In the United States, the two groups that
most ardently support Israel are Jews and evangelical and fundamentalist
Christians. Jewish support is easy to explain, but why should certain
Christians, most of them politically quite conservative, be so devoted to
Israel? There is a second puzzle: despite their support for a Jewish state,
evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are disliked by many Jews. And a
third: a large fraction of African-Americans are hostile to Israel and critical
of Jews, yet Jewish voters regard blacks as their natural allies.
The evidence about evangelical
attitudes is clear. In 2006, a Pew survey found that evangelical Christians
were more favorable toward Israel than the average American was—and much more
sympathetic than either mainline Protestants or secularists. In another survey,
evangelical Christians proved much likelier than Catholics, Protestants, or
secular types to back Israeli control of Jerusalem, endorse Israeli settlements
on the West Bank, and take Israel’s side in a Middle Eastern dispute. (Among
every religious group, those who are most traditional are most supportive of
Israel. The most orthodox Catholics and Protestants, for instance, support
Israel more than their modernist colleagues do.)
Evangelical Christians have a
high opinion not just of the Jewish state but of Jews as people. That Jewish
voters are overwhelmingly liberal doesn’t seem to bother evangelicals, despite
their own conservative politics. Yet Jews don’t return the favor: in one Pew
survey, 42 percent of Jewish respondents expressed hostility to evangelicals
and fundamentalists. As two scholars from Baruch College have shown, a much
smaller fraction—about 16 percent—of the American public has similarly
antagonistic feelings toward Christian fundamentalists.
The
reason that conservative Christians—opposed to abortion and gay marriage and
critical of political liberalism—can feel kindly toward Jewish liberals and
support Israel so fervently is rooted in theology. One finds among
fundamentalist Protestants a doctrine called dispensationalism. The dispensationalist
outlook, which began in early-nineteenth-century England, sees human history as
a series of seven periods, or dispensations, in each of which God deals with
man in a distinctive way. The first, before Adam’s fall, was the era of
innocence; the second, from Adam to Noah, the era of conscience; the third,
from Noah to Abraham, of government; the fourth, from Abraham to Moses, of
patriarchy; the fifth, from Moses to Jesus, of Mosaic law; and the sixth, from
Jesus until today, of grace. The seventh and final dispensation, yet to come,
will be the Millennium, an earthly paradise.
For dispensationalists, the
Jews are God’s chosen people. For the Millennium to come, they must be living
in Israel, whose capital is Jerusalem; there, the Temple will rise again at the
time of Armageddon. On the eve of that final battle, the Antichrist will
appear—probably in the form of a seeming peacemaker. Fundamentalists differ
over who the Antichrist will be (at one time he was thought to be Nero, at
another time the papacy, and today a few have suggested the secretary-general
of the United Nations), but dispensationalists agree that he will deceive the
people, occupy the Temple, rule in the name of God, and ultimately be defeated
by the Messiah. Many dispensationalists believe that how a person treats Israel
will profoundly influence his eternal destiny.
Christian dispensationalists
were early Zionists and continue to support Israel today, for it is there that
they believe Christ will return. In 1878, William Blackstone, a well-known
dispensationalist and the author of Jesus Is Coming, wrote a document that argued for a
Jewish state in Palestine. It appeared in 1891, five years before Theodor Herzl
called for a Jewish state and six years before the first Zionist Congress.
Blackstone got more than 400 dignitaries to sign his document, including the
chief justice of the Supreme Court, the Speaker of the House, John D.
Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and several other prominent Americans, almost all of
them Christians. After President Benjamin Harrison ignored the petition,
Blackstone tried again in 1916 with President Woodrow Wilson, who was more
sympathetic—and who supported the British foreign minister, Arthur Balfour, a
devout Protestant, when in 1917 he issued his famous declaration calling for a
Jewish home in Palestine.
