‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ and the Transatlantic Right
Part of a special issue on The New Right and International Order, this article explores the conceptual history and contemporary local contexts of ‘Christian democracy’ and more broadly ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ – concepts and slogans that are gaining prominence in the US and Europe, seemingly uniting a new Transatlantic Right.
The article shows how the idea of ‘Judeo-Christian values’ was originally coined as a recipe for humanism and tolerance by progressives and liberals in the early and mid-twentieth century, but how the language of Judeo-Christianity slowly moved from centrist to radical conservative hands. In Europe, by travelling from Adenauer’s Europeanism to Orban’s nationalism; in the US, by moving from Dr. King and his Alabama banners of black emancipation, to the Alt-Right and the flags of white civilizationism in Charlottesville, Virginia. As the article unpacks, this Judeo-Christian language has aligned the European and American Right in a joined anti-liberal, anti-secular, and anti-Muslim culture war.
And yet beneath that culture war, the article also depicts another and possibly deeper cultural conflict: one which pulls the Transatlantic Right not together, but apart. Above all, the article provides an analysis of those cultural rifts, and of why the state-centric visions of Christian Democracy espoused by Orban’s Hungary, stand in dire contrast to the localist, libertarian and radically anti-statist visions of Christian Democracy pursued in the US South and Mid-West. Too dire perhaps, to ever truly align? And possibly reflexive of tensions likely to take center stage, should the radical Right in Europe and the US gain further ground.
On a more theoretical note, the article concludes that the study of contemporary Far Right ideas and alliances need to take local and regional nuances seriously – and that to do so, the methods of intellectual history and political theory must be combined with the sensibilities of ethnography and political anthropology.
