgeist which—between 2013 to 2024—promoted the following things: 1) 21st century Western societies were steeped in racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, fatphobia, etcetera, all of which needed to be excised, leading to 2) a dogmatic insistence that the personal was always political, and one could never separate politics from personal tastes, desires, or decisions, leading to 3) the conviction that one should constantly interrogate both themselves and immediate friends and family about their tastes, desires, and decisions to ensure everyone was doing and saying “the right things”, leading to 4) the belief that enforcing strict censorship policies on all major social communication platforms was necessary to stop the rise of “rightwing extremism”, and also 5) the belief that an obsessive hunt for “outsiders” within all important industries from finance to science to media to entertainment was necessary, as was the complete ruination of those outsiders’ professional and personal lives if they continued to disagree with woke consensus.
As for how one defined “woke consensus”, it was not strictly Marxist or Maoist. It was not strictly postmodernist or poststructuralist. It was not strictly Sartrean or Foucauldian. And while one could certainly detect a satanic force animating the movement’s mobs and rioters, the movement itself had little to do with the occult. “Woke” was, by and large, its own monster; combining disparate ideologies united only by hostility to American and European history and values, while never allowing itself to be subsumed by any particular ideology. In the United States, “wokeism” was left-ist and of the left, but also in many ways distinct from what the American left used to be historically. Wokeism was radical, yes, but incoherent in terms of what it claimed to be radical about. It had slogans and hashtags and sleek manifestos, yes, but very few actual policies. It spoke often of “justice”, “equity”, and “diversity”, but its unappeasable and unfocused rage caused its petulant adherents to really only want one thing: to see the West burn.*
And it’s for this reason I’m not convinced Trump’s return to the presidency is the end of woke.
Fanaticism and self-righteousness are very hard things to kill.
Quasi-religions designed to replace actual religions are very hard things to kill. (Swap “the sovereign will of God” with “the right side of history”, “original sin” with “privilege”, “total depravity” with “unconscious bias”, “renouncing the devil” with “agreeing to diversity training”, “opening prayer” with “land acknowledgments”… you get the idea.)
People were saying the radical left was dead when the anti-war protests didn’t end the Vietnam war. They were saying the radical left was dead when Carter lost to Reagan. They were saying the radical left was dead when the Berlin Wall fell. They were saying the radical left was dead when the Soviet Union collapsed. They were saying the radical left was dead in the early months of the War on Terror. They were saying the radical left was dead the first few days after Trump won his first election.
But the radical left doesn’t die. It hibernates. Woke hasn’t been ended. It’s been paused.
Regardless, the supposed “end of woke” brought on by Donald Trump’s reelection can only be spoken of in the context of the United States. In Western Europe, woke ideology continues to barrel through governments and private institutions full steam ahead. This is why Germany tried to ban a popular rightwing political party that came in second with 20% of the popular vote (out of six parties), and may still attempt to ban it ahead of the 2029 election. This is why Romania recently overturned their election when a rightwing candidate won. But perhaps the iron grip of wokeism on the consciousness of the European elite became most apparent when European leaders attending the Munich Security Conference cried like absolute bitches and consoled each other with hugs, when Vice President J.D. Vance gave them exactly the tough medicine they needed to hear during his first major speech:
“I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from. And of course that’s important. But what has seemed less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important? And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people. […] If you’re running in fear from your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. […] You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail; whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win a democratic mandate by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like ‘Who gets to be part of our shared society?’ […] No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more, all over Europe, they’re voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration.”
