I can admit that “Judeo-Christian” is fairly recent label. However I don't believe that it negates the American Founding by introducing a foreign concept...
Given that the founders were mostly supersessionist, believing that they (the Protestant church) were the true continuation of Israel, and that the nation they made was the New Israel. Because of that, they treated the Old Testament as living authority for their own political life, not as something distant or secondary. Their supersessionism made the Hebrew (Judeo) roots more applicable, not less.
"Judeo-Christian" however, is a softening of the Founders claim on the Hebrew inheritance for shared set of values of governance that can be held while setting that claim of supersessionism aside. (There is a whole debate to the veracity of supersessionism, but even among the direct theological desendents of the Founders it has been found to be a theology that has major flaws.)
The claim that the "Judeo-Christian" framework being recent invention, and therefore incompatabel with the Founding, does not follow when one takes the the Founders’ own understanding as a New Israel already placed the Judeo roots at the center of their project. The discontinuity comes from the lack of supersessionism, not framework or grounding.
Further, Jordan's argument from the Orthodox position about the Scriptures being “polluted” by the shift from the Septuagint to the Masoretic (Hebrew) texts rests on a church tradition that was never the tradition nor understandings of the Founders. To make a critique from this position is to make the same fallacy that the article itself attempts to push onto the Judeo-Christian framework.
The Founders worked from English Bibles—chiefly the Geneva and the King James—whose Old Testament was translated from the Hebrew Masoretic tradition, not from the Greek Septuagint. They stood inside the Reformation’s preference for the Hebrew text. To treat the later use of that Hebrew tradition as a corruption or displacement is to measure the Founding by a standard that was not its own. The preference for the Septuagint as the pure Apostolic text is far more characteristic of Eastern Orthodoxy and certain patristic retrievals than of the English Protestant world that formed the American founding.
The reason why the textual part is important is because outside of the jurisdictional, ontological, and metaphysical problem I’m pointing out, this is an ad fontes issue. That’s the core of the argument.
I’m almost finished with a piece on that specific topic and how it relates that should be up this weekend.
The question isn't whether the Founders drew upon Hebrew Scripture. They obviously did. The question is whether "Judeo-Christian ethics" describes a single, legally and metaphysically coherent foundation for the American constitutional order.
Once we move from the level of broad moral ideals to the actual structure of law, the differences become impossible to ignore. The Founding's legal universalism operates through a Roman/Common Law inheritance in which the law aspires to a common juridical order applicable to persons under a universal sovereign jurisdiction. Halakhic law operates within a covenantal system of differentiated obligations and communal categories. Essentially a two-tier system.
Those traditions can coexist politically. They can cooperate against tyranny. They can share moral intuitions. But that does not mean they constitute one unified legal or metaphysical foundation.
That's precisely the distinction my argument is making.
The founders were aspiring for universal jurisdiction. That is a very different architecture from a covenantal legal system whose obligations are structured according to membership, covenantal status, and differentiated categories of persons.
This is where Halakhah becomes relevant—not as a caricature of Judaism, and certainly not as a claim that Jewish people cannot participate in or support universal civil law, but as an example of a fundamentally different conception of juridical order. Halakhic jurisprudence is embedded within the covenantal life of Israel. Its categories of obligation are not simply a universal civil code abstracted from communal identity. The legal system presupposes a particular covenantal community and differentiates obligations accordingly.
The point, therefore, is not that one system is "good" and the other "bad." The point is that they are notinterchangeable.
A Christian participating in a universal civil order can affirm that all persons possess a dignity grounded in the imago Dei while simultaneously holding that the Church possesses a distinct spiritual jurisdiction. The Roman and canon-law traditions developed precisely through arguments about how multiple jurisdictions could coexist without one absorbing the other.
That is fundamentally different from saying that two distinct religious traditions together constitute a single legal foundation simply because they share certain moral intuitions.
