by Paul Braterman
When Representative (now House Speaker) Mike Johnson told us that the cause of school shootings was the study of Darwinism, he did so from the platform of Shreveport Christian Center, on which there were no religious symbols, but two flags equally prominent, that of the United States, and that of Israel. This symbolizes the political position of the Christian Right in the US, now and for many years past Israel’s main source of external political support.
It is not my intent here to discuss the situation in Gaza. I have already done this elsewhere, and information is freely available, for example from Médecins Sans Frontières, whose reports are based on the evidence of medical personnel on the spot, 1Disclosure; Médecins Sans Frontières is one of the causes to which I donateand Sky News, one of whose notable reports describes the operation of the current aid distribution system. Reuters issues regular reports (e.g. this, from mid-July, giving a UN estimate of 875 for total number of Palestinians killed in six weeks while trying to collect food), while for distinguished comment from within Israel, see e.g. here and here and here.
Here, I have set myself the more modest task of describing how US biblical Christianity uses support of Israel as a plank in its alliance with the American Right. Their success in doing so does much to explain the otherwise mysterious inability of US politicians to influence Israeli policy, despite Israel receiving almost $18 billion in the year following the October 7, 2023 attack. I will also point out that while this support is unconditional politically, it is not so theologically, may prove a broken reed (to invoke a biblical expression) when it comes to resolving any major crisis that it helps create, and has already, at a crucial juncture, sabotaged Israel’s own peace initiative.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel from 1996 to 1999, and with brief intervals from 2009 until now, has done much to nurture this support. He is unusual in his long and close association with United States, and understanding of US politics. He spent six years of his childhood in the US, where his father was for a while a Professor of Jewish history at Cornell, and was later a student at MIT where he earned degrees in architecture and management. In 1982, he returned to the US in order to promote Israel’s public relations, which he continued to do while Israeli ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988. Prominent contacts he made during this period include Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump, Mitt Romney, and prominent evangelicals, including John Hagee and Robert Jeffress, on whom more below. He shares the strong pro-capitalist ideology of the Christian Right, whom he has cultivated even at the expense of the more flexible and Democratic-leaning majority within American Judaism.
There is a school of thought, understandably popular with authoritarian preachers, that regards the literal words of the Bible as the eternally true Revealed Word of God, independent of context and invulnerable to questioning. Applied to the natural world, this leads directly to creationism, since the biblical creation narratives are separated from their cultural and cosmological contexts. Applied to human affairs, the words of the Old Testament prophets are divorced from a history that included biblical Judaea, the destruction of the First Temple, the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE, and the return leading up to the building of the Second Temple, while the apocalyptic passages of both Old and New Testaments are divorced from the struggles between Judaism and Hellenistic and Roman paganism, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the ensuing horrors of Roman rule and unsuccessful rebellion.
This deracinated exegesis leads naturally to a huge preoccupation with the Jewish people, the birth of a Jewish nation-state, and the regularly foretold although repeatedly postponed Apocalypse. Dispensationalism is one extreme version, now particularly influential in the United States. It combs both Old and New Testament for descriptions of the End Times, and generates an extraordinarily detailed timetable, including signs and wonders that will culminate in the Rapture (always hinted at as imminent), while since 1948 the establishment of modern Israel has been taken as evidence that the End Times are already approaching. We are warned of signs and portents, leading to a seven-year Tribulation, to be followed by Jesus’ triumphant reappearance that ushers in the Millennium. It is from this perspective there we need to understand the nature of the commitment of the US Religious Right to the State of Israel, with a preoccupation with the End Times not far behind.
Dispensationalist advocacy of the return of Jews to their ancestral home actually predates the modern Jewish Zionist movement. William E. Blackstone, a real estate developer turned dispensationalist preacher, organized a conference to advocate this in 1890, which gave rise to a declaration signed by John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, and presented to President Harrison.
The claim that the foundation of the State of Israel is a sign of the End Times is spelt out in Henry Morris’ The Bible and Modern Science, 1951, which speaks of Revelation as an indubitable history of the future in the same way that Genesis is an indubitable history of the past. (Henry Morris went on to co-author The Genesis Flood, key text in the mid-20th century revival of Young Earth creationism.) His colleague Tim LaHaye, whom I have already discussed here as a link between Morris’ creationism, and Ronald Reagan’s Christian Republicanism, was explicitly and lucratively dispensationalist, and is best known today as author of the Left Behind series. LaHaye wrote several other works regarding prophecy, including a Prophecy Study Bible. Together with Ed Hindson, a professor at the evangelical creationist Liberty University, he spelt out the implications of these beliefs in the slim 2015 volume, Target Israel, caught in the crosshairs of the End Times.