One might wonder why European leaders attending the conference wept and whined about what Vance said. After all, what the Vice President said was very reasonable. You can’t cancel elections because you don’t like the results - that’s not how a democratic society works. You can’t put people in jail for expressing opinions you don’t like - that’s not how free speech works. You can’t bring migrants into your country that your citizens don’t want to come in - that’s not how ‘consent of the governed’ works. You can’t subordinate individual liberty to the whims of perpetually offended minority groups - because you can’t base laws and rights on hurt feelings. But European leaders don’t like hearing this because the politics of a Europe under the spell of wokeism is comically masochistic, self-loathing, and authoritarian. Europe is ashamed of being European, and hates anyone (mainly conservatives) who try to stop it from killing itself. The political leaders on the continent have been convinced by weak sniveling academics, foreign agitators, and (frankly treasonous) activists and “journalists” that Europe has consistently perpetuated evils so uniquely horrible—surpassing Genghis Khan, Mayan human sacrifice, and Arby’s roast beef sandwiches—that the only way countries on the continent can make amends to “marginalized” and “formerly colonized” groups, is to import millions of migrants from third world countries who are hostile to Western civilization for the sake of having those migrants dismantle Western civilization.
An even worse indictment is that if I were a citizen of a European country, I would be put in jail for writing what I’ve just written due to their insane “hate speech” laws (Germany example here, UK example here, France example here, Spain example here, Sweden example here, Holland example here).
Keep in mind I’m just talking about the decline of Europe in relation to free speech, free elections, and migration. I haven’t even touched on how European countries’ extreme environmental laws have caused heat deaths that have surpassed U.S. gun deaths because Greta Thunberg convinced them that turning on air conditioning was equivalent to raping a baby chipmunk. I haven’t even touched on the disturbing tendency of Europe’s elite to downplay, excuse, justify, and even enable pedophilia. I haven’t even touched on the noticeable deterioration of the average European man and woman in terms of conviction, in terms of pride, in terms of vigor, in terms of grit, in terms of their fleeing what is virtuous and human toward what is nihilist and anti-human (Europe, Europe: your women have become feminist ogres and your men have become women with extra body hair. If it weren’t for your soccer hooligans, the total nanograms per deciliter of testosterone on your whole continent would be -4… which, come to think of it, is the same number of kids you’re all having.)
Okay okay. I’m getting mean. I have mean humor sometimes. Europe deserves it, but I’ll stop.
Wait hold on…
Okay now I’ll stop.
In truth, despite my mockery and loathing, I’m actually pretty sad about what’s happened to Europe. Go through my travel photos or read any of my writing, and you’ll catch on pretty quick that I love “old Europe”. The great symphonies and concertos of classical musicians like Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Vivaldi elevate the mind and soul beyond what language can describe; giving us a taste (only a taste) of the ecstasy we will experience in the life to come, in a way no other music since has or can. Ancient, medieval, and romantic literature—from Greek, Roman, and Celtic mythology to the satire and poetry of Chaucer to the dramas attributed to Shakespeare to the novels of Austen and the Brontës—fully capture the depths of human desire, human wonder, human anguish, the human heart itself. And if I could choose any place to die in a valorous Alamo-style last stand against a fanatical baying jihadist horde, it would be within the sacred walls of Notre Dame or Westminster or St. Eustache or St. Nicolas or Santa Maria de Palma or Dakovo (beneath their magnificent arches, their gargoyles, their icons and finials, their stained glass windows; in the company of entombed warriors who in their own time gave their lives for the truth, goodness, and beauty of Western civilization). For to understand old Europe is to understand that its music is not just music. Its stories are not just stories. Its buildings are not just buildings.
But this is exactly what’s sad. A small minority of Europeans are fighting their own governments, the Muslim invasion, the tyrannical and bureaucratic European Union, and the globalist propaganda promoted by their media, sure. And they’re to be saluted for it. (Hats off to Douglas Murray, Brendan O’Neill, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Carl Benjamin, Tommy Robinson, and Naomi Seibt, along with politicians Geert Wilders, Alive Weidel, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, and Nigel Farage.) Yet the fact remains that concern about the dismantling of European heritage comes primarily from those of us who are not European and do not live in any European country. Why does a Jew from Texas who was raised in southern Protestantism care more about a Vienna court embedding sharia law into Austrian contract law than Austrians? Why does a Jew from Texas who was raised in southern Protestantism care more about “Mohammed” being the most popular baby name now in Great Britain than the British? I’ll tell you why: because the history of the Europe of old—from the proto-Christian metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle to the conversion of Constantine until right before the Reformation—is more than just a history. It’s a snapshot of how true religion and the hand of providence transformed a continent from ugliness, hedonism, and barbarism to creativity, virtue, and order. The history of the Europe of old reveals to everyone everywhere how radically the transcendent can transform what is ordinary or depraved. Far from being a “Dark Age”, some of the greatest theological, philosophical, architectural, and artistic work was undertaken during these centuries. And maybe modern Europeans are so used to the moral relativism and apathy that secularism and wokeism have encouraged, that they don’t assign much importance to who they once were as peoples. But for us on the outside, the disdain and desecration is hard to witness.
