By Daniel Hummel
When I read the recent story in the New York Times on American evangelical leaders pressing for Israel to annex the West Bank, I immediately recalled an anecdote from forty-five years ago. The rising religious-political celebrity, Reverend Jerry Falwell, was on the cusp of creating the Moral Majority, the political organization probably best known for its lobbying in the 1980s around issues like abortion and prayer in schools. Falwell’s foreign policy passions were a bit simpler in these early years of his political activism: oppose communism and support Israel.
To that end, he traveled in 1979 to the new Israeli settlement of Elon Moreh, a few miles northeast of the city of Nablus in the West Bank, and produced a television special profiling the band of rogue settlers who were claiming that land for the State of Israel. The settlers were members of Gush Emunim, the Orthodox Jewish group formed after the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War to settle various conquered lands by Israel. Falwell’s TV special exalted the pioneering spirit of the settlers and explained the significance of the name as the traditional site where God promised Abraham, “To your descendants will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7).
Elon Moreh became something of a lightning rod (in a landscape already full of them). In a case brought by the land’s Palestinian landowners later that year, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the settlement was illegal. The case codified the rules for Israeli settlements until today, including the process for the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to assess settlement sites based on security concerns. The security justification was too vague in Elon Moreh and the professed ideological, religious, and political motives of the settlers were, we might say, too explicit to be credibly explained as security concerns. As a consequence, the Israeli government forced the settlement to move from its original location. It always strikes me as curious, and perhaps revealing, that Falwell picked a settlement to profile that was deemed too extreme even for Israel’s settlement policy.
What does this anecdote say about the current situation? To borrow from the New York Times report, “Evangelical Christian leaders who delivered votes to President Trump” were in Jerusalem on March 4 calling on him “to declare that Israel can claim ownership of the West Bank, based on a promise God made to the Jews in the Bible.” How different is this from what Falwell was doing in 1979? On the surface it might appear similar, and in many ways, the two data points have a continuity to them. But a historical understanding of what has happened in the pro-Israel evangelical movement since 1979 also reveals the distance traveled in the intermittent decades—namely that the Christian Zionist movement Falwell assumed leadership of in the late 1970s has changed in at least three critical ways:
It has professionalized
It has consolidated
It has extended into conservative networks in both Israel and the United States
Falwell might have predicted some of these changes (he lived to see a few of them before his death in 2007), but in other ways, the Christian Zionist movement of the 2020s is a larger, more organized, more imposing entity than anyone could have anticipated in the 1970s. The value of this historical insight is that we can see some of the developments that have seeded the seemingly inflexible situation we have today, and we can understand how that inflexibility is not natural or necessary.
Professionalization: Through the 1990s and 2000s a new class of full-time, trained lobbyists and politicians replaced pastors like Falwell and other pro-Israel leaders. Televangelists, like Pat Robertson, more effectively and consistently pressed the cause. This process did not happen in a vacuum. It was yet another theater in the professionalization of the Christian right that is documented by Frances FitzGerald, among other observers. This “new class” of evangelical influencers was made up of political operatives rather than clergy or theologians. The New York Times article mentions Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and Mario Bramnick—these are precisely the kinds of career operatives that barely existed in the 1970s but which, by the 1990s, were at the center of the Christian right-Republican Party collaboration. I have written elsewhere of the professionalization of the evangelical pro-Israel infrastructure headquartered in Israel. The same process has occurred in Washington DC.
Consolidation: Evangelical on-the-ground advocacy for Israel has a long history dating back at least to the late nineteenth century. But for most of that time, interest was niche and sporadic. Prophetic and geopolitical attention on Israel increased dramatically after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, but even then the interest was mostly religious and politically uncoordinated. Dozens of advocacy organizations bounded by region, denomination, or personality popped up. Falwell’s ascendancy to something of the spokesman of the Christian right, at least in the early and mid-1980s, brought some national attention to pro-Israel views, but Middle East diplomacy was a secondary issue among many that the Moral Majority advocated. The same was true in the 1990s of Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed’s Christian coalition. Through the turn of the millennium, there was a lot of energy around pro-Israel evangelical support but little coordination or gatekeeping.
