Well before Theodore Herzl
founded political Zionism and published The Jewish State, Christian Zionists in
the United States and England were already seeking to direct and influence the
foreign policy of both nations in service to a religious obsession end times
prophecy.
The largest pro-Israel
organization in the United States is not composed of Jews, but of Christian
evangelicals, with a total membership of
7 million, more than 2 million more members than the entirety of the American
Jewish community.
Members of this organization,
Christians United for Israel (CUFI), met in Washington on Monday, attracting
thousands of attendees and featuring speeches from Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo,
Vice President Mike Pence, and National Security Advisor John Bolton. CUFI’s
leader, controversial evangelical preacher John Hagee, has met with President
Donald Trump several times and was recently part of an exclusive White House
meeting in March on the administration’s upcoming “peace plan” for Israel and
Palestine.
CUFI is but one of many
organizations throughout American history that have promoted the state of
Israel and Zionism on the grounds that a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine is a
requirement for the fulfillment of end-times prophecy and necessary for Jesus
Christ to return to Earth — an event Christians often refer to as “the Second
Coming.”
While organizations like CUFI
and its predecessors have long seen the creation of the state of Israel in
1948, and the later Israeli victory and conquest of Jerusalem in 1967, as the
fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, there is one prophecy that this sect of
evangelical Christians believes is the only thing standing between them and the
Second Coming. There are estimated to be more than 20 million of
these Christians, often referred to as Christian Zionists, in the United States
and they are a key voting bloc and source of political donations for the
Republican Party.
As was explored in previous
installments of this series, these Christian Zionists, much like religious
Zionist extremists in Israel, believe that the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of
the Rock must be replaced with a Third Jewish Temple in order to usher in the
end times.
These two groups of different
faiths, since the 19th century, have repeatedly formed an opportunistic
alliance in order to ensure the fulfillment of their respective prophecies,
despite the fact that members of the other faith are rarely if ever on the same
page in their interpretations of what occurs after the temple’s construction.
This alliance, based on a
mutual obsession with hastening the coming of the Apocalypse, continues to this
day and now, more than at any other time in history, these groups have reached
the heights of power in both Israel and the United States. Parts I and II of
this exclusive series explored how this branch of religious Zionism has come to
dominate the current right-wing government of Israel and has led Israel’s
current government to take definitive steps towards the destruction of the Al
Aqsa mosque and the imminent construction of a Third Temple.
Now this installment (Part III)
will show how this movement’s Christian counterpart in the United States,
Christian Zionism, has likewise become a dominant force in American politics,
particularly following the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, where
this apocalyptic vision is a major driver behind his administration’s Middle
East policy.
Yet, this fire-and-brimstone
vision of the end times has long been a guide for prominent figures in American
history and the American elite, even predating Zionism’s founding as a
political movement. Thus, Christian Zionism’s influence on Trump administration
policy is merely the latest of a long list of examples where prophecy and
politics have mixed in American history, often with world-altering results.
Accounts of the role of
European and North American Christians in the creation of the state of Israel
often begin with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, but the efforts of certain
Christian groups in England and the United States to create a Jewish state in
Palestine actually date back centuries earlier and significantly predate
Zionism’s official founding by Theodore Herzl.
Among the first advocates for
the physical immigration of European Jews to Palestine were the Puritans, an
offshoot of Christian Protestantism that emerged in the late 16th century and
became influential in England and, later, in the American colonies. Influential
Puritans devoted considerable interest to the role of Jews in eschatology, or
end-times theology, with many — such as John Owen, a
17th-century theologian, member of parliament, and administrator at Oxford —
believing that the physical return of Jews to Palestine was necessary for the
fulfillment of end-time prophecy.
While the Puritan roots of what
would later become known as Christian Zionism are often overlooked in modern
accounts of where and why American evangelical support for Israel began, its
adherents still clearly acknowledge its legacy. For instance, on Monday at the
CUFI conference, Pompeo, himself a Christian Zionist known for his obsession
with the end times, told the group the
following:
Christian support in America
for Zion — for a Jewish homeland — runs back to the early Puritan settlers, and
it has endured for centuries. Indeed, our second president [John Adams], a
couple years back, said… ‘I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent
nation.’
These Puritan beliefs, which
persist today and have only grown in popularity, became more entrenched in
England and colonial America with time, especially among the monied political
class, and led to a variety of interpretations regarding exactly what the Bible
says about the end times. Among the most influential was the development of
Christian “dispensationalism,” an interpretive framework that uses the Bible to
divide history into different periods of “dispensations” and sees the Bible’s
prophetic references to “Israel” as signifying an ethnically Jewish nation
established in Palestine.
Dispensationalism was largely
developed by English-Irish preacher John Nelson Darby, who believed that the
God-ordained fates of Israel and the Christian church were completely separate,
with the latter to be physically removed from the Earth by God prior to a
foretold period of earthly suffering known as the Tribulation.
In Darby’s view, the
Tribulation would begin following the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This belief in the physical removal of
Christians from the Earth prior to the Tribulation, widely known as “the
rapture,” was invented by Darby
in the 1820s and its lack of scriptural support has been widely noted by
theologians of various denominations as well as biblical scholars. However, it
is important to point that there are differences among dispensationalist
Christians as to whether the rapture will occur before, during or after the
Tribulation period.
Yet, despite its relatively
short existence as an idea and lack of support in the Bible, the rapture was
enthusiastically adopted by some churches in England and the United States,
particularly the latter. This was largely thanks to the work of highly
controversial theologian Cyrus Scofield.
