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Days before the Trump administration bombed three nuclear sites in Iran, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tried to defend his unblinking support of Israel by telling Tucker Carlson that the Bible gives him no other choice and that Zionism is part of his Christian faith, though he could not recall the precise verse that bolsters his arguments.

Christian Zionism is not a new phenomenon, and it can’t take all the credit for the United States’s bloody foreign policy. But it is once again salient as Donald Trump surrounds himself with Evangelicals who profess the ideology and he pays lip service to it, as he does to other popular Evangelical convictions. Many Christian Zionists are influenced by dispensationalism, a relatively new doctrine that bestows the fate of Israel with prophetic significance. The end-times are nigh, and Israel has a key role to play in Armageddon — these are ideas popularized by the Left Behind series, which sold millions of copies at the beginning of this century. Followers such as Cruz vote, run for office, and shape foreign policy, and often they make excuses for Israel’s war crimes.

I spoke with scholar Daniel G. Hummel of the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, about his 2019 book, Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations, and the history of Christian Zionism in the U.S. and the rest of the world. In Covenant Brothers, Hummel traces the movement from its origins and early popularity in the 19th century to the rise of the contemporary Christian right and beyond.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the idea of dispensationalism, which is key to the rise of Christian Zionism. What is it, and how does support for Israel factor into it? Dispensationalism is a system of theology that’s quite popular among conservative Protestants — Evangelicals and what we call Fundamentalists. It started in the early 19th century on the fringes of dissenter Protestantism in Great Britain. When John Nelson Darby broke from the Church of England and founded the Plymouth Brethren sect, he developed a way of reading the Bible that led to a distinct set of teachings about who Israel is, who the Church is, and, for the sake of simplicity, what the future holds based on the Bible.

Dispensationalists starting with Darby believe God has had basically two chosen peoples throughout history: One of those is Israel, and one is the Church. The payoff is that any prophecies relating to Israel in the Old Testament prophets or wherever Israel is mentioned in Revelation or elsewhere, are, for dispensationalists, always referencing the ethnic Israel, what we call the Jewish people today.

The Church is to gather all Gentiles to God to follow him. Then, at some point soon, God will hit “unpause” on his plans with Israel. The thing that will launch that is the Rapture, which will take away the Church from the world. It will go up into Heaven and then God will resume his plans with Israel through the prophecies.

Dispensationalism, at least as I learned about it, also holds that the end-times events will happen in a specific order. Can you talk about that a bit? On paper, dispensationalists say nothing needs to happen in the world right now before the Rapture happens. It’s an imminent event. In practice, it’s very common in dispensational circles to try to glean where the world is going because of the assumption that the Bible really does lay out in pretty specific detail what will happen at the end-times. For at least a hundred years, there has been a strong tradition in dispensationalism of speculating about global events, world wars, the Cold War, or conflicts in the Middle East but also elsewhere. The European Union was a source of speculation because it seemed to align with the beast with ten horns in Revelation.

They’re not saying that this has to happen before the end comes but that these are the types of things we would expect to happen as the world ramps up to its climactic phase as prophesied. Some dispensations have veered into date setting, though that is considered a no-no. The one people make a lot of fun of is a famous book called 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. But in the main, date setting is looked at as not the right way to go. Partly, it leads to a credibility crisis in the movement, but also, in theory, this should be something only God knows the timing of. Of course, the more popular side of dispensationalism makes a ton of money and gets a lot of attention for Left Behind in the 1990s and 2000s and The Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970s.

I’m glad you brought up Left Behind. There is what I think of as pop-culture dispensationalism, and I think that’s what most people are familiar with: Left Behind, or A Thief in the Night. They’re easy to make fun of. But Christian Zionists can also be savvy political actors. How are they building power in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere? Many pro-Israel Evangelicals talk about Israel in ways that aren’t entirely theological. They’re more cultural or geopolitical. They love talking about Israel as a democracy, Israel as a beacon of western values, Judeo-Christian values. So all those things are working together, and particularly in the past 20 years, there has been a very deliberate, you could say sophisticated, effort by Evangelical activists, including some pastors, to forge a political relationship around these ideas — one that is very narrowly focused on generating U.S. support for Israel or domestic support in the U.S. for pro-Israel policies. That has been the change.

