RELIGION IS ABRAHAMIC AND AMERICA IS RELIGIOUS:

"Judeo-Christian" gained further traction during the Cold War--"Judeo-Christian" America opposed godless Communism. This, logically enough, intensified during the Eisenhower Administration. The late President was (to my knowledge) not a strongly religious man, and certainly not a sophisticated theologian, but a much-quoted sentence of his nicely expresses the national mood at the time (it was in an address to the Freedom Foundation): "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." The last phrase (although I doubt that Eisenhower intended this) gives a hint on how the alleged "Judeo-Christian" affinity might be further enlarged.

So now we have "Abrahamic," increasingly relevant as both American government and the American people are forced by events to think about Islam. Clearly there are other potential candidates for admission to the grand alliance--in addition to Muslims, a sizable number of Buddhists and Hindus (most of whom are naturalized citizens and thus legally entitled and, as good Americans, culturally inclined to sue for their First Amendment rights). Leaving aside numerous smaller religious groups, there are lots of so-called "nones" (who say in surveys that they have no religious affiliation) who will also protest their exclusion in federal court. The mind boggles as one imagines all future religious representatives crowding presidential inaugurations. [They have already been pretty crowded since the beginning of the "Judeo-Christian " dispensation. By the way, Herberg not only omitted Muslims. He also omitted Eastern Orthodox Christians. Somebody must have noticed (the Greek lobby?). They are now always present when American pluralism is celebrated, and they are always noticed: The tall black hats of their clergy dwarf all other religious headgear.] As Rosenhagen points out in his article, the term "Abrahamic" was coined by Louis Massignon (1853-1962), a distinguished French scholar of Islam, who wrote the influential paper "Three Prayers of Abraham" in 1949. In the United States, the term was rapidly picked up in the wake of 9/11. Right after the attack on the World Trade Center, George W. Bush declared that we were not at war with Islam (a morally and politically desirable declaration), adding that "Islam means peace" (which is not good Arabic--Islam means submission, not peace--but, I guess, President Bush's credentials as a scholar of religion are as good as were President Eisenhower's). The recent eruption of Islamist violence makes the distinction made by Bush all the more important politically: the present war against the terrorist threat will finally be decided by somebody's "boots on the ground," but it cannot be won without the support of powerful Muslim allies. (The Bush presidency will not be judged by his scholarly knowledge of Islam; neither will Obama's, who has been singing from the same hymn book with more ardent wooing of Muslims, ever since his famous Cairo speech.)

The sociological context of these develoments is religious pluralism--an empirical reality, whether one likes it or not. The political responses and the philosophical or theological assessments must be clearly distinguished from the empirical analysis. The latter, of course, is to understand what is actually happening in the world today, especially if one is to understand the phenomenon of radical Islamism. I have tried to do this in my recent work on pluralism as a sociologist of religion. Part of such a project must be an understanding of the place of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the dynamics of global pluralism. I cannot do this here. But I must, at least briefly, address two questions to which sociology cannot give answers. One: Are assertions of Abrahamic commonality useful in the development of American domestic and foreign policy? Does that commonality stand up in the philosophical or theological assessment of these three traditions?

The concept of "Judeo-Christian" has been immensely useful in the integration of Jews as an ethnic group and of Judaism as a religion in America. I think it is fair to say that in no other country in modern history have Jews become as much part of the taken-for-granted landscape of the society as in America. Jews are not only accepted; they are esteemed. In a recent survey respondents were asked to name the religion other than their own they liked best, and the one they liked least. Muslims and Mormons competed for the least liked place; Jews were the most liked. Given the enormous capacity of America to integrate the most diverse religious and ethnic groups, there is no intrinsic reason (intrinsic, that is, to Islam) why the growing number of American Muslims should not go through the same process of indigenization. Of course the future course of radical Islamism will help or hinder this process. Thus far the concept of "Abrahamic" religion has been useful in countering the anti-Muslim sentiments stoked by the likes of Donald Trump. Could this change? Of course it could: It is not difficult to imagine any number of scenarios in which new horrendous attacks by radical Islamists could lead to an explosion of hatred against Islam in general and American Muslims in particular. But this is not an unavoidable future. In the meantime, both the actions of the federal government, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and those of the institutions of civil society have made impressive moves to protect American Muslim from being identified with the ideology and the atrocities of al-Qaeda and ISIS. Individual Jews, synagogues and Jewish organizations have been prominent in their support of these efforts.

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