Notably, Darby’s brand of
Christian eschatology coincides with similar developments in
Jewish eschatology, namely the ideas of Rabbi Zvi Hirsh Kalisher and
the creation of a new branch of Jewish messianism that believed that Jews must
proactively work to hasten the coming of their messiah by immigrating to Israel
and building a Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Darby’s beliefs,
and those he inspired promoted something similar in the sense that Christians
could hasten the coming of the rapture and the Tribulation by promoting the
immigration of Jews to Israel as well as the construction of a Third Jewish
Temple.
Darby traveled to North America
and several other countries to popularize his ideas, meeting several
influential pastors throughout the English speaking world, including James
Brookes, the future mentor of Cyrus Scofield. His travels and the spread of his
written works popularized his eschatological views among certain circles of
American and English Christians during the religious revival of the 19th
century. Darby’s beliefs were particularly attractive to the elite of both
countries, with some English noblemen placing newspaper advertisements urging
Jews to immigrate to Palestine as early as the 1840s.
Another prominent figure influenced
by Darby’s end-times doctrine was the American preacher Charles Taze Russell,
whose church later gave rise to several different churches, including the
Jehovah’s Witnesses. Decades before the founding of modern political Zionism,
Russell began preaching — not just to Christians, but to Jews in the United
States and elsewhere — about the need for mass Jewish immigration to Palestine.
As Rabbi Kalisher had done
a few decades prior,
Russell penned a letter in
1891 to a wealthy member of the Rothschild banking family, Edmond de
Rothschild, as well as Maurice von Hirsch, a wealthy German financier, about
his plan for the Jewish settlement of Palestine. Russell described his plan as
follows:
My suggestion is that the
wealthy Hebrews purchase from Turkey, at a fair valuation, all of her property
interest in these lands: i.e., all of the Government lands (lands not held by
private owners), under the provision that Syria and Palestine shall be
constituted a free state.”
The same plan was to resurface
a few years later in arguably the most influential Zionist book of all time,
Theodore Herzl’s The Jewish State, which was published in 1896.
It is unknown whether
Rothschild or Hirsch was influenced at all by Russell’s letter, though
Russell’s ideas did have a lasting impact on some prominent American Jews and
American Christians with regard to his promotion of Jewish immigration to
Palestine.
The same year that Russell
wrote his letter to de Rothschild and von Hirsch, another influential
dispensationalist preacher wrote another document that is often overlooked in
exploring the role of American Christians in the development and popularization
of Zionism. William E. Blackstone, an American preacher who was greatly influenced
by Darby and other dispensationalists of the era, had spent decades promoting
with great fervor the immigration of Jews to Palestine as a means of fulfilling
Biblical prophecy.
The culmination of Blackstone’s
efforts came in the form of the Blackstone Memorial, a petition that
pleaded that then-President of the United States Benjamin Harrison and his
secretary of state, James Blaine, take action “in favor of the restoration of
Palestine to the Jews.” The largely forgotten petition asked Harrison and
Blaine to use their influence to “secure the holding at an early date, of an
international conference to consider the condition of the Israelites and their
claims to Palestine as their ancient home, and to promote, in all other just
and proper ways, the alleviation of their suffering condition.”
As with Russell’s letter to de
Rothschild and von Hirsch, it is unknown exactly how influential the Blackstone
Memorial was in influencing the views or policies of Harrison or Blaine.
However, the Blackstone Memorial petition is highly significant because of its
signatories, which included the most influential and wealthiest Americans of
the era, the majority of whom were Christians.
Signatories of
the Blackstone Memorial included J.D. Rockefeller, the country’s first
billionaire; J.P. Morgan, the wealthy banker; William McKinley, future
president of the United States; Thomas Brackett Reed, then speaker of the
House; Melville Fuller, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; the mayors of New
York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston and Chicago; the editors of
the Boston
Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, among others; and numerous
other members of Congress, as well as influential businessmen and clergymen.
Though some rabbis were included as signatories, the petition’s content was opposed by most
American Jewish communities. In other words, the primary goal of Zionism,
before it even became a movement, was widely supported by the American
Christian elite, but opposed by American Jews.
The Blackstone Memorial would
later attract the attention of Louis Brandeis, one of the most prominent
American Jewish Zionists, who would later refer to Blackstone
as the real “founding father of Zionism,” according to Brandeis’ close friend
Nathan Straus. Brandeis would eventually succeed in convincing an elderly
Blackstone to petition then-President Woodrow Wilson with a second Blackstone
Memorial in 1916 that was presented in private to Wilson nearly a year later.
Instead of gathering signatures
from prominent members of America’s elite class, Blackstone this time focused
on shoring up support from Protestant organizations, namely the Presbyterian
Church, in keeping with Wilson’s Presbyterian faith. According to historian
Jerry Klinger, president of the Jewish American Society for Historic
Preservation, this change in focus had been Brandeis’,
not Blackstone’s, idea.
Alison Weir, author of Against Our Better
Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel,
described Brandeis as “one of the most influential” American Zionists and a key
figure in the efforts to push Wilson to support the formation of a Jewish state
in Palestine, of which Blackstone’s second petition was part. However, Weir
asserted that Blackstone’s second petition was secondary to a so-called
“gentleman’s agreement” whereby English
officials promised to support a Jewish state in Palestine if American Zionists,
led by Brandeis, were able to secure the United States’ entry into World War I.
Wilson ultimately supported
Blackstone’s new document, which was never presented publicly to the president,
but privately by Rabbi Stephen Wise. This second Blackstone Memorial was a key
component of the Brandeis-led campaign that eventually guaranteed American
support — i.e., private support — for the Balfour Declaration, which
established British intentions to support a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine.
