The All-American Origins of Christian Zionism

Although Christian Zionists only began to involve themselves in US politics in a major way in the 1970s, the movement arrived in America with the first settlers. The Puritans and the Scottish Covenanters were Christian Zionists who modeled their escape from the British Isles over the Atlantic on the Israelite exodus from Egypt through the Red Sea. Back at home, many of these colonists had been ridiculed as Judaizers by the crown and the church for emphasizing that God still had a plan for the Jews, a view so heterodox it bordered on heresy.

The universities they founded, Harvard and Yale, required all students to learn Hebrew. Salem, one of their first settlements, was named after the Hebrew word for “peace.” The more radical branches of European Protestantism were skeptical of the Christian doctrine, prevalent among Catholics and mainstream Protestants, that Christians, not Jews, were now God’s chosen people. Instead, radical Protestants such as the Puritans read biblical promises made to the Jews as unfulfilled commitments to modern Jews. These included, crucially, the repatriation of the Jews and reconstruction of a Third Temple.

The emergence of the Jewish Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century was shaped by Christian Zionists who were far greater in number and had been agitating for centuries for the repatriation of the Jews to their biblical homeland. William Blackstone, a highly influential evangelical author who dubbed himself “God’s little errand boy,” headed up a mass petition to then-president Benjamin Harrison for the delivery of Palestine to the Jews.

The Blackstone Memorial petitioning for the transportation of Jews to Palestine was sent in 1891, several years before the Jewish Zionist movement had emerged. In 1956, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the petition, Israel named a forest in the Judean Hills after their Christian Zionist agitator.

William Hechler, an Anglican clergyman, and a patron and door-opener for Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Jewish Zionism, is another important figure in the history of Christian Zionism. Hechler lobbied Herzl to select Palestine as the political objective for the movement over other options in Africa and Asia offered by the British Empire. So implicated were nineteenth-century Christians in the early days of Zionism that many scholars and rabbis have gone as far as to describe Zionism as a Christian phenomenon.

In a recent paper, Gil Hochberg, a professor of Middle East Studies at Colombia, has argued that “the majority of Zionists across the globe are Christians. In fact, it has always been the case. Zionism is a Christian ideology with deep roots in both Catholic and Protestant communities.” Christian eschatology, which conflates the Jews of the Bible with contemporary European Jews and which advocates for their physical restoration to Palestine, dates back to at least early seventeenth century Jacobean England. These Zionist prophecies had the quality of science fiction, but the emergence of the British Empire made these old Christian dreams come true.

Today US Christian Zionists take many forms. Some, such as Ted Cruz, have a transactional view of their relationship to the Holy Land based on crude readings of the Torah: if we support Israel, God will support America. Others assume a “prosperity gospel” theology, which reverses the Gospel’s economy of alms for the poor to gain “treasures in heaven” to alms to Israel for treasures on earth.

The Making of an American Zionist

The most influential current of Christian Zionism in the twentieth century, which is still well financed but slowly fading culturally, is called premillennial dispensationalism, or “rapture theology.” Many believers in the Rapture have served in Trump’s administrations, including Mike Pompeo (CIA director), Mike Pence (vice president) and Paula White-Cain (advisor). A missionary Anglo-Irish clergyman named John Darby is responsible for importing Rapture theology to the United States in the late nineteenth century, and it has thrived among traditionalist Protestants ever since.

A feverish reading of the Bible after a Paul-like fall from his horse led Darby to predict that before the inevitable battles between Christ and the anti-Christ, after which the Son of God would rule for a thousand years, Christians would be “raptured” into the air, safe from the bloody “tribulations” that would befall Jerusalem. Two-thirds of the restored Jews in Israel will be killed for their “spiritual blindness” and a third will be spared having accepted Christ as their Lord.

“Rapture theology” was the driving force of one of the most powerful voting blocs in American history. But before the late 1970s, evangelicals did not vote as a bloc. Southern evangelicals voted like Southerners and Midwesterners voted like Midwesterners. Buoyed by Israel’s annexing of Jerusalem, evangelical churches and publishing houses preached that the 1967 war and the frenetic pace of Cold War events were signs that Christ’s return was imminent. But first biblical Jewish lands would need to be restored as a necessary prelude to the apocalypse.

Hal Lindsey, an little known evangelical missionary within California’s universities, decided to write a book in his early forties. The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, was a runaway hit, selling over twenty-eight million copies. In it, Lindsey imagined Mao Zedong as one of the “Kings of the East,” a biblical ruler that the Book of Revelation prophecies will gather alongside Gog, the “King of the North,” whom Lindsey cast as the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev, in a final battle against Christ, during which they would both invade Israel before the Rapture. Owing to the success of his book, he quickly became a televangelist, joining a booming market with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Jack Van Impe, who beamed out nightly eschatological commentary on the Cold War to tens of millions of Americans.

Jimmy Carter’s election year marked the first time in American political history that the evangelical movement voted together, electing the evangelical Sunday school teacher to office in 1977. That same year, Israel elected the Likud party, which campaigned on a revisionist Zionism that sought to expand the 1967 borders to Eretz Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates. Likud, the party of Netanyahu, quickly made ties with the evangelicals, who turned on Carter due to his unscripted aside in a 1977 speech in which he said he supported a Palestinian “homeland.” Evangelicals in 1979 massed for Reagan, who was truly one of their own.

