How evangelicals set in motion today's violence in the Middle East
What drives unceasing U.S. support for Israel, especially in the shadow of Gaza?
Among the American electorate, after all, Israel is decreasingly popular. A recent Economist poll reveals that fully half of President Biden’s 2020 voters now believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. U.S. support of Israel is often cast in Jewish terms — an outgrowth of American Jews’ concern and lobbying, and sustained by those who sympathize with Jews. But America’s tiny proportion of Jews has never been the force behind America’s policy.
Israel is — and always was — an evangelical state as much as a Jewish one.
I am not just talking about today’s right-wing evangelical pastors cheering Israel’s policies. In fact, 19th century English evangelicals constituted the first modern movement to establish a Jewish polity in Palestine, and the idea saturated English Protestantism well before it caught on with Jews.
English parliamentarian, social reformer and devout Christian Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885), dedicated much of his life to advocating the settlement of Europe’s Jews in Palestine. While he became known as a philosemite, Shaftesbury actually hoped Jews would leave Europe, accept Jesus and, in time, cease to exist. Representing “true” Christianity, he also saw England as Palestine’s natural inheritor.
Shaftesbury’s brand of evangelical Christianity profoundly influenced British culture, as well as its “Eastern” policy. His friend Lord Palmerston, who served as foreign minister and later prime minister, appointed a British consul in Jerusalem in 1838, and regularly called upon Britain’s ambassador in Constantinople to urge the Ottomans to offer protections to Palestine’s Jews. When Christ Church was erected in Jerusalem in 1849, it was to serve as the new seat of the British consul, William Tanner Young, who was forbidden to evangelize but still hoped to “restore” Jews to Palestine. The church led pilgrimages, archeological digs and map-making expeditions, casting Palestine as first and foremost “the Land of the Bible.”
Evangelicals’ vision of Jewish return contrasted with traditional Jewish thought. Certainly, Jews longed for redemption and a return to Palestine. Many Jews already lived there. But religious Jews believed that galut, or “exile,” was divinely ordained and different from the Jewish diaspora. Living in Palestine was meritorious, but an organized, mass political movement to establish a secular “Jewish” state was, for many, against God’s will.
Anglicans, however, were not troubled by traditional Jewish thought. The English expanded their influence in Palestine until World War I, when they occupied the country, ignoring the population's wish for independence.
Now controlling Palestine, the British Empire supported the new, struggling Zionist settlement movement through policies that divided the population by religion and favored Jewish institutions. During the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, British favoritism went so far as to enlist Zionist militias to help suppress Palestinian resistance. Echoing Shaftesbury and decades of Protestant thought, Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour famously described Britain’s mission of establishing “a Jewish national home in Palestine” as of “far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs that now inhabit that ancient land.”
British patronage boosted Zionism’s prospects considerably, and after World War I, many Jews joined the movement. Ongoing Russian pogroms, new, anti-Jewish immigration laws in the U.S., and eventually Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 convinced many Jews of the need for a Jewish national home.
While American Jews remained proportionately tiny in the U.S. population, Zionists successfully translated both Zionism and Judaism itself into an American, Christian idiom. Books, murals and even exhibits at World Fairs linked Jews and Palestine to Biblical stories shared with Christians. But specifically Jewish laws and customs rooted in the post-Biblical Rabbinic tradition were de-emphasized. By Israel’s founding in 1948, many American Christians, like their British predecessors, saw Zionism through a prophetic lens.
After the 1967 occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank, the Israeli government turned to those Americans they saw as the most reliable supporters of Israel’s expansionism. While American Jews leaned Democratic and had shrunk to under 3 percent of the population, self-identified “born-again Christians” had grown from 24 percent in 1963 to nearly 40 percent in 1978. Israel began hosting massive conferences for evangelicals.
This history helps explain why, in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, organizers of the “March for Israel” in Washington did not deny Pastor John Hagee an opportunity to speak. Sure, organizers had to overlook Hagee’s earlier comments describing Adolf Hitler as “a half-breed Jew” sent by God to drive Jews to Israel, “the only home God ever intended for the Jews.” But Hagee represents America’s largest pro-Israel constituency, and as such inevitably shapes U.S. policy.
Currently, many of the 63 percent of Americans who identify as Christians — not just Republican-voting evangelicals — see Jews’ so-called “return” to Israel as having prohetic resonances. To echo Arthur Balfour, this is of “far profounder (electoral) import” than the feelings of the 2.4 percent of Americans who are Jewish.
We must not forget that while Jews, Muslims and Christians lived in Palestine for centuries, the current conflict originated only when powerful English evangelicals acted on their belief that — in the words of Pat Boone, the evangelical Christian Zionist composer of the 1960 theme song of the movie Exodus — “this land is mine.”
Joshua Schreier, MA, Ph.D., is professor of history at Vassar College, with a focus at the intersection of Middle Eastern, Algerian, Jewish and French histories.