Notably, the Balfour Declaration is named for the then-English Foreign Secretary
Arthur Balfour, himself a Christian
dispensationalist, though Weir told MintPress that Balfour was more
likely influenced by political imperatives than religious motives. The only
person in the British cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration was its only
Jewish member, Edwin Montagu.
The Balfour Declaration was
addressed to a member of the Rothschild banking family, Lionel Walter
Rothschild, the last in a series of letters written to members of the
Rothschild family urging them to use their wealth and political influence to
favor the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine: from Rabbi Kalisher, who
wrote to Baron Amschel Rothschild in 1836; to Charles Taze Russell, who wrote
to Edmond de Rothschild in 1891; and finally to the Balfour Declaration,
written to Lionel Walter Rothschild in 1917.
Weir told MintPress that the Rothschilds
figure so prominently in these early efforts to establish a Jewish state in
Palestine owing to “their wealth and the power that goes with it,” making them
very sought after by those who felt that a Jewish state could be formed in
Palestine by the purchase of the territory by wealthy European Jews, as both
Kalisher and Russell had proposed. However, the Balfour Declaration was
addressed to the Rothschilds because, at that time, members of the Rothschild
family, Edmond de Rothschild in particular, had become among the strongest
supporters of the Zionist cause.
Though the declaration carries
his name, it is unclear whether Balfour himself actually authored the document.
Some historians — such as Michael Rubinstein, former president of the Jewish
Historical Society of England — have made the case that
the declaration itself was written by Leopold Amery, then-political secretary
of England’s War Cabinet and a Zionist who, despite his commitment to the
Zionist cause, obfuscated his Jewish roots for much of his career for reasons
that are still the source of speculation.
As shown by the Balfour
Declaration and the lobbying efforts that led to its creation, support for what
would soon become known as Zionism among the nobility of England and the United
States was already formidable before Herzl even began work on The Jewish State. It is worth considering
that the power and influence of this religiously-motivated class of Christian
elites had an influence on Herzl and his ideas, particularly given the fact
that dispensationalist Christians had been promoting a Jewish ethnostate in
Palestine at a time when the idea was unpopular among
many prominent Jews in Europe and the United States.
Furthermore, the role of
Christian Zionists, as they would later become known, continued well after
Herzl began his Zionist activities, and resulted in many of the most
influential acts that led to the establishment of the State of Israel,
including the Balfour Declaration.
Notably, Herzl’s own success in
promoting his views following the publication of The Jewish State was largely due to
English dispensationalist pastor William Hechler. Hechler, while serving as
chaplain at the British Embassy in Vienna, forged an alliance and
later close friendship with Herzl and was critical to negotiating meetings
between Herzl and prominent members of the German government, including Kaiser
Wilhelm II, which lent necessary political legitimacy to Herzl’s Zionist
movement.
A largely overlooked figure in
the rise of Zionism, Hechler is mentioned in Herzl’s diary more than any other
person and passionately felt that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine
would bring about the end times. Hechler is also known to have been extremely
interested in the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple
Mount, having devoted considerable
time to creating models of that Temple, some of which he prominently displayed
in his office and showed to Herzl with great enthusiasm during their first
meeting.
The Hechler-Herzl alliance is
one early example of how Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists each used the
motivations of the other for political gain despite the fact that Christian
Zionists often hold anti-Semitic views and secular Zionists, as well as
religious Zionists, do not hold Christianity in high regard. This opportunism
on the parts of both Christian and Jewish Zionists has been a key feature in
the rise of Zionism, particularly in the United States, and the case of Cyrus
Scofield, the man more responsible than any for popularizing Christian Zionism
among American evangelicals, offers another important example.
There is perhaps no other book
that has been more influential in the dissemination of Christian Zionism in the
United States than the Scofield Reference Bible, a version of the King James Bible whose annotations were written
by Cyrus Scofield. Scofield — who had no formal theological training, though he
later claimed to have a D.D. (doctor of divinity degree) — originally worked as
a lawyer and political operative in the state of Kansas and eventually became
the district attorney of that state.
Soon after his appointment to
the position, he was forced to resign as a result of numerous allegations of
corruption, including bribery, forging signatures on banknotes and stealing
political donations from then-Senator of Kansas James Ingalls. During this
time, Scofield abandoned his wife and two daughters, an action since blamed on
the burgeoning scandals he was facing as well as his self-admitted heavy drinking
habits.
Amid this backdrop, Scofield is
said to have become an evangelical around the year 1879 and soon became
associated with prominent dispensationalist preachers of the era, including
Dwight Moody and James Brookes. Local papers at the time, such as the Atchison Patriot, regarded Scofield’s
conversion and career change with great skepticism, referring to Scofield as
the “late lawyer, politician and shyster generally” who had disgraced himself
by committing “many malicious acts.”
Scofield went on to pastor
relatively small churches, moving from Kansas to Dallas, Texas, and later
Massachusetts. Yet, despite his lack of renown and his troubled history, by
1901 Scofield had managed to gain entrance to an exclusive men’s club in New
York, the Lotos Club, whose members at the time included steel magnate and
multi-millionaire Andrew Carnegie, members of the Vanderbilt
family, and famous American writer Samuel Clemens, better known
by his pen name, Mark Twain.
