White evangelical Christians are some of Israel's biggest supporters. Why?
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
What's good? You're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm Gene Demby. And today on the show, we are starting in Jerusalem.
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MIKE HUCKABEE: Hi. I'm Mike Huckabee. I've been coming to Israel since 1973, when I was all of 17 years old. But starting in 1981, I started bringing groups here.
DEMBY: Y'all remember Mike Huckabee. He used to be the governor of Arkansas. He ran for president a couple times. He's a media guy now, and one of his side hustles is that he leads these semiregular tours in Israel for evangelical Christians like himself.
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HUCKABEE: He is risen. That is the message we all need to never forget. To get information on our next trip to the land of the Bible, go to thegreatesttrip.com - thegreatesttrip.com.
DANIEL HUMMEL: I'm sure it's very expensive to go on his tours. There's a high demand for them.
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DEMBY: That voice you're hearing belongs to Daniel Hummel. Daniel is a fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
HUMMEL: I also direct a research center near campus called The Lumen Center, and I'm a historian of American religion and American foreign policy.
DEMBY: Daniel did some of his research in Israel and interviewed people on these tours while he was there. He said there are literally hundreds of groups that run tours like this. And, you know, whether they're led by Mike Huckabee or someone else, they tend to visit the same sites and hit on the same general themes. One of the most spectacular moments on the tour Huckabee leads, though, is when he takes the tourists to this place called Masada. It's this ancient fortress high on top of a mountain in the middle of the desert.
HUMMEL: It's the site of a Jewish resistance movement, a sort of massacre, in the year 79 A.D., when the Jews are resisting Roman rule. And so there's really nothing having to do with Christian history here. This is about, sort of, Jewish history, Roman history. But one of the first things you do in the Mike Huckabee tour is you go to the top, and you start singing a few hymns, including "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." It's sort of, like, thematically good to do it up there.
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UNIDENTIFIED CHOIR #1: (Singing) For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe.
HUMMEL: But then he sort of tells everyone, like, consider this your home. Like, think about that you're being welcomed home here in Israel. And he's trying to get across that the Christian faith started in Israel, just like Judaism did, and he's trying to sort of reorient the Americans on his tour to think not of America as their home, but Israel as their home.
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UNIDENTIFIED CHOIR #2: (Singing) His kingdom is forever.
DEMBY: Before October 7, before the pandemic, the Israeli government says about 900,000 Americans visited Israel every year as tourists, about half of whom were Christian. And it's tough to get hard stats on this part, but we know a big chunk of those visitors are evangelicals. They're on religious tours.
HUMMEL: These tours are not sort of, like, centrally organized. There are literally thousands of tourist groups that go to Israel from the American Christian community. This is basically the same format of touring that's been around since the '67 war, which made a lot of these territories administered by Israel.
DEMBY: Daniel Hummel said that, for decades, these tours have tended to be extremely curated. And the people who organize them are really careful about which parts of Israel they expose people to.
HUMMEL: So you might talk to an Arab Israeli who really likes being Israeli and will tell you about why that is or sort of what the benefits of being Israeli are for that Arab Israeli. This might happen in a place like Nazareth, which is a very important site for Jesus' story, but it's also majority Arab - majority Arab Christian, actually. So there could, in theory, be a lot of opportunities for Western Christians to meet even evangelical Palestinians - Palestinians who share essentially the same theology, but a very different political context - but those tend to be avoided because they raise a lot of questions. They create a much more complicated narrative, and they're just, like, sort of uncomfortable if you're a typical evangelical Christian.
What these tours tend to avoid are the West Bank, except for some particular sites, like the Church of the Nativity, because it has resonance for Christians 'cause that's the site of Jesus's birth, but they tend to avoid areas that would be under the Palestinian Authority or under related authority. This is not the vision of the Holy Land that most Christians have when they come to Israel, and it's not the vision that they're really interested in learning more about.
DEMBY: It's a viewpoint Mike Huckabee gave voice to when speaking to the press on a 2017 trip to Ma'ale Adumim. It's a settlement in the West Bank considered illegal under international law.
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HUCKABEE: There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank - it's Judea and Samaria. There's no such thing as a settlement. They're communities. They're neighborhoods. They're cities. There's no such thing as an occupation.
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DEMBY: These kinds of trips, similar to Birthright for young Jewish people, are a small part of why so many evangelical Christians in the United States are also Zionists - staunch supporters of the State of Israel. And that evangelical support has huge consequences for the United States' relationship to Israel as a whole.