Evangelical
and fundamentalist Christian preachers enthusiastically promote this pro-Israel
vision. In a study of preachers in 19 denominations, political scientist James
Guth of Furman University found that evangelicals were much likelier to back
Israel in their sermons than mainline Protestants or Catholics were, a
difference that persisted after controlling for age, sex, party identification,
and type of media used to reach congregations. Guth also showed that
self-described evangelicals who attended church regularly, and thus heard their
ministers’ sermons, were much more inclined to support Israel than were
believers who did not attend regularly.
Evangelical preachers are
reinforced by popular Christian books. In 1970, Hal Lindsey published The Late Great Planet Earth; in 1995, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins
followed with Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, and went on to write 11 more volumes on
the same theme. Lindsey can claim more than 35 million sales, and the Left Behind books have sold 60 million. These
bestsellers tell the dispensationalist story, discuss Armageddon, and argue for
the protection of Jews and of Israel. Lindsey argues that, based on the book of
Revelations and related biblical sources, “some time in the future,” there will
be “a seven-year period climaxed by the visible return of Jesus Christ” but
that this will not happen until the Jewish people have reestablished their
nation in their ancient homeland.
Whatever one makes of his
prediction, Lindsey is unambiguous about the importance of Israel to him—and,
by extension, to his millions of readers. Reinforcing the preachers and writers
are various pro-Israel evangelical organizations, including Bridges for Peace,
the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, and the National Christian
Leadership Conference for Israel.
Mainstream
Protestant groups, such as the National Council of Churches and the Middle East
Council of Churches, have a very different attitude toward Israel. The NCC, for
example, refused to support Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967, and
immediately afterward began to protest victorious Israel’s expansion of its
territory. From that point on, the NCC’s positions ran closely with Arab
opinion, urging American contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization,
for instance, and denouncing the Camp David Accords because they supposedly
ignored the Palestinians’ national ambitions. In 2004, the Presbyterian Church
decided to study a proposal to divert its investments from firms doing business
with Israel. Within a year, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ,
and parts of the Methodist Church followed suit. As Paul Charles Merkley sums
up in his book about Christian Zionism, mainline Protestant churches’
“respectable leadership had backed away from Israel; all of her constant
friends were seated below the salt.”
Why do mainline Protestant
leaders oppose Israel? That question becomes harder to answer when one recalls
that Israel is a democratic nation with vigorously independent courts that has
not only survived brutal attacks by its Arab neighbors but provided a
prosperous home for the children of many Holocaust survivors. As with any other
nation, Israel has pursued policies that one can challenge. Some may criticize
its management of the West Bank, for example, or its attacks on Hamas leaders.
But these concerns are trivial compared with Iran’s announced desire to wipe
Israel off the map by using every weapon at its disposal, including
(eventually) a nuclear one.
The answer, I think, is that
many Christian liberals see Israel as blocking the aspirations of the
oppressed—who, they have decided, include the Palestinians. Never mind that the
Palestinians support suicide bombers and rocket attacks against Israel; never
mind that the Palestinians cannot form a competent government; never mind that
they wish to occupy Israel “from the sea to the river.” It is enough that they
seem oppressed, even though much of the oppression is self-inflicted.
After the Marxist claims about
the proletariat proved false and capitalism was vindicated as the best way to
achieve economic affluence, leftists had to stop pretending that they could
accomplish much with state-owned factories and national economic plans. As a
result, the oppressed replaced the proletariat as the Left’s object of
affection. The enemy became, not capitalists, but successful nations.
That shift in focus has
received encouragement from certain American academics, such as Noam Chomsky,
and from the European press, including the BBC, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and Le Monde. All tend to denounce Israel in the most
unrestrained terms. When Israeli ground forces sought to root out terrorists
hiding in a Jenin refugee camp, they lost 23 soldiers and killed 52
Palestinians. Among other press critics, the British writer A. N. Wilson,
uninterested in the facts, called the episode a “massacre” and a “genocide.”
The Left will always have its enemies; Israel has merely replaced John D.
Rockefeller at the top of the list.
