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THE RADICAL PAST AND FUTURE OF CHRISTIAN ZIONISM  
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Sarah Jones
July 1, 2025
New York Magazine

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_ Christian Zionism is again salient as Donald Trump surrounds
himself with Evangelicals who profess the ideology and he pays lip
service to it, as he does to other popular Evangelical convictions.
Many Christian Zionists believe end-times are nigh. _

"Ted Cruz - Caricature", by DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

Days before the Trump administration bombed three nuclear sites in
Iran, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tried to defend his unblinking support
of Israel by telling
[[link removed]] Tucker Carlson
that the Bible gives him no other choice and that Zionism is part of
his Christian faith, though he could not recall the precise verse that
bolsters his arguments.

Christian Zionism is not a new phenomenon, and it can’t take all the
credit for the United States’s bloody foreign policy. But it is once
again salient as Donald Trump surrounds himself with Evangelicals who
profess the ideology and he pays lip service to it, as he does to
other popular Evangelical convictions. Many Christian Zionists are
influenced by dispensationalism, a relatively new doctrine that
bestows the fate of Israel with prophetic significance. The end-times
are nigh, and Israel has a key role to play in Armageddon — these
are ideas popularized by the _Left Behind_ series, which sold
millions of copies at the beginning of this century. Followers such as
Cruz vote, run for office, and shape foreign policy, and often they
make excuses for Israel’s war crimes.

I spoke with scholar Daniel G. Hummel of the Lumen Center in Madison,
Wisconsin, about his 2019 book, _Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals,
Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations_, and the history of Christian
Zionism in the U.S. and the rest of the world. In _Covenant
Brothers_, Hummel traces the movement from its origins and early
popularity in the 19th century to the rise of the contemporary
Christian right and beyond.

_This interview has been edited for length and clarity._

LET’S START WITH THE IDEA OF DISPENSATIONALISM, WHICH IS KEY TO THE
RISE OF CHRISTIAN ZIONISM. WHAT IS IT, AND HOW DOES SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL
FACTOR INTO IT?
Dispensationalism is a system of theology that’s quite popular among
conservative Protestants — Evangelicals and what we call
Fundamentalists. It started in the early 19th century on the fringes
of dissenter Protestantism in Great Britain. When John Nelson Darby
broke from the Church of England and founded the Plymouth Brethren
sect, he developed a way of reading the Bible that led to a distinct
set of teachings about who Israel is, who the Church is, and, for the
sake of simplicity, what the future holds based on the Bible.

Dispensationalists starting with Darby believe God has had basically
two chosen peoples throughout history: One of those is Israel, and one
is the Church. The payoff is that any prophecies relating to Israel in
the Old Testament prophets or wherever Israel is mentioned in
Revelation or elsewhere, are, for dispensationalists, always
referencing the ethnic Israel, what we call the Jewish people today.

The Church is to gather all Gentiles to God to follow him. Then, at
some point soon, God will hit “unpause” on his plans with Israel.
The thing that will launch that is the Rapture, which will take away
the Church from the world. It will go up into Heaven and then God will
resume his plans with Israel through the prophecies.

DISPENSATIONALISM, AT LEAST AS I LEARNED ABOUT IT, ALSO HOLDS THAT THE
END-TIMES EVENTS WILL HAPPEN IN A SPECIFIC ORDER. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT
THAT A BIT?
On paper, dispensationalists say nothing needs to happen in the world
right now before the Rapture happens. It’s an imminent event. In
practice, it’s very common in dispensational circles to try to glean
where the world is going because of the assumption that the Bible
really does lay out in pretty specific detail what will happen at the
end-times. For at least a hundred years, there has been a strong
tradition in dispensationalism of speculating about global events,
world wars, the Cold War, or conflicts in the Middle East but also
elsewhere. The European Union was a source of speculation because it
seemed to align with the beast with ten horns in Revelation.