With this understanding, the importance of “Judeo-Christian” cannot be overstated.
It was a Jewish messiah from a Jewish royal line in a Jewish country whose teachings and followers eventually (and against all conceivable odds) brought Europe out of paganism. It was Jews (and one Jew above the rest) that ultimately pushed Europe to achieve its cultural and intellectual height. Between the 1st and 11th centuries there were three Jewish popes, and the majority of converts in Spain, Portugal, and Germany during the 15th and 16th centuries were Jewish ethnically and culturally. Speaking of the 15th and 16th centuries, the greatest painter and sculptor of that time (and arguably of all time), Leonardo da Vinci, who painted numerous Catholic masterpieces—from The Last Supper to Benois Madonna—was Jewish. Other lesser known Jewish artists illustrated both Christian and Jewish prayer books and hymnals, and Jewish objects and symbols adorned some of Europe’s most prestigious cathedrals (three examples: a massive bronze menorah in Essen Minster, a Star of David on the facade of the Santa Croce Basilica designed by a Jewish architect, and a statue of King David in Notre Dame). A majority of medieval Old Testament commentaries read and used by Catholic clergy, philosophers, and theologians were written by Jewish scholars and rabbis. And, to sum things up, according to the 20th century Orthodox Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide, in his 1967 book Three Popes & The Jews: “The papacy—with rare exceptions—remained [European] Jewry’s staunchest friend and defender; often times being the only bulwark against the bloodshed and wanton violence typical of the medieval period.”
But beyond Judaism and Jewish culture being the origin point of the Christian faith, and beyond there being a long line of Jews who supported Catholic ambitions in Europe well into the medieval and Renaissance periods, Jews made spectacular contributions outside religion to European civilization throughout their diaspora from the 7th century to the 20th.
Jews translated scientific and historical texts from asiatic languages (like Syriac, Arabic, Turkic, Armenian) to Latin.
As local economies in European countries increasingly needed credit in order to grow, Jews opened the continent’s first lending companies; as Christians living in most kingdoms at the time were forbidden to lend money due to a misreading of biblical passages (later corrected) like Exodus 22:25-27, Deuteronomy 23:19, Luke 6:34-36. From this, Jewish people were able to establish robust banking systems that caused European economies to prosper.
Some of the earliest medical clinics in Europe (circa 8th century) were operated by Jews, and it was not uncommon for entire Jewish families to study medicine and become doctors. In fact there’s some evidence to suggest that Jews constituted a majority of medical practitioners in Germany, Spain, Italy, France, and the Balkans until the latter half of the 12th century.
Coming to this understanding about how Jews and Christian together once built a loose confederation across different countries and centuries that blended the sacred with the mundane in a way that inspired the greatest poets, scientists, explorers, authors, warriors, and saints who ever lived, we even outside of Europe would be foolish not to yearn for the existence of such a confederation again.
Thus, Jews and Christians should unite to combat creeping Islamization and the secular woke disintegration of law, order, and common sense. Europe is a patient on a battlefield operating table with a severed carotid and ten seconds left to live, and the fastest way to pinch that artery and stop the bleeding is for a “Judeo-Christian” alliance to throw their full support behind Europe’s rightwing parties. But beyond politics, once the immediate crisis has been remedied and those who comprise what we might call “the red-green alliance” have been defeated in a very final way, Jews and Christians (especially in Europe) then need to form strong friendships 1) so that they can work to restore the continent to its former glory as an artistic, philosophical, architectural, and theological powerhouse, and 2) so that they can work to ensure that the average European citizen never becomes this demoralized and apathetic ever again; preaching against nihilism and relativism, and insisting upon the existence of the God that both Jews and Christians believe in (and who is distinct from the Muslim god) who cares very much about how we order our hearts, our homes, and our society.**
Rightwing Antisemitism
That support for Israel over the past two years has been relatively muted among conservatives in the United States is a new and strange development to be sure, when we compare this quiet to the broad support the Jewish state used to be able to count on from neoconservatives and the Christian right in previous decades.
