What Are Judeo-Christian Values?
Transcript
Have you ever heard the term, “Judeo-Christian values?”
I suspect you have.
Can you name any of those values?
I suspect you can’t.
But you should because Judeo-Christian values are the moral foundation of Western civilization.
As the great British prime minister Margaret Thatcher put it:
“The truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition are infinitely precious, not only…because they are true, but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace…for which we all long.”
Mrs. Thatcher was a believing Christian. I am a believing Jew. While we have different theologies, we have the same core values. And as far as society is concerned, moral values are far more important than theologies.
That is why traditionally religious Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews are aligned on almost every important moral issue.
Here, then, are ten of those values.
Number 1: There is one God. That God is the God introduced to the world by the Hebrew Bible, or as Christians came to refer to it, the Old Testament.
Number 2: The Hebrew Bible introduced the most revolutionary moral idea in history: that there are objective moral truths just as there are objective mathematical and scientific truths. Without God, there is no moral truth; only moral opinions.
Number 3: Because there are moral truths, good and evil are the same for all people.
Number 4: God—not man, not government, not popular opinion, not a democratic vote—is the source of our rights. The American Declaration of Independence declares that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Number 5: The human being is “created in the image of God.” Therefore, Every human life is precious and therefore race is of no significance because God has no race.
Number 6: The world is based on divine order, and order is made by distinctions. Among these divine distinctions are God and man, God and nature, man and woman, human and animal, good and evil.
Number 7: Man is not basically good. Christians speak of “original sin” in referring to man’s nature; Jews cite what God said in Genesis: “The will of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Both beliefs are diametrically opposed to the naive modern belief that man is basically good. And they lead to the same conclusion: we need God-based rules to keep us from our natural inclinations.
Number 8: Therefore, our natural inclinations are a very poor moral guide. As religious Jews and Christians put it, don’t follow your heart. A lot of terrible things have been done—and are being done now—by people thinking their hearts are better guides than Judeo-Christian values.
Number 9: Human beings have free will—and are therefore responsible for how they behave. In the secular world, free will does not exist because all human behavior is the result of biology and environment. And if there is no free will, people are not responsible for what they do—good or bad.
Number 10: The Ten Commandments. They are the core of Judeo-Christian values. In fact, if everyone lived just by the Ten Commandments, we wouldn’t need armies or even police.
There is another important aspect to the term “Judeo-Christian.” The two religions need each other. Without the Old Testament, there is no New Testament. Virtually every Christian moral principle derives from the Hebrew Bible—not only the ten Judeo-Christian values I just enumerated, but such basic moral principles as “Love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18), “Love the Lord your God …” (Deuteronomy 6:5), and “Love the stranger” (Deuteronomy 10:19).
At the same time, Jews need Christians. It was overwhelmingly Christians who carried knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to the world.
“Judeo-Christian” refers to one other fact: No religions in the world share a common revelation the way Judaism and Christianity do. That common revelation is the Hebrew Bible. The only two religions that share that Bible, or any sacred work, are Judaism and Christianity.
The ultimate embodiment of Judeo-Christian values has been the United States of America. America’s Founders were Christians—some culturally, some theologically—who were rooted in the Old Testament. So much so that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin designed a seal for the United States that depicted God leading Israel out of Egypt, just as they believed God was leading America out of Europe.
Only if we keep these values will we keep America, and for that matter, Western Civilization. I’m Dennis Prager.