Of course there are other, not necessarily “Christian,” reasons why evangelicals (like other Americans) support Israel. Shared ethical and moral foundations; the feeling of kinship between two settler democracies with a sense of their own exceptionalism; the impulse to partner against enemies of the democratic West and especially, these days, against radical Islam; the urge to protect against a second Holocaust—one doesn’t need to be evangelical to have these feelings. But evangelicals have them intensely.

At a time when the state of Israel lies under existential threat from jihadist Islam, and under ideological and diplomatic assault in foreign ministries, international organizations, churches, universities, editorial offices, and other circles of advanced Western opinion—and when even some Jews in the Diaspora seem to be growing disenchanted with the Zionist cause—millions of evangelical Christians unabashedly continue their outspoken, wholehearted, stalwart defense of both the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

By all rights, this rather stunning fact—the fact of a vibrant Christian Zionism—should encourage a welcoming response from beleaguered Jewish supporters of Israel. Instead, it has caused palpable discomfort, especially among Jewish liberals. Wary of ulterior religious motives, and viewing evangelicals as overly conservative in their general outlook on the world, such Jews either accept the proffered support with a notable lack of enthusiasm or actively caution their fellow Jews against accepting it at all. To many, the prospect of an alignment with evangelicals, even one based on purely tactical considerations, seems positively distasteful. Very few have attempted to penetrate the evangelical world or to understand it in any substantive way.

This is a pity, for many reasons. It is also a serious strategic error. For the reality is that today’s Christian Zionism cannot be taken for granted. For one thing, not all evangelicals do support Israel. For another, more alarming thing, a growing minority inside the evangelical world views the Jewish state as at best tolerable and at worst positively immoral, a country that, instead of being supported on biblical grounds, should be opposed on those same grounds.

Jewish supporters of Israel who view evangelicals monolithically may judge this latter development to be a matter of little significance. I would argue otherwise. A debate is beginning to take hold within the evangelical world, and the Jewish future will be greatly affected by how it unfolds.

1. GETTING PERSONAL

As a Christian who often finds himself working among Jews, I am accustomed to people being fascinated by my background and interrogating me at length on this or that point of doctrine. But even among my Jewish friends I am constantly struck by the profound lack of understanding of evangelical Christianity and of the factors behind Christian Zionism.

My own odyssey into the Jewish world started nine years ago when, impelled by a convergence of religious and political concerns, I approached the cantor of a local synagogue and asked for help in the finer points of modern Hebrew. Caught completely off guard by this request from a devout Baptist, he said he would have to sleep on it. Whatever he struggled with that night I don’t know, but the next day he readily agreed to take me on; for the next two years, we met twice a week in the synagogue library to pore over Hebrew texts and discuss Jewish language, Jewish faith, and the history of the Jewish people.

Although he never said so explicitly, the cantor’s first instinct was to be suspicious of my motives. He had heard about evangelical Christians who “loved” Israel, but like most Jews he found the subculture puzzling and bizarre. Still, during the many hours we spent together I believe he came to understand me, to appreciate my interest, and to comprehend the sincerity of my faith and my intentions. When our two years ended and I went on for a degree in Jewish studies, he expressed confidence that I would one day prove a “blessing” to the Jewish people.

As was borne in on me in the ensuing years, the cantor’s initial wariness was typical. And it could hardly have been otherwise. The fact that people bearing the name of Christ had spent centuries demonizing the Jewish people and shedding Jewish blood placed the burden squarely on me to justify myself and explain my intentions.

“Can there be a greater stumbling block than Christianity?” Maimonides asks in hisMishneh Torah:

All the [biblical] prophets spoke of the messiah as the redeemer of Israel and their savior who would gather their dispersed and strengthen their observance of the commandments. In contrast, Christianity caused the Jews to be slain by the sword, their remnants to be scattered and humbled, the Torah to be altered, and the majority of the world to err and serve a god other than the Lord.

For centuries, Maimonides’ attitude was shared by Jews wherever they lived in Christendom. Even when not sequestered in ghettos or compelled to wear identifying marks on their clothing, their marginal status in Christian society precluded significant interaction between the two communities. The suggestion of Jewish-Christian cooperation on anything but the most trivial matters of daily existence would have seemed not only absurd but almost unthinkable.

Even today, when so much has happened to alter the terms of this status quo—most dramatically, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948—memories of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and innumerable pogroms and persecutions have not dimmed; nor should they. Today’s religiously observant Jews tend to share Maimonides’ concern that excessive contact with Christianity is a “stumbling block” to traditional Jewish life. For their part, secular Jews are worried about what they see as the encroachments of evangelical Christians, with their irrational and provincial prejudices, into the American public sphere. How can one fraternize or collaborate with such people? Even in furtherance of a noble cause, as a Jewish woman of my acquaintance memorably phrased it, the idea feels “icky.”

