FDR and the Judeo-Christian Tradition

by Rachel Gordan

For those of us who teach and write about 20^th century American religious history, 1950’s civil religion often seems best explained by President Eisenhower’s 1952 remark, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” It’s a perfect statement for evoking the vague, non-theological brand of 1950’s religion. It also usually gets a chuckle. But a terrific recent article about the history of the Judeo-Christian tradition by Healan Gaston (in Relegere), reminds me of the need to complicate what seems so simple. “Judeo Christianity” is a term with an evolving and contested meaning, Gaston explains. It held varied significance to Jews and Catholics and Mormons, just as its meaning in 1940 was very different from its meaning in 1970.

 Recent work on FDR has helped me think about Gaston’s call to re-examine the dimensions of Judeo-Christianity. We tend to associate Judeo-Christianity with President Eisenhower, but considering FDR’s role in the creation of this “tradition” reveals the term’s evolution and its tensions. Andrew Preston’s Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith (2012) clarifies how FDR’s simple, non-intellectual Christian faith helped him succeed “in enshrining religious pluralism at the heart of the American national faith.” Preston takes FDR’s religion seriously, notwithstanding its lack of theology. “He was a Protestant Christian who respected faith in general, and thus was the most instinctively ecumenical president since Lincoln,” Preston writes. FDR once said of his ancestors, “In the dim distant past they have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants. What I am more interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God. I hope they were both.” It is a startling comment from a man of FDR’s social caste. FDR’s patrician parents instilled in him the noblesse oblige that encouraged tolerance toward Jews, but the president had many anti-Semitic friends and relatives, including his wife.

 It’s hard not to compare the recent and dramatic shift in Americans’ perception of the GLBT community with the changing perception of Jews during the 1930’s-1950’s. America’s postwar embrace of Jews and Judaism (although quotas and “gentleman’s agreements” certainly kept bigotry alive) was preceded by the general acceptance of anti-Semitism. Eleanor Roosevelt is a case in point. After attending a party in honor of Jewish financier Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt commented, “The Jew party was appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels, and sables mentioned again.” As the authors of FDR and the Jews(2013), Richard Breitman and Alan Lichtman, explain, Eleanor had “acquired harsh and commonplace stereotype of Jews as pushy, social inferiors.” More sheltered than her husband, she did not have the kind of friendships and interactions with Jews that ultimately helped inform the president’s tolerance — and, in time, affected Eleanor’s Jews.

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