Political coalitions are inherently perishable. They are created to advance common interests that invariably diverge at some point. But this particular coalition was unusual from the start. It was built not just on the belief that defending Israel was in America’s strategic interests, but also on faith: Many of the evangelical Christians who have long made up the core of the Republican Party’s base saw the Jewish people’s return to their biblical homeland and their subsequent, improbable military victories over their Arab enemies as divine providence, a sign that the second coming was imminent. Now, other kinds of Christianity are taking hold in conservative power circles. A growing number of evangelicals subscribe to a very different understanding of the biblical prophecies about Christ’s return, while other influential Christians — including Vance — have been gravitating toward Catholicism. At the same moment, many Republicans are pushing for a nationalist retreat from American commitments overseas.
In other words, the very forces that built this coalition — geopolitics and theology — are the ones tearing it apart.
The 1967 war also captured the attention of evangelical Christians, then a growing force in American life. Israel had not only beaten back a coalition of well-armed Arab states; it had also extended its control over Jerusalem, reunifying the holy city. To many evangelicals, this was more than an unlikely military victory. It was an unmistakable sign that history was moving, inexorably, toward its final climax.
A few years later, a graduate of the Dallas Theological Seminary and former campus ministry worker, Hal Lindsey, popularized this belief — known as premillennial Dispensationalism — in his mass-market paperback “The Late Great Planet Earth.” Lindsey aimed his book squarely at baby boomers — “the searching generation,” he called them — offering a divine truth based on his own reading of biblical prophecies. Now that the Jewish people had returned to their homeland and taken control of Jerusalem, all they needed to do was rebuild the temple destroyed by the Romans to enable the rapture (“the ultimate trip,” as Lindsey called it) to commence. It became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s.
As the head of the Christian Coalition, founded by Pat Robertson, in the 1990s, Reed once wielded enormous influence among Christian voters. But today, the religious right’s political power is far more diffuse. The towering figures who once served as its theological and political gatekeepers, shaping American Christian thought about both the Bible and the ballot, are largely gone. They have been replaced by a wide range of online figures like the Texas pastor Joel Webbon, who advocates a breaking of geopolitical ties between America and Israel and has written on X that Jews are “generally marked by subversion, deceit, and greed.”
A growing number of Christians are turning away from premillennial Dispensationalism and toward other theological frameworks that see, at most, a diminished role for Israel and the Jewish people in God’s plan for redemption. Many believe that God abrogated his covenant with Abraham when the Jews rejected the Gospel of Jesus and that the church replaced ancient Israel as the vessel of God’s will.
Some of these Christians are known as “postmillennialists.” Premillennialists believe that the second coming will occur before the 1,000-year reign of peace referred to in the Book of Revelation as the millennium. Postmillennialists believe that Christ will return after the millennium, and that it’s their duty to prepare for this moment by making the earth fit for him. Many postmillennialists don’t see Judaism and Christianity as complementary, but as at odds with each other.
“They are much more likely to think that Jews are in a state of theological incompleteness and really what they should do is become Christians sooner rather than later,” said Samuel Goldman, an associate professor at the University of Florida and the author of “God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America.”
This is by no means a new framework. It was the default position throughout most of Christianity, and it laid the foundation for the church’s long history of persecuting Jews, justifying their expulsion from Christian societies and playing into countless anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. “The Jews are suffering and stateless because Christ came to them first and they rejected him,” said Mark Tooley, a lifelong member of the United Methodist Church and the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, describing the theology.
A new cohort of religious leaders and thinkers are now repurposing this theology for our contemporary politics, arguing that America should embrace Christianity as its national religion. They are, in a sense, the Protestant answer to liberalism’s Catholic critics — like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule — who have gained prominence during the Trump era. They include Stephen Wolfe, the author of “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” and Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist pastor in Idaho who recently opened a branch of his church on Capitol Hill — and counts Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth among his admirers. “I am no kind of Zionist,” Wilson has written.