Scofield’s membership in this
exclusive club — as well as the club’s patronage of his activities, which
granted him lodging and financing to produce what would become the Scofield Reference Bible
— has
been the subject of considerable speculation. Indeed, many have noted that the
presence of a fundamentalist, dispensationalist small-town preacher with a
disgraced political past in a club stuffed with some of the country’s most
elite academics, writers and robber barons just doesn’t add up.
Joseph M. Canfield, in his
book The Incredible Scofield and
his Book, asserted that “the admission of Scofield to the
Lotus Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the
suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of
C.I. Scofield.”
Canfield puts forth the theory
in his book that the person “directing” Scofield’s career was connected to New
York lawyer and Zionist activist Samuel Untermeyer, who was on the club’s
executive committee and was a close associate of Louis Brandeis and influential in
the administration of Woodrow Wilson. He then notes that Scofield’s annotated
bible was later “most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the
international interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects — the Zionist
Movement.”
Other scholars, such as David
Lutz, have been more explicit than
Canfield in linking Untermeyer’s Zionist activism to his role in financially
backing Scofield and his work on his annotated Bible. Ultimately, like the
Blackstone Memorial before it, the Lotos Club’s patronage of Scofield’s work
again reveals the interest of the American elite of the era, Christian and
Jewish alike, in promoting Christian Zionism.
Untermeyer and the Lotos Club
notably also funded Scofield’s numerous travels to Europe, including one
fateful trip to England where Scofield met with Henry Frowde, publisher of
Oxford University Press. Frowde was taken with Scofield’s work, largely owing
to the fact that Frowde was a member of
the “Exclusive Brethren,” a religious group founded by John Nelson Darby, the
father of dispensationalism. Oxford University Press subsequently published
the Scofield
Reference Bible in 1909. Twenty years after its publication, it became the first-ever Oxford
publication to generate over a million dollars in sales.
Scofield’s Bible became spectacularly popular
among American fundamentalists soon after its publication, partly because it
was the first annotated bible that sought to interpret the text for the reader
as well as because it became the central text of several influential seminaries
that were set up after its 1909 publication. Among Scofield’s many annotations
are claims that have since become central to Christian Zionism, such as
Scofield’s annotation of Genesis 12:3 that those who curse Israel (interpreted by Christian
Zionists to mean the state of Israel since its founding in 1948) will be cursed
by God and those that bless Israel will similarly be blessed.
Modern Christian Zionists, like
Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), have frequently cited
this interpretation that originated with Scofield in defending extreme
pro-Israel stances. For instance, Hagee made the following statement in
2014:
You have to go back to basics,
with the fact that in Genesis (chapter 1), God created the world and made a
very solemn promise (brought in Gen. 12:3), ‘I will bless those who bless you
and I will curse those who curse you.’ From that moment on, every nation that
ever blessed Israel has been blessed by God. And every nation that has ever
persecuted the Jewish people, God crushed. And so He will continue.”
Despite the widespread
dissemination of the Scofield Reference Bible and its popularization among
American evangelical churches and seminaries, the public influence of
dispensationalist eschatology and Christian Zionism on American politics was
relatively limited for much of the 20th century. However, the private influence
of Christian dispensationalists was nonetheless present, as seen through the
role of dispensationalist preacher and
Third Temple advocate Billy Graham and his close relationships to
several presidents including Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Richard
Nixon.
Then the political power of
dispensationalist theology dramatically moved from the private quarters of the
halls of power into the mainstream American political discourse with the
founding of the Moral Majority by evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell in 1979.
In the early 1970s, Falwell’s
growing ministry was bringing in millions of dollars annually, especially his
nationally broadcast program “The Old Time Gospel Hour,” which ran on several
major cable networks at the time. Despite — or perhaps because of — the spike
in donations, Falwell was soon targeted by
the federal government, specifically the Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC), for “fraud and deceit” and “gross insolvency” in the financial
management of his ministry, particularly the ministry’s sale of $6.6 million in
church bonds. The SEC lawsuit was eventually settled when a group of
businessmen in Lynchburg, Virginia — where Falwell’s ministry was based — took
over the ministry’s finances for the next several years, until 1977. Falwell
blamed his ministry’s financial problems on his “financial ignorance.”
One year after his ministry
appeared to be on a better financial footing, Falwell received an invitation to
visit the state of Israel and was personally invited on the all-expenses-paid
trip by Menachem Begin, then the prime minister of Israel and leader of the
Likud Party. The trip would mark the beginning of a long friendship and close
relationship between Falwell and Begin and, more broadly, a relationship
between American evangelical leaders and Israel’s Likud Party. As Israeli historian
Gershom Gorenberg notes in
his book The
End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, the Begin administration “was
the first to tap evangelical enthusiasm for Israel and turn it into political
and economic support.”
Soon after returning from
Israel, Falwell’s finances again came under federal
scrutiny after a federal investigation found that Falwell
had transferred the health insurance policies of his employees to an unlicensed
shell company with just $128 in assets and hundreds of thousands in dollars in
unpaid claims. Just as Falwell’s financial troubles began to mount yet again,
he received a generous gift from none other than Begin in the form of a private Learjet valued at
$4 million. Shortly thereafter, Falwell went on to found the
Moral Majority organization, “after consultations with
theologians and political strategists.”
The Moral Majority is widely
credited with turning the Christian evangelical right into a major political force in
the United States, promoting extremely pro-Israel policies, increased defense
spending, a Reaganite approach to the challenges of the Cold War, as well as
conservative domestic policies. Falwell frequently utilized his gift from Begin
in traveling and promoting the new organization, as well as himself as a major
public figure.