The rebirth of Israel plays a central role in this book. It takes Ezekiel’s image of dry bones, reconnecting and coming to life, which clearly describes the return from Babylon (538 BCE onwards), and applies it to the formation of modern Israel. Tortuous interpretations are also imposed on other texts. For example, the Hebrew word Rosh (head) in Ezekiel 38:2, describing Gog of Magog, and generally translated as “chief,” is taken as a proper name and applied to Russia. But Russia did not come into existence until 1500 years after Ezekiel’s death. This very fact is taken as evidence that Ezekiel must have been divinely inspired, and was refering to a forthcoming Russian attack on Israel (hence the title of the book). Throughout, there is heavy emphasis on the special role of Israel and the Jews, with repeated reference, also found in theologians who do not accept End Times dispensationalism, to Genesis 12:3, God’s promise to Abraham:
I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
Unlike the covenant with Moses, this covenant was not replaced by the New Testament covenant, and so it continues in force. Old and New Testament prophecies from Deuteronomy onwards predict that that Israel would be scattered, but that during the latter days they would be gathered together to take part in the tribulation. Israel’s survival is a miracle, surrounded as it is by enemies, with little support from Western nations. Writing in 2014, a year in which Israel received $ 3.1 billion in general military aid from the US, and a further billion in anti-missile defense, the authors complain of deteriorating relations between Israel and the US, and say that this was prophesied by Zechariah.
Similar arguments had been put forward 45 years earlier, by Harold Lindsey, in The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold over 28 million copies. Lindsey was opposed to the formation of the European Union, and in his later writings to the United Nations, as steps towards a World Government to be headed by the Antichrist, and his views had considerable influence within the Reagan Administration. Importantly in today’s context, he opposed any two-state solution after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, since Israel was entitled to all of the land of Canaan. He anticipated LaHaye’s view that the War of Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38) refers to in imminent attack of Israel by a coalition read by Russia, and the same interpretation is still being graphically promoted by churches such as the Dispensationalist Heritage Church, which maps biblical names onto modern political entities with graphic precision.
Tom DeLay, Republican Representative and powerbroker from 1995 for a decade, until finance scandal ended his career, is a biblical literalist creationist, who read into the Congressional record a letter saying that the Columbine shootings happened “because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.” He was a strong supporter of the most extreme Israeli territorial claims, and in 2005 successfully blocked US aid to the Palestinian Authority. In this way he sabotaged the first step towards a two-state solution, despite it being at that time favored by the Bush administration, as well as American Jewish organizations, and the then Israeli government under Ariel Sharon, who had come to see implications of long-term occupation as unacceptable.
If biblical territorial claims are taken as a starting point, a two-state solution is contrary to God’s will, which is why the pioneering televangelist Pat Robertson regarded the stroke that put an end to Sharon’s career as a divine judgement for his 2005 decision to dismantle Israeli settlements in Gaza.
Jerry Falwell, creator of the Moral Majority and founder of Liberty University, was a dispensationalist and strong supporter of Israel. He was honored by the Israeli government in 1980 for his contributions to their cause, and in 1981 said that one reason why God had raised up America was for the protection of His people, the Jews.
James Dobson, who became prominent in the 1970s for very biblically advocating spanking, has had a major influence on evangelical Christianity through his networks, which attract more than 220 million listeners worldwide daily. He was a member of Trump’s 2016 Faith Advisory Board, and his Family Institute celebrated the first hundred days of Trump 2025, praising his policy towards Israel, on the grounds that “The Jews are God’s chosen people, and Israel is a covenant land given to the Jews by Jehovah as an everlasting possession.” Hence approval of Trump’s Middle East policies in general and Huckabee’s appointment in particular.
After the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Trump rewarded his evangelical supporters by appointing Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is on record as saying that there is no such thing as a West Bank, since the territories concerned, which he refers to as Judea and Samaria, were promised to Israel by God. Recently, he distinguished himself by visiting a farm in Israel devoted to breeding red heifers, for sacrifice on the altar of a future rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem.
Paula White’s National Faith Advisory Board lists “Support strong U.S.- Israeli Relations,” as part of promoting a strong America, among its Pillars.
The megachurch pastor John Hagee preaches of knowing God’s love for Israel, which he first visited in 1978. In 2016 he revived the organization, Christians United for Israel, which now claims more than 10 million members. A search for “End Times” on his website brought up a message (now deleted, though I have a screenshot) saying among other things
There is no time to waste! October 7 [2023; the date of Hamas’ incursion into Israel] was the end of the world as we knew it
while a link still active at the time of writing promotes Hagee’s book The End of the Age; the Countdown has Begun.
