Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic?

On December 9, 2015, The Christian Century published an article, “One Abraham or three?”, by Ulrich Rosenhagen, a Lutheran theologian at the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions of the University of Wisconsin. Rosenhagen places this relatively recent shift from “Judeo-Christian” to “Abrahamic” in the wider context of the expanding religious pluralism in American society. Even before independence the British colonies in North America were religiously diverse compared with Europe and most of them gave up on projects to set up state churches. The Puritans tried in Massachusetts, the Anglicans in Virginia, but these projects failed because of the ineradicable heterogeneity of the immigrant population. When factual pluralism coalesced with the ideal of religious freedom, the new nation adopted the latter as one of its core values, enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. George Washington eloquently expressed this ideal in his letter to the synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, and in his farewell address asserted that religion and morality provide “indispensable support for political prosperity.” At the time it was clear which religion he had mainly in mind: It was above all Protestantism which, in the words of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (a Roman Catholic), had created “a nation with the soul of a church.” These words were written in 1922; by then the massive arrival of Catholic and Jewish immigrants had made it much less clear which church had given its “soul” to the country.