The more important question is whether Judaism and Christianity, considered in their own internal juridical and theological structures, actually provide one coherent theory of sovereignty, law, jurisdiction, and the human person.
If they do not, then "Judeo-Christian" is not a description of a unified metaphysical foundation. It is a political synthesis.
And political syntheses can be extraordinarily valuable. Christians and Jews can cooperate. They can defend religious liberty together. They can oppose tyranny together. They can participate in the same constitutional order. They can recognize genuine moral affinities between their traditions.
But cooperation does not imply identity.
An alliance is not an ontology.
A coalition is not a metaphysics.
A shared political vocabulary is not necessarily a shared theory of law.
This is the distinction I mean by civic alliance versus civilizational source code.
The deeper question is what actually generated the Western conception of limited government: the mere aggregation of Jewish and Christian moral values, or the historical development of a Christian jurisdictional order in which the state itself was placed under a transcendent authority it could not legitimately absorb.
That distinction matters enormously.
Because if Western liberty was produced by a particular jurisdictional architecture—one that divided authority, recognized intermediate institutions, and placed temporal power under a law it did not create—then replacing that architecture with an abstract "Judeo-Christian value set" may preserve the vocabulary while losing the structure.
And that is ultimately the problem with treating the hyphen as a foundation.
The hyphen tells us whom we can stand beside. It does not, by itself, tell us what the building stands on.
"The addition of “American” to this hyphenated synthesis is the final move toward procedural neutrality. By defining the West as “Judeo-Christian-American,” the framework shifts the source of liberty from the transcendent Logos to the procedural genius of the American Founding. Here, the “American” term acts as a stabilizer—a secular container that allows “Judeo-Christian” values to be utilized without the “danger” of their original, non-negotiable theological claims. The American hyphen does not merely describe our tradition; it redefines it as a manageable set of administrative values capable of sustaining a neutral public square."
I don't see how this follows, given that the only way one has theological claims outside of the sourcing and functions of values and justice laid out in the "judeo-christian" metaphysic is for a theocracy... Which in and of itself is a further rejection of the Founders and for that note, strengthens the term "Judeo-Christian".
“This formulation achieves stability through systematic omission: it brackets the sovereign authority of the living Logos. By defining the West through functionalist values rather than a shared metaphysical reality, the framework inadvertently adopts the very nominalism it purports to oppose.”
To say it is bracketing out the Logos by naming the values is to say that the formulation of “all things are lawful unto me, not all things are expedient” brackets out the Logos. This is not so. To quote a famous line, it is “self-evident”.
The constitutional order recognised rights, duties, and values as Creator-endowed and antecedent to government. Civil power is limited precisely because justice is not created by the state. To describe this order as already hollow, or rather “nominalist” is to cut the root of the American claim itself. Once that root is severed, the addition of “Judeo-Christian” can be portrayed as merely filling an empty container with usable values. But if the order was never hollow in that sense, the portrayal fails.
The same problem appears in the article’s reliance on the Septuagint as the pure Apostolic foundation that was later sidelined. The LXX is a Greek translation tradition rooted in Hebrew texts. It is not a single stable original; it was produced by multiple hands over time and is marked by well-documented internal inconsistencies in style, vocabulary, and readings. Elevating it as the clean baseline against which the Hebrew tradition appears as pollution or displacement rests on an unstable foundation. A textual argument that requires the Septuagint to function as a pure and consistent standard cannot bear the weight the article places on it.
Taken together, these two claims—the assumption of a hollow American order and the reliance on an unstable LXX baseline—undermine the article’s larger claim that the modern framework represents a decisive break from the original roots. The critique cuts against a Founding that was never hollow in the sense portrayed, and it rests on a textual standard that is itself less secure than the argument needs.
I don't argue that naming values brackets out the Logos. I argue that the reduction of metaphysical claims to values can do so, and I think your response collapses several distinct levels of the argument.
There is a difference between saying that a value is derived from God, saying that a value is affirmed by a political community, and asking who possesses the jurisdiction to determine what that value means when competing interpretations arise. Those are three different questions.
If I say that human dignity is Creator-endowed, I have made a metaphysical claim about the source of human dignity. But I have not yet answered the juridical question of who has authority to determine what human dignity requires in a concrete case. Nor have I answered the jurisdictional question of whether the state itself possesses the authority to define the meaning of that dignity.
This is precisely where I think your invocation of "self-evident" values collapses the distinction I am trying to make. The fact that a principle is declared to be self-evident or Creator-endowed does not, by itself, establish the institutional mechanism through which that principle is interpreted, adjudicated, and limited. The existence of a transcendent source and the existence of an institutional structure capable of mediating that source are not the same thing.
The historical Christian order addressed this problem through a jurisdictionally plural conception of authority. The state was not understood to be the sole interpreter of justice. The Church, family, local associations, universities, and other intermediate institutions possessed forms of authority that did not derive simply from administrative delegation by the state. The temporal ruler was therefore subject to a law and a moral order that preceded him, while the Church itself possessed a distinct jurisdiction that the state could not simply absorb.
My concern is that the modern procedural framework can preserve the language of Creator-endowed rights while progressively relocating the interpretive authority for those rights into the administrative state. The metaphysical claim may remain rhetorically intact while the institutional structure that once prevented the state from becoming the final interpreter of that claim disappears.
That is why I distinguish between the Logos as the source of an objective moral order and the administrative state as the institution that increasingly determines how that order is operationalized. The former does not automatically guarantee the latter. Indeed, the entire historical problem of Western constitutionalism was how to prevent any temporal authority from claiming precisely that interpretive sovereignty.
So I am not saying, "You mentioned values, therefore you have excluded God." I am saying something much more specific: a transcendent foundation is not identical to a transcendent jurisdiction. One can retain the language of Creator-endowed rights while simultaneously allowing the state to become the practical arbiter of what those rights mean. That is the distinction my argument is concerned with.
Ah, was still working on that...
I can admit that “Judeo-Christian” is fairly recent label. However I don't believe that it negates the American Founding by introducing a foreign concept...
Given that the founders were mostly supersessionist, believing that they (the Protestant church) were the true continuation of Israel, and that the nation they made was the New Israel. Because of that, they treated the Old Testament as living authority for their own political life, not as something distant or secondary. Their supersessionism made the Hebrew (Judeo) roots more applicable, not less.
"Judeo-Christian" however, is a softening of the Founders claim on the Hebrew inheritance for shared set of values of governance that can be held while setting that claim of supersessionism aside. (There is a whole debate to the veracity of supersessionism, but even among the direct theological desendents of the Founders it has been found to be a theology that has major flaws.)
The claim that the "Judeo-Christian" framework being recent invention, and therefore incompatabel with the Founding, does not follow when one takes the the Founders’ own understanding as a New Israel already placed the Judeo roots at the center of their project. The discontinuity comes from the lack of supersessionism, not framework or grounding.
Further, Jordan's argument from the Orthodox position about the Scriptures being “polluted” by the shift from the Septuagint to the Masoretic (Hebrew) texts rests on a church tradition that was never the tradition nor understandings of the Founders. To make a critique from this position is to make the same fallacy that the article itself attempts to push onto the Judeo-Christian framework.
The Founders worked from English Bibles—chiefly the Geneva and the King James—whose Old Testament was translated from the Hebrew Masoretic tradition, not from the Greek Septuagint. They stood inside the Reformation’s preference for the Hebrew text. To treat the later use of that Hebrew tradition as a corruption or displacement is to measure the Founding by a standard that was not its own. The preference for the Septuagint as the pure Apostolic text is far more characteristic of Eastern Orthodoxy and certain patristic retrievals than of the English Protestant world that formed the American founding.
The reason why the textual part is important is because outside of the jurisdictional, ontological, and metaphysical problem I’m pointing out, this is an ad fontes issue. That’s the core of the argument.
