Making a Judeo-Christian America: The Christian Right, Antisemitism, and the Politics of Religious Pluralism in the 20th Century United State

My dissertation reconceptualizes our understanding of conservative evangelicals' staunch support for Israel in recent decades as part of a wider turn toward philosemitism. Though scholars have pointed to premillennialism---the theological belief in Israel as the fulfillment of prophecy---to explain evangelical support for Israel, my work illustrates a broader embrace of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness in response to political upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s. I demonstrate how political and social tumult in the U.S. and Middle East broke traditional antisemitic stereotypes, prompted Christian conservatives to identify with Jews and Israel, charged premillennialism with new meanings, and realigned American politics. By the early 1980s, the new Christian right rejected the antisemitism of the old Christian right, reached out to Jews, turned premillennial belief into political action, and adopted the idea that America was a Judeo-Christian nation. This shift facilitated the Christian right's first return to political prominence since it was ostracized for its antisemitism at the end of the Second World War. Through Judeo-Christian language, evangelicals revitalized conservatism by articulating a politics of righteous victimization and popularized a pro-Israel rhetoric that framed political debate on Middle East, two legacies that continue to shape American politics to this day.;This history also demonstrates that religious and ethnic pluralism were not as liberal and inclusive as we have assumed, and illustrates how even the most conservative, exclusionary rhetoric has evolved from otherwise progressive, inclusive language and ideas. Offering the most complete history of how America became known as a Judeo-Christian nation, I interrogate how accepting religious diversity through performative language allowed Americans not only to redefine their national identity, but also to articulate a range of moral and political claims in the name of the Judeo-Christian tradition. My dissertation shows that while the Judeo-Christian tradition first emerged as an inclusive, leftist concept during the 1920s and 30s, the new Christian right recast it in the 1980s as a conservative idea to denounce gays, feminists, and secular humanists. By embracing Jews, conservative Christians were empowered to reject others, which I call exclusionary pluralism.