They’re not saying that this has to happen before the end comes but
that these are the types of things we would expect to happen as the
world ramps up to its climactic phase as prophesied. Some
dispensations have veered into date setting, though that is considered
a no-no. The one people make a lot of fun of is a famous book
called _88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988_. But in the main,
date setting is looked at as not the right way to go. Partly, it leads
to a credibility crisis in the movement, but also, in theory, this
should be something only God knows the timing of. Of course, the more
popular side of dispensationalism makes a ton of money and gets a lot
of attention for_ Left Behind_ in the 1990s and 2000s
and _The_ _Late Great Planet Earth_ in the 1970s.

I’M GLAD YOU BROUGHT UP _LEFT BEHIND_. THERE IS WHAT I THINK OF AS
POP-CULTURE DISPENSATIONALISM, AND I THINK THAT’S WHAT MOST PEOPLE
ARE FAMILIAR WITH: _LEFT BEHIND_, OR _A THIEF IN THE NIGHT_
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THEY’RE EASY TO MAKE FUN OF. BUT CHRISTIAN ZIONISTS CAN ALSO BE
SAVVY POLITICAL ACTORS. HOW ARE THEY BUILDING POWER IN THE U.S.,
ISRAEL, AND ELSEWHERE?
Many pro-Israel Evangelicals talk about Israel in ways that aren’t
entirely theological. They’re more cultural or geopolitical. They
love talking about Israel as a democracy, Israel as a beacon of
western values, Judeo-Christian values. So all those things are
working together, and particularly in the past 20 years, there has
been a very deliberate, you could say sophisticated, effort by
Evangelical activists, including some pastors, to forge a political
relationship around these ideas — one that is very narrowly focused
on generating U.S. support for Israel or domestic support in the U.S.
for pro-Israel policies. That has been the change.

THERE’S NO HARD-AND-FAST LINE FOR THIS, OBVIOUSLY, BUT IN THE
’80S, WE SAW THE FORMATION OF WHAT WE THINK OF TODAY AS THE
CHRISTIAN RIGHT AROUND A BACKLASH TO ABORTION RIGHTS AND THE PERCEIVED
LIBERALIZATION OF SOCIETY OVERALL. HOW DOES CHRISTIAN ZIONISM BECOME
PART OF THAT CHRISTIAN-RIGHT MILIEU IN THAT PERIOD?
We have to credit certain people like Jerry Falwell, the leader of the
Moral Majority, and Tim LaHaye, who ended up being a co-author of
the _Left Behind_ novels. In the ’70s and ’80s, they helped
create things like the Religious Roundtable, really important
political organizations. One thing they did was to merge this ongoing
dispensationalist way of talking about Israel and the Church with
their critique of American society. The big battle for them was that
there’s this Christian worldview and then there’s a secular
worldview, and the Christian worldview needs to come out on top. They
conscripted Israel as part of this Judeo-Christian tradition. Israel
became the dominant representative of the Jewish part of the
Judeo-Christian world.

This was helped along by the first election victory of the Israeli
right in 1977 with Menachem Begin, who was a much more religiously
observant Jew than the previous prime ministers had been, and he
played that up. He would quote from the Bible a lot; he would talk
about the shared conservative values of Christians and Jews. So the
relationship between people like Falwell and Begin was a key part of
making it seem this was a natural fit between the Likud Party and the
Republican Party. There were also important events, such as the
Lebanon War. Israel committed a number of massacres of Lebanese
citizens, and the Christian right, particularly Falwell, played
interference in the U.S. media, defending Israel’s actions or
dismissing some of the reports about what Israel was doing as
inaccurate. This was a key moment certainly for the Israeli
government’s understanding of what it had in its alliance with
Evangelicals.

MOVING FORWARD, LET’S TALK ABOUT 9/11. I WAS QUITE YOUNG THEN, BUT I
DO REMEMBER THINKING THE END-TIMES WERE FINALLY UPON US; THAT WASN’T
AN UNUSUAL REACTION FOR THE SPHERE I WAS IN. CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE
SIGNIFICANCE OF 9/11 TO CHRISTIAN ZIONISTS AND THE POSSIBILITY THAT IT
KICKED OFF A NEW POLITICAL ERA FOR THE MOVEMENT?
One way to frame that is there was a sort of interregnum period in the
’90s, like in much of American culture after the end of the Cold
War. But for so much of the Cold War, the end-times were tied to the
Soviet Union, then the Soviet Union collapsed and the end-times did
not come. So there is this decade when there’s a recalibration and a
pretty strong turn to seeing the Islamic world as perhaps what
biblical prophecy is talking about.