But what’s been absolutely astonishing to observe since October 7th 2023, has not been the timid reservation of Israel’s normal friends, but the unprecedented levels of hostility and deranged paranoia toward Israel and Jews from a certain segment of the right that came seemingly out of nowhere.
An eruption of animosity from largely young, single, terminally online, so-called “conservative” men has been directed at a tiny nation fighting a war for its survival that it didn’t start; a tiny nation fending off not just Hamas in Gaza, not just Hezbollah in Lebanon, not just the Houthis in Yemen—all three of which are proxies of Iran—but direct attacks by Iran itself. (Iran: a country that has also sponsored over 20 terror attacks in Europe and 200 attacks against American soldiers and civilians abroad in the past five years alone, with neither any nation in Europe nor the United States considering said attacks an act of war for some inexplicable reason.)
I get isolationism. I do. Ron Paul ‘08. But for this contingent of loud obnoxious twenty-something rightwing men to take Iran’s side? And to do so because they actually think that out of the two, Israel—fighting four enemies simultaneously, two of which are right on its doorstep—is the villain? Seriously? I wanna say “I’m not mad, just disappointed” but no I’m mad.
I’m mad because the most anti-Israel influencers on the right didn’t gain their legions of followers from making such an articulate rock-solid case against Zionism. Instead they’ve somehow gained a massive amount of influence among Gen Z men for conspiratorial “views” that are barely discernible from the ravings of a cracked-out hobo camped beside a liquor store.
Candace Owens has asserted the following in the past 24 months: that Israel was founded by a cult of satanic pedophiles, that “secret Jewish gangs” run Hollywood and the government, that accounts of medical experiments conducted on Auschwitz prisoners during the Holocaust are “absurd propaganda”, and that the Jews were behind 9/11.
Tucker Carlson recently interviewed a “nun” with a mustache from Gaza (looking like Mole from Disney’s Atlantis) who did nothing but spew Hamas propaganda for over an hour straight; claiming that “No Islamic terror is taking place in the region”, that “Jews like to taunt Palestinian Christians by calling Jesus a monkey”, that “Hamas is not a jihadist organization”, and that “she would have voted for Hamas” in 2006 had she been able. Carlson’s interview with this “nun” comes on the heels of revelations that the communications firm consulting with Carlson’s production team is directly funded by Qatar; a government who, as it so happens, has also given Hamas something to the tune of $1.8 billion.***
Ian Carroll—a conspiracy theorist YouTuber who’s amassed almost half a million subscribers in just two years—was invited on the biggest podcast in the world to talk about how Israel enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of underaged girls because he was their spy, how the Rothschild banking family sits at the top of a “global Zionist finance and crime syndicate”, and how the existence of the State of Israel is “cancerous to the Jewish faith” (a faith, Carroll doesn’t seem to understand, that for the entire 4000 years of its existence has always been connected to the land itself). Elsewhere, Ian Carroll has claimed that the Israeli government was behind the JFK assassination.
I mean at this point I’m just waiting for one of the people above to connect “da Jooz” to Bigfoot in some way. Forget Israel for a moment. How completely untethered from reality do you have to be to think that this is how anything in the real world actually works? There was once a time where a rabid antisemite like Ian Carroll would have been lucky to secure a 2 AM local radio slot with five listeners including his mom, his wife, and his brother. There was once a time where a hostile foreign government compromising the integrity of a former #1 cable news host like Tucker Carlson would have been mourned. There was once a time where jumping incoherently from one delusion to the next about about “how the Jews are behind everything” to “how the moon landing was a hoax” to “doubting that dinosaurs existed”—as Candace Owens has done—would have gotten someone put into a straightjacket and driven to the nearest looney bin for electroshock.
