>>Sorry guys, but this is definatively not true. There is a judeo-Christian ideology -- it's called the Reformation. And it was especially pronounced
in Puritanism, where being able to read Hebrew was considered more important than being able to read Greek. Do you know there were several serious proposals to make Hebrew the official language of America (because English
is a pagan tongue)? >>
Certainly the Reformation helped to get Christians to fight amongst themselves more than go after Islam, though it also helped to re-invigorate militant Catholicism and Eastern Catholicism/Orthodoxy in some places, much to the cost of the Muslims in Europe.
That wouldn't necessarily make protestant Christians like the looneytunes who founded the Massachussetts colony J-C ideologues, simply historically, linguistically, and religiously confused (post-modern man looks back and laughs). Still, you are right to point out that the need for a J-C 'tradition' does seem to come out of the Reformation and it finds expression in not-so-recent American history (and about America, it could be said, its ruling class has a rather long history, the new European peoples, such as Germans, Italians, and even French and their collective naivete about it notwithstanding).
This need for J-C resolution and synthesis seems mostly to center on somehow having to deal with the fact that so much of 'western' civilisation and learning came from non-Christians, while the sacred texts were largely inacessible because no one knew their languages.
With huge amounts of anachronism and delusion, 'history' is re-read through the New Testament, and the Indo-European polytheists who count (not Indians or Persians but Romans and Greeks) and the Semitic people who count (monotheists whose religion came from Judea, not the Arabian peninsula) are restored to some unifying vision as people of the 'logos', and somehow the logos was Hebrew, never mind its extinction or the use of Aramaic and Greek and Latin well BC. You might almost think it was protestant Christians stealing ideas from Islam and its use of Arabic (since the word of God in Arabic can not be translated into other languages and still be the word of God).
Then M.P. writes: >>And the kind of millenarianism that unites fundamentalists with right wing Jews today is nothing compared to what you found in the mid-17th century, which was one of America's formative moments. >>
I'm not sure, though, if the detructiveness and unconscious nihilism (or the all-out greed, such as the multi-billion dollar giveaway that is the Bush administration) that has found expression are 'nothing compared to' the historic phenomenon, even if that was a founding, defining moment. Also, it's not really clear how millenarian most zionists and their Bush regime supporters are (most strike me as nationalist exceptionalist, pro-US empire, pro-Israel, extremely greedy and materialist, and in practice, quite secular--though wisely ecumenical in their speeches). They seem to be good at exploiting the sort of Christian you are talkinga bout, but it also seems that American nationalism has done this for quite a while. They seem to be good at exploiting certain types of Muslims, too, for that matter.
>>If you'd like to read more about the deep connections between Protestanism and Judaism, there was an absolutely brilliant exhibition mounted at the New York Public Library in the Fall of 2004 called "Jewes in America.">>
I'm not sure if 400 years of fucked up American history actually means that the two religions have deep connections, but I'll go along with it because current America does seem to be a major problem for the rest of the world. One thing to remember is that protestant Christians, when they read at all and read largely linguistically opaque texts like the King James Bible, read the Old Testament through the New Testament. And they are of a salvationist bent, which makes them much more co-religionists with Muslims than Jews(Islam being a religion which has largely integrated Jesus as a true prophet, to whom , in part, God's truth was revealed, and it could be argued that Islam is actually the dominant non-trinitarian form of Christianity, with Mohammed as the last prophet, unless you are Shia or of a few other branches).
For an article that largely matches the first argument (that J-C ideology is of recent origin and that J is not reconcilable with C), see this:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4803.htm
Let me conclude by saying that I'm surprised, though, that neither side has brought up that new form of Christianity given birth to in the US, Mormonism, since it seems to be one of the main purveyors of that American fusion of American nationalism, nationalism as salvationism and messianism, and this needful Christian identification with Jews as part of all that jazz.
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