The real reason Christian Zionists love Israel

I was telling you about a small community in this country that grew up among religious authoritarians but can no longer live among them, usually after a long period in which members of this small community tried and failed to make life work among religious authoritarians. This small community, of which I am a part, understands – and wants the rest of the country to understand – that the kookiness of religious authoritarians isn’t something to be laughed at. It’s to be feared.

Today, I’m going to tell you about another thing that this small community understands about religious authoritarians. When they talk about Israel, they are not really talking about Israel. They are talking about a character in a story that these religious authoritarians want to tell. In this story, Israel is the centerpiece of the Rapture, when Jesus comes back to collect “the saved.” Also in this story? Some Jews, but by no means all Jews, can decide. They can take God’s side in His great world-razing war against “evil” – or they can remain Jewish.

You don’t hear that from religious authoritarians. Instead, you hear them being strong supporters of the Jewish state and the Jewish people who live in it. That has been especially the case since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Robert Jeffries, one of the religious authoritarians I’m talking about, said recently: “For America to be on the right side of Israel is the same as being on the right side of history, and the right side of God.” John Hagee, another religious authoritarian, said: “There is only one nation whose flag will fly over the ancient walls of the sacred city of Jerusalem. That nation is Israel, now and forever.”

A lot of talk about Israel, but not about Jews. The language, imagery and rhetoric that Jeffries, Hagee and other religious authoritarians draw from is rooted in something called dispensationalism, a big clangy word for the story that these religious authoritarians want to tell about what happens at the end of the world, when Jesus returns.

The story is about how these religious authoritarians are the winners and “sinners,” “heretics” and so on are the losers, but also about how God is merciful. He made special allowances for some Jews, since they were his first chosen people, but not too many, just 144,000, who must decide in the end to convert to Christianity. If they don’t convert, well then. They’ll burn for eternity along with the rest. (There are nearly 7 million Jews in Israel. There are more than 15 million Jews globally.)

The small community I’m talking about, the one that knows something about religious authoritarians that the rest of the country doesn’t know, also knows about this space between “Israel” and “Jew.” It’s because of this space that people who sound like supporters of the Jewish state and the Jewish people who live in it are sometimes not. They are supporters of a character in a story they want to tell about the end of the world in which a fraction of Jews might take God’s side in liquidating all other religions, but only after they renounce theirs.

And it’s because of this space between “Israel” and “Jew” in the language of end times prophecy – or dispensationalism – that religious authoritarians who sound like supporters of the Jewish state and the Jewish people who live it can also sound like titanic antisemites.

John Hagee, for instance, who is the head of a huge “Christian Zionist” organization called Christians United for Israel, has a record of making antisemitic remarks. According to journalist Jonathan Katz, Hagee has said that “Hitler was a ‘half-breed Jew,’ that the Antichrist is also ‘at least going to be partially Jewish’ (and gay), and that Hitler was sent by God for the purpose of driving the Jews to Israel — which, Hagee argues, is ‘the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have.’”

There is a small community of people in this country that knows something about religious authoritarianism. But don’t take their, and my, word for it. Take the word of a scholar of apocalyptic literature. Thomas Lecaque is a historian at Grand View University in Des Moines.

“They love Israel for the possibility of ethnic cleansing at home – remove Jews from Euro-American Christian spaces and send them elsewhere – and also for the apocalyptic implications, which lead to a specific Christian victory and the elimination of all other religions.”

JS: Please explain the place of Israel in apocalyptic thinking?

TL: Israel pops up throughout Revelation and other books in the Christian corpus that are used to discuss the apocalypse, sometimes clearly, sometimes not. 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 talks about the Antichrist taking a seat in the temple. Revelations 11 opens with discussing measuring the temple in the section on the Two Witnesses. But there’s also a belief that the 1948 founding of Israel meets the conditions of Deuteronomy 30:1-5, the so-called Gathering of Israel.

It is both a typological issue — the Old Testament links to the New Testament links to the present — and an apocalyptic one.