In 2006, the Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which has become just the coordinating, gatekeeping representative of the so-called “American evangelical” view on Israel. With more than 10 million members, it dwarfs most other Christian right advocacy organizations in size, and its members outnumber the entire Jewish American population. Unlike the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition, CUFI has just one issue on which it advocates. This has allowed Hagee – who is a pastor, television personality, and writer – to embrace the professionalization trend. The longtime Executive Director of CUFI from its founding in 2006 to 2018 was David Brog, a conservative lawyer and U.S. Senate staffer who is Jewish with connections to major GOP fundraisers. Following Brog and until today, the executive directorship is jointly shared between Diana Hagee (John Hagee’s wife) and another long-term Washington insider, Shari Dollinger, a one-time American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) researcher and officer for the Israeli embassy.
Extension: As the example of CUFI illustrates, professionalization and consolidation create opportunities to increase reach in larger and more influential political networks. The two most lucrative for pro-Israel evangelical activists have been the Republican Party and the Israeli political rightwing, beginning with the Likud Party but extending into further rightwing politicians and movements. Falwell’s 1979 visit to Elon Moreh already hinted at these developing connections. It was no accident that upon becoming Israel’s prime minister in 1977, Menachem Begin – a proponent of Israeli settlements and a “greater Israel” that included Israeli sovereignty over occupied territories (articulated in various ways up to and including annexation) – cultivated relationships with American evangelical leaders. This outreach included inviting Falwell to Israel and, famously, awarding Falwell the Jabotinsky Award (named after the infamous rightwing Zionist and mentor to Begin, Ze’ev Jabotinsky).
These connections deepened through the collaboration of numerous leaders in both countries: Benjamin Netanyahu, Ron Dermer, and Michael Oren from Israel; John Hagee, Mike Huckabee, and Mike Evans from the United States. Some, like Huckabee, have ascended to official positions in the era of Donald Trump after decades of work in Holy Land tourism and state-level advocacy. Others, like Mike Evans, have built private sources of influence, like the Friends of Zion Heritage Center in Jerusalem, that have become key sites of gathering between the two communities. Religious leaders ranging from evangelical theologians to Orthodox rabbis have conducted formal Jewish-evangelical dialogues, often coordinated by political and state interests. The cooperation is vast and deep, centered especially on evangelical tourism to Israel, humanitarian aid to Israelis, and political lobbying in Washington D.C.
The professionalization, consolidation, and extension of pro-Israel evangelical politics since the 1970s brings us back to the most recent effort of some evangelicals to further Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
The story is partly of an emboldened rightwing Israeli government catching up to and enacting a vision held in the 1970s by a fringe in Israel and American evangelicalism: the full annexation of the land. The Israeli settlement of the West Bank, while proceeding over the last 50 years more or less apace, was never officially embraced by the Israeli government until the past three years. American evangelicals have outpaced Israeli governments in advocating this line of thinking. Currently, they seem in lockstep.
The window for pro-Israel evangelical politics may be closing. Younger evangelicals are less interested. Older evangelicals have shown more diversity of thought around land annexation and unconditional support for Israel. What the history shows us is that the window for current advocacy has not always been there—it took time, energy, and effort to create—and it will not always be there.
While annexation is a chief aim of pro-Israel evangelical activists, it is one in a long list of objectives. As the movement grew it pursued adjacent causes, including contesting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS), combating antisemitism, organizing against a nuclear deal with Iran, and opposing competing theological schools within evangelical Christianity that could undermine support for Christian Zionism. The movement has also promoted closer Jewish-Christian religious practices, more evangelical business and tourism to Israel, and deeper coordination with Jewish lobby groups like AIPAC – in each case to the consternation of some Jewish observers. The point is that the pro-Israel evangelical platform is actually quite broad, and getting broader, as the movement matures. Its influence is already multipronged and will likely diverge in new directions.
Taken as a whole, we can appreciate that the latest news is not unprecedented nor is it a unique product of the Trump era. The new administration has certainly contributed to the arc and the changes of recent decades, but these developments have their own sources and logics. Pulling back, we can see perhaps the unstated subtext of the recent coverage: on this issue, at least, Trump’s presidency is perhaps best understood as a chapter in pro-Israel politics that advances, and in some cases, accelerates existing trends. His administration is something of the bit player in the story of Christian Zionism, rather than the reverse.
Daniel G. Hummel is the director of the Lumen Center (Madison, WI) and a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans, 2023) and Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). He has written about religion, politics, and foreign policy for the Washington Post, Christianity Today, and Religion News Service and appeared on NPR, Wisconsin Public Radio, and PBS.
Excellent article. I actually belong to CUFI. Thank you for the historical description of The Christian Zionist history and beliefs. I have spent a lot of time battling the Hamas/Palestine propaganda machine on my own time. Getting the younger generations to understand how things got to where they are in the Middle East is difficult. They are not getting access to the Truth.