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JOHN HAGEE: Israel is not a political issue. Israel is a Bible issue.
NIKKI HALEY: No one can destroy what God has blessed, and make no mistake - God has blessed Israel.
DONALD TRUMP: And we move the capital of Israel to Jerusalem.
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TRUMP: That's for the evangelicals. The evangelicals are more excited about that than Jewish people. That's really - right?
DEMBY: So that's what we're getting into in this episode - how evangelical Christians have shaped U.S. support for Israel, and how the idea of Israel has shaped the politics of evangelical Christians.
We are in the eighth month of Israel's bombardment of Gaza. More than 34,000 people have been killed since Israel responded to Hamas' attacks on Israeli citizens on October 7. And so stateside, people have been paying a lot of attention to how American Jews feel about Israel's bombing of Gaza. Some attention has been paid to the way American Palestinians and American Muslims think about it - not enough. But when we talk about that region, American Christians - particularly evangelical Christians - they tend to be overlooked. That's likely because it's not as quickly named that Christians have an ethnoreligious stake in the fate of that region, which is a mistake because their political support for Israel is a major driver for U.S. policy in that region. It's not the only driver, of course - support for Israel has long been bipartisan and driven by a lot of factors. The United States routinely gives more foreign aid to Israel than it does to any other country, and almost all of that aid goes to Israel's military - about $3.3 billion a year.
Since the attacks on October 7, tourism to Israel is down, but some evangelicals are still traveling to Israel. Many of them are doing volunteer work to support Israelis, helping with things like orchard harvests or cooking meals for the Israeli military. And we've seen some distinctly Bible-y (ph) language being used in Washington by lawmakers. Take this moment, when administrators of Columbia University were called before Congress so they could testify about how they were handling student protests on campus. This is Congressman Rick Allen questioning Columbia's president, Minouche Shafik.
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RICK ALLEN: Are you familiar with Genesis 12:3?
MINOUCHE SHAFIK: Probably not as well as you are, Congressman.
ALLEN: (Laughter) Well, it's pretty clear. It was the covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear. If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.
SHAFIK: I have heard that. Now that you've explained it, yes, I have heard that before.
ALLEN: So it's now familiar. Do you consider that a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God of the Bible?
SHAFIK: Definitely not.
ALLEN: OK (laughter). Well, that's good - so here's the deal.
DEMBY: This perspective is not limited to individual politicians. Take Christians United For Israel - that's the country's largest Christian Zionist organization.
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HAGEE: CUFI supports Israel because God supports Israel, and his word commands believers to bless, pray, comfort and defend Israel and the Jewish people. For...
DEMBY: They've been fundraising for Israeli settlement projects for decades, and they've been leaning on lawmakers in Washington - especially Republican lawmakers - to give more military and financial support to Israel as it continues to bomb Gaza. Christians United for Israel say they have 10 million members in the United States. Just to put that in perspective, there are about 7.5 million Jews in the United States. So even if every Jewish person in this country was a Zionist - and, as we've talked about recently on the show, that is definitely not the case - then they would still be outnumbered by just this one Christian Zionist organization.
I was looking for a breakdown of what the white evangelical landscape even looks like, so I reached out to our play cousin, Robert P. Jones. He's been on CODE SWITCH a grip of times over the years.
ROBERT JONES: I am a religion scholar. I am the president and founder at Public Religion Research Institute.
DEMBY: PRRI is a nonpartisan organization that studies how Americans feel on all sorts of issues and how those feelings differ based on things like age and race and religion. Anyway, going back to evangelicals...
JONES: Well, you know, in public opinion surveys, we have a very specific definition. They are people who self-identify as white, as non-Hispanic, as Christian, as Protestant, and who also say that they are born-again or evangelical. So if you check all of those boxes, you get counted, in public opinion surveys today, as a white evangelical Protestant for shorthand.
DEMBY: Robert said that the share of White evangelicals in the United States has fallen since 2000. Back then, about a quarter of the country identified as White evangelical. As a group, they're getting older, and fewer young people are identifying as such. And those young people say that's in no small part because of social issues - particularly how churches treat LGBTQ folks.
JONES: Other people cited things being too partisan, which is something with the rise of the Christian right in the last few decades - and it being sort of not just political, but partisan - right? - the - overwhelmingly Republican - has been a turnoff for many young people as well.
