Ask an Evangelical: Where does evangelical support for Israel come from?

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Commentary by Cassy Benefield | FāVS News

Where does Evangelical support for Israel come from?

Ask an evangelical Christian: Where does evangelical support for Israel come from?

As an evangelical Christian, I was taught God told Abraham in Genesis 12:3 that he would bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him. This was further identified with Israel in Numbers 24:1-9. So, my support for Israel was something I believed I should do as a Christian in order to be blessed personally and nationally. This included people and land.

As a new committed believer, I took what I was taught seriously. I hadn’t read the whole Bible. I didn’t know what questions to ask. 

I also didn’t understand that I should check on the context of the passage and compare Scripture with Scripture. On a personal level, it did mean I had a high view of Jewish people as an ethnicity, and I prayed for Israel whenever there was conflict in the Middle East.

Oct. 7 and growing doubts

Fast forward to Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas and “other Palestinian militant groups” attacked Israel killing 1,195 and taking 251 people hostage. With the rest of the world, I mourned with Israel and still do. Days after the attack my focus began to add another layer, as within the first three months after Hamas’ horrific attack, 30,000 Gazans died from Israel’s military response. 

I watched as homes, neighborhoods and cities were destroyed leaving hundreds of thousands who survived Israel’s counterattacks homeless. My spirit began to feel like something was very off. The death toll didn’t match with Israel’s death toll. The power differential between the surprise attack and Israel’s response was just, well, unjust. 

The evangelical community around me continued to mostly encourage us to pray for Israel. Rarely was there a mention of Gaza. Once I did hear from a church’s pulpit that if it were up to the speaker, Gaza would be utterly demolished. He noted that was his opinion, not the church’s. Nothing was ever said about the few Christian Palestinians in Gaza — who represent the oldest Christians in the world — and the deaths of their parishioners and the destruction of their homes and churches. 

My friendships with those on the political left opened my eyes to a different perspective. I had long marveled at what seemed miraculous about Israel’s founding in 1948 and their stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War against a coalition of Arab nations. After the horrors of the Holocaust, surely God’s hand was evident in the Jewish people’s return to their homeland!

But some of my dearest friends said other things after the Oct.7 attack. They talked more about Palestinian rights than Israel’s right to defend itself from its enemies, Hamas among them. I began to listen to another narrative about rising terrorism against Israel, which included another possibility behind Hamas’ actions that day, without excusing the violence and human rights abuses upon Israel and so much more.

Discovering hidden history

Soon after Oct. 7, a good friend gently told me that what Israel calls its day of independence in 1948, Palestinians call Nakba or “catastrophe” in Arabic. I never heard this discussed in Christian evangelical spaces. Nakba for Palestinians was the day when 750,000 of their people were displaced from their homes from the land Israel took.

At first, I was skeptical that what my friend was telling me was true. Surely my friend was influenced by some kind of propaganda. (I’m sorry friend.) But I’ll hear them out. And then I’ll search this term and history to see if it is in fact true.

Sure enough. The Nakba is real, and the Palestinian struggle continues today. Israel’s counterinsurgency is yet another unfortunate example. This isn’t because Israel doesn’t have the right to defend itself. It doesn’t have the right to slaughter innocent people and maintain an apartheid-like system of occupation.

I went back to my friend and thanked them for helping me see. For helping me become aware of something I didn’t know. And then I started reading. One question I wanted to answer was when did this Christian support begin and why do evangelicals of the fundamentalist, conservative or even some mainline persuasions have such a strong affection for Israel. 

I asked myself why, for example, was it important that President Donald Trump meet the requests of his evangelical Christian base and move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? The answer is found in a particular Bible interpretation of Israel in the end times before Jesus’ second coming.

Political power and divine will

As it so happens, there is a book that successfully identifies the beginning of Christian Zionism. It was birthed in Protestantism.

Written by Robert O. Smith (Chickasaw), an ordained Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor, “More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism” showed that one of the reasons for this was because when Protestants began reading the Bible for themselves, Old Testament prophecy still showed Israel had many future events that had yet to happen. 

This left a lot to various future end times interpretations by Bible scholars and readers from the Reformation to today using disparate historical-political contexts. It also gave generations of budding Bible theologians and readers a desire to prove the Bible’s veracity by showing even partial-fulfillment of prophecy in their own day. 

One such fulfillment is this return of Jews to Palestine, which would accord with what is known as the Palestinian or Land Covenant God made with Israel before Moses died and they entered the Promised Land. One way Christians could assist God with his plan was to use political power to do it, which according to Smith, “was the conviction of many English and Anglo-American Protestants.”

The power of this kind of Zionism on Christianity has birthed a powerful lobby in American politics that continues today. Smith writes, “The most conspicuous contribution evangelical politics have made to American public life is the promotion of unwavering U.S. support for the State of Israel.”

Even in Eastern Washington’s current U.S. representative we see this influence playing out. Tucked in the end of his Aug. 15 weekly update to his constituents, Rep. Michael Baumgartner speaks highly of his recent visit to Israel. He highlights the trip was bipartisan, that he visited key Israeli leaders to discuss their security needs, how much a visit to the Sea of Galilee affected him as a Christian and how America “must continue to stand firmly with Israel against terrorism.”

Recently in The Spokesman-Review, Orion Donovan Smith wrote Baumgartner also said Israel is held to a higher standard of criticism of their wars against and in response to attacks from their enemies.  

“‘I think Israel is taking great concern, and appropriately so, to safeguard the population of Gaza, and is in the middle of a bloody counterinsurgency with an extremely dedicated terrorist enemy. It’s an extremely difficult situation that I think they’re doing, relatively speaking, a good job on,’” Baumgartner said in The Spokesman.

Currently world opinion contradicts Baumgartner’s statement. One example being Gaza City. It is now officially experiencing a man-made famine with the rest of the territory soon to follow. One reason is lack of access to food distribution sites. 

Since May, only four “mega-sites” are used for food distribution and are run by the Israeli- and U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, compared with the 400 the United Nations-led network used to run.

As part of his trip to Israel, he also visited the West Bank settlement of Ariel. The controversy of this visit in the international community is that all Israeli settlements are illegal under international law as they displace residents of an occupied territory. 

While there, House Speaker Mike Johnson set an unmistakably Christian evangelical Zionist tone, according to Ben Lorber in his Aug. 5 Religion Dispatches article about the visit. Johnson professed U.S. commitment “to full annexation of the occupied territories.” 

The reason was spelled out by U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee when he said, it’s “not a matter for human debate but a matter of accepting divine will.” This is because the West Bank is Judea and Samaria of Israel’s history, part of the Land Covenant. Many evangelical Christians claim Gaza is also a part of this Land Covenant.

But, we still need to answer why do American white evangelical Christians seem to support Israel almost without any criticism? Where does this come from? Smith writes, “Jews, quite unbeknownst to themselves, were assigned a central place in the apocalyptic hope of Protestants in England, and later, in the United States.” 

What I have found perplexing over the years, however, is why does this particular group of evangelical Christians — who have a strong influence in the Trump administration — believe God needs their political support to usher in their preferred interpretation of the end times? And what costs are they willing to keep paying? 

As I grappled with these theological questions, the human cost continued mounting. Over 62,000 Gazans had died, including more than 18,000 children. Nearly 40,000 children had lost one or both parents. These weren’t just statistics — they represented real families, including Palestinian Christians whose churches lay in ruins.

How could I reconcile my belief in a God of justice with unwavering support for actions that produced such devastation? The numbers forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: my theology had real-world consequences.

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.