The Moral Majority marks a
clear turning point in the Israel-U.S. evangelical relationship, as it made
fervent support for Israel an area of major importance to evangelical voters
and also led many evangelical voters to pay closer attention to events going on
in the Middle East. Yet, given Falwell’s strong promotion of Christian Zionism,
many evangelicals who became increasingly politically active following the
organization’s founding not only supported Israel’s policies of the era but
also supported many of the future ambitions of Begin and the Likud Party. This
support was solidified by
the beginning of the Israeli Ministry of Tourism’s ongoing practice of offering
U.S. evangelical leaders free “familiarization” tours to Israel in the early
1980s.
Begin’s vision of “Greater
Israel” — the complete annexation of Palestine as well as large parts of Lebanon,
Syria, Iraq and Egypt by Israel — was also shared and promoted by Falwell. In
1983, Falwell stated that
“Begin will quickly tell you, ‘We don’t have all the land yet we’re going to
have,’” and further predicted that Israel would never relinquish control over
the occupied West Bank because Begin was determined to keep the land “which has
been delivered to them (the Israelis).”
Falwell framed Begin’s
expansionist ambitions as a religious belief in “the inerrancy of the Old
Testament,” a sentiment Falwell shared. Falwell also pushed for a U.S. recognition
of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and felt that construction of a Third
Temple on the Temple Mount was necessary to usher in the end times and the
second coming of Christ.
As Falwell helped turn
Christian Zionism into a major political force in the United States, he also
made himself a key political figure in the Reagan era and an important
go-between for U.S.-Israel relations. In 1981 Begin informed Falwell of his
plans to bomb an Iraqi nuclear facility before he
informed the Reagan administration with the hopes that Falwell would “explain
to the Christian public the reasons for the bombing.” According to Canadian
academic David S. New, Begin told Falwell during
that phone call: “Get to work for me.”
In addition, Falwell frequently
met with Begin, whom he later called a personal friend, and these
meetings often overlapped with
Begin’s official meetings with Reagan. A year later, Begin gave Falwell
Israel’s Jabotinsky award, making Falwell the first non-Jew to receive the
honor for his advocacy on behalf of Israel and, more specifically, Likud
policies and ambitions.
Though the Moral Majority
officially shuttered its doors in 1989, its political legacy persisted long
after, as did Falwell’s political clout. Indeed, following Begin’s model,
Benjamin Netanyahu, during his first term as prime minister, also made a habit
of visiting Falwell, meeting with the controversial pastor even before he met
with political officials in his visits to Washington.
During one trip to D.C. in
1998, Netanyahu’s first visit was to an event co-hosted by Falwell, where the
pastor praised Netanyahu as “the Ronald Reagan of Israel.” The New York Times described
the purpose of Netanyahu’s U.S. visit not as a visit aimed at meeting with
government officials, but rather one intended “to shore up his base of
traditional support in the United States. Conservative Christian groups have
long been ardent supporters of Israel because of its religious importance to
Christianity.”
However, this relationship
between Christian Zionists like Falwell and prominent right-wing Israeli
politicians has not been without its controversy, especially given that
pro-Israel evangelicals like Falwell have a history of making anti-semitic
statements.
For example, during a 1999
sermon, Falwell discussed his interpretation of end-times prophecy, widely
shared by Christian Zionist evangelicals, that the Second Coming would follow
not just the creation of the state of Israel but the construction of a Third
Temple on the Temple Mount, from which a figure known to Christians as the
“Antichrist” would reign. In responding to his own rhetorical question as to
whether the Antichrist is “alive and well today,” Falwell stated that “Probably
because when he appears during the tribulation period he will be a full-grown
counterfeit of Christ. Of course, he’ll be Jewish.”
Falwell’s comments were immediately condemned by
a variety of Jewish groups, including the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League
(ADL). Rabbi Leon Klenicki, then-director of interfaith affairs for the ADL,
noted that Falwell’s view is a “common theological position” among American
evangelicals and that Falwell was “an influential voice among evangelical and
charismatic Christians” who “only supports Israel for his own Christological
ends.” “He sees us only as the ones who prepare the coming of Jesus,”
Klenicki stated at
the time. “It is a great disappointment after more than 30 years of dialogue;
he’s still in the Middle Ages.”
Another prominent
dispensationalist with great political and literary influence is Hal Lindsey,
the author and co-author of several books, including The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey’s work greatly
influenced many prominent U.S. politicians like Ronald Reagan, who was so moved
by Lindsey’s books that he invited Lindsey
to address a National Security Council meeting on nuclear war plans and helped
make Lindsey an influential consultant with several members of Congress and the
Pentagon.
As noted by Israeli historian Gershom
Gorenberg, Lindsey sees Jews as serving “two central roles” in
Christian dispensationalist eschatology:
[T]he first — despite his
insistence of love for Jews — is the classic one of Christian anti-Jewish
polemic: They are ‘the Jewish people who crucified Jesus’ and the archetype of
those who ignore the truth of prophecy. The second role is to fulfill prophecy
despite themselves.”
Gorenberg further notes that
Lindsey believes that Jews have fulfilled two of the three crucial prophecies
that will usher in the end times, with the first being the creation of the
state of Israel in 1948 and the second being the Israeli conquest and occupation
of Jerusalem after the Six Day War in 1967. According to Lindsey:
“There remains but one more event to completely set the stage for Israel’s part
in the last great act of her historical drama. That is to rebuild the ancient
Temple…”
As Falwell’s and Lindsey’s
comments reveal, the eschatological views of dispensationalism frequently
perceive the Jewish people as little more than pawns that must fulfill certain
requirements — e.g., establishing the state of Israel, conquering Jerusalem,
building a Third Temple — in order to hasten the salvation and “rapture” of
evangelical Christians. Meanwhile, Jews in Israel who do not convert to
Christianity are expected to die horrible deaths, though some Christian
Zionists in recent years, as will be seen shortly, have sought to adjust this
still common theological position.