The disastrous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which I have discussed elsewhere, is headed by the evangelical Johnnie Moore, whose qualification appears to be a PhD in public policy from Liberty University. Moore was co-chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 evangelical advisory board, and among those who successfully advocated moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. From 2018 until 2021, he was a Trump-nominated commissioner on the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom. He is a frequent visitor to Israel, for which he describes himself as zealous advocate.
The America First Policy Institute, founded in 2021 to promote the Trump agenda, and with strong links to the 2025 Trump administration, argues on biblical grounds that the US should always stand with Israel.
Among leading dispensationalist leaders, Robert Jeffress, whose sermons are broadcast to over 900 radio stations in the US, was also part of Trump’s 2016 Faith Advisory Board. He strongly welcomed Trump’s moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and said that Trump is “on the right side of history” and “the right side of God,” while both the charismatic Lance Wallnau and the dispensationalist Mike Evans compared the move to that of the Persian king Cyrus, praised by Isaiah for allowing the Jews to return from Babylon to Jerusalem. (This, and much more on the connections between evangelicals and Trump, is spelt out in John Fea’s Believe Me, Eerdmans, 2018). David Jeremiah, who was also part of the 2016 Faith Advisory Board, had in 1981 succeeded Tim LaHaye as the senior pastor at Scott Memorial Baptist Church (now Shadow Mountain Community Church). He has, like LaHaye, written a novel based on dispensationalist predictions, as well as a book alerting us to 31 undeniable signs of the apocalypse, and runs Turning Point broadcast ministry. Following dispensationalist predictions closely. he spells out in detail the argument that God’s promise to Abraham includes far greater territory than that of Israel today, or even Israel plus the West Bank.
If friends of Israel wholeheartedly welcome such support, they need to pay closer attention.2Others have also pointed this out; see e.g. here and here. For what happens next in this scenario is that while peace will be achieved between Israel and its neighbors, this will be temporary, Israel will be attacked again as never before, and peace will only come with Christ’s return and judgement. This has been part of dispensationalist doctrine ever since the 1880s. And we should never forget that this judgement includes condemnation of all those Jews who persist in rejecting Christ, an echo of Christian anti-Semitism since mediaeval times.
Such anti-Semitism is never far beneath the surface of Christian extremism. In the 1930s, as detailed by the historian Carl Weinberg, the American Religious Right was strongly anti-Semitic. William Bell Riley, in some ways a forerunner of today’s politicized Christianity, openly sympathized with Hitler, and he and others believed in the existence of a satanic Jewish Communist conspiracy that aimed to undermine Christian morality, with the ultimate goal of crowning the Antichrist King of the whole world.
Pat Robertson’s 1991 The New World Order, a New York Times bestseller, also combined an anti-Semitic subtext with apocalyptic prediction, echoing the 1930s conspiracy theories about the secret operations of international bankers.
James Hagee has made some very strange remarks about Jews in the past. He has said that Scripture suggests that the Antichrist “is at least going to be partially Jewish, as was Adolf Hitler, as was Karl Marx,” and that Hitler was sent by God for the purpose of driving the Jews back to Israel.
In his 1980 book Listen, America!, Jerry Falwell called the Jewish people “spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior,” and in 1999 said that he was convinced that the Antichrist would be Jewish. He also said, in 1979, to an I Love America audience,
I know a few of you here today don’t like Jews, and I know why. He can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose.
Tim LaHaye described the creation of Israel as the “fuse of Armageddon,” but the Jews themselves would be
destroyed by the anti-Christ in the time of the seven years of tribulation; a potential dictator waiting in the wings somewhere in Europe who will make Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin look like choirboys.
And, in Target Israel:
Eventually, Israel will sign a covenant with the Antichrist, and that will initiate the seven-year Tribulation.
“Eventually,” what does that mean exactly, what, in the eyes of these evangelical leaders and their successors, will constitute “a covenant with the Antichrist,” and at what point will they decide that Israel must decide to follow Christ, or face the consequences? Friends of Israel need to ask themselves, among many other things, whether it is wise to court allies with such ambivalent attitudes, who cheerfully consign Israel to a future of extreme violence, and whose ultimate objectives differ so completely from their own.
As for the substantial issue of how we can move forward from where we now are, that is beyond the scope of this essay.
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Footnotes
- 1Disclosure; Médecins Sans Frontières is one of the causes to which I donate
- 2