Antisemitism, Evangelicalism, and the Modern Support of Israel
How the U.S. Administration Has Been the Right Hand of the Evangelical Church
The bane of Christian theology has been so called “end times prophecy” from the evangelical wing. My first introduction with this type of theology was hearing about Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, the first non-fiction book of its kind sold by a non-Christian publisher, in college. It was published in about twenty years before that, in 1970, and sold over 28 million copies by the time I heard about it in 1990. I have a copy of it somewhere in storage because I took it from a church library that I was an assistant pastor of. They were purging their book collection and thought I would spare the public from it getting into circulation and take the book home as a souvenir. Little did I know I would be working on my own translation of the book of Revelation and later taking a class on apocalyptic literature with a scholar on the subject. This was about the time that the fictional Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins was on its rise. This series was a total of a massive sixteen books and sold over 65 million copies in multiple languages. What Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series had in common was to spotlight Israel as the key that unlocks the end-times apocalyptic war between the forces of good and evil. Ridiculing anyone’s belief system is far from what I want to do in this article, rather I seek to highlight why the U.S. government has supported Israel and how this support is actual antisemitic rather than seemingly the other way around.
There are very good articles of how evangelicalism has supported the state of Israel, especially of late, and part of this adherence is not because of the Israeli people themselves, but because how the preservation of Israel could start the end times and one such article is here. What I want to do is take apart some of the theology that came about in the 19th century and show how much of this theology is part of a greater antisemitic project of evangelicals. First, the need to uphold and defend the nation of Israel comes from a belief known as premillennial dispensationalism. “Millennial” refers to the thousand-year reign of peace and pre-millennial refers to Christ’s second coming before this time of peace on earth. However, this coming is also followed by a tribulation in which Christians are spared through the rapture of believers, who are taken up into heaven by God. Historically, there have been several early church theologians who held loosely to premillennial beliefs because they take the thousand years in the book of Revelation to be literal.
Dispensationalism is a way to think about Christian history as divided up into different eras or dispensations. Jesus’s return would take place during what is known as the Kingdom or Zionic age. What is relevant here is that Jesus would take up residence in Jerusalem as his base of operations while he rules the thousand years of peace and prosperity, hence the “Zionic” dispensation. For those not familiar, the term Zion was used in the Hebrew Bible as a name for Jerusalem. Therefore, the modern term Zionism stands for those people who are eager to restore Jerusalem. However, this millennial would be preceded by unprecedented war and tribulation upon the people who remain on the earth after the rapture. Dispensationalism did not come into existence until the 19th century and the Premillennial + Dispensationalism (like a hipster café) was the new apocalyptic system adopted by many evangelicals, especially in the U.S. In this new way of seeing history there are two important points: 1) Jerusalem was needed for Jesus to return and 2) the time of tribulation means bad times for the Jews. This is where the use of the Jewish people comes in; they either convert or die. Let me note that not all evangelicals subscribe to these beliefs, but a large portion do. On the day of my ordination, I was given a Scofield Reference Bible by a congregant I did not know very well. Cyrus Scofield popularized dispensationalism during the 20th century by publishing a bible with commentary interpreted through this lens. This was at a Baptist church, in which half of the congregation was moderate.
Ever since Billy Graham ministry, the evangelical wing of the Christian Church has had the ear of most U.S. Presidents. Even though Graham supported Israel and was offered the ambassadorship there, Graham refused Nixon’s appointment. This relationship between evangelical leaders and presidency continues today because the white evangelicals make up 20-25 percent of the electorate (however, this number is steadily declining). evangelical Pastor, John Hagee, of the Trinity Broadcasting Network fame also founded Christians United for Israel in 2006. This sounds like a nice, friendly name for an organization, but Hagee also claimed that Hitler was a “half-breed Jew” and that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves for rejecting God’s plan to help them in the first place. A long-term belief within Dispensationalist is that Jesus was to be made King of the Jews and lead a rebellion against the Roman Empire. The Jew’s rejection of this plan was their downfall. Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871-1952), the founder of Dallas Theological Seminary has this to say about the rejection of Jesus by the Jews:
"This offer of the kingdom which was extended through Christ, John, and the disciples to the nation Israel was rejected by that nation, notwithstanding the fact that it was in complete fulfillment of every divinely given prediction. It was a bona fide offer and, had they received Him as their King, the nation's hope would have been realized.” (The Kingdom in History and Prophecy)
If the reader recalls, in 2018 Donald Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and this was done by the behest of Christians United for Israel and the evangelical lobby. They want to secure Jerusalem and book Jesus’s seat for his return to rule over the world and bring on another round tribulation onto the Jews, as if the Holocaust was not enough. The dangerous thing is that I am sure, without doubt, that Trump did not know what he was doing. He just went along because this was his base.
We see clouds and want to make out faces because our brains have evolved to try to make sense of chaos.
We see clouds and want to make out faces because our brains have evolved to try to make sense of chaos. Those who have a penchant for trying to predict events of the future are doing just that, giving Christians a historical framework to deal with distress, worry, fear and anxiety. This is why Hal Lindsey’s books did so well during the Cold War and the Left Behind series could be seen in piles of paperbacks in bookstores (remember those?) during the Obama administration with the rise of globalization. Many evangelical Christians were scared and wanted a meaningful way to see the world. “Tipping Point Prophecy Update” is the eighth highest paid newsletter on this website, making over $770,000 a year (please subscribe to my newsletter instead. Thank you!). This of course is fueled by the pandemic, the conflict in the Near East, a Biden Administration, January 6th, and so on. For sure that this is not the first time in history that religious groups looked upon prophecy to try to predict the end time scenario, but this modern remix is dangerous because it uses people as cannon fodder for its end-times fulfillment and makes it seem like support of these same people when it is another form of antisemitism.
This kind of prophecy is what we can call “predictive” prophecy and part of an unverifiable belief system, meaning that it is made up interpretation about things that cannot be proven. First, most of what we call prophesy in the Bible is more like proclamation of doom for those who act unjustly. It is doom and gloom because the prophets are proclaiming what will happen to people if they behave badly to others. This is more akin to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s preaching “truth to power.” But it is the “what will happen” part that these interpreters make into fortune telling prophecy. Second, as with any predictions about the future, the more vague it is, the better for the believer. This is why when evangelical pastors start talking about the details, it starts to fall apart. It is best to keep things unspecified because you can’t disprove it. But this is part of the same list of Q-anon conspiracies. In the same breath, evangelicals could say, “We need to support Israel” and “George Soros is part of the deep state Jewish media and banking industry.” The cognitive dissonance is truly diabolical.
Belief is powerful, but misplaced beliefs will be the fall of evangelical Christianity. There are thousands, if not millions, of young people leaving evangelical denominations and even in 2019 I spoke to many of them on the campus of a Christian university. The reason for the exodus is that they can see through the propaganda, but the bad news is that many adults who are in general not as well educated can’t see this. What they see instead is an affirmation of something they think they should believe in, and that this affirmation is part of a greater divine plan. However, if people can’t examine their beliefs, they will be “tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming” (quoting Ephesians 4:14, to be cheeky). Much of contemporary evangelicalism has become mired with right-wing politics, even though this is not the case of all evangelicals and evangelical churches. Whatever denomination or creed, joining partisan politics with religion is a dangerous act. As we can see, “supporting Israel” does not necessarily mean being allies of the Jewish people, just as being critical of the State of Israel does not mean being against Jewish people. I can be critical of the Vietnamese government and still support Vietnamese people; it’s not a either/or option. As in life, the truth is much more complex than that and people need to see through the fog to know what all the rhetoric is truly about.