Despite the anti-semitic
motivations underlying evangelical support for the state of Israel and the
Likud-supported vision of “Greater Israel,” the politically active Christian
Zionist movement that Falwell helped create translated into a strong support
base for Israel and right-wing Likud policy that has made it crucial to
prominent Israeli politicians.
For instance, significantly more American
Christians (55 percent) than American Jews (40 percent) believe that God gave
Israel to the Jews while that sentiment is shared by only 19 percent of
Israeli Christians. In addition, with regards to the Trump administration’s
pro-Israel policies, only 15 percent of
evangelical Christians believe that President Trump favors Israel too strongly
while 42 percent of American Jews hold the view that Trump is biased in favor
of Israel.
In a video recorded in the
early 2000s — later broadcast on Israeli TV — Netanyahu, speaking to a family
of Jewish settlers, described the mass support among Americans, particularly
evangelicals, for Israel as “absurd,” saying:
America is something that can
be easily moved. Moved in the right direction. They won’t get in our way; 80
percent of the Americans supprt us. It’s absurd.”
In a 2017 speech to
the Christian Zionist group CUFI, Netanyahu made it clear that much of this
“absurd” support came from American evangelicals, stating that “America has no
better friend than Israel and Israel has no better friend than America, and
Israel has no better friend in America than you.”
Richard Silverstein — an
academic and journalist whose work has been published in Haaretz and MintPress, among other outlets — has
argued that Israeli politicians, particularly Netanyahu, have sought out
support from evangelical groups despite their anti-Semitic undertones and the
fact they the act out of self-interest in pursuing their political objectives.
In a 2017 article,
Silverstein stated that for Israel’s nationalist right-wing:
Judaism is not a spiritual
value, it is a physical manifestation of power in the world. These Israelis
understand that not all Jews are their “brothers.” Some Jews are too effete,
too liberal, too humane, too universalist. These Jews are the detritus which
will be washed away by the tide of history. Israeli nationalists need to
replace these traditional Jewish allies and have done so by finding new ones:
Christian evangelicals, African dictators, European neo-Nazis. Zionism as they
define it is less a movement dedicated to ethics and more one dedicated to
self-interest.”
As Falwell began to fade from
public view in the early 2000s, his legacy has largely fallen to a handful of
preachers now at the forefront of Christian Zionism and Christian Zionist
political activism, with Falwell’s son, Jerry Falwell Jr., ranking prominently
among them. However, of the preachers that followed in Falwell’s footsteps, one
stands out: John Hagee.
Hagee is the pastor of
Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, which has an active membership of
over 22,000. A charismatic Christian who believes in dispensationalist
eschatology and thinks that Christians are biblically required to support
Israel, Hagee has long been a major advocate for Israel within evangelical and
charismatic Christianity circles and has raised over $80 million for Israel since
he first began hosting “A Night to Honor Israel” events in the early 1980s.
In 2006, Hagee sought to create
the “Christian AIPAC” and revived a then-defunct organization previously
founded in 1975 known as Christians United for Israel, or CUFI, mentioned at
the beginning of this installment. Since its re-founding, CUFI has grown
exponentially, now counting 7 million
members, a figure that exceeds the Jewish population of the
United States, which stands at around 5.7 million. Hagee chairs its executive
board, which included Jerry Falwell up until Falwell’s death in 2007.
CUFI is exempt from
paying U.S. taxes and from publicly disclosing its finances because it is officially
registered as a church, though it is often likened to an arm of the pro-Israel
lobby in the United States and actively promotes and
funds illegal West Bank settlements. CUFI also advocates for Israeli
sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount and the construction of
a Third Temple.
Much has been written about
CUFI’s influence in the Republican Party, which began under the George W. Bush
administration soon after its founding. As journalist Max Blumenthal noted
in a 2006 article for The Nation: “Over the past months, the
White House has convened a series of off-the-record meetings about its policies
in the Middle East with leaders of Christians United for Israel (CUFI).”
As a result of these meetings,
CUFI aligned itself tightly with the neoconservatives that were well
represented in the Bush administration, even appointing neoconservative and
Christian Zionist Gary Bauer to its board and naming Bauer the first director
of its lobbying arm, the CUFI Action Fund. Bauer is a founding member of
the highly controversial and now-defunct neoconservative group, Project for a
New American Century (PNAC), and has also served on the executive board of the
neoconservative group Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).
CUFI has since won powerful
allies and counts neoconservative Elliott Abrams; former CIA director James
Woosley; neoconservative archon Bill Kristol; former Arkansas Governor Mike
Huckabee; Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX);
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence
among its staunchest supporters. At a CUFI summit last year, Netanyahu described CUFI as
a “vital part of Israel’s national security.”
In addition, CUFI has close
ties to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the top donor to President Trump and
the entire Republican Party. Adelson even received a special award from
Hagee at a 2014 CUFI event. “I’ve never had a greater warm feeling than being
honored by Pastor Hagee,” said a beaming Sheldon Adelson at the time.
At the most recent CUFI summit,
held on Monday, the Trump administration sent Pence, Pompeo, U.S. Ambassador to
Israel David Friedman, Assistant to the President and Special Representative
for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt, and National Security Advisor
John Bolton, all of whom spoke at the summit.
