Who’s Afraid of Christian Zionism?

Well, the short answer is: a lot of people, especially on the right. The next question is: Are they correct to be afraid?

It depends, of course, on what you mean by the term, which can be taken to mean too much or too little. The word “socialism” has been claimed by everyone from Lenin to Hitler to printmaker William Morris. (The late historian John Lukacs liked to infuriate people by referring to Sweden’s welfare state as “national socialism.”) Likewise, “Christian Zionism” requires a definition, and once defined, deserves some calm reflection.

The most alarming meaning which “Christian Zionism” can carry is the one that Tucker Carlson likely had in mind when he vented his contempt in an interview for which he has since (sort of) apologized: A theological position which claims that the establishment of Israel in 1948 by irreligious socialists with weapons from the Eastern Bloc is the fulfillment of Old Testament promises to the Jewish people, which remain in force forever. Further, Israel’s refounding is a sign that the end times are coming, and after a series of horrifying events predicted in the Book of Revelation, we’ll enjoy a peaceful millennium, or the Second Coming, and all our troubles will be over. As part of this culmination, a large part of the Jewish people will be destroyed by their pagan neighbors, but the remnant will turn to Jesus, fulfilling St. Paul’s long-ago prediction.

The most zealous, and eccentric, adherents of this “dispensationalist” view have been known to breed red heifers in Palestine, Texas, in the hope that they might be sacrificed in a Third Temple, rebuilt in Jerusalem on the current site of Al-Aqsa Mosque. Demolishing that Muslim holy site would surely trigger an apocalyptic turn of events, as Israel’s Muslim neighbors would be motivated to take revenge. So this form of Christian Zionism seems an awful lot like trying to force God’s hand. That is something He doesn’t appreciate, as even a cursory reading of the Bible might show. (Recall that Jesus refused to throw Himself off the temple mount, at Lucifer’s puckish suggestion. I doubt he wants us to throw His people off that mount into a potentially genocidal war.)

Insofar as that is what constitutes Christian Zionism, yeah—it deserves much of the scorn that anti-dispensationalists vent at it. Given the body counts among Israelis that such a strategy would yield, it also seems like a strange way to practice philo-Semitism. “Go sell Crazy someplace else—we’re all stocked up here,” as Jack Nicholson’s character told an itinerant evangelist in As Good As It Gets.

Leave aside the theological and moral objections one might raise about this position, and apply some constitutional scrutiny: In what world should citizens of a nation with no established church press for its foreign and military policy to be dictated by highly debatable interpretations of Scripture?

Happily, there aren’t many full-throated supporters of what I’ll call here “Red Heifer Zionism,” so perhaps we needn’t spend any more time on their position.

“Christian Zionism” can be defined in a much, much narrower fashion, however, as “the belief on the part of a Christian that Israel has a right to exist in the same way that Armenia and Ireland do, and for exactly the same reasons.”

If you don’t accept the theology that asserts Jews are still owed every acre of land God granted them under King David (much of it now part of other sovereign countries), you can also reject the idea that Jews are specially cursed, unworthy of having a homeland at all. That’s a position with strong support among the Church Fathers, (though they also took many stances we need not accept today).

The left has reinvented this ancient tenet of anti-Judaism, roping in Israelis as just another group of “white people” who deserve to be dispossessed of their homeland, much like the English, the Swedes, and European Americans. That’s the practical import of “globalize the intifada.”

In this narrow sense, I am an enthusiastic Christian Zionist. I hope Israelis have carefully studied the aftermath of “democratic transition to a multiracial society” in countries such as South Africa and Rhodesia and have taken in the sobering lessons. The hunted white farmers driven off their land in both failing, now-immiserated countries are now looking for refuge, as Jews expelled from various European nations once did.

The practical reasons for supporting a strong, secure Israel get more compelling every day, as Muslim colonists pack the streets of London, Munich, Paris, and Minneapolis. To put things bluntly: Israel is a bug-zapper for jihadis, and if (God forbid) it disappeared, Islamic supremacists wouldn’t miss a beat. With “Palestine” safely back in the Dar-al-Islam, they’d turn their attention to reclaiming every other scrap of land which Muslims ever governed—from Spain to Greece to Hungary.