But now? Now we reward such people with fame and/or millions of dollars.
Well, alright. But my middle finger in response is going to be my continued use of “Judeo-Christian”.
Because no amount of spooky campfire yarns about Mossad villains wielding umbrella guns will cuck me into believing that the problem with the Middle East is one Jewish country and not the fourteen Muslim countries that surround and hate it. No amount of “America First” pompom waving by idiots is going to convince me that my friends and family from Israel deserve to be abandoned. No amount of fake “Nakba” storytelling is going to convince me that the neighborhood in Beersheba I lived in for three years should be leveled, and its occupants subjected to the cruel tyranny of sharia law. No amount of shaky 10-second phone footage posted to Rumble of an extreme minority of Jewish religious zealots stalking and harassing Christian tourists is going to convince me that “Israelis secretly hate Christians” (honestly, if some of you would just take a break from the internet and actually go and visit the places you think you know so much about, like Israel, you would be embarrassed at how dumb some of these narratives are that you’ve bought into; the small group of extremist ultra-Orthodox Jews who on rare occasion curse and spit at Christian tourists are reviled by the overwhelming majority of Israelis).
I swear, if I’m the last person on planet earth who uses the term “Judeo-Christian” in an effort to preserve the single fraying thread of Jewish-Christian relations, so be it.
No Bible Without Tanakh, No Church Without Synagogue
The third motive for preserving the term “Judeo-Christian” is the strongest, and one I briefly touched on in the course of the first section: Christianity owes its existence to Judaism and Jews.
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt,” says Jeremiah 31:31-32, in clear anticipation of the coming New Testament. Similarly, St. Paul the Apostle writes in Romans 15:4 about the Old Testament, “For whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.”
It only follows then that the wondrous achievements of Western civilization cannot be attributed only to Christianity at the exclusion of Jews and Judaism, if Jews and Judaism are the reason Christianity came to be in the first place; in much the same way you couldn’t justly praise a young man for his wealth without acknowledging the father who taught him the principles of investing. The riches of Christian culture (i.e. Western culture) have as much to do with the Jewish culture that was father to it, as those riches have to do with the Christian culture itself with its own unique developments.
During the Mass, numerous acts are parallels of Jewish worship: the reading and singing of scripture in the presence of the congregation parallels Jews doing the same (Nehemiah 8:1-12, Acts 15:21); the Presider’s Seat, where the priest sits during portions of the Mass, parallels the Seat of Moses that was found in many ancient synagogues (referenced in Matthew 23:2-3); the lighting of candles during the Mass as symbols of God’s eternal presence parallels Jews doing the same (Exodus 25:31-40, 1st Maccabees 4:50, John 8:12); and finally, the eucharist parallels the consumption of bread and wine by Jews on Passover, as well as parallels Abram being offered bread and wine by Melchizedek the High Priest (Exodus 12:1-11, Genesis 14:18). I could go on and on about the many hundreds of ways the Christian faith has been informed and enriched by Judaism, but suffice to say, anyone who has a problem with Judaism or Jews—and by extension anyone who takes issue with the word “Judeo-Christian” as a descriptor for any aspect of Western culture—is unacceptably ignorant.
As Christians, it is simply not an option to ignore the fact that without the Tanakh we would not have a Bible and without the synagogue we would not have the Church. Nor (to head this off at the pass) is it correct to assert that the Jewish people bear a collective guilt for “killing Christ”, as the Council of Trent, the Magisterium, and St. Paul the Apostle himself have made abundantly clear. (For more on why the Jews are not the enemies of the Church, I recommend Dr. John Lamont’s ambiguously titled essay Why The Jews Are Not The Enemies Of The Church).
If you are somebody who claims to follow Christ, but you’re obsessing over Jews and “you’re going down rabbit holes” of Jewish conspiracies, stop. You’re making Christians look stupid, you’re making Jews feel afraid, and you’re making Jewish-Christians wanna slap you.