9/11 also seemed to signal that we were in a clash-of-civilizations
scenario where there were clear lines between a Judeo-Christian world
and a Muslim world, and that got up the antennae of everyone in the
dispensational movement trying to rethink some of the prophecies and
how this would fit into them. That was definitely a major moment for
putting forward the sense that what happened on September 11, and then
what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, had prophetic significance.
Frankly, almost every time there’s a war in the Middle East, we go
through a cycle like this. A book published in 1974
called _Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis,_ by John
Walvoord, gives one way to think about it. It got rushed to print in
that year because it attempted to explain the 1973 Arab-Israeli War in
prophetic context, and it sold a ton of copies. It got rereleased in
1991 because Walvoord updated it and then he died in 2000 or so. But
it was rereleased again in 2003 as a way to explain what had happened
in 2001 and what was imminently happening in Iraq at the time. I mean,
it had sold millions and millions of copies by this point. Iran was
emerging then too, with a nuclear program that was becoming a major
point of conversation. So Christians United for Israel was founded in
2006 in part as a response to the post-9/11 moment and a sense that
Iran and Islamic terrorism were the most threatening things not only
to Israel but to the U.S. at that time.

I WANT TO TALK ABOUT PENTECOSTALISM AND CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY FOR A
MOMENT. HOW DO THESE SECTS APPROACH THE SUBJECTS OF BIBLICAL PROPHECY
AND ISRAEL, AND HOW HAS THEIR INFLUENCE GROWN OVER TIME?
Much of the Pentecostal world is influenced by dispensational
theology, so one way Pentecostals can enter into being pro-Israel is
just by inheriting and internalizing that theology. Another way,
though, which is really indebted to distinctly Pentecostal theology,
is the very strong emphasis today on God blessing those who bless
Israel. This is Genesis 12:3, in which God says to Abraham, “I’ll
bless those who bless you. And whoever curses you, I will curse.” If
you’re in a dispensationalist tradition, you see that verse as
referencing Abraham’s family and being in continuity with modern-day
Israel. That verse becomes essentially a command or an explanation of
how God blesses people.

This came up recently with Ted Cruz’s comments on Tucker Carlson’s
show when he said he had grown up in a tradition that commanded him to
bless Israel, to support Israel. And when Carlson asked him, “Where
is that in the Bible?” Cruz couldn’t remember. While a lot of
people make fun of Cruz for not being able to cite where he gets his
political theology, I took it more as a sign of how pervasive this is
in Pentecostal and charismatic circles, that it’s so common you
don’t even really need a verse to justify it. It’s just sort of
the way we think about the world.

This is very popular among Pentecostal Christians in the U.S. Many of
the people on Trump’s spiritual-advisory council come from the
Pentecostal and charismatic traditions. This would be an obvious way
for them to talk about how God works in the world and what God cares
about in relation to Israel. It’s also quite popular in other parts
of the globe: The Global South has a massive Pentecostal population;
it’s probably half a billion or more at this point. Not all of them
are Christian Zionists, but many are sympathetic to this way of
talking about Israel. There are many, many more Christian Zionists
outside the U.S. than are often in the U.S.

YOU WRITE ABOUT BENJAMIN NETANYAHU IN YOUR BOOK. CAN YOU SHED SOME
LIGHT ON THE RELATIONSHIPS HE HAS BUILT WITH CHRISTIAN ZIONISTS?
He has had a history with American Evangelicals going all the way back
to the 1970s but especially when he started serving in different
capacities with the Israeli government in the ’80s. He has been a
very key connection between American Christianity and the Israeli
government. Part of why he’s good at that is he spent a good amount
of his childhood in the U.S., so he has familiarity with American
culture that other Israeli politicians don’t have.