I’m almost finished with a piece on that specific topic and how it relates that should be up this weekend.
The question isn't whether the Founders drew upon Hebrew Scripture. They obviously did. The question is whether "Judeo-Christian ethics" describes a single, legally and metaphysically coherent foundation for the American constitutional order.
Once we move from the level of broad moral ideals to the actual structure of law, the differences become impossible to ignore. The Founding's legal universalism operates through a Roman/Common Law inheritance in which the law aspires to a common juridical order applicable to persons under a universal sovereign jurisdiction. Halakhic law operates within a covenantal system of differentiated obligations and communal categories. Essentially a two-tier system.
Those traditions can coexist politically. They can cooperate against tyranny. They can share moral intuitions. But that does not mean they constitute one unified legal or metaphysical foundation.
That's precisely the distinction my argument is making.
The founders were aspiring for universal jurisdiction. That is a very different architecture from a covenantal legal system whose obligations are structured according to membership, covenantal status, and differentiated categories of persons.
This is where Halakhah becomes relevant—not as a caricature of Judaism, and certainly not as a claim that Jewish people cannot participate in or support universal civil law, but as an example of a fundamentally different conception of juridical order. Halakhic jurisprudence is embedded within the covenantal life of Israel. Its categories of obligation are not simply a universal civil code abstracted from communal identity. The legal system presupposes a particular covenantal community and differentiates obligations accordingly.
The point, therefore, is not that one system is "good" and the other "bad." The point is that they are notinterchangeable.
A Christian participating in a universal civil order can affirm that all persons possess a dignity grounded in the imago Dei while simultaneously holding that the Church possesses a distinct spiritual jurisdiction. The Roman and canon-law traditions developed precisely through arguments about how multiple jurisdictions could coexist without one absorbing the other.
That is fundamentally different from saying that two distinct religious traditions together constitute a single legal foundation simply because they share certain moral intuitions.
The more important question is whether Judaism and Christianity, considered in their own internal juridical and theological structures, actually provide one coherent theory of sovereignty, law, jurisdiction, and the human person.
If they do not, then "Judeo-Christian" is not a description of a unified metaphysical foundation. It is a political synthesis.
And political syntheses can be extraordinarily valuable. Christians and Jews can cooperate. They can defend religious liberty together. They can oppose tyranny together. They can participate in the same constitutional order. They can recognize genuine moral affinities between their traditions.
But cooperation does not imply identity.
An alliance is not an ontology.
A coalition is not a metaphysics.
A shared political vocabulary is not necessarily a shared theory of law.
This is the distinction I mean by civic alliance versus civilizational source code.
The deeper question is what actually generated the Western conception of limited government: the mere aggregation of Jewish and Christian moral values, or the historical development of a Christian jurisdictional order in which the state itself was placed under a transcendent authority it could not legitimately absorb.
That distinction matters enormously.
Because if Western liberty was produced by a particular jurisdictional architecture—one that divided authority, recognized intermediate institutions, and placed temporal power under a law it did not create—then replacing that architecture with an abstract "Judeo-Christian value set" may preserve the vocabulary while losing the structure.
And that is ultimately the problem with treating the hyphen as a foundation.
The hyphen tells us whom we can stand beside. It does not, by itself, tell us what the building stands on.
The rest of my critique.
"The addition of “American” to this hyphenated synthesis is the final move toward procedural neutrality. By defining the West as “Judeo-Christian-American,” the framework shifts the source of liberty from the transcendent Logos to the procedural genius of the American Founding. Here, the “American” term acts as a stabilizer—a secular container that allows “Judeo-Christian” values to be utilized without the “danger” of their original, non-negotiable theological claims. The American hyphen does not merely describe our tradition; it redefines it as a manageable set of administrative values capable of sustaining a neutral public square."
I don't see how this follows, given that the only way one has theological claims outside of the sourcing and functions of values and justice laid out in the "judeo-christian" metaphysic is for a theocracy... Which in and of itself is a further rejection of the Founders and for that note, strengthens the term "Judeo-Christian".