DEMBY: So today, the share of the population that is white evangelicals is about 14% and holding steady. That's still more than 47 million people in this country. Again, just to put that into perspective, only about 2% of the American population is Jewish, and about 1% is Muslim. I had assumed that there were way more white evangelicals than that, just given how much sway they hold in our politics, but Robert said that's because they punch way above their weight in elections. They really turn out to the polls, and they're overwhelmingly clustered into one party.
JONES: Even though it's only 14% of the population, it makes up about a third of the Republican Party base.
DEMBY: All of that gives them a very big megaphone. For a lot of evangelicals, their investment in Israel is of spiritual importance, informed by Israel's role in the Bible, so I think we kind of got to talk about those biblical ideas and what they portend for a minute.
One of the flashiest versions of this idea is tied up with the end of the world. You might know the "Left Behind" series of books. They were New York Times bestsellers. They also became movies in the early 2000s. The inciting event in those stories is the Rapture - this moment when, according to one reading of the Bible, all the Christian believers in the world will one day disappear...
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DEMBY: ...In the blink of an eye.
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CHELSEA NOBLE: (As Hattie Durham) People are missing. Dozens of seats empty.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) What's going on, kid?
CLARENCE GILYARD: (As Bruce Barnes) It's written in the scriptures. I guarantee it.
DEMBY: The thought goes that, after the Rapture, all the nonbelievers who are left behind will have to live in the brutal, cruel, post-Christian world to fend for themselves.
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KIRK CAMERON: (As Cameron "Buck" Williams) Standing in the middle of an all-out attack.
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CAMERON: (As Cameron "Buck" Williams) The sun is gone. Fire is raining from the sky.
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JONES: There's going to be these end times that are terrible - seven years of global chaos, natural disasters and suffering, the rise of the Antichrist, Armageddon - like, these are words that we've heard - right? - in our culture.
DEMBY: And this period of tribulation will last until Christ returns, with all of his believers, to reign on Earth for a thousand years. And everybody on Earth, regardless of their religion, either will claim Jesus as their Lord and savior, or they will die very terribly. But - and this is why Israel matters here for so many evangelicals - in this prophecy, the restoration of a Jewish state in Israel was one of the dominoes that needed to fall in order for Jesus to return.
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HAGEE: This prophetic portrait paints the following sequence of events for the future - America and Europe become weakened and cannot respond to Israel in the time that Russia and the Arab invasion begins against Israel.
DEMBY: That's the founder of Christians United for Israel, John Hagee, preaching in 2006.
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HAGEE: This is God's plan. Why? Because he wants the Jewish people in Israel and around the world to know that He - the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - saved them.
DEMBY: As you can hear, there is a lot going on in this prophecy, and we can't get to it all here. And just to be clear, not all white evangelicals share this belief. But for a long time, a lot of the most influential evangelicals in the United States did. And this idea, as a result, has really spread and permeated the American Christian world. Here's Robert P. Jones again.
JONES: If you've been in pretty much any Protestant - and certainly evangelical - churches for any amount of time, you're going to run across hymns that have the word Zion in it, and they're not referring to Israel or Jews in those hymns. They're referring to Christians as the inheritors of the ultimate promise - Jesus and the Christian Church as the fulfillment of those initial promises to Abraham. So there's a way in which it gets transposed into this Christian key - right? - so that all of it then points to Christian authority. And again, even the part of Christian Zionism that has to do with Israel - you have to understand that, at the end of the day, Jews bow their knee to Jesus - right? - at the end of that vision.
DEMBY: This strand of Christian Zionism that is informed by this very particular reading of prophecy that we're talking about - it sits real close to the idea that America should be a nation for Christians only.
JONES: You know, and I use this word promised land - America as a promised land, right? - and you hear that all the time - you know, the manifest destiny, city set on a hill, all of these kind of metaphors. And even America as a new Zion - I mean, that's rife through our cultural lexicon, right? And all of that is borrowed from a kind of Zionist idea, but with white Christians seeing themselves as the proper final inheritors of those promises and being the chosen people.
DEMBY: And Robert says it's important to ask - who is not in this story?
JONES: And it's pretty clear that who's missing from that are Muslims.
DEMBY: And he says another big thing is this way of understanding that part of the world and its political actors is shaped more by religious belief than historical fact. He sees it as a dangerous approach to international politics.
