When and How Did Evangelicals Become Zionists?

Thomas R. Getman

March 18, 2018

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2018/03/18/when-and-how-did-evangelicals-become-zionists-thomas-r-getman/

[Some of beginning of article is omitted. Author likes to talk "social justice" and "progressive". He credits some Democrats for standing quietly against Zionism. Whatever.]

Zionism says the bible predicts "seven dispensations of history" returning Jews to all of Palestine in order to hasten the day of the end times.

... silence in the mainstream church has allowed Palestine to be defined by Zionists. Christian Zionism ... is a movement within Protestant, now Catholic, fundamentalism that understands the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and thus deserving of political, financial and religious support.

Christian Zionism preceded by 50 years, and even influenced the emergence of, Jewish Zionism. ... It explains the division of the house in Israel, which resulted in the damaging replacement of rabbinic social justice Judaism with secular Jewish Zionism. Recent history shows the resulting marriage of convenience for joint image protection by the Jewish-Christian lobby.

"To exclude the rights of one group over another, the law of love is replaced by violence."

"The lobby, writ large, is the questionable combining of forces between the Israeli government and American Christian Zionists. Our government and our church people are complicit in this furtive enterprise, sometimes unwittingly. AIPAC is successful as an agent of minority Gentile sentiment, not just Jewish support. Sadly, the majority, as you heard from me early, has been silent.

It is important to see the progression of Christian Zionism’s development. It has roots at least as far back as the 16th century European Reformation. The early literal readership of the local language translations like the King James Bible, later in Scofield Reference editions, had footnotes and commentary that promoted dispensational Zionism. It led to several centuries of anti-Semite Jewish persecution, ultimately the Holocaust, and all the way to the mid-20th century best-selling fictional works of The Late Great Planet Earth and Left Behind.

The modern movement can be traced to the early 19th century, with a group of eccentric British Christian restorationists lacking formal theological training. They began to lobby for Jewish return to Palestine and the necessary precondition for the second coming of Christ – or the first coming of the Messiah, as you wish. John Darby was their leader. The Darbyists gained traction from the middle of the 19th century, when Palestine became strategic to Britain, France and Germany, and their colonial interests in the Middle East.

These Christian Zionists who preceded Jewish Zionism were some of Theodor Herzl’s strongest advocates and, ironically, were both clergy and lay people who embraced the anti-Semitic theology and genocidal images around racial nationalism. Herzl’s appeal to the British leadership was in part an understandable anger for what had happened to Jews in the previous centuries, but also undergirded by misinterpreted scriptures.

In the early 20th century, evangelists Billy Sunday, D.L. Moody and others promulgated the Scofield Bible dispensational point of view to convert people by employing end-of-the-world fear. As early as 1917, the British bartered away Palestine with the Balfour Declaration. And the 1919 American King-Crane report urged caution about the Zionist intention of dispossession. But the report’s attention to the local population was either ignored or buried by President [Woodrow] Wilson for several years. This was concurrent with the Arab false appreciation that they would gain Palestinian liberation by their alliance with the Allies.

In the early 20th century, evangelists Billy Sunday, D.L. Moody and others promulgated the Scofield Bible dispensational point of view to convert people by employing end-of-the-world fear. As early as 1917, the British bartered away Palestine with the Balfour Declaration. And the 1919 American King-Crane report urged caution about the Zionist intention of dispossession. But the report’s attention to the local population was either ignored or buried by President [Woodrow] Wilson for several years. This was concurrent with the Arab false appreciation that they would gain Palestinian liberation by their alliance with the Allies.

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When and How Did Evangelicals Become Zionists?

Arthur Balfour and Lloyd George were predisposed toward Zionism in their support for a Jewish national home, but with mixed racist motives about white British superiority. Their primary goal was to advance British imperial interests with utilitarian politics. Zionism continued to reflect some of that strain into the middle of the last century and until today.

After World War II the more urbane Billy Graham avoided the label Zionist with his approach, which stirred millions. He did not, however, instruct about the dangers of Zionism in the churches to which he sent his converts. Even with his anti-Semitic misstep recorded with Richard Nixon, fortunately he founded Christianity Today magazine, a globally-minded modern evangelical publication that reflected his social justice abolitionist roots, and has had a series of progressive editors partnering with Anglican scholar anti-Zionist John Stott and the NGO-sponsored trips to the Holy Land. Sadly his son Franklin hasn’t taken the same path.

The impact of the Holocaust in this era was a legitimate concern. Then, coupled with the guilt about U.S. capping Jewish asylum and turning away refugees, the U.N. partition resolution in November of 1947 was supported by Harry Truman. He was influenced, certainly, by his dispensational beliefs, but likely even more by the looming re-election campaign considerations and the financial infusion from pro-Israeli donors. The fact was ignored that the Palestinians, as the 66 percent majority, owned 90 percent of the land.

Christian Zionism was encouraged when, in ’48, Israel was assumed to be the sign of God and His personal intervention, with the anticipation of the end time battles of Armageddon, and was, as well, influenced by AIPAC’s predecessor, the American Zionist Council. It gained impetus after the return of Jews to what they call the eternal undivided capital in ’67, which encouraged the populous teaching of dispensational theology by Dallas seminarians and similar seminaries, especially throughout the South, in the Bible Belt.

The more secular Israeli Labor Party had few relationships with Christian Zionists prior to the election of Likud’s Menachem Begin in 1977. Begin, however, saw the necessity of the theo-political match made in heaven. Likud courted the relationship with leaders such as [Rev. Jerry] Falwell, [Pat] Robertson and other TV preachers who captured the TV time for most Christians, and from the booming fundamentalist Zionist churches in the South. In 1979, with great fanfare, Falwell was presented a private jet by Begin, purportedly to affirm the [televangelist’s support for] Israeli policies such as their impending 1981 bombing of Iraq’s nuclear site, but also to spread the Zionist action plan.

The election of Ronald Reagan, who was converted to Christian Zionist beliefs, helped solidify Christian Zionism up to the center of the Republican Party and the White House, along with several Speakers of the House. Opposition began to be more public by well-known liberal ministers and scholars, and even [Sen.] John McCain called Falwell and Robertson “agents of intolerance.”

Still, Jewish Zionists had few encounters with Christian Zionists before 2000. Even with the assumption by Christians that the ’67 war miracle was final proof to them for the return of Jesus, it took politics and necessity to drive the strange bedfellows together – helped, of course, by Jewish lack of faith in the Zionist Christian distasteful end-time creed. 9/11 sealed the marriage. The glue was that they both feared and hated Muslims. This hastened the growth of the so-called evangelical Zionism."

"As the Zionist profile became more public through the pro-Israel lobby of Christians and Jews – especially through John Hagee’s CUFI, Christians United for Israel – three factors were apparent. First, the lobby served to undermine peace and increase, and even encourage, violence. Second, their utterly biased and one-sided utterings and massive funding have been opposed by Jews as well as Christians. Finally, third, the United States is seen increasingly to be a party to injustice, rather than an honest broker for a just settlement of the conflict."

[Article continues, mentioning hopeful movements in opposing Christian Zionism from within and withoutvthe church.]