But
why do so many Jewish groups and voters abhor their Christian evangelical
allies? To answer that question carefully, we would need data that distinguish
among Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and secular Jews. It is quite possible
that Orthodox Jews welcome evangelical support while Reform and secular ones
oppose it, but I could find no data on which to base a firm conclusion. Most
Jews are political liberals, devoted to the Democratic Party and liberal causes
generally. As Milton Himmelfarb once put it, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and
vote like Puerto Ricans.” Such voting habits are not hard to explain in a
population that historically includes victims of discrimination, oppression,
and mass murder. By contrast, evangelicals tend to be conservatives to whom
politics seems less important than their dispensationalist beliefs.
That liberal politics trumps
other considerations—including worries about anti-Semitism—for many American
Jews becomes clearer in light of other data. The most anti-Semitic group in
America is African-Americans. This wasn’t always the case. Many early black
leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Bunche, were quite supportive of
American Jews. Du Bois even criticized Bunche for being “insufficiently
pro-Zionist.” The NAACP endorsed the creation of Israel in 1948, and the Jewish
state received continued support from Paul Robeson, Bayard Rustin, and Martin
Luther King, Jr. But by the time of the 1967 war, much of that leadership had
left the scene. Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, James Forman, Malcolm X, and
Shirley Du Bois (widow of W. E. B. Du Bois) were critical of Israel. At a New
Left convention in the late 1960s, black delegates insisted on passing a
resolution condemning the “imperialist Zionist war.” Nowadays, according to
several polls, about one-third of U.S. blacks have very anti-Semitic attitudes,
and this hasn’t changed since at least 1964, when the first such poll was conducted.
And it has been African-American leaders, not white evangelicals, who have made
anti-Semitic remarks most conspicuously. Everyone recalls Jesse Jackson’s
reference to New York as “Hymietown,” to say nothing of Louis Farrakhan, a
great admirer of Hitler, who has called Jews “bloodsuckers.”
Yet African-American voters are
liberals, and so often get a pass from their Jewish allies. To Jews, blacks are
friends and evangelicals enemies, whatever their respective dispositions toward
Jews and Israel.
But another
reason, deeper than Jewish and evangelical differences over abortion, school
prayer, and gay marriage, may underlie Jewish dislike of Christian
fundamentalists. Though evangelical Protestants are supportive of Israel and
tolerant of Jews, in the eyes of their liberal critics they are hostile to the
essential elements of a democratic regime. They believe that the United States
was founded as a Christian nation and worry about the decay of morality; they
must wish, therefore, to impose a conservative moral code, alter the direction
of the country so that it conforms to God’s will, require public schools to
teach Christian beliefs, and crush the rights of minorities.
Christian Smith, a sociology
professor at the University of North Carolina, analyzed four surveys of
self-identified evangelicals and found that, while they do think that America
was founded as a Christian nation and fear that the country has lost its moral
bearings, these views are almost exactly the same as those held by
non-evangelical Americans. Evangelicals, like other Americans, oppose having
public schools teach Christian values, oppose having public school teachers
lead students in vocal prayers, and oppose a constitutional amendment declaring
the country a Christian nation. Evangelicals deny that there is one correct
Christian view on most political issues, deny that Jews must answer for
allegedly killing Christ, deny that laws protecting free speech go too far, and
reject the idea that whites should be able to keep blacks out of their
neighborhoods. They overwhelmingly agree that Jews and Christians share the
same values and can live together in harmony. Evangelicals strongly oppose
abortion and gay marriage, but in almost every other respect are like other
Americans.
Whatever the reason for Jewish
distrust of evangelicals, it may be a high price to pay when Israel’s future,
its very existence, is in question. Half of all Protestants in the country
describe themselves as evangelical, or born-again, Christians, making up about
one-quarter of all Americans
(though they constitute only 16 percent of white Christian voters in the
Northeast). Jews, by contrast, make up less than 2 percent of the U.S.
population, and that percentage will shrink: as many as half of all Jews marry
non-Jews. When it comes to helping secure Israel’s survival, the tiny Jewish
minority in America should not reject the help offered by a group that is ten
times larger and whose views on the central propositions of a democratic
society are much like everybody else’s. No good can come from repeating the
1926 assertion of H. L. Mencken that fundamentalist Christians are “yokels” and
“morons.”