Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy

When conservatives talk of defending America's “Judeo-Christian tradition,” do they know what they are talking about? Yes and no, says K. Healan Gaston. Leaders of the Left and the Right have been invoking Judeo-Christian terminology for almost one hundred years now, but that dialect has always been aspirational and contested. Deftly interweaving religious, intellectual, and political history, Gaston provides a masterfully constructed and beautifully written narrative about the centrality of an imagined heritage to America's long culture wars. It would be tempting to conclude that Judeo-Christianity began as a liberal ideal that was later co-opted by the religious Right. Gaston instead identifies a...