CUFI’s
2019 Washington Summit is days away and includes speakers @VP @Mike_Pence, @SecPompeo, @USAmbIsrael David
Friedman, NSA @AmbJohnBolton,
Assistant to President Trump @JdGreenblatt45, @DennisPrager,
and @PastorJohnHagee.
Register at https://t.co/q1hsRMLNnA. pic.twitter.com/EO1Bi11llR
— Pastor John Hagee
(@PastorJohnHagee) July 4, 2019
In addition to its own
influence as an organization, the group has made Hagee himself a major
political player. In 2007, then-Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) compared Hagee to Moses,
stating:
I want to take to opportunity
to describe Pastor Hagee in the terms the Torah used to describe Moses. He is
an Ish Elohim. A man of God. And those words really do fit him. And I have something
else. Like Moses, he’s become the leader of a mighty multitude. Even greater
than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the Promised Land.”
Efforts by prominent
politicians to court Hagee were once numerous, until evidence of Hagee making
remarks about the Holocaust that were widely considered anti-semitic surfaced
during the 2008 presidential campaign. In those remarks, Hagee assertedthat
Adolf Hitler had been sent by God to act as a “hunter,” and force Jews by means
of the Holocaust to resettle in Palestine as a means of fulfilling Biblical
prophecy. Then-Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who had aggressively courtedHagee’s
endorsement, was forced to distance himself from Hagee after those comments
resurfaced.
Yet, the stigma around Hagee
has since worn off and his influence is again on the rise following Trump’s
election to the presidency, as evidenced by the attendance of numerous top
Trump officials to the 2019 CUFI Washington Summit earlier this week.
Though he was not included on
the official board of Trump’s evangelical advisers early in Trump’s
presidency, several slightly less controversial
allies and associatesof Hagee were, including Tom Mullins, Jerry
Falwell Jr., and Kenneth Copeland. Then, a few months after Trump’s
inauguration, Hagee “dropped by” the White House unannounced and
met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss U.S. support for Israel. He also
met with Trump a few weeks before Trump announced plans to move the U.S.
Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a meeting at which Trump had reportedly promised Hagee
that the embassy would soon be moved and told the pastor “I will not disappoint
you.” Hagee described Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem as having “biblical
timing of absolute precision.”
More recently, Hagee was part
of an exclusive group of evangelical leaders who met with White House officials this
past March prior to the partial release of the so-called “Deal of the Century,”
aimed at bringing “peace” to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is widely viewed as
greatly favoring Israel and is expected to be rejectedoutright
by Palestinian leadership.
After the meeting, Hagee issued
an urgent prayer request. ”Our topic of discussion was discussing the
forthcoming peace plan concerning Israel. Israel and the Jewish people need our
prayers and our advocacy like never before,” Hagee said in a video posted
to the CUFI Twitter page soon after the meeting. “The Bible gives the command,
‘For Zion’s sake, I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake, I will not
keep my peace.’ I urge you tonight to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”
As the final installment of
this series will show, the shared apocalyptic visions of extremist religious
Zionists and Christian Zionists regarding a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple
Mount is a major driver behind the Deal of the Century and was also a major
factor in the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as
Israel’s capital, despite Palestinian hopes that East Jerusalem would serve as
the capital of their future state. Notably, Christian Zionists believe that
Palestinians must be expelled from
the state of Israel. In addition, these end-times beliefs are also a factor in
the administration’s push for war with Iran, which Christian Zionists like
Hagee and Pompeo believe is also a requisite for
the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.
While Hagee’s influence and the
influence of his organization CUFI are stronger than ever with Trump in the
White House, his political clout with the Trump administration is, at least
partially, due to the presence of staunch Christian Zionists in two of the top
offices in the executive branch: vice president and secretary of state.
Though several Trump officials
spoke at the recent CUFI summit, two stand out — not just for their
high-ranking positions but also for their open admissions that their Christian
Zionist beliefs guide their policies. These officials are Vice President Mike Pence
and Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
After Trump chose his running
mate, Pence’s religious fervor came under media scrutiny,
with several outlets noting that he was known to be an ardent Christian
Zionist. Pence’s faith gained particular attention owing to his past statements
on Israel, which he has often described in
prophetic terms.
Though raised Catholic, Pence
gradually transitioned to an “evangelical Catholic” and then to an evangelical
Protestant and has since become a key political figure representing the
fundamentalist Christian movement that promotes “dominionism,” an ideology that
varies in its interpretations but ultimately seeks to see the secular nature of
the U.S. government shift towards one governed by “Biblical law.” Pence’s
association with this movement has led prominent voices in the media to accuse himof
supporting a theocratic form of government.
Though many of the initial
concerns about Pence revolved around his likely effects on domestic policy,
much of his influence has instead been seen in foreign policy, including the
administration’s Middle East policy.
His public identification as
a Christian Zionist and his speech to the 2017 CUFI summit, the first vice
president to ever speak at the annual event, have led some to worry that the
Christian Zionist view of prophecy is guiding Pence’s political actions.
Following Pence’s first speech
at CUFI, Daniel Hummel, a scholar and fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told the Washington
Post:
Christian Zionism has a long
history in American politics, but it has never captured the bully pulpit of the
White House. Past administrations often used general biblical language in
reference to Israel, but never has the evangelical theology of Christian
Zionism been so close to the policymaking apparatus of the executive branch.
By identifying with Christian
Zionism while in office, Pence risks the Trump administration’s ongoing search
for an ‘ultimate deal’ to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and erodes the
U.S.’ claim that it can be an ‘honest broker’ in the Middle East.”