JONES: It's disconnected from any understanding of geopolitics - you know, actual history, foreign policy - but solely based on this kind of mapping religious writings from 2,000 years ago directly onto the complex politics of modern nation states.
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DEMBY: When we come back...
HUMMEL: We now just sort of take for granted today that there are millions of evangelicals who really care about the issue of supporting Israel. That's a really recent development - that's probably in the last 30 years.
DEMBY: That's after the break. Stay with us.
Gene - just Gene this week - CODE SWITCH.
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DEMBY: So we've been talking about white evangelicals and how they've had this outsized influence in America's politics, particularly America's politics around Israel. As we said earlier, white evangelicals in the U.S. make up about 14% of the population, but their influence goes much further than that. I wanted to understand the theology and the history of that theology that was shaping evangelical beliefs towards Israel, and how all of that has played out over the years, so I started digging deeper with Daniel Hummel. Daniel is the religious historian we heard from earlier in this episode. For our purposes, conveniently, he's also the author of the book "Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, And U.S.-Israeli Relations," and he said that one of the things that's most important for us to understand is that for a long time, American evangelicals were firmly of the belief that religion and politics should not mix. That belief took on particular significance during the Civil War, when a lot of evangelical leaders were really concerned with the way that the war was dividing white people on the issue of slavery. And so these evangelical leaders were saying, look, it's not our job to worry about this. Let's stay out of it. Here's Daniel.
HUMMEL: The most influential person to pick up this way of thinking about the church was Dwight Moody, who was the most important revivalist in the 19th century in America. This is sort of a dated reference now, but he was like the Billy Graham of the 20th century. He spoke in front of millions of people, crucially in both the North and the South, and his message was this otherworldly church message, that the role of the church was not to adjudicate who was guilty for the Civil War or to try to get reparations for African Americans. All of that stuff was politics and worldly. What the church was called to do was go to evangelize in the United States in North America, but also to evangelize the world, and that was Moody's big call. And this is the way that the theology that we now call dispensationalism really entered into the mainstream of evangelicalism in the United States, is it was through this global mission's focus and the theology that underpinned that that became, for millions of evangelicals, just the sort of standard theology.
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DEMBY: All right - a quick explanatory comment about a term you just heard Daniel use. Dispensationalism is a way of reading the Bible that includes the idea that Jesus could come back at any moment, and as Daniel said, the people who believe this believe that that's why they shouldn't concern themselves with the politics of the day - they're on a cosmic timeline. So then how did this group become so concerned with the basket of thorny political issues that is Israel-Palestine?
HUMMEL: Right. It's a complicated story that takes place over a century, and so there's a lot of change over that time, but for these earlier evangelicals, people like Dwight Moody, they were very interested in the Zionist movement. So the Zionist movement dates back to the 19th century. We start seeing the waves of Zionist settlers in the 1890s and after. And so they were interested in that, but they really saw it as something that they didn't have to participate in personally. This was something that God was orchestrating - God would ultimately make sure it would happen, and their role was to focus in on evangelization and other things. Over time, that turns into active interest, and some of it actually has to do with the 1920s and '30s and this awakening of humanitarian concern for Jews that many evangelicals experienced at that time, and so they actually get sort of in the game in the 1920s and '30s, advocating for increased Jewish immigration to the United States, for increased Jewish immigration to Palestine, for increased aid to Jews in Europe - those types of things. It's still a really small elite of evangelicals that cares enough about this issue to do that.
What really sparks the interest is actually the founding of Israel in 1948 as a state, and this appears to fulfill prophetic expectations. The way that dispensationalists read prophecy is that ultimately, Jews would be regathered in their ancient homeland and that they would actually be given a state, just like in the Old Testament, there's the Kingdom of Israel. And it still takes a while, but by the 1960s, there's a growing group of evangelicals who, because of their prophecy beliefs, because of their humanitarian concerns and because of a broader shift in evangelicalism to become more politically active on all types of issues, these things combined together in the '60s to start creating the modern Christian Zionist movement that we now just sort of take for granted today - that there are millions of evangelicals who really care about the issue of supporting Israel. That's a really recent development - that's probably in the last 30 years you could say that that's a actually significant, consistent voting bloc - or not even a voting bloc, but just an issue bloc - but it took a long time, and it took a lot of things to fall into place for that to become natural to evangelicals, to think that political support for Israel was part of what it meant to be a true Christian, or a mature Christian.
DEMBY: You mentioned Billy Graham. You said it was a dated reference. In your book, you talk about Billy Graham as being, you know, part of this wave of evangelical leaders who played a big role in the tying together of this idea of, like, American Christians and their obligations to the state of Israel.
HUMMEL: Right, and I just say it's dated because Graham's passed away now...
DEMBY: Yeah.
HUMMEL: ...And he really wasn't relevant in the political eye for a few years before that. Of course, going back to the '80s and '90s, he was voted the most-admired American, like, year after year after year, so he was very relevant to Gen X and earlier Americans.
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BILLY GRAHAM: Evangelical Christians especially have an affinity for the Jews, because the Bible they love is essentially a Jewish book written under the influence of God's spirit. It is my conviction that the vast majority of evangelical Christians in this country and abroad support the state of Israel's right to existence. In biblical history and secular history, Israel has every right to exist as much as Syria or Egypt or Russia or the United States.
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HUMMEL: Graham and, yeah, this other guy, G. Douglas Young - who's much less well-known, 'cause he was much more focused on this one issue of evangelical support for Israel - you know, they were born in the 1910s, and so they came of age during the '20s and '30s, and so their imagination very much formed around World War II and the Holocaust. And so they were both trying to navigate sort of how to relate to Jews in the United States, and also how to deal with this new entity on the international scene, the state of Israel, and what all this meant theologically. And so both Graham and Young - they both grew up in dispensationalist-type traditions, where they were taught that the founding of Israel in 1948 was very significant - or would be significant. They were taught about the Rapture and all that kind of stuff.
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G DOUGLAS YOUNG: In the midst of Armageddon, God is going to intervene. Messiah will come and set up his kingdom. Till that glorious day, we are to work and we are to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
HUMMEL: But they really came to their views of Israel in a post-Holocaust context, and so both of them grappled pretty deeply with the role of evangelization to the Jews, which was a major issue for evangelicals. Even the ones that were the most pro-Israel tended to also have as a goal converting Jews to Christianity, and this was not something that most Jews took kindly to - and in fact, this often scuttled any possibility of a relationship, because Jews always suspected that, right behind any type of, sort of, friendly attitude, was this ulterior motive of converting them. And so Graham and Young were at the forefront of trying to rethink that theology in a way that held on to the evangelicals', sort of, desire for evangelization and the universal applicability of the gospel, and both of them made that turn. Young made it earlier - he made it in the 1960s - Graham made it in the 1970s, but these were really big moments where particularly Billy Graham, in 1973, comes out and basically says it is not the role of Christians to try to convert Jews to Christianity.
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GRAHAM: When I preached, I spoke all over Israel. I told them that I had not come to proselyte. I'd come to thank them for proselyting me.
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HUMMEL: This created some flack for Graham within the evangelical world, but he makes this turn, and it becomes something that today, if you're in any Christian Zionist setting, this is basically a given that if you're supporting Israel as an evangelical Christian, you are not also trying to evangelize them. That would be head-spinning to the 19th-century dispensationalists.
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DEMBY: In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter was elected president, and Carter was famously a born-again Christian, and Carter suggested in one of his autobiographies that his biblical beliefs had shaped his approach to the Camp David Accords - this historic peace agreement that eased tensions between Israel and Egypt. And Carter was a Democrat, but more people with dispensationalist beliefs jumped into the fray of Middle East geopolitics once Carter's Republican successor in the White House, Ronald Reagan, took office.
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DEMBY: It always comes back to Ronald Reagan on this show, right? Anyway, here's Daniel again.
HUMMEL: Yeah, this is a hard thing to square. So we have dispensationalists in the 1870s saying, don't get involved in politics, because the church is meant only for heaven and for spiritual things, and then by the 1970s, we have almost the opposite - we have dispensationalists saying you better get involved in politics, because everything's going to sort of fall apart if we don't. And the way I try to square that is to say that their theology didn't really change. When you go to someone like Jerry Falwell, who becomes a major figure in the Christian right in the Reagan years and is a dispensationalist...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: To bring you Jerry Falwell and The Old-Time Gospel Hour.
HUMMEL: He's not saying that the church has any other destiny besides evangelizing people, and, for him, supporting Israel. Actually, that's one of the things...