But there’s a version of Christian Zionism that’s much broader, and in some ways more interesting than either Red Heifer Zionism or the moderate nationalism of the kind preached by Yoram Hazony. Samuel Goldman unpacked the term in a fascinating essay at Compact, doubtless drawn from his scholarly book on Christian Zionism. It’s worth reading Goldman’s piece in full, but I’ll quote a few key passages:

The story begins in 16th-century Europe. Stimulated by the renewed emphasis on the authority of Scripture—including the so-called Old Testament—Protestant scholars began to reassess references to “Israel” in the Biblical text. Were these, as Catholic theology suggested, prefigurations of the church that were fulfilled by the appearance of Jesus? Or did they refer to the people and land of Israel, who had a future as well as a past in God’s plan?

Preceding the Scofield Reference Bible by more than 300 years, the so-called Geneva Bible of 1560 included marginal notes that affirmed the latter interpretation. The explanations of the prophets are particularly striking. A note on Isaiah speaks of a time when Israel “shuld buylde again the ruines of Jerusalem and Judea.”

These ideas were conveyed to the new world by the Puritans, who brought “our Geneva” with them as the favored translation. In addition to drawing on the narrative of the Biblical Israel to explain their own “errand into the wilderness,” some Puritan leaders looked forward to the re-gathering of the Jews in what was then Ottoman Palestine and the establishment of some kind of state there.

Goldman notes that Founding Father John Adams “wrote to the Jewish American politician Mordecai Manuel Noah that ‘I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.’” Recall that American colonists had overwhelmingly sympathized with the Puritans in the English Civil War—which culminated in the victory of Oliver Cromwell, who invited Jews, who had been expelled from England in the Middle Ages, to return.

There are depths here worth exploring. When I see American Protestants visit Israel and pray at the Wailing Wall—instead of the Holy Sepulcher, which Vice President JD Vance rather pointedly visited—I don’t bristle, or suspect them of visceral anti-Catholicism or anti-Orthodoxy. These visits strike me instead as poignant.

The low-church Protestant tradition (i.e., not Anglican or Lutheran) cut itself off dramatically from the rituals, imagery, and religious folkways of medieval Catholicism, seeking to return to the “purity” of a poorly recorded “early Church.” There are no Protestant low-church shrines like Compostela, miraculous wells like Lourdes, or sacred places suitable for pilgrimage except … for Israel, and its Jewish sites. Catholic shrines are clustered with images—often of Mary or other saints—and reek of what Calvin or Wesley would have called “superstition.” The stark, weathered ruins of ancient Jewish places, however, are thoroughly biblical—and offer an ancient heritage to people whose church organizations might be only a few centuries or even decades old.

There is a dark side to Protestant philo-Semitism: many American Christians show a more tender concern for the lives and safety of Israelis than of Middle Eastern Christians. It was right and proper for American Christians to be horrified by the slaughter of Oct. 7, 2023. But how many of them paid attention to the mass persecution of Christians in Iraq after 2003, or the plight of Christians in Syria? All too many on the right expressed support for the “moderate rebels” (John McCain’s lying words, not mine) who were directly linked to al Qaeda, and infamous for persecuting Syria’s ancient Christian community. Those terrorists are now in power in Damascus, and Donald Trump just held a friendly meeting with their leader.

Having worked very happily for 10 years with Texas evangelicals, I’ve overcome my own Catholic ghetto snobbishness and come to appreciate the deep Christian commitments and genuine virtues of these people. And I must say that the low-church Protestant attitude toward the Jewish people strikes me as vastly more wholesome than the medieval disdain which carries over among some traditionalists in Catholic and Orthodox churches—which reeks to me of … ingratitude. I’m reminded of the verbal duel in Parliament between Daniel O’Connell and Benjamin Disraeli. After O’Connell made a nasty remark about Disraeli’s ethnic origins, Disraeli shot back: “‘Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”

The mutual hostility between the Church and the Jews that pervaded most of Christian history has much of the bitterness of an intra-ethnic quarrel. There’s a good reason for that: Not only do Christians owe our monotheism and most of our scriptures to Jews, but the Church itself was largely Jewish not just for the first century, but for hundreds of years after that. Scholar Rodney Stark showed in his authoritative The Rise of Christianity that the single most powerful predictor for the growth of the Church in the Roman Empire was … a Jewish population. In other words, large numbers of Hellenized Jews across the Mediterranean world accepted the Church’s claim to be the continuation of Israel—and much of post-Temple Judaism developed in reaction against that claim.

This family quarrel won’t be resolved in our time, or by merely human means.

 

Source: https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/whos-afraid-of-christian-zionism/