JS: It's almost like being a Jewish state is beside the point.

TL: Absolutely. Israel exists in a specific Christian apocalyptic worldview simply to be destroyed. It’s not about Judaism. It’s about Judaism as a Christian stepping stone. Being a Jewish state is important for the purposes of Christian theology, not for Jews.

Collecting all Jewish people into one place serves another, grosser purpose – getting them out of these other countries. I don’t necessarily think that idea is on the forefront of people’s minds when they do Christian Zionism, but the idea that all Jews should move to Israel has a different ring to it when you consider the widespread antisemitism of Christian history and the ongoing use of blood libel mythology across multiple strains of ideology in the United States.

JS: In apocalyptic thinking, Jews can convert. What about Muslims?

TL: Because of when all of these texts get written, there is no mention of Muslims beyond the idea of “false prophets” in the New Testament as a sign of the apocalypse. From the Middle Ages onward, that was a traditional way for Christian thinkers to avoid engaging with Islam — describe it as a heresy instead of a religion, view it as part of the apocalypse (like the Pseudo-Methodius ideas of the Last World Emperor, which I’ve written about elsewhere), things like that.

So I’m sure some churches and pastors have specific ideas about whether Muslims get to convert, but that would be individual readings as opposed to broader ideas coming out of the longer strain of Biblically-focused Christian apocalypticism.

JS: For people who say they love Israel, a lot of them trade in antisemitism. Can you explain this apparent contradiction?

TL: Israel is necessary for them, but that doesn’t cancel out the gross history of Christian antisemitism, the idea that “Jewish leaders killed Jesus of Nazareth,” the blood libel associations, all the rest.

So they love Israel for the possibility of ethnic cleansing at home – remove Jews from Euro-American Christian spaces and send them elsewhere – and also for the apocalyptic implications, which lead to a specific Christian victory and the elimination of all other religions.

They can love Israel while also hating Judaism and its existence and practitioners, because it is a utilitarian trade-off. Again, not all or not necessarily even most Christians who engage in this kind of Christian Zionist apocalyptic thought believe this. That’s because we often don’t follow through on thinking about the logical conclusion of our beliefs.

JS: You said that, as someone who teaches apocalyptic literature, it's hard to maintain hope sometimes. But we must hope, you said. Explain.

TL: I’m a solid millennial – 38 – and my life has been defined by a series of apocalyptic events. Moments where an old world collapses and we watch a new world emerge, sometimes better, sometimes worse, sometimes just new. I exist because of the Cold War – long story – so the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the fall of Warsaw Pact communist governments was an ending.

I learned about the terrorist attacks on 9/11 walking down a hallway of my high school from a friend coming out of the bathrooms. I was going to Tulane in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina happened. I graduated in 2008 as the economy was hitting bottom. Trump and climate change and the pandemic and the next round of wars and everything else — the world I was born into keeps dying and being reborn, and I’m a white cisgender heterosexual man in America, riding all of this out with as much privilege as a middle-class person can.

So many of the dreams I had as a kid seem impossible now, and you build new dreams to replace them, but every domino that falls makes it feel like all of them are going to. Hope is hard as you watch the news and the state of the world, as you worry about your kids and your friends and your family and yourself — how do we endure all of this?

How, in the face of monstrosity, the seeming bottomless pit of despair all around us, do we get back up at the start of the day and fight on?

Hope is the only way.

Hope that what remains good in this world can be saved, and that when this version of our world collapses, this time what we build on its ashes will be better. Fairer, most just, kinder, more inclusive.

Hope is what gets us through the darkness – hope is that tiny thread of light we cling to in the maze of this world, pulling it bit by bit until we come out of the labyrinth back into the sun.

And it is hard, hard not to give in and give up, hard not to look at what is happening around us and decide we’re doomed.

Maybe we are – but humanity is not.

So we hope for better for the generations below us and the generations to come, and that means we keep fighting to give them something better than this mess we have created now.