14 - Interrogating the Judeo-Christian Tradition: Will Herberg’s Construction of American Religion, Religious Pluralism, and the Problem of Inclusion

Summary

Although the notion of the Judeo-Christian tradition has in many ways become passé in the academic study of religion, it remains very much a part of popular political and legal discourse. It continues to shape an imagined mainstream or dominant culture in the United States. This essay offers a reevaluation of this legacy from within religious studies, in part by considering the range and diversity of contemporary expressions of Judaism and Christianity – the very traditions that were to have been defined by this legacy. By rereading Will Herberg’s classic statement of the Jewish-Christian postwar consensus, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, I reconsider the lasting power of this concept. I offer a close reading against the grain of Herberg’s text, with special attention to the way Jews figure in his work in order to examine the fault lines in his position. In so doing, I open up discursive space in the present for other ways of imagining social inclusion.

Although many have continued to build on Herberg’s vision of liberal inclusion by adding other traditions to his triple melting pot, this strategy is, I argue, quite problematic. Instead of making room for all kinds of other religious traditions or even the diversity among, between, and within various Jewish and Christian communities and commitments, Herberg’s classic statement of the Judeo-Christian consensus was, in fact, an attempt to contain such diversity within a single, unified, normative vision of religion in America.