This is an adapted excerpt from Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West by Josh Hammer. Used with permission from Radius Book Group, a division of Diversion Publishing.
In June 2024, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a law making his state the first to mandate display of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms from kindergarten through university. As Landry, himself a Catholic, said before signing the bill, “If you want to respect the rule of law, you gotta start from the original law given, which was Moses…. He got his commandments from God.”
Unfortunately, the governor’s lavish praise of Moses — whom religious Jews consider “the father of all the prophets that were before him and that arose after him,” per Maimonides’s well-known Thirteen Principles of Faith — was not appreciated by secular Jewish families in Louisiana, three of whom immediately filed suit in federal court. The families cited concern that their children might feel suppressed in expressing their “own Jewish background and beliefs.” One cannot help but wonder whether these families realize it was the Jews themselves whom God chose as His intermediary for introducing the Ten Commandments to the world.
Truly, there is so much wrong with this picture that it is difficult to know where to begin.
America, which was founded in 1776 with an appeal to our “Creator,” has long been a Godlier nation than its peers. This Godliness is one reason why John Winthrop first described America as a “shining city upon a hill,” and why Ronald Reagan reiterated the sentiment centuries later. In a somewhat similar vein, the Jewish people are famously called in the Book of Isaiah to be a “light unto the nations.”
In a great and Godly country such as America, it is incumbent upon the original People of the Book to be that “light” and to lead by example. As Rabbi Tuly Weisz wrote in 2024 following Louisiana’s Ten Commandments controversy, “a return to basic principles is in order, and the Jewish community should promote biblical teachings.” To oppose the introduction of biblical principles in the public square is to necessarily also undermine Jews’ unique mission on earth — to be a “light unto the nations” by sanctifying God’s name in all that we do. To oppose the teaching of the Ten Commandments in schools is to fail to be a “kingdom of princes and a holy nation” in the eyes of the Lord.
This is counter to the post-World War II legal and cultural paradigm turned ideology of separation-ism, which rigidly (and wrongly) holds that faith must be excluded entirely from public life and government affairs. As a practical matter, the end of such separation-ism and the return of Christianity to the public square would, perhaps counterintuitively to some, also do a great deal to safeguard the Jewish future in America.
Anti-Semitism from the Woke Left
One does not need a microscope to examine the origins of the recently ascendant anti-Semitism in America and throughout the Western world: It is almost entirely coming from woke leftist radicals who have replaced the one true God with the false gods of intersectionality, and who suffer from a debilitating case of Western civilizational self-hatred. What is needed to withstand and roll back totalizing woke revanchism is to cut through the liberal illusion of public “values-neutrality” and promote an alternative affirmative conception of the good life — which in America means Judeo-Christian ecumenism at minimum, and in many instances a Christian majority promoting Christianity tout court.
John Adams, one of the most devoutly Christian of the Founding Fathers, famously wrote that the Jews “are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth.” Adams added: “They have given religion to three quarters of the Globe and have influenced the affairs of Mankind more, and more happily, than any other Nation ancient or modern.” Adams’s sentiment is hardly aberrant; rather, he is representative of American Christianity, which has often tended toward philo-Semitism ever since the founding of the republic.
It is no coincidence that, as regular church attendance has declined and secular wokeism has ascended in America and throughout the West in general, anti-Semitism has skyrocketed. In the year 2024, any Jewish American who throws in his lot with wokeism and not the one entity pragmatically capable of subduing wokeism, the American church, is foolish beyond measure.
Jews Should Promote a Biblically Oriented Public Square
The more biblically oriented and the more authentically Christian America is, the better off both America and American Jews will be. The alternative paradigm — the doctrinaire separation-ism of liberal groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, which rejects Christianity in the public square — diminishes the very Bible that is the Jewish people’s greatest inheritance, embitters the very Christians who are the greatest natural friends of both the Jewish people and the State of Israel, sours Jewish–Christian relations, and vitiates the only affirmative force capable of vanquishing the hegemonic wokeism that poses an existential threat to the American Jewish experience.
American Jews should therefore advocate for an American public square that is more explicitly oriented toward God and Scripture — even if that is not strictly limited to the shared Judeo-Christian inheritance, such as the Ten Commandments, and will at times take the inevitable form of sectarian Christianity. The Judeo-Christian tradition, more generally, is the only affirmative positive force capable of withstanding and possibly rolling back the three hegemonic forces that today threaten ruin for the West: wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism.
At times, it will also be necessary for American Christians to move beyond more abstract appeals to the Judeo-Christian tradition at large, and to simply promote Christianity qua Christianity. Even if one does not believe in the truth of the Christian faith — and any God-fearing Jew, by definition, does not — there is a compelling tactical reason to promote a biblically oriented public square that will, in America, sometimes take sectarian Christian form.
Christianity is America’s predominant religion, and it is the only concrete force in existence that is truly capable of providing a totalizing worldview alternative to wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism. Thus, the Jewish–Christian anti–separation-ism alliance must be comfortable with a public square that, while often ecumenical and oriented toward promotion of foundational moral components of the Hebrew Bible such as the Ten Commandments or the Seven Noahide Laws, will nonetheless sometimes veer into promotion of Christianity tout court. There is a strong tactical basis for even non-Christians, such as myself, to make peace with such an arrangement.
If one believes that wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism must be decisively rejected — as every God-fearing Jew, Zionist, and American patriot should — then one must support measures to fortify the American church. But church attendance has been declining, and Christians are repeatedly told they suffer from excessive “privilege.” Ending a legal and cultural paradigm of separation-ism can help tame anti-Christian hostility, embolden individual Christians, and fortify the church. For tactical purposes and also for reasons of basic survival and preservation, American Jews must enthusiastically support all of this.
It is imperative that Jews and Christians unite to defeat our common civilizational foes. That necessitates, among other things, a public square that is hospitable once again for expressions of authentic biblical religiosity. And that, in turn, requires a Jewish–Christian anti-separation-ism alliance between the original People of the Book and the “grafted [Gentile] wild shoot.”