**There’s no hard-and-fast line for this, obviously, but in the ’80s, we saw the formation of what we think of today as the Christian right around a backlash to abortion rights and the perceived liberalization of society overall. How does Christian Zionism become part of that Christian-right milieu in that period?**We have to credit certain people like Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, and Tim LaHaye, who ended up being a co-author of the Left Behind novels. In the ’70s and ’80s, they helped create things like the Religious Roundtable, really important political organizations. One thing they did was to merge this ongoing dispensationalist way of talking about Israel and the Church with their critique of American society. The big battle for them was that there’s this Christian worldview and then there’s a secular worldview, and the Christian worldview needs to come out on top. They conscripted Israel as part of this Judeo-Christian tradition. Israel became the dominant representative of the Jewish part of the Judeo-Christian world.

This was helped along by the first election victory of the Israeli right in 1977 with Menachem Begin, who was a much more religiously observant Jew than the previous prime ministers had been, and he played that up. He would quote from the Bible a lot; he would talk about the shared conservative values of Christians and Jews. So the relationship between people like Falwell and Begin was a key part of making it seem this was a natural fit between the Likud Party and the Republican Party. There were also important events, such as the Lebanon War. Israel committed a number of massacres of Lebanese citizens, and the Christian right, particularly Falwell, played interference in the U.S. media, defending Israel’s actions or dismissing some of the reports about what Israel was doing as inaccurate. This was a key moment certainly for the Israeli government’s understanding of what it had in its alliance with Evangelicals.

**Moving forward, let’s talk about 9/11. I was quite young then, but I do remember thinking the end-times were finally upon us; that wasn’t an unusual reaction for the sphere I was in. Can you explain the significance of 9/11 to Christian Zionists and the possibility that it kicked off a new political era for the movement?**One way to frame that is there was a sort of interregnum period in the ’90s, like in much of American culture after the end of the Cold War. But for so much of the Cold War, the end-times were tied to the Soviet Union, then the Soviet Union collapsed and the end-times did not come. So there is this decade when there’s a recalibration and a pretty strong turn to seeing the Islamic world as perhaps what biblical prophecy is talking about.

9/11 also seemed to signal that we were in a clash-of-civilizations scenario where there were clear lines between a Judeo-Christian world and a Muslim world, and that got up the antennae of everyone in the dispensational movement trying to rethink some of the prophecies and how this would fit into them. That was definitely a major moment for putting forward the sense that what happened on September 11, and then what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, had prophetic significance. Frankly, almost every time there’s a war in the Middle East, we go through a cycle like this. A book published in 1974 called Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis, by John Walvoord, gives one way to think about it. It got rushed to print in that year because it attempted to explain the 1973 Arab-Israeli War in prophetic context, and it sold a ton of copies. It got rereleased in 1991 because Walvoord updated it and then he died in 2000 or so. But it was rereleased again in 2003 as a way to explain what had happened in 2001 and what was imminently happening in Iraq at the time. I mean, it had sold millions and millions of copies by this point. Iran was emerging then too, with a nuclear program that was becoming a major point of conversation. So Christians United for Israel was founded in 2006 in part as a response to the post-9/11 moment and a sense that Iran and Islamic terrorism were the most threatening things not only to Israel but to the U.S. at that time.

**I want to talk about Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity for a moment. How do these sects approach the subjects of biblical prophecy and Israel, and how has their influence grown over time?**Much of the Pentecostal world is influenced by dispensational theology, so one way Pentecostals can enter into being pro-Israel is just by inheriting and internalizing that theology. Another way, though, which is really indebted to distinctly Pentecostal theology, is the very strong emphasis today on God blessing those who bless Israel. This is Genesis 12:3, in which God says to Abraham, “I’ll bless those who bless you. And whoever curses you, I will curse.” If you’re in a dispensationalist tradition, you see that verse as referencing Abraham’s family and being in continuity with modern-day Israel. That verse becomes essentially a command or an explanation of how God blesses people.

