Religion News Service<\/P>
UNITED STATES, May 17, 2003: Leading Muslim organizations say it’s time for Americans to stop using the phrase “Judeo-Christian” when describing the values and character that define the United States. Better choices, they say, are “Judeo-Christian-Islamic” or “Abrahamic,” referring to Abraham, the patriarch held in common by the monotheistic big three religions. The new language should be used “in all venues where we normally talk about Judeo-Christian values, starting with the media, academia, statements by politicians and comments made in churches, synagogues and other places,” said Agha Saeed, founder and chairman of the American Muslim Alliance, a political group headquartered in Fremont, Calif. According to a 1984 scholarly article by religion writer Mark Silk, “Judeo-Christian” wasn’t used to refer to a common American outlook of values and beliefs until World War II, when the supposedly Christian Nazis and their death camps made future references to “our Christian civilization” sound ominously exclusive. “‘Judeo-Christian,’ which in 1952 looked like an incredibly inclusive term, doesn’t look very inclusive now,” said Silk, now director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, in Hartford. Conn., in an interview. “So we probably need a new term.” Osama Siblani, an influential voice among American Muslims and publisher of the Arab-American News in Dearborn, Mich., takes an even broader view. “I believe we should call this the United States of America, made up of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, Jews and others,” said Siblani. “This stuff about language has to stop. We are all just Americans.”
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\nHPI adds: America’s founding fathers consciously avoided creating a “Christian nation.” Thomas Jefferson, author of the declaration of Independence, authored in 1786 the “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom,” which set strong precedent for the standing of religion in the new country. He wrote that during a debate to adopt the bill, “An amendment [which proposed to insert] the words, ‘Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion,’ [was rejected] by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the infidel [any non-Christian] of every denomination.”
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