Putting the Judea back into Judeo-Christian Civilization

In a time of a health and economic crisis, civil unrest, and a week of difficult supreme court rulings, the President’s moves in the coming days regarding the extension of Israeli law to the areas in the territories occupied in 1967 appear little other than a distraction.  And yet, they may be among his most important and lasting decisions.

This president has been very pro-active on economics and foreign policy. And yet, he has also taken several critical actions that have led a strong part of his political base, the communities of faith, not only to support, but to view this New York secular businessman in terms of being their voice.  A few such actions are domestic, but that only partially explains his following since other Republican presidents have supported similar policies without garnering such intense following. Only President Reagan, who was also broadly secular, managed such support in the past.  The underlying reason for both presidents’ support in this community is that both took actions which signal that the fight they face was not over policy, but over reasserting Western civilization.

When the President says Make America Great Again, his understanding of America derives from a deeply rooted and not always consciously appreciated understanding of the United States as the carrier of both Rome and Jerusalem, namely of the convergence of the two pillars of Western civilization, the Greco-Roman culture, including the idea of civic virtue, from Plato to NATO as well as of Judeo-Christian, including the values embedded within them. The eclipsing power America reached capped a historical evolution of fusing those two strands into one. In other words, the United States is the bottom line of carrying Western civilization forward. The president may not spend Saturday nights reading Livy or Suetonius, but he implicitly understands this as have generations of American leaders before.

As such, to make America great again requires restoring those two foundations. Only a few secular historians understand this, but communities of faith do. The attempt to shore up civic virtue and assert American power – namely to be the new Rome – is indispensable, but unsustainable without the Judeo-Christian pillar. This was understood by Emperor Constantine as he dramatically embraced Christianity as the religion of the empire to reverse declining Roman population, economy and culture to usher in the flourishing period of late antiquity, which by any measure was the foundation for the eventual Renaissance, which welded firmly the realms of power and spirit into the strand of modern political thought which culminated in the American revolution.

President Reagan challenged the malaise of the 1970s, trounced a more devout opponent and secured the following of the faith communities because he linked American exceptionality to its civilizational roots by ending every public appearance in one phrase which was jolting and electrifying: “God Bless America.” In his last farewell address, he evoked the image of Washington as the shining, beaconing city on the hill, namely the new Jerusalem which had animated American thinkers since the Puritans, and concluded: “As long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours.” This was a civilizational battle cry, which is why he is so reviled by the nihilist left.

Two weeks ago, President Trump had his moment. He defiantly wandered across Lafayette park in front of the White House to St. John’s church, which had just been damaged by arsonists.  Around him on every flat surface were graffiti with anarchist symbols. When he arrived, he held up a Bible.  The symbolism reached out to traditional American society powerfully. It evoked a Victorian novel in that it was almost as if he were holding a cross up to vampire to ward off and disempower its evil.  Of course, it was symbolically exactly what he was doing.  The “vampire” is the nihilism so threatening communities of faith, for which restoring confidence in Judeo-Christian civilization is the anti-dote.

The act was consistent with the President’s other moves, the importance of which are only now beginning to be understood, the foremost among them was the decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there – a move probably based as much in instinct than calculation, but nonetheless misguidedly dismissed as naïve, momentary or just a result of the influence over him held by several Jewish advisors.

Jerusalem always meant captured the American imagination. Reagan understood Jerusalem as an idea and symbol physically manifesting and serving as the seat of political power of a people defined around an abstraction. Our capital is conceptually an amalgam of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. Rome was the seat of imperial power whose history was the reference point and touchstone of civilizational survival, against which the course of American history would be measured and judged as rising or declining.  Athens was the birthplace of democratic politics and political debate over public matters. But why would that not be satisfied by placing the capital in Philadelphia, New York or Annapolis?  Why create Washington DC?

Jerusalem was built by King David as a common political symbol unifying twelve tribes into one nation. The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican attempted to copy the Solomonic first Temple of Jerusalem for this very reason (to unify Christendom around that structure as part of the Basilica of Paul). The creation of Washington, DC as the capital of the new-born United States consciously tapped the precedent of David’s Jerusalem. King David chose neutral territory between the 12 tribes, and then employed the physical founding of Jerusalem to unify those tribes politically. Similarly, the United States’ founders determined to use the neutral territory of Washington DC to unify the 13 quarreling colonies into one nation.

The willingness by many since the interwar period to write off the original Jerusalem as lost to Islam– something the framers of the League of Nations Mandate could not have imagined or countenanced since they were still men of faith —  was itself a reflection of the beginning of the erosion of Western civilization.  Erasing old Jerusalem of all meaning and surrendering it to the non-Western world while trying to build the new Jerusalem modeled upon it ultimately was untenable. The non-Western world understood this, which is precisely why the city was always strategically understood by our enemies as too dangerous a symbol to allow its being restored to the West through the agency of Israel. For many in the Middle East who seek the West ill, the continued Islamic domination of Jerusalem was a necessary sign of Christendom’s and Judaism’s fallen favor with the divine.  Ironically, even Muslim nations who understand their fate is tied to the power of the West now tolerate, but not necessarily relish, the formal return of Jerusalem to Western hands.

In recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, President Trump started restoring the American story. He struck a deep chord with communities of faith who firmly believed Jerusalem was never just another city for early American colonialists and post-revolutionary war Americans. For communities of faith, the President tapped into a tradition running from the early settlers to President Reagan that America itself was “the new Jerusalem” — a deeply cherished vision of a city on the hill living in our imaginations as a beacon for our own soul.

In this context, the coming recognition of Israeli sovereignty in additional parts of the Judean and Samarian heartland, would reaffirm and deepen the catalytic nature of what recognizing Jerusalem was. It would place the recognition of Jerusalem in context as a turning point in a broader strategy to reassert and firm up the foundations of Western idea rather than as an aberration.

Those foundations of American society are wobbling dangerously.  Ideas animating three millennia of Western thought are under siege internally as well as externally. Our young believe socialism is as valid a system as capitalism. They are taught in our educational structures to reject Western history – Athens, Rome and Jerusalem alike — and obsessively focus on the flaws and growing pains of the early republic to the exclusion of recording the vast brilliance of what was launched. Now, our youth seem to be at ease supporting anarchy, nihilism and lawlessness. When the President holds up the Bible to stand down the protestors, to recognize Jerusalem, and to bring parts of the Judean heartland back into Judeo-Christian culture, he is concretely shoring up American greatness by re-asserting the foundations its western civilization.  He is putting the Judea back into Judeo-Christian culture.  The communities of faith and several historians understand this, and thus their support of President Trump is deeper and more determined than other past Republican presidents since Reagan.