With Imagining Judeo-Christian America, intellectual historian of religion K. Healan Gaston has written the first comprehensive history of the concept of America as a Judeo-Christian nation. Moving from the early twentieth century to the present, Gaston shows how this vision of America developed and how it was deeply contested from the start. This shifting discourse, she argues, illuminates how successive generations of American politicians and thought leaders “dream[ed] America” and so “imagined their national project” (1). In the process, the concept of a Judeo-Christian America also shaped the contours and the limits of American democracy.

Gaston's first three chapters describe the origins of the Judeo-Christian concept. Its antecedents, she suggests, lay in nineteenth-century Anglo-American speculations about the relative weight of “Hebraic” versus “Hellenic” roots of “Western civilization.” Resting on supersessionist views of Judaism, these theories fed the simultaneously racial and religious hierarchies of an imperial age. In the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of an ascendant totalitarianism in Europe, the idea of a unified “Judeo-Christian” tradition took shape. Leading intellectuals and politicians not only began to see the United States as the world's best hope for democracy, but also contended that this democracy rested necessarily on the religious foundations of this tradition. Many Jewish leaders now embraced this discourse, despite its supersessionist strains, in order to locate both Jews and Judaism as fully American. Hoping to combat anti-Semitism around the world, the burgeoning tri-faith movement adopted the Judeo-Christian idea to incorporate both Jews and Catholics into a nation that had often been conceptualized as exclusively Protestant.

The book's middle section unpacks the competing political visions within the discourse of Judeo-Christian America at its mid-century peak. Pushing back against standard depictions of this era as one of consensus, Gaston identifies sharply different ideas about what the Judeo-Christian tradition entailed. On one side were the Judeo-Christian exceptionalists, who saw specifically Christian or Jewish religious foundations as an essential bulwark against the nihilistic threats of atheistic or secular totalitarianism. On the other were a somewhat less influential strand of Judeo-Christian pluralists, who agreed that American democracy had historical roots in Jewish and Christian traditions but made space for a more pluralistic American future. These discourses were malleable enough to be deployed in service to a persistent White Christian nationalism, to support postwar expansions of US global power, and at the same time to bolster the African American civil rights movement within a changing domestic order.

In her final three chapters, Gaston tracks the discourse of Judeo-Christian America into the twenty-first century as it became increasingly associated with the religious and political right. While conservatives in the Reagan era celebrated the nation's “Judeo-Christian” heritage and used it as a bludgeon against what they saw as the evils of secularism in American culture, the left came to see this discourse as inherently exclusionary and largely abandoned it. Gaston concludes with a perceptive analysis of an arguably declining Judeo-Christian discourse in the increasingly polarized US politics of recent years. President Obama drew on the pluralist tradition but preferred the more inclusive language of a “multireligious America.” Trump, in contrast, almost entirely ignored the Judeo-Christian discourse and offered instrumental appeals to White Christian nationalism instead.

As a wide-ranging intellectual history, this book necessarily focuses on public figures and public pronouncements. At various points, however, I wished for a wider range of voices. We hear from Martin Luther King, Jr., and other key African American leaders at the height of the Civil Rights movement. But how did other Black thinkers, in other times and places, invoke or challenge this discourse? Gaston also attends in her final chapter to the fraught position of American Muslims and to the occasional effort by some Muslim and interfaith leaders to introduce a broader “Abrahamic” framework. These moments left me wanting even more. How did other racial and religious minorities, more or less excluded from the Judeo-Christian discourse, either seek inclusion or frame alternative visions of American democracy? I raise these questions less as a critique of Gaston's already ambitious book, and more as a call for further scholarship along all of these lines.

Gaston clearly locates the Judeo-Christian discourse in its early Cold War context. I would have liked to see even more sustained attention to its ongoing global and imperial contexts. Conservative discourses in the 1980s shifted away from fears of totalitarianism abroad, she argues, and towards the domestic politics of the so-called “culture wars.” But American anxieties about the security of white womanhood and of the (white) American home have long been connected to fears of foreign incursions and foreign disorders, enabling the expansion of US imperial power around the world (see, for example, Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002]; Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Next Wave [Durham: Duke University Press, 2007]; Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism [Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018]). Gaston briefly recognizes that the conservative crusade for “Judeo-Christian” family values reflected, in part, anxieties about “political Islam” after the Iran hostage crisis (240). How then did Judeo-Christian discourse continue to intersect with US empire-building projects, and with the rise of neoliberal capitalism as an engine of US imperial power? This question too suggests new directions for scholarship informed by Gaston's work.

In sum, Imagining Judeo-Christian America provides a powerful history of the Judeo-Christian discourse as an illuminating key to the twists and turns of American political culture. It concludes with a profound set of meditations on how language shapes politics and how different ways of naming the foundations of American democracy authorize “competing patterns of inclusion and exclusion” (276). This book should be required reading for historians of twentieth-century American religion and politics, and for anyone invested in the future of American democracy.