Concerns that the U.S. is under
the influence of extremist religious Zionism and Christian Zionism that would
prevent the country from acting as an “honest broker” in the Israel-Palestine
conflict have, unsurprisingly, been proven true.
In fact, Pence’s religious beliefs are believed to have been a major factor in
Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move
the U.S. Embassy to the contested city.
Though Mike Pence is the
highest-ranking member of the Trump administration who is openly a Christian
Zionist, it is Pompeo that is the most overt and open about how his religious
beliefs regarding the end times guide his decision-making as head of the U.S.
State Department.
For uch of his political
career, Pompeo has framed U.S. counterterrorism policy as a “holy war”
between Christianity and Islam, which he believes is the earthly equivalent of
a cosmic battle between good and evil. In 2017, as CIA director, Pompeo
claimed:
Radical Islamic terror [will]
continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and
fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior [and] truly
the only solution for our world.”
That same year, Pompeo created a
new CIA “mission center” targeting Iran headed by Michael D’Andrea, whose CIA
nickname is “The Prince of Darkness.”
Pompeo, like many Christian Zionists, believes that war between the United
States and Iran is part of the end times, a belief that is outright alarming
given his prior control over CIA covert operations and his focus on Iran, as
well as his current role as the U.S.’ chief diplomat, in which he has also been
laser-focused on promoting an aggressive policy towards Iran.
In addition to his views on
“holy war,” Pompeo also frequently discussed his views on the rapture while
serving as CIA director. TYT reported last
year that Pompeo had spoken about the rapture so frequently that it had
reportedly frightened top CIA officials.
According to Michael Weinstein
— founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation,
a watchdog group on issues of religious freedom in the military and
intelligence community — who was quoted in the TYT report:
He [Pompeo] is intolerant of
anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian. The people that worked under him
at the CIA that came to us were never confused — they never had time to be
confused. They were shocked and then they were scared shitless.”
A 2015 video of Pompeo that
surfaced while he was CIA director also shows the former congressman describing politics as
“a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”
More recently, a New York Times article published in
March again brought Pompeo’s obsession with the end times back into public
view. Titled “The Rapture and the Real
World: Mike Pompeo Blends Beliefs and Policy,” the article
detailed how Pompeo has made it standard operating procedure to mix his
Christian Zionist views with his approach to foreign policy. That article
also referenced the statementPompeo
made earlier this year, in which he opined that it was “certainly possible”
that President Trump had been sent by God to “save the Jewish people from the
Iranian menace.”
Pompeo made those statements
during an official trip to Jerusalem that was also controversial for other
reasons. Indeed, in a state department video shared on social media and meant
to publicize Pompeo’s trip, footage of a model of the
Third Jewish Temple was included while footage of the Al
Aqsa mosque was notably excluded, despite it being the most iconic building in
Jerusalem.
Given that Pompeo had also
visited the tunnels that have worn away the historic mosque’s foundations, many
Palestinians took the video as a sign that the Trump administration was
colluding with the Temple Activist movement in Israel, which was discussed in
detail in Part II of
this series.
Well before Theodore Herzl
founded political Zionism and published The Jewish State, Christian Zionists in the
United States and England were already seeking to direct and influence the
foreign policy of both nations in service of a religious obsession with
ushering in the end times. The historical record clearly shows how Christian Zionists
have influenced events throughout history, particularly in regard to the
founding of the state of Israel and subsequent developments in the
Israel-Palestine conflict.
In the pursuit of these
dispensationalist end-times prophecies, Christian Zionists have forged
alliances with Jewish Zionists and each has opportunistically used the other in
order to usher in the common events that are believed to facilitate the coming
of their respective apocalypses or to aid more secular, political goals. From
Hechler and Herzl, to Scofield and Untermeyer, to Begin and Falwell, these
alliances have shaped the policy of Western governments, particularly the U.S.
and England, for over a century.
Today, only one such prophecy
has yet to be fulfilled, the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on the
Temple Mount, which is currently occupied by the Al Aqsa mosque compound. Now,
more than ever before, Israel’s government, as shown in Part II, is filled with
high-ranking officials who openly call for Al Aqsa’s destruction and seek to
hastily construct a Third Temple. Similarly, as this report has shown, the
Trump administration is greatly influenced by Christian Zionists who also seek
the mosque’s destruction, in hopes that the Third Temple will soon be built.
Yet, the Trump administration’s
ties to this apocalyptic ideology go even deeper than has been discussed in
this article, as many other influential members in the Trump administration —
especially top Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, and U.S.
Ambassador to Israel David Friedman — also share and actively promote this
extremist religious Zionist ideology that seeks to rebuild a Third Temple. As
will be seen in the next installment of this series, this ideology is also a
driving factor for top Trump and Republican Party donors such as Sheldon
Adelson.
The end result is that the hold
of this apocalyptic ideology on both the governments of Israel and the United
States appears to be stronger now than ever, meaning that the danger currently
facing Al Aqsa mosque, and with it world peace, looms large.
Correction | An earlier version
of this article stated that Hal Lindsey was a co-author of the popular Left Behind book series. This was
incorrect, as that series was co-written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, both
of whom were influenced by Lindsey’s earlier books including The Late Great Planet Earth.
Feature photo | Texas
evangelist John Hagee of Christians United for Israel addresses a crowd of his
followers and Israeli supporters at a rally at the Jerusalem convention center,
April 6, 2008. Sebastian Scheiner | AP
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News
journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media
outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st
Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television
appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised
Integrity in Journalism.
(Republished from Mint Press News by
permission of author or representative)