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JERRY FALWELL: I could spend a great deal of time here talking about this miracle nation, Israel. Who can explain the Jew except by a supernatural understanding? And God has blessed those nations who've blessed the Jew. I believe that history proves this - not only the Bible, but history - that God blesses those nations who bless the apple of God's eye - the Jew.
HUMMEL: So he doesn't move much from that, but what changes is the analysis of the situation on the ground, and so in the 1870s, during Reconstruction, the view was that racial reconciliation, social justice, racial justice - these things were basically threats to the evangelization movement.
DEMBY: Why was that?
HUMMEL: These things divided white people. These are things where northerners and southerners lobbed accusations at each other. Dwight Moody personally abhorred racism, abhorred slavery.
DEMBY: Dwight Moody, you'll remember, was an influential evangelical leader during the Civil War.
HUMMEL: He actually protested against the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, but he did not prioritize that issue after the Civil War over other issues he cared about, like evangelization. And so he was willing to work alongside segregationists and supporters of Jim Crow if it meant getting evangelization further into the globe. It was to say, whether you're from Alabama or from Illinois, if you're a Christian, you care about getting the gospel out. So let's just put all that stuff aside, and let's unite over evangelization.
I think by the 1970s, you had that same dynamic working, except it's sort of reversed in the sense that someone like Falwell is saying the biggest threat to evangelization is this thing called secular humanism, which he thought was taking over all parts of American society. And this comes out of a critique of the radical '60s that basically it was anti-Christian and feminism and the LGBTQ movement in its infancy, all those things were sort of eroding the ability of the church in the United States to act independently, autonomously, to fulfill its mission to evangelize to the world.
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FALWELL: I believe that we have, during the 1980s, a responsibility to our nation and to the free world to raise up a standard of righteousness, which, if this nation is to be spared, if this nation is to survive, we must have a moral reformation.
HUMMEL: And so he tries to gather other evangelical dispensationalists who have a similar read of the situation and say, basically, for the sake of our greater calling of evangelization, we have to, in the short term, get involved in politics in order to protect our interests, our values on these things. And so for Falwell, those issues are - as he states them - feminism and abortion are the ones that he sees as basically existential threats. There's plenty of historians who've looked back and said race relations is also a major motivating factor for Falwell, though he tended not to cite that himself. But he increasingly took actions to build autonomous schools and other things in order to avoid integration rules in Virginia. He sees these all as sort of part of a larger conspiracy foisting these values on the Moral Majority, as he called his organization.
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FALWELL: The federal government is the No. 1 enemy of the family. And there are those in government today who would like to legalize mandatory daycare units. Your children would be taken out of the home into a federally funded daycare system. And from age 2 until graduation from high school and later college, they would be taught humanism, which is anti-Christ, anti-biblical, anti-God and certainly anti-American.
HUMMEL: So Falwell gets alongside a lot of other dispensationalist evangelicals. And so by the 1980s, a major segment of the Christian right - of the supporters of Ronald Reagan - are coming out of this motivation that they see this looming threat that's seemingly taking over education, media, government, everything else, and that they're going to vote to get Christians into those places to counteract that threat.
DEMBY: So what happened that white evangelicals went from, you know, reluctantly engaging in politics to keep the state off their backs and out of their business to become essential to how they understood and move through the world?
HUMMEL: Well, there's two things, probably. One is there's mission creep.
DEMBY: OK.
HUMMEL: So people make this argument for why they get into politics, then they get into politics, and they like being in politics, and then they want to stay in politics. And there's definitely a version of that for the Christian right, that once people like Jerry Falwell got into politics, it actually was quite beneficial for him personally. So he ends up basically extending that window of when Christians need to get into politics to as long as he's alive, at least, and then after. So there is that. I mean, that's maybe a basic human trait, or at least one that's shared by a lot of these evangelical leaders.
But I think a more profound one is that the Seven Mountains theology or the dominionist theology or the theonomy - I mean, these are all terms to talk about, like, a Christian-run government. That's the de jure theology that's in the air right now among some on the Christian right. Evangelicals like James Dobson, the Focus On The Family founder, he comes from a different tradition, and he was willing to sort of work alongside Jerry Falwell and others when it made sense. But he also has a different theology that's animating what he's doing.
