I’ve never heard that definition of it. I’ve heard [this one]. But when used to describe something as Judeo-Christian, it’s not being used to describe claims, it’s being used to assume a shared system, which is the thing that’s being disputed. I’m not saying there aren’t people who think we do, who claim we do. I’m just saying they’re incorrect with regard to Holy Orthodoxy, regardless of what they claim. At best they’re referring to their own minds. And lots of people have lots of things going on their own minds that have nothing to do with Holy Orthodoxy.

Incidentally, I view it a bit like calling my wife Asian. She’s not Asian, she’s Korean. She hates being lumped in with 3/4 of the world of indistinct people just because she’s slant-eyed and yellow-skinned and isn’t European or African. What has she got in common with the Chinese? What… rice? Yeah, maybe. But does that really make them bedfellows? The Japanese? Bitter enemies of her people for quite some time, and for pretty incontrovertable reasons. Malaysians? She’s never met a Malaysian. It’s a bit like calling a whole lot of people Aryan – just different.

It’s like people who try to refer to us as “people of the book” or “monotheists”. One thing Orthodox certainly are NOT is monotheist. That’s heresy, not to mention blasphemy. And we’re not people of the book, either. We’re not a text-based religion. We pre-dated books of our Faith. What were we then, just people?

Terms like Judeo-Christian are about other people’s wish to consolidate things into oversimplified, comprehensive, and comprehensible categories that involve doctrinal statements and lists of characteristics. Even when they’re correct, they aren’t correct – it’s the confusion of the map for the ground. This is Orthodoxy’s whole dispute with the rest of the world about God. We deny the confusion of God with attributes of God – we deny the lists of characteristics – we deny that God is just or loving or good in the sense that you and I can apply that concept to anything else, and we insist that the energies of God are uncreated and are God. In other words, we think descriptions of God that utilize comparisons with other things, when not purely poetry or metaphor, are heresy and aren’t referring to God at all – they’re referring to things happening in your own mind – the idol of one’s personal theology – the subjectivity of one’s own prelest. And we think attempts to categorize us as this or that kind of religion are like attempts to categorize God – whatever you want to say about them – blasphemous, impious, heretical, heterodox – they’re also just incorrect.

After all, I can think of some comparisons that would really creep people out but which, technically, I could justify with the same kinds of appeals – the same apparatus in kind. Women-chatel. Protestant-freemasons. Evangelical-islamists. Republican-neofascists. Muslim-Hindus. You get the point.

I believe ti was an invention of American secular sociologists in the 1930s, who wanted to describe what religion was “American”, and they came up with “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” but that was too much of a mouthfuol so they shortened it to “JudeoChristian”.