My purpose here is not to polemicize in favor of a Jewish-evangelical partnership on every social issue. The two sides disagree on a fair number of things, and neither side should be ashamed of its position. My purpose instead is to inform. What do evangelicals really think about the Jewish people, what are the roots of Christian Zionism—and what is now driving growing numbers of evangelicals to change their minds about the Jewish state.

2. DEFINING A MOVEMENT

Set aside media stereotypes of evangelicals as ignorant backwoodsmen, loud-mouthed bigots, maniacal Jesus-zombies bent on taking over the world, one-dimensional drones who, when they are not worshiping the criminal state of Israel, live to demonstrate outside abortion clinics and block the rights of gay people. The reality, needless to say, is far more complex—so complex, that it defies easy explanation.

Scholars who study the evangelical community quickly discover just how atomized and amorphous it is, dispersed around the globe under the authority of no single denomination, without a single statement of faith shared by all or a pope or patriarch to whom all look for guidance. Many labeled as evangelicals don’t even refer to themselves by that term, at least not in defining their primary religious identity.

Historically, evangelicalism grew out of the Protestant Reformation, which shook the Christian world in the 16th and 17th centuries as groups of European Christians separated themselves from the Roman Catholic Church. Basing themselves on their reading of the biblical text, then newly available in vernacular languages, these Christians denounced Catholicism as a bastardized and corrupt version of the apostolic church portrayed in the New Testament.

Originally, the term “evangelical” (from the Greek word signifying the bringer of good news) served as a label for these non- or anti-Catholic Christians, who set about to create new and “purified” churches. Later, it came to be applied to the movement of religious awakening that swept across Britain and America in the 18th century, a movement that owed its energy to a combination of Puritanism, pietism, and revivalism.

Today, the global evangelical population numbers somewhere around 300 million people scattered across every continent. While most live in developing countries, the United States remains the movement’s traditional center. Yet even here, defining it proves difficult. The Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Illinois offers three distinct contemporary uses of the term. The first denotes the large swath of Christians who subscribe to four key doctrinal points; the second refers to an organic network of movements and religious traditions; the third signifies a coalition of churches and institutions. For its part, the Barna Group, an evangelical polling firm, has identified no fewer than nine criteria to capture the profile of Christians who adhere to the evangelical way of life more than just nominally. Others have their own criteria.

Given the elasticity of the term, it’s no wonder that estimates of the number of evangelicals in the United States vary greatly. In its latest survey, the Gallup organization concludes that those identifying themselves as “born again” or evangelical comprise fully 41 percent of the national population, or roughly 128 million Americans. The Wheaton College estimate is lower—90 to 100 million—while the Barna Group, which excludes mere “cultural evangelicals,” claims that only 20 million or fewer Americans meet the strict nine-point test.

Moving away from this muddle, I would propose a simpler and more normative description that starts from the word “evangelical” itself, with its announcement of “good news”: a concept translated into Old English as godspel and into the English of the King James Version of the Bible as gospel. This one word contains the central thrust of all evangelical belief: namely, the good news of Jesus Christ’s salvific death and resurrection by means of which believers can obtain forgiveness of sins, eternal life, and citizenship in the kingdom of God. Evangelicals are those Christians who believe in the truth of this message as the only hope for the human soul, and who deny that heaven can be reached in any other way.

By this criterion, no one can be born a Christian in evangelical belief: everyone must come to Jesus individually of his own volition, making a profession of faith based on a genuine conviction of the truth of Jesus’ messiahship. This also explains why, more so than the members of almost any other branch of Christianity, evangelicals share a profound attachment to the textual world of the Bible. For the evangelical, the Bible is more than just a “good book”; it is the literal and inspired word of God, written by prophets who were moved by the holy spirit and preserved through the ages by the hand of divine providence. To evangelicals, the Bible is the blueprint of the cosmos, the framework of history, and the answer to all of life’s mysteries. Only the Bible—not a priesthood or a church hierarchy—can assert authority over the Christian.

Evangelicals likewise share a commitment to spreading the good news that they have been blessed to hear. Not content to practice their faith for an hour on Sunday mornings, they not only strive to infuse every aspect of their lives with the aura of the good news but take literally Jesus’ words to “go into all the world and preach the gospel.” This does not emanate from some prideful impulse to impose their religion on others but from a sincere concern for human souls and a deep love for the “lost”: those who, for whatever reason, have never heard the word. But—to repeat—evangelicals emphatically do not believe that faith can be coerced, or that baptism can somehow confer the power of salvation; Jesus must be chosen voluntarily and out of genuine faith.