And so by the 2010s, by today, there's an entirely different wave of conservative evangelical activism that comes much more out of the Pentecostal world, that comes out of the charismatic tradition. They don't think Jesus is going to come back to establish the kingdom. They tend to think Jesus has called Christians to actually establish that kingdom, that it is actually the role of the church to assume the seven mountains of culture - that's where that term comes from - so, like, media, government, business. There's, like, seven mountains, and their theology is Christians should be at the head of all seven of those, that that is what God has called the church to do. That is a way different theology than Jerry Falwell ever taught, even though in some - in many ways, they can all vote for Republicans and that sort of gets what they want across. But in terms of their ultimate visions for how society should be ordered and what a Christian is called to do in that, they're very different.
DEMBY: What is their general sort of posture, orientation towards Israel? Is it pretty consistent with the dispensationalist orientation to Israel?
HUMMEL: They tend to be pro-Israel. They tend to be pro-Israel for slightly different reasons, though. So there's been a very popular move, I'd say in the last 30 or 40 years, to tie support for Israel to prosperity theology and basically say God wants to bless you to the extent that you bless Israel. Biblically, it comes out of a reading of Genesis 12:3, which is where God is speaking to Abraham and he is saying I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. Basically, if you bless Abraham and his offspring, that's a stand-in for Israel, for the Jewish people.
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FALWELL: He said, I will bless them that bless thee. One of the reasons for America's greatness is because we have blessed the Jew. We've blessed Israel.
HUMMEL: One interesting side note to this is we often think of Christian Zionism as an American phenomenon. And it does, the dispensationalist part of it at least has a very American flavor to it. But today, there are Christian Zionists all over the globe. In fact, if you got them all together, there would be way more Christian Zionists in the global South than there would be in North America. And for those Christian Zionists, this blessing theology is absolutely at the core of why they support Israel.
They are from developing countries like Brazil or South Africa or Nigeria, where the appeal of God materially blessing their country if they bless Israel has some, like, real meat to it because they're actually trying to develop their countries in the moment. And one really practical way I saw this - I interviewed a South African politician. He's Black, but he is a very strong Christian Zionist. And I was talking to him about why he supported Christian Zionism. And he cited this Genesis 12:3 reason. But it was really practical to him. He actually talked about a technology - agricultural irrigation technology, that Israel had gifted to South Africa in recent years.
Israel's a very prominent exporter of farming technology to African countries. This is part of their diplomacy. And he said that that gifting of that technology was God actually fulfilling the blessing. It wasn't some vague blessing, it was the blessing of this technology. And the technology came to South Africans only through this relationship that South Africa diplomatically had built with Israel over the previous decade. So that's where it's like a really tangible blessing. It's not just this sort of like...
DEMBY: Wow.
HUMMEL: ...Pie in the sky like, oh, you'll feel better, or somewhere in the future, something good will happen to you. It's, like, there are things here and now that they see as manifestations of that blessing. And that's really the logic that makes the global Christian Zionist movement run. And it's also very popular in the American scene as well. This works at an individual level that you individually will be blessed, but also that your nation or your people group will be blessed in a way that is totally tied into how you're treating Israel and the Jewish people.
DEMBY: Which again, is exactly what we've been watching play out like at that hearing on the Hill with the president of Columbia University.
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ALLEN: If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.
DEMBY: Again, that hearing was about how conversations regarding Israel are allowed to play out at elite universities and colleges like Columbia. But that exchange was one small part of this larger reality in which this influential, organized, dedicated group of Christians, many of whom hold powerful elected positions, is going to throw their weight behind supporting Israel and will hold accountable people that they feel are otherwise inclined.
Earlier, we talked about how evangelicals only got into politics insofar as it served their larger belief system on a host of issues of the day. For these believers, the stakes of supporting Israel are bouncy, in abundance, and withholding that support means eternal damnation. And those beliefs have enormous consequences for people all over the world, whether those people are the main characters in this apocalyptic saga, or whether they wind up being the collateral damage in it.
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DEMBY: And that's our show.
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DEMBY: You can follow us on Instagram at @nprcodeswitch. If email, if that's more your bag, ours is codeswitch@npr.org. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the very dope CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. And another way to support our work is to sign up for CODE SWITCH +. It's small, but it makes a big difference for us, and you get to listen to every CODE SWITCH episode with no ads. So check that out at plus.npr.org/codeswitch, and thank you to everybody who already signed up.
This episode was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Leah Donnella, and our engineer was Gilly Moon. Special thanks to Johannes Doerge. And we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez, Dalia Mortada, Courtney Stein, Veralyn Williams, B.A. Parker and Lori Lizarraga. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, y'all.
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