Reagan was an avid reader of Lindsey and invited the author to put on the event “Prayer Breakfasts for Israel,” which set the cultural tone for his White House. In 1971 he reportedly told a Californian politician:

Everything is falling into place. It can’t be too long now . . . Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people [Jews]. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons. . . . Ezekiel tells us that Gog, the nation that will lead all the other powers of darkness against Israel, will come out of the north. Biblical scholars have been saying for generations that Gog must be Russia. What other powerful nation is to the north of Israel? None.

Mike Evans, a televangelist and personal friend of Netanyahu’s, wrote in 1982 that the Reagan White House had invited him to Washington to “shake for Israel,” but “little did I know that the president of the United States would invite me to challenge fifty-eight generals and admirals with the truth of God in the middle of a White House meeting.”

Polls conducted between 2022 and 2025 mark a sharp decline in support among Americans in general for Israel due to its genocide of the Palestinians. Most Americans now have an unfavorable view of Israel and half of young Republicans hold a negative opinion, an increase of 15 percent since the start of the war.

Something comparable appears to be happening within evangelical circles. In a 2024 book, Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin analyzed polling data collected on evangelicals before the recent war began that showed a significant increase in polarization between young and old evangelicals, with just over one-fifth of participants expressing support for Palestinians over Israel. Three years of videos of dead Palestinians are likely to have accelerated this trend.

The vintage brand of premillennial Zionist US politics has peaked and has been on the wane in the last decade. There are still lots of money and websites such as Rapture Ready, which inform viewers daily about how “the terror goblins in the biblical heartland have ramped-up their efforts even as the IDF works 24/7 to contain them.” However, these groups are becoming increasingly marginal.

Younger members are less keen on planning for the end-times, at least insofar as these plans involve Israel. Online Christian forums are full of lively debate about the plausibility of evangelical theology. “I couldn’t accept that God will once again accept animal sacrifices in a rebuilt earthly temple,” wrote one renegade living just outside of Salem.

Young Christians tend to move to other churches, some Zionist, some not. Others become “exvangelicals,” which seems to be a pipeline into middle-of-the-road liberalism, while some shed their Christian Zionism through engagement with Palestinian Christians who are persecuted in Israel. Daniel Bannoura, a Palestinian theologian at the University of Notre Dame is also involved in intra-evangelical ecumenicism, bringing US evangelicals to an evangelical parish in Beit Sahour, just outside of Bethlehem, pastored by Munther Isaac, author of Christ in the Rubble. Bannoura cautions about predicting the downfall of US Christian Zionism due to the fall in premillennialism. “Transactional and prosperity-gospel evangelical Zionists seem to have made up, at least in part, for the loss of the premillennialists,” he says.

But there is clearly concern in Israel about losing a reliable fifty-year-old US electoral constituency. Israel is now spending hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for religious propaganda among US Christians to stem the tide. “If we had five or six Mike Huckabees, we would not have a hasbara [or diplomatic communication] problem,” Netanyahu said recently. Israel has also employed a firm called Clock Tower X to influence ChatGPT output related to Israel’s military operations in Gaza. In addition, the tech company Oracle, which is owned by Larry Ellison, a personal friend of Netanyahu and a donor to the IDF, is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok.

“There’s been a shift, almost an inversion, post-COVID. I think, really, we’re talking about this decade,” says Stephen De Young, a pastor at the Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Louisiana. “The Democratic Party is more lockstep with Israel than the Republicans.” De Young, who keeps a close eye on American ecclesiastical affairs, traces a forty-year slow takeover of premillenarianism by postmillenarianism or a-millenarianism, neither of which require the restoration or slaughter of the Jews but demand an earthly renewal of America before Christ comes. This shift can be understood, says De Young, as the secularization and reterritorialization of end-times theology whose logical conclusion is Christian nationalism.

“I am no kind of Zionist,” says Douglas Wilson, perhaps the most influential Christian nationalist in America today, who has established something of a theocracy in Moscow, Idaho. “I am a supercessionist — the Church is Israel now . . . all God’s promises to Abraham are found in the root of the olive tree, which is the Christian Church.”

Wilson, a postmillenarian, is spiritually committed to the creation of a patriarchal, nonracial society built on natural hierarchy where power is held diffusely. It feels like a call for America to try and become the late Western Roman Empire, but within its own borders. Social media has, of course, been a boon for a roster of Christian nationalists, such as homespun rural priests like Andrew Isker, who rejects dispensationalism and support for Israel. “I hate Judaism,” tweeted the Christian nationalist internet personality Joel Webbon. “But I love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity.” The ties of this growing Christian movement to the insurgent America First wing of MAGA are as yet unclear, but their interests clearly align.

“Where are you telling people to look in hope?” asks De Young. “The two options within Protestantism are both civilizationalist. You’ve got this secularized dispensationalism of Christian nationalism, which wants to turn the US into an end-times “Christian nation,” or you have the end-times Christian nation in Jerusalem. The only kind of changes that are imaginable are, and not to go all [Mark] Fisher here, the end of the world.”