As a Jew, I Need You to Stop Saying Judeo-Christian
I am begging Gentiles, especially atheists, Pagans, ex Christians, and other people who spend a lot of time yelling about the Religious Right, to stop saying “Judeo-Christian” when they mean “Christian.” You are not being precise. You are not being inclusive. You are repeating Christian dominance while dragging Jews into shit we did not build, do not support, and actively suffer under.
When people rage about “Judeo-Christian values” taking over the US, what they are actually mad about is fundamentalist evangelical Christianity. Full stop. Jews are not pushing for a theocracy. Non-Hasidic Jews in the United States do not want one (and American Hasidic Jews largely just want to be left alone). We do not believe everyone has to be Jewish to be moral, saved, righteous, or in good standing with G-d. Judaism is not a universalizing religion. It is one specific covenant with the Creator, made with one people, with obligations that apply to us and not to everyone else. That is not a bug. That is the entire point.
I converted to Judaism. That did not involve deciding everyone else was wrong or evil or damned. It involved choosing to take on a particular way of living, a particular set of responsibilities, and a particular relationship to law, ethics, time, and community. Conversion to Judaism is not “seeing the light.” It is more like becoming a citizen of another country and agreeing to live by its customs and laws. If you do not want that, cool, you are not required to. Judaism does not need you.
And no, Judaism and Christianity are not the same religion. Not two branches of one big happy “Abrahamic” tree. Not siblings who just had a falling out. They are fundamentally different belief systems with different premises, different goals, and different definitions of truth. Since converting, you could no more get me to believe Yeshua was Moshiach than you could get me to believe in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. That is not stubbornness. That is not hard heartedness. That is because there are specific requirements for the messiah in Judaism, and he does not meet them. He did not bring universal peace. The world is not redeemed. The dead are not resurrected. The exile is not ended. These are not minor details. They are the fucking checklist.
Christians love to frame this as Jews being willfully blind or obstinate, because Christianity needs Judaism to be an unfinished draft that they conveniently “complete.” Jews do not agree with that framing. At all. From a Jewish perspective, Christianity is not a continuation of Judaism. It is a radical departure that reworked Jewish texts to tell a completely different story. One that centers belief over practice, salvation over repair, and cosmic guilt over responsibility in this world. Calling the two “Judeo-Christian” is like calling Tolkien canon and bad fanfiction part of the same literary tradition just because they share some names and vibes.
Christianity is essentially fanfiction that won because it was backed by empire, violence, forced conversion, and centuries of brutal power. Jews did not “lose the argument.” We were conquered, expelled, massacred, ghettoized, and blamed for everything from plagues to economic collapse to the death of a god we do not believe in. And yet we keep getting lumped in with our persecutors as if we were co-authors of the mess.
This gets especially ugly when people start bitching about “our 3000 year old storm god” ruling over everyone. First of all, knock it the fuck off. Jews are not trying to rule you. Jews are trying to exist without being erased, caricatured, or held responsible for Christian nationalism. Second, Jewish theology is not Christian theology with different aesthetics. Our concepts of sin, morality, law, and accountability are not the same. Christianity is concerned with salvation and the afterlife; Judaism is deeply concerned with harm, with restitution, with repair, with how your actions affect other people in the here and now. There is a reason non-Orthodox Jews tend to be politically liberal, and it is not because we are all secretly atheists. It is because Jewish interpretive tradition is contextual, argumentative, suspicious of absolutism, and allergic to one size fits all moral pronouncements.
A massive amount of what people think Judaism says is actually Christian theology back projected onto Hebrew texts through bad translations and worse assumptions. English Bibles are not neutral documents. They are filtered through centuries of Christian doctrine. I have already written elsewhere about how Christianity treats homosexuality and trans identity versus what the Torah actually says, and yes, I am a gay trans man saying this. Jewish texts are argued with. Debated. Reinterpreted. They are not frozen proof weapons meant to shut down human complexity.
So when you say “Judeo-Christian” as shorthand for the Religious Right, you are not being edgy or insightful. You are reinforcing Christian hegemony while scapegoating Jews as co-conspirators in oppression we did not design and do not benefit from. If you care about accuracy, if you care about justice, if you care about not reproducing the same erasures you claim to oppose, then name the problem correctly. Say Christianity when you mean Christianity. Say Christian nationalism when you mean Christian nationalism. And stop dragging Judaism into your rage as rhetorical seasoning.
We have already paid enough for a religion that is not ours.
