The term “Judeo-Christian” has been in common use for decades to refer to the Biblical heritage of America and the West in general, but if one French intellectual gets his way, we will soon be referring instead to our “Islamo-Christian” heritage.

When one surveys the world in which jihadis have just taken over Afghanistan and are emboldened everywhere, and an ostentatiously Roman Catholic president’s Justice Department files suit against a state of the United States for daring to restrict abortion, maybe “Islamo-post-Christian” would be more apt.

But in any case, the French intellectual Charles Saint-Prot, a professor at the Institute of International, European and Comparative Law in Paris and an expert on Islamic law, is pushing for the “Islamo-Christian” term. Because the Christian and post-Christian West and the Islamic world have so very much in common, you see.

It has long been taken for granted that it was Judaism and Christianity that had so much in common. Back in 1960, Martin Luther King, Jr. denounced racism as a “cancerous disease that prevents us from realizing the sublime principles of our Judeo-Christian tradition.” But now, according to the French-language Riposte Laïque, Charles Saint-Prot wants the West to look to a different shared heritage, the one the West supposedly shares with Islam.

The thesis of Saint-Prot’s work is “Islam is a harmless religion,” and “if there are any lingering hiccups, they shouldn’t be taken too seriously.” He rejects the idea of a “Judeo-Christian culture,” and instead recommends use of the term “Islamo-Christianity,” as the two are, he says, “sister religions with very few differences.” Saint-Prot also claims that “Islam did not harbor any particular hostility against Christianity.” He is not just talking about terminology for its own sake. Saint-Prot “now proposes an economic alliance with the Maghreb countries, particularly Morocco, convinced that France’s future is here.”

While Charles Saint-Prot is hardly a household name, his views on this are shared by all too many on both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere. He is by no means the first to suggest a shift in terminology to reflect an embrace of Islam by the West. As far back as 2003, Agha Saeed of the American Muslim Alliance recommended that the U.S. government and media begin speaking of “Judeo-Christian-Islamic values” rather than “Judeo-Christian values,” and should do so “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.”

Much more recently, in August 2020, The Atlantic ran a piece complaining that “the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ excluded not only Muslims, Native Americans, and other non-Western religious communities, but also atheists and secularists of all persuasions…The mythical ‘Judeo-Christian tradition,’ then, proved an unstable foundation on which to build a common American identity.” The Atlantic didn’t call for the adoption of the term “Islamo-Christian values,” but clearly it likely wouldn’t have any problem with it, either.