A subtler but no less central tenet of evangelical belief is that history itself is pre-written and God-directed. A story neither of endlessly recurring cycles nor of linear and infinite progress, history is instead the acting-out of a cosmic epic in which God reveals Himself to man and works to reconcile the gap between heaven and earth. This, for evangelicals, is the essence of Christianity: the story of a God who loves His creatures so much that He sent a redeemer to atone for their sins and restore them to the divine communion that was lost at Eden.

This story has discrete players. It has a plot. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most importantly, from the Jewish perspective, it has a nation, a chosen nation, upon whom the rest of the story turns. And here we come to how it is that, by and large, evangelicals support the state of Israel.

3. CHRISTIAN ZIONISM

The Zionist bent in Protestantism has been evident for centuries, and goes back (as we shall see) to the very earliest days of the Reformation. Today’s evangelicals are the direct heirs of that tradition. Thanks to their literal reading of Scripture, they see Israel as a nation chosen by God to play a unique role in history.

But is this really all there is to it? Many find that hard to credit; utterly baffled by the phenomenon of Christian Zionism, they search instead for other, darker explanations. Of these, the most common is that, desperately craving the end of the world as a prelude to their own final salvation, evangelicals need the state of Israel in place for the predicted bloodbath in the battle of Armageddon. For this reason, the story goes, evangelicals will do everything in their power to ensure that Israel retains its foothold in the Middle East, no matter what. Yet once the appointed end does come, believing Christians (in this scenario) will be miraculously evacuated to heaven while Jews will be slaughtered in a horrific holocaust. The few survivors will then be converted to Christianity en masse.

Not surprisingly, this rendition of evangelical eschatology raises Jewish hackles. “What would Theodor Herzl have said,” thunders one critic, “about Jews supporting Christian homophobes who think Jews must ultimately either convert or burn in hellfire and Armageddon?”

There is no denying an eschatological element in the approach of many evangelicals to Israel—and a minority, emphasizing apocalyptic themes, does try to calculate the exact date and time of the second coming of Jesus. But the reality bears no resemblance to the portrait of cardboard-cutout Jesus freaks itching for the annihilation of the Jews and using them as pawns in their apocalyptic game.

The first and perhaps the most important thing to note here is the significance of Israel within evangelical thought as a whole and not just in, as it were, the final chapter. Evangelicals believe that God chose the biblical people of Israel as His vehicle for world redemption, an earthly agent through whom He would accomplish his grand plan for history. Why did God choose Israel? Not because of any innate virtue or genius they may have possessed, but because He had made a covenant with their patriarch, Abraham, based on the latter’s demonstrated faith and devotion.

Although, in the evangelical account, there were and are many aspects to Israel’s divine mission, preeminent among them was the task of birthing the messiah: the same person, Jesus, whose messiahship was then repudiated by most Jews. Those who did accept him became known as Christians, and their good news eventually spread to the non-Jewish nations as well. Meanwhile, those who did not accept him were subsequently conquered by the Romans and scattered to all corners of the earth in accordance with the prediction of Moses long before. With the destruction of the Temple and the end of the sacrificial system, ancient Jewish religion morphed into rabbinic Judaism and survives until the present day.

Over the centuries, Christians in general have debated whether Jews still have a role in history after their rejection of Jesus. Some have denied it, affirming instead that the Christian church constitutes the “true Israel,” superseding and replacing the Jews in God’s favor. These “supersessionist” Christians are not Zionists; far from it. By contrast, many of the early Reformers and most modern evangelicals believe that the nation of Israel and the Jewish people still retain their position as the apple of God’s eye. Despite Jewish unbelief in Jesus, the Jewish people are covenanted to God and will never be completely cast away. Christians who believe this tend to be Zionists.

Part of God’s covenant with the Jewish people involved bringing them back from exile and setting them once again in their own land. Since the 16th century, and despite the sheer improbability of the idea, Protestant writers spoke of a Jewish ingathering and sometimes actively promoted it. When the Zionist movement proper began in the late 19th century, and especially after the Jewish state was founded in 1948, this unlikely prophecy seemed to many to be coming true before their very eyes. Although not all Christians embraced the new state, the vast majority of evangelicals became immediate supporters; one of them was President Harry Truman, a Baptist.

Most evangelicals also believe that the ingathering of the Jews is the first stage in the second coming: the moment when Jesus will return to earth not as a humble servant but as a conquering king to establish his righteous rule in Jerusalem and restore the nation of Israel to its favored place for a millennium. Evangelicals differ over the sequence of events that will precede this occurrence. Many believe that true Christians will be “raptured,” or taken out of the earth, before the onset of a seven-year period of chaos that culminates in the second coming and its thousand-year aftermath. This approach, known by the cumbersome term of “premillennial dispensationalism,” holds broad appeal but is hardly unchallenged.