This came up recently with Ted Cruz’s comments on Tucker Carlson’s show when he said he had grown up in a tradition that commanded him to bless Israel, to support Israel. And when Carlson asked him, “Where is that in the Bible?” Cruz couldn’t remember. While a lot of people make fun of Cruz for not being able to cite where he gets his political theology, I took it more as a sign of how pervasive this is in Pentecostal and charismatic circles, that it’s so common you don’t even really need a verse to justify it. It’s just sort of the way we think about the world.

This is very popular among Pentecostal Christians in the U.S. Many of the people on Trump’s spiritual-advisory council come from the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions. This would be an obvious way for them to talk about how God works in the world and what God cares about in relation to Israel. It’s also quite popular in other parts of the globe: The Global South has a massive Pentecostal population; it’s probably half a billion or more at this point. Not all of them are Christian Zionists, but many are sympathetic to this way of talking about Israel. There are many, many more Christian Zionists outside the U.S. than are often in the U.S.

**You write about Benjamin Netanyahu in your book. Can you shed some light on the relationships he has built with Christian Zionists?**He has had a history with American Evangelicals going all the way back to the 1970s but especially when he started serving in different capacities with the Israeli government in the ’80s. He has been a very key connection between American Christianity and the Israeli government. Part of why he’s good at that is he spent a good amount of his childhood in the U.S., so he has familiarity with American culture that other Israeli politicians don’t have.

He also comes out of the same tradition as Begin — he talks a lot about God; he talks a lot about western values. He will talk in an Evangelical way when it suits him, and that’s something other Israeli politicians just haven’t done over the years. In his capacity as prime minister, he has been very diligent about courting deep relationships with particular strategic Christian leaders in the U.S., even when the crisis isn’t at a boiling point. He has deep relationships going back decades with people like the televangelist John Hagee and with people like Robert Jeffress, the pastor in Dallas who came to prominence in recent years because of his support for Trump but had been going to Israel for decades before that, partly at the Israeli government’s invitation.

There is a Christian tradition in Palestine that is extraordinarily old, though I never heard anything about it while I was an Evangelical myself. What sort of relationship, if any, do Christian Zionists have with Palestinian Christians? The short answer is there’s not much of a direct relationship. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some have to do with the support of Israel, some with Christian or Evangelical theology. Some have to do with American biases and blind spots that many people share, not just Evangelicals.

Many American Evangelicals side with the Israeli narrative on a couple of key things, like whose land is Israel. Evangelicals believe God covenanted this land with the Jewish people, so it is their land. To them, Palestinian Christians have maybe lived on the land for a long time, but it’s not theirs in some divine sense. Just on that basis alone, they’re not seeing eye to eye with Palestinian Christians who reject that theology and that idea.

Then there’s just a practical distance between Evangelical Christians and Palestinian Christians. There’s a language barrier. Many Evangelicals go on tours to Israel in any given year, but most never go to an occupied territory outside of very specific areas like Bethlehem for religious reasons. Most Evangelicals who have visited Israel have not actually met a Palestinian, whereas they have met many Jewish Israelis on such a tour. And even if they do meet Arabs, they might meet an Arab Israeli in a place like Nazareth. That’s a different experience than meeting a Palestinian Christian in the occupied territories.

**You write about Brazil and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in your book, and though I would not say Christian Zionism is the glue holding the global far right together, I do wonder how important the ideology is to this moment?**There are things Christian Zionists package with Christian Zionism that are ideologically not necessary. That’s where you get broader interpretations of western civilization being in decline, and immigrants from non-western countries being a major threat, and Islam being largely a religion of violence antithetical to western values. There you can see it is part of the binding glue because that’s what unites how the right in Britain views the world, how the right in Israel views the world, and how the right in the U.S. views the world.

In most of these circles, Israel is seen as the tip of the spear in a civilizational conflict. Some of that is conflict with the Muslim world, and some is just the effectiveness of the Israeli military and intelligence apparatus. It’s seen as the envy of a lot of western countries, or at least as one of the best. There’s also a sense that, in its settlement activity, Israel is doing what western nations have done for a long time, which is to claim land when they think it’s rightly theirs. You see conversations about the birth rate, which is higher in Israel than in other western countries, so there’s a pronatalist argument.

But Christian Zionism may not be the thing actually driving that ideology. I’ll just say that among some of the people who agree with colonialism and pronatalism, there is a growing antisemitism as well. So it gets really confusing.

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