He also comes out of the same tradition as Begin — he talks a lot
about God; he talks a lot about western values. He will talk in an
Evangelical way when it suits him, and that’s something other
Israeli politicians just haven’t done over the years. In his
capacity as prime minister, he has been very diligent about courting
deep relationships with particular strategic Christian leaders in the
U.S., even when the crisis isn’t at a boiling point. He has deep
relationships going back decades with people like the televangelist
John Hagee and with people like Robert Jeffress, the pastor in Dallas
who came to prominence in recent years because of his support for
Trump but had been going to Israel for decades before that, partly at
the Israeli government’s invitation.

THERE IS A CHRISTIAN TRADITION IN PALESTINE THAT IS EXTRAORDINARILY
OLD, THOUGH I NEVER HEARD ANYTHING ABOUT IT WHILE I WAS AN EVANGELICAL
MYSELF. WHAT SORT OF RELATIONSHIP, IF ANY, DO CHRISTIAN ZIONISTS HAVE
WITH PALESTINIAN CHRISTIANS?
The short answer is there’s not much of a direct relationship. There
are a lot of reasons for that. Some have to do with the support of
Israel, some with Christian or Evangelical theology. Some have to do
with American biases and blind spots that many people share, not just
Evangelicals.

Many American Evangelicals side with the Israeli narrative on a couple
of key things, like whose land is Israel. Evangelicals believe God
covenanted this land with the Jewish people, so it is their land. To
them, Palestinian Christians have maybe lived on the land for a long
time, but it’s not theirs in some divine sense. Just on that basis
alone, they’re not seeing eye to eye with Palestinian Christians who
reject that theology and that idea.

Then there’s just a practical distance between Evangelical
Christians and Palestinian Christians. There’s a language barrier.
Many Evangelicals go on tours to Israel in any given year, but most
never go to an occupied territory outside of very specific areas like
Bethlehem for religious reasons. Most Evangelicals who have visited
Israel have not actually met a Palestinian, whereas they have met many
Jewish Israelis on such a tour. And even if they do meet Arabs, they
might meet an Arab Israeli in a place like Nazareth. That’s a
different experience than meeting a Palestinian Christian in the
occupied territories.

YOU WRITE ABOUT BRAZIL AND THE ELECTION OF JAIR BOLSONARO IN YOUR
BOOK, AND THOUGH I WOULD NOT SAY CHRISTIAN ZIONISM IS THE GLUE HOLDING
THE GLOBAL FAR RIGHT TOGETHER, I DO WONDER HOW IMPORTANT THE IDEOLOGY
IS TO THIS MOMENT?
There are things Christian Zionists package with Christian Zionism
that are ideologically not necessary. That’s where you get broader
interpretations of western civilization being in decline, and
immigrants from non-western countries being a major threat, and Islam
being largely a religion of violence antithetical to western values.
There you can see it is part of the binding glue because that’s what
unites how the right in Britain views the world, how the right in
Israel views the world, and how the right in the U.S. views the world.

In most of these circles, Israel is seen as the tip of the spear in a
civilizational conflict. Some of that is conflict with the Muslim
world, and some is just the effectiveness of the Israeli military and
intelligence apparatus. It’s seen as the envy of a lot of western
countries, or at least as one of the best. There’s also a sense
that, in its settlement activity, Israel is doing what western nations
have done for a long time, which is to claim land when they think
it’s rightly theirs. You see conversations about the birth rate,
which is higher in Israel than in other western countries, so
there’s a pronatalist argument.

But Christian Zionism may not be the thing actually driving that
ideology. I’ll just say that among some of the people who agree with
colonialism and pronatalism, there is a growing antisemitism as well.
So it gets really confusing.

_Sarah Jones [[link removed]] is a senior
writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and has written for New
York since 2018. She was previously a staff writer for The New
Republic and is the author of Disposable: America's Contempt for the
Underclass, forthcoming from Avid Reader Press._

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