What of the much-hyped mass conversion of the Jews? Many evangelicals do believe that, just prior to the second coming, thousands of Jews will accept Jesus as the messiah they have been waiting for. But these Jews will be making a voluntary choice—they will not be “converted” by anyone, let alone against their will—and will not be “converting” at all in the classic sense. That is, they will not become Christians; they will be Jews who believe in Jesus as their messiah. At this point in history, the old forms of organized religion—churches, baptisms, Sunday schools, even synagogues—will, along with pretty much everything else, be completely transformed, as befits the commencement of a supernatural kingdom on earth.

Clearly, the problem with explaining all of Christian Zionism on the basis of eschatology is that not all evangelicals agree on the details or even believe it to be true. Furthermore, while eschatology itself generates much study and sermonizing, it is hardly the overriding or even the preponderant focus of evangelical belief. In 2011, a groundbreaking Pew survey of over 2,000 world evangelical leaders found 48 percent agreeing that the state of Israel was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy relating to the second coming of Jesus and 42 percent disagreeing. Among U.S. evangelical leaders, the split was roughly the same. As for rank-and-file American evangelicals, an earlier Pew survey found three-fifths believing that Israel was prophetically significant—but to this day, no clear consensus has been reached on what is entailed in that belief.

The upshot? In citing eschatology as a motivation for Christian Zionism, one can prudently say only that most evangelicals believe that the ingathering of the Jewish people to their historic homeland is connected in some way to biblical prophecy.

But if eschatology isn’t the real basis for most Christian Zionism, what is? Put simply, it’s the belief in the truth of God’s eternal covenant with the nation of Israel. When asked in the 2011 Pew survey if God’s covenant with the Jewish people continues today, 73 percent of world evangelical leaders, including 67 percent of the Americans, answered positively. Most rank-and-file evangelicals agree. After all, the main theme throughout the Bible is God’s abiding love for and faithfulness to His people no matter how often they disappoint Him. Again and again in Scripture, evangelicals see Israel falter only to be raised up by the loving hand of God who still intends to keep His promises with them and to guide them toward an expected end.

In brief, evangelicals love Israel because God loves Israel. But there is also another way of putting it. For evangelicals, Israel’s mistakes are representative of their own mistakes as imperfect individuals in need of God’s grace. They are comforted by the fact that God remains faithful to Israel; it means that God remains faithful to them.

And this relates to another point. Though it may surprise most Jews, evangelicals feel not only a strong sense of protectiveness toward the state of Israel but a deep cultural affinity with the Jewish people. It is not just that they are well versed in the Hebrew Scripture and its values. More importantly, as convinced Protestants, evangelicals tend to bypass the period of church history between the apostles and the Reformation—more than a thousand years of Christian corruption and paganism, as they see it—and look for inspiration not to Origen or Aquinas but to the heady days when all Christians were, in fact, Jews. In returning to the roots of their faith, they often feel closer to Jewish culture than to other branches of Christianity. Some go the extra mile to don akippah, observe Passover, or celebrate a bar mitzvah.

Nor is that all. Evangelicals are eager to show Jews that they are not like other Christians by whom the Jewish people were mercilessly persecuted in history. To the contrary, they feel a religious obligation to protect Jews and minister to their material needs. American evangelicals in particular hope to use their influence to ensure that violence against Jews doesn’t happen on their watch.

Lest this make evangelical impulses sound wholly altruistic, I should also note the element of self-interest at work. Believing that God will “bless those who bless” the children of Abraham and “curse those who curse” them, many evangelicals refrain from criticizing Jews or the state of Israel for fear of getting on the wrong side of God. Looking back at the Jewish people’s historic enemies, they note that all, to a one, have met their doom. Indeed, many evangelicals see American prosperity as bound up directly with America’s benign treatment of Jews and strong support of Israel. A common refrain in evangelical churches goes something like: “America will be fine so long as we don’t go against the Jews.”

Of course there are other, not necessarily “Christian,” reasons why evangelicals (like other Americans) support Israel. Shared ethical and moral foundations; the feeling of kinship between two settler democracies with a sense of their own exceptionalism; the impulse to partner against enemies of the democratic West and especially, these days, against radical Islam; the urge to protect against a second Holocaust—one doesn’t need to be evangelical to have these feelings. But evangelicals have them intensely.

Despite what some may think, then, Christian Zionism is far more than an outgrowth of prophetic eschatology. It is an amalgamation of several strongly-held beliefs and principles that, taken together, cause millions of evangelicals wholeheartedly to endorse the continued sovereignty of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

And yet, unfortunately, that is not the whole story.

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