“This formulation achieves stability through systematic omission: it brackets the sovereign authority of the living Logos. By defining the West through functionalist values rather than a shared metaphysical reality, the framework inadvertently adopts the very nominalism it purports to oppose.”
To say it is bracketing out the Logos by naming the values is to say that the formulation of “all things are lawful unto me, not all things are expedient” brackets out the Logos. This is not so. To quote a famous line, it is “self-evident”.
The constitutional order recognised rights, duties, and values as Creator-endowed and antecedent to government. Civil power is limited precisely because justice is not created by the state. To describe this order as already hollow, or rather “nominalist” is to cut the root of the American claim itself. Once that root is severed, the addition of “Judeo-Christian” can be portrayed as merely filling an empty container with usable values. But if the order was never hollow in that sense, the portrayal fails.
The same problem appears in the article’s reliance on the Septuagint as the pure Apostolic foundation that was later sidelined. The LXX is a Greek translation tradition rooted in Hebrew texts. It is not a single stable original; it was produced by multiple hands over time and is marked by well-documented internal inconsistencies in style, vocabulary, and readings. Elevating it as the clean baseline against which the Hebrew tradition appears as pollution or displacement rests on an unstable foundation. A textual argument that requires the Septuagint to function as a pure and consistent standard cannot bear the weight the article places on it.
Taken together, these two claims—the assumption of a hollow American order and the reliance on an unstable LXX baseline—undermine the article’s larger claim that the modern framework represents a decisive break from the original roots. The critique cuts against a Founding that was never hollow in the sense portrayed, and it rests on a textual standard that is itself less secure than the argument needs.
I don't argue that naming values brackets out the Logos. I argue that the reduction of metaphysical claims to values can do so, and I think your response collapses several distinct levels of the argument.
There is a difference between saying that a value is derived from God, saying that a value is affirmed by a political community, and asking who possesses the jurisdiction to determine what that value means when competing interpretations arise. Those are three different questions.
If I say that human dignity is Creator-endowed, I have made a metaphysical claim about the source of human dignity. But I have not yet answered the juridical question of who has authority to determine what human dignity requires in a concrete case. Nor have I answered the jurisdictional question of whether the state itself possesses the authority to define the meaning of that dignity.
This is precisely where I think your invocation of "self-evident" values collapses the distinction I am trying to make. The fact that a principle is declared to be self-evident or Creator-endowed does not, by itself, establish the institutional mechanism through which that principle is interpreted, adjudicated, and limited. The existence of a transcendent source and the existence of an institutional structure capable of mediating that source are not the same thing.
The historical Christian order addressed this problem through a jurisdictionally plural conception of authority. The state was not understood to be the sole interpreter of justice. The Church, family, local associations, universities, and other intermediate institutions possessed forms of authority that did not derive simply from administrative delegation by the state. The temporal ruler was therefore subject to a law and a moral order that preceded him, while the Church itself possessed a distinct jurisdiction that the state could not simply absorb.
My concern is that the modern procedural framework can preserve the language of Creator-endowed rights while progressively relocating the interpretive authority for those rights into the administrative state. The metaphysical claim may remain rhetorically intact while the institutional structure that once prevented the state from becoming the final interpreter of that claim disappears.
That is why I distinguish between the Logos as the source of an objective moral order and the administrative state as the institution that increasingly determines how that order is operationalized. The former does not automatically guarantee the latter. Indeed, the entire historical problem of Western constitutionalism was how to prevent any temporal authority from claiming precisely that interpretive sovereignty.
So I am not saying, "You mentioned values, therefore you have excluded God." I am saying something much more specific: a transcendent foundation is not identical to a transcendent jurisdiction. One can retain the language of Creator-endowed rights while simultaneously allowing the state to become the practical arbiter of what those rights mean. That is the distinction my argument is concerned with.
Ah, I was still working on that...