Sydney
Commenting on Razib Khan’s brief against the term “Judeo-Christian,” with which I very much agree, Samuel Goldman makes an important point:
The political Hebraism that emerged in the 17th century is a major and often unacknowledged source for American principles and institutions.
When I read this, Algernon Sydney’s Discourses Concerning Government came to mind. As I am sure Mr. Goldman and others know, Sydney’s Discourses was indeed one of the major influences on the thought of many of the Founders and particularly on the thought of Jefferson, and it is one of the most extensive arguments by a republican drawing heavily on the Bible. This was a main reason why he was chosen as one of the Whig heroes whose name went into the name of my alma mater. His Discourses was both prior to and more influential in its way than Locke’s treatise of the same name (it also led to his execution). In it he polemicized against Filmer’s Patriarcha (which is a much more interesting text) by going through the Old Testament very methodically and using it as his historical proof that monarchs did not inherently possess a divine right to rule. His defense of popular sovereignty (i.e., that God invested the people with sovereignty, who then chose how they were to be ruled) was, of course, as ahistorical as it was extremely useful in justifying the execution of Charles I after the fact. His popular sovereignty theory went on to have great influence on the post-1688 Whigs and on the political thought of the colonists. Nonetheless, even Sydney’s heavy reliance on the Old Testament was primarily a function of his Protestantism and the shape of his political theory was tied to his Presbyterian ecclesiology.
The adoption of the term Judeo-Christian tradition was always a sop to the pluralist Jewish Lobby. Soon we will have the Judeo-Muslim-Voodoo-Christian tradition. No one had the bad manners to point out that the Jewish tradition stood adamantly apart from everything Western for centuries. The same can be said of all the other traditions we are about to embrace. When the majority culture collapses, why not the more the merrier?
Thanks for the hat-tip. To clarify, my point was not that thinkers like Sydney regarded themselves as promoting a Judeo-Christian rather than merely Christian position (although it’s possible that the much more radical Spinoza did). Rather, our democratic-republican traditions were founded in a renewed emphasis on the normatively-binding character of the Old Testament, and the political example of the Hebrews. Jean Calvin was the pioneer here. And it’s interesting to note how philo-Semitic the opponents of the Stuart dynasty often were (Cromwell allowed Jews to settle in England for the first time in centuries).
On the other hand, these arguments were extraordinarily easy to separate from their theological origins. Once the priority of the popular sovereign is accepted, the burden of legitimacy shifts almost unavoidably from a sanctified nexus of divine and human will to arbitrary consent.
Thanks for the comment, Mr. Goldman. I take your point, and I should have been more clear that I understood that you were not claiming Sydney et al. as Judeo-Christian figures. I agree on the importance of Calvin in all of this. Several early modern federal and republican political theorists came from Calvinist churches, and it is understanable that their ideas were transmitted among Calvinists here in America. Althusius is an example of the former that comes to mind.
Hmm, for my part, I’ve never taken the term “Judeo-Christian” to mean that our culture derived its values from both Judaism and Christianity independently. Rather, I’ve always assumed it was supposed to be a recognition of the fact that Christianity itself got its moral law and worldview from the Judaism that preceded it, along with some uniquely Christian alterations derived from the teachings of Jesus. With that interpretation, the term makes perfect sense.
But, then, that was just my assumption, since I’m not actually familiar with the origin of the term. Is it really a fact that it was invented as “a sop to the pluralist Jewish Lobby”?