"Judeo-Christian" is the great religious shibboleth of post-World War II American religion. I (modestly) should know, because I wrote the book on it--well, the article anyway: "Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America," American Quarterly, 1984. It came into use during the war as a way of including Jews in the American religious thing, and after the war was on the tongues of politicians from Dwight Eisenhower on down. In that sense, it is of a piece with "In God We Trust," which became the national motto in the same era. More recently, it has come to be the special province of religious conservatives like Rep. King, while those more inclusively inclined reach for terms like Abrahamic (i.e. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim).

To the extent that "Judeo-Christian" signifies actual religious history, it surely includes the species of slave labor that went into building the pyramids, or whatever it was that the Egyptians put the resident Israelites to work building--and the great importance attached to remembering that hard labor prior to the Exodus.

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