Whatever one may think of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Steve Bannon, or Nick Fuentes, they've got a point on this one: the unwavering and uncritical support of evangelical Protestants and throwback-Catholics for Israel and its policies is puzzling and disturbing.
The question has been roiling right-wing circles for months, and since Carlson had Fuentes on his show late last month to discuss "Christian Zionism," people perceive a crack-up of the American Right. Much of the Right (JD Vance, for example, but also American ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee) is currently taking the approach of uncritical support for a government that has, even according to MAGA conservative Greene, been engaged in genocide.
The screwed-up thing is that for some of these people (certainly Fuentes, and also Carlson in a milder way) their skepticism about Israeli policy in Gaza and American support for it is tangled up in antisemitism. But whatever the source of their skepticism, the cocked eyebrow is warranted.
The US has provided much of the munitions by which Gaza has been leveled. Greene was the first Republican I heard who called it a “genocide,” and she wondered out loud why her party and the MAGA movement with which she’s been so closely associated has been more dedicated to Israel's defense than to America's. Bannon refers to Israel as " a US protectorate," a vassal state. He doesn't understand how exactly that serves American interests.
The story of Christian evangelical support for Israel is somewhat surprising, having to do with a 19th-century theological approach known as “dispensationalism” and a literalist reading of certain biblical passages, such as Zecharia 14, which includes material like this:
I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped… Then the Lord will go out and fight against those nations, as he fights on a day of battle… The Lord will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one Lord, and his name the only name. This is the plague with which the Lord will strike all the nations that fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. On that day people will be stricken by the Lord with great panic. They will seize each other by the hand and attack one another… This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles… And on that day there will no longer be a Canaanites in the house of the Lord Almighty.
The interpretation of this passage in certain previously marginal Protestant and even Catholic sects is that a gathering of the people in Jerusalem will set off the final annihilating war on earth, "Armageddon," characterized by “rape” and “plague.” This will in turn bring the return of Jesus Christ and his 1000-year reign ("the millennium"). To hasten the second coming, these people believe, Israel must be supported unquestioningly, and we should expect a total war and the end of history to ensue.
Okay. Believe whatever you want. Have “faith” of a breathtakingly arbitrary kind. Transcend rationality and just accept. However, the Biblical passages, if they predict all this, predict it cryptically and obscurely. You might want to make sure that the translation is adequate, or look at some others. And you certainly can't expect anyone who isn’t a biblical literalist, or who might demand reasons or evidence for wild, sweeping claims like that before using them in policy decisions, to take this seriously.
Just what sort of information are you using to set American foreign policy?
The support of American evangelical Christians has been fundamental to Israel's character, economy, and war strategies. Maybe Israel's economy is partly based on evangelical Christian tourism. But one should ask: is this sort of support really good for Israel? Is it really, as the phrase goes, good for the Jews?
This set of beliefs comes from an evidently-irrational faith tradition for which Judaism has no time. No Jew can take "Armageddon" or "the 1000-year reign of Christ" seriously, and there can’t be any reason for anyone who’s not in a particular sort of denomination to think this picture has any credibility at all. The support for Israel isn’t based on respect for Judaism. It foresees killing everyone who doesn’t accept Christ. One thing that’s coming at the Armageddon: the end of Judaism.
The belief system that has driven unquestioning support for Israel among people such as House speaker Mike Johnson, is entirely irrational, entirely arbitrary. There’s no reason for Jewish people to take it seriously. But there are reasons for Jewish people to be concerned about the support of people with belief systems like that, and there are reasons to wonder whether, if things get much worse, Mike Johnson and Mike Huckabee will be celebrating. The destruction of Israel, I hate to say it, could also be interpreted as a sign that the millennium is now.
Meanwhile, the reactionary Catholics who surround Trump or dominate the Supreme Court seem to have the same pointedly irrational devotion to Israel that the evangelical Protestants do, though I'm not sure they are interpreting the same Biblical passages the same way. Perhaps they are, however, and for a devout Roman Catholic, JD Vance sure seems a lot like an evangelical Protestant, and disagrees with popes about immigration, for example, as well as about flattening Gaza and decimating its Canaanites.
But whether it's coming from Protestants or Catholics, Christian Zionism and its apocalyptic philosemitism ought to make Jews and everyone else nervous.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell