How Christian Zionists Came to Shape American Foreign Policy on Israel

Asked a stark hypothetical — if one country had to cease to exist, the United States or Israel, which would you choose? — US Congressman Don Bacon offered a striking reply: “Read Revelations and report back.” He was pointing to the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, which in one specific evangelical reading casts the Jewish return to Israel as the opening act of a sequence that ends with Armageddon and the return of Christ to Earth.

How does a sitting member of Congress come to frame a foreign-policy question that way? The answer runs through centuries of American Christianity and into a world that goes far deeper than the lobbying operation that draws most of the attention in Washington. And Bacon is far from the only person in a position of power who thinks like this.

Much of the public conversation about American support for Israel fixates on AIPAC, corporate donors, and professional Beltway influence. But a different and arguably more decisive force has been building in church basements, megachurches, and prophecy paperbacks for more than a century — and over the last decade it has reached the heights of American government.

Key Takeaways

American Christian support for a Jewish state predates organized political Zionism: an 1891 petition to President Benjamin Harrison, signed by figures like JP Morgan and a future president, asked Washington to help establish one.
A hardline strand reads the founding and expansion of Israel as the opening act of an end-times sequence, making support for Israel a matter of cosmic stakes rather than ordinary foreign policy.
Pastor John Hagee turned these beliefs into political infrastructure, founding Christians United for Israel (CUFI) in 2006 — a grassroots, turnout-driven counterpart to the donor-driven AIPAC.
Israeli strategist Ron Dermer has argued for years that the real backbone of US support for Israel now comes from evangelicals, not the American Jewish community.
Under Trump, that worldview produced concrete policy: the Jerusalem embassy move, recognition of the Golan Heights, the reversal of the 1978 settlements legal opinion, and a second-term push to rebrand the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria.”
Inside the administration, Catholic figures like Marco Rubio and JD Vance — both 2028 frontrunners — have pushed back on West Bank annexation, signaling a coming divide.
Public opinion is shifting fast: a majority of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, and support is collapsing among younger voters, including young evangelicals.

This is the story of Christian Zionism: a theological movement of tens of millions of believers whose conviction that the modern State of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy has quietly become one of the strongest engines behind US Middle East policy, even as the coalition that carries it begins to fracture.

Older Than Israel Itself

Some of what follows is genuinely contentious, and the quotes and positions involved will land differently depending on a reader’s background. The aim here is not to pass judgment on anyone’s faith but to take seriously a strand of American Christianity that has had enormous influence on US policy in the Middle East — because the people involved take it seriously, and they currently hold some of the most powerful positions in Washington.

It is also only one part of a much larger story. The US-Israel relationship rests on pillars that have nothing to do with theology: strategic interests, defense-industry ties, conventional lobbying, and a post-Holocaust moral commitment that runs across both parties. Those are covered widely elsewhere. The focus here is on the piece that usually isn’t.

To understand how the relationship reached its present form, it helps to go back further than most people expect. While this strand of Christianity peaked in influence over the last decade, its roots run far deeper.

A Petition Before Herzl

American support for a Jewish state in the Middle East took off in the late 1800s. In March 1891, Methodist evangelist William Blackstone walked a petition into the White House and presented it to President Benjamin Harrison, asking the United States to use its diplomatic influence to help establish exactly that. This was no collection of fringe signatures: the names included JP Morgan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Melville Fuller, the editor of the New York Times, and future president William McKinley.

Consider the timing. In 1891 there was no organized Zionist project — Theodor Herzl would not write his founding pamphlet of modern political Zionism for another five years. Most of the signatories, and all of the prominent names, were not Jewish. And this was not an effort to push Jews out of the United States. It was, in their understanding, a sincere religious conviction that the Jewish people had a rightful home in the Middle East and that America had a role to play in helping them reach it.

What Made the American Version Different

The Americans were not entirely alone. The idea of restoring Jews to Palestine had circulated in English religious circles for generations and had already shaped British thinking about the region well before the Balfour Declaration of 1917. But by then the theological roots on the British side were being overtaken by secular geopolitics: securing wartime alliances, positioning for the post-Ottoman carve-up, and outmaneuvering the French. The American version is distinct precisely because the issue was never fully secularized.

When David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948, the United States recognized the new country within eleven minutes. The president was Harry Truman, a Missouri Baptist who later bristled at the idea that he had merely “helped” create the Jewish state, insisting instead that he was the reason it was possible at all. “I am Cyrus,” he said — identifying with the Persian king who allowed the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem in the sixth century BC.

An Alliance That Almost Wasn’t

The relationship did not begin smoothly. Israel in 1948 was not the country many picture today. Its founders were overwhelmingly secular socialists, its economy was built around collectively owned kibbutzim that would have made a Scandinavian social democrat blush, and its early foreign policy, if anything, leaned closer to Moscow than to Washington. The Soviet Union had voted for the UN partition plan and recognized the new state almost immediately.

For several years it was not clear which side of the Cold War Israel would land on.

Even so, the theological current running through American Christianity did not require Israel to be a Cold War ally to feel vindicated. It only needed Israel to exist. For millions of American Christians, the sheer fact that a Jewish state had reappeared on the map after two thousand years of exile was confirmation enough. The 1948 war reinforced the feeling — a tiny, fledgling country, surrounded by hostile armies, survived its first war against a near-double-digit number of adversaries.

The Stuff of Legends

June 1967 supplied what those still on the fence were looking for. In six days, Israel destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, seized the Sinai Peninsula, and took the city of Jerusalem. For someone who had grown up reading in Isaiah that a nation would be born in a day, this was the stuff of legend.

The secular world had its own reasons to take notice. The armies Israel had just defeated were overwhelmingly Soviet-backed, Soviet-trained, and Soviet-armed, which more or less settled where Israel stood in the Cold War. The relationship with Washington would still take time to mature into its present form, but the warm years with the Soviets were clearly over.

That is the broad-brush history. To understand the relationship American evangelicals have with Israel, it helps to get into the weeds — to figure out what, exactly, scripture is read to say that would make believers sincerely treat one Middle Eastern nation as the key to Christ’s return.

Sunday School Theology

Religion clearly played a sizable role in early American support for Israel, but the historical episodes above represent a far more toned-down version of Christian Zionism than the hardline movement that matters most today.

Most American Christians who felt warmly about Israel — and there were many — held the view loosely. They might vote on it if it came up, they had a general sense that Israel was on “their” side, but it was not militant and not especially organized. Jimmy Carter is hardly the embodiment of hardline foreign policy.

Watch on HomeFronts

Watch the full video analysis on the HomeFronts YouTube channel, presented by Simon Whistler.

The smaller, far more committed group viewed the Jewish state as the opening act of a sequence ending in Armageddon, and they mean that literally. In this reading, the Jews returning to their ancient homeland triggers a chain of events building toward a catastrophic global war centered on Israel, at the end of which Christ physically returns to Earth. True believers, in this framework, are taken up to heaven before the worst arrives — the event known as the rapture. For someone who genuinely believes they are watching the opening chapters of that sequence unfold, “two-state solutions” are not going to command much attention.

Two Tracks, or One?

The passages this all hinges on are taken seriously across virtually every Christian tradition, yet interpreted very differently. Genesis 12 has God telling Abraham that those who bless his descendants will be blessed and those who curse them will be cursed. Romans 11 has Paul writing that all of “Israel” will ultimately be saved. What those texts mean — and in particular whether “Israel” refers to a future Jewish nation-state, the modern State of Israel, or something else entirely — is a question theologians have fought over for the better part of two thousand years.

One interpretation, called Dispensationalism, answers with particular enthusiasm. This theology, which only took root in the 1800s and did not become a mass movement until the twentieth century, holds that God maintains two separate, parallel approaches to the world: one with Christians, the other with Jews. The promises made to the latter — including, crucially, the land — remain permanent, literal, and still in effect. And the current phase, in this view, is one in which those Old Testament promises are being actively fulfilled, not spiritually or metaphorically, but on the ground in the modern state of Israel.

How Most of Christianity Reads It

For most of Christianity’s two-thousand-year history, none of this existed. The way most traditions — Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant — read those same passages is that the promises God made to Abraham were ultimately about the coming of Christ and the community of believers that followed, not about a specific piece of territory in the modern Middle East.

If the land is not part of any active divine covenant, then Israel is a country like any other, and the question of its borders is purely political rather than theological. There is no second track, no separate divine plan for a future nation-state that requires particular borders to stay on schedule. That is why the Vatican sees no contradiction in recognizing the State of Israel while also supporting Palestinian statehood, and why the Christians who actually live in the region — from Bethlehem to Beirut to Baghdad — do not read the modern Israeli state as the fulfillment of prophecy.

But if you genuinely believe this is the opening act of a sequence that ends with the return of the Messiah, the question of where your country stands on Israel is not really a foreign-policy question at all. It becomes a question about which side your country wants to be on when the world ends. In this reading, God blesses those who stand with Israel and curses those who do not. For many believers, opposing a Palestinian state, backing settlement expansion, and supporting Israeli control of Jerusalem are not mere policy preferences that happen to align — they are ways to keep the divine plan on track.

Building the Machine

For most of the twentieth century these beliefs stayed in churches, Bible study groups, and paperback prophecy books that the rest of America was content to ignore. What changed was that a handful of people figured out how to turn them into political infrastructure.

Much of that transformation traces, improbably, to one megachurch in Texas and the pastor running it. John Hagee built what became Cornerstone Church in San Antonio from a handful of congregants in the 1970s into a 22,000-member operation that today functions as something close to the institutional headquarters of American Christian Zionism. He believes the modern state of Israel is the visible fulfillment of biblical prophecy in real time, and for decades he has told his congregation that current events look an awful lot like the end times — a message that goes back to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

This was the work of a lifetime for some of the movement’s thought leaders, and it grew steadily more organized and more Republican as the decades passed. By the late 1970s the broader evangelical movement was finding its footing as an increasingly Republican constituency. Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to push that constituency into a national political force, and while it focused largely on domestic issues, support for Israel was on the list.

Israel Reaches Back

Israel was undergoing a transformation of its own. In 1977 the Israeli left lost power for the first time in the country’s history, replaced by the right-wing Likud under Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The change came gradually, but the country began moving away from its rural, kibbutz-oriented, centrally planned origins toward a more market-friendly economy.

More relevant here, the Israeli right immediately saw an opportunity to strengthen ties with the exuberantly pro-Israel crowd in the United States and wasted little time showing goodwill. Begin gifted Falwell his own private jet and awarded him the Jabotinsky Medal the same year.

Around that time in San Antonio, Hagee organized the first “Night to Honor Israel,” essentially a fundraiser bringing together well-off evangelicals to boost support financially and otherwise. It was controversial — one early event even drew a bomb threat that forced an evacuation halfway through — but it would be held annually for decades. For most of the 1980s and 1990s these tracks ran in parallel rather than as a single operation. Support for Israel remained bipartisan, and while hardliners were happy to accuse Democratic opponents of selling out the country, there was little substance behind it beyond firing up the base.

CUFI and the Grassroots Difference

That began to change in 2006, when Hagee gathered roughly 400 evangelical leaders at Cornerstone Church to formally launch Christians United for Israel. By then his Nights to Honor Israel had been running for 25 years and had grown into a national phenomenon; over time its fundraising reached a magnitude of $130 million directly for Israeli causes. CUFI formalized that infrastructure into a nationwide organization with centralized leadership and a lobbying arm, built explicitly to push the United States and its politicians in a more pro-Israel direction.

What makes CUFI distinctive is that it does not look like the organization most people picture. Where the far better-known AIPAC operates as a polished, well-funded Beltway machine built on corporate donors and professional policy staff, CUFI leans heavily into the grassroots. It raises money — a great deal of it — but a fraction of AIPAC’s, and fundraising is not the central purpose around which it operates.

These are true believers, and that is the source of their influence: they can mobilize turnout in primaries and general elections alike, keeping the Republican Party in lockstep behind Israel in a way money alone cannot. This is, for better or worse, what democratic organizing looks like when the people doing it genuinely believe what they are saying.

The Israelis Take Notice

The value of all this became clear to the Israelis quickly. Ron Dermer — Benjamin Netanyahu’s longtime American adviser and a chief architect of the Israeli right’s strategy in Washington — has argued for the better part of a decade that the real backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is no longer the American Jewish community but the evangelicals. The math reinforces the point: there are roughly seven and a half million Jews in the United States, whereas evangelicals make up over a quarter of the entire country.

Then, in November 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency, a moment of enormous significance for his evangelical base. Trump is no theologian, and few have described him as a particularly devout Christian. But he offered something arguably more useful: a transactional politician with no attachment to the foreign-policy establishment’s consensus on the Middle East, who owed an enormous political debt to the evangelical base that helped put him in office and was more than happy to repay it. The Republican platform had already dropped its commitment to a two-state solution that year, and Trump campaigned on moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is perhaps the single most geopolitically, theologically, and emotionally charged piece of real estate on the planet — sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and claimed as a capital by both Israelis and Palestinians. Israel had captured and unified the city in 1967 and treated it as its undivided capital, but virtually no other country recognized that status. Every US president since Bill Clinton had promised to move the embassy there, and every one had found a reason to quietly shelve it.

By the time Trump took office, the promise had been made and broken so many times that most of Washington had stopped taking it seriously. His evangelical base had not.

A Down Payment in Jerusalem

In December 2017, less than a year into his term, Trump announced that the United States would relocate its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel’s capital. AIPAC, for all the attention it draws, was relatively quiet on the matter — not opposed, but not a major player.

This was, at its heart, a core evangelical project, something Trump acknowledged himself: “That’s for the evangelicals… You know, it’s amazing with that — the evangelicals are more excited by that than Jewish people.” The opening ceremony at the embassy in May 2018 featured a prayer led by Robert Jeffress, a Dallas megachurch pastor squarely inside the hardline strand, with the benediction delivered by Hagee himself.

It proved to be a down payment on what followed. Across the rest of his first term, Trump signed a proclamation recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights — territory Israel had taken from Syria in 1967 and annexed in 1981 despite international objection. Eight months later, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would no longer consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank inconsistent with international law, formally reversing a State Department legal opinion that had stood since 1978.

Where Policy Turns Theological

The Golan decision rested mostly on secular strategic ground — a buffer zone Israel had occupied for so long that nobody seriously expected Syria, then mired in civil war, to retake it by any means. The West Bank is where things turn theological fast.

The West Bank is part of the biblical heartland — Judea and Samaria, in the vocabulary the movement has spent decades insisting on — and the question of whether Jews have a right to build there is exactly where the theological framework stops being an abstraction argued in Bible studies and yeshivas and becomes real-world policy. The 1978 opinion, formulated under President Carter (himself an evangelical), had functioned for forty years as the United States’ legal position that Israeli settlements on that land were dubious. Removing it was more than clearing a diplomatic obstacle; it aligned the official American legal position with a theological claim about who the land belongs to. Pompeo, an evangelical Presbyterian who told a Christian broadcasting network in 2019 that he believed God might have raised Trump up to protect Israel, was well aware of the alignment.

Trump left office in January 2021 with all of it still on the books, and none of it was seriously challenged by the administration that followed. Joe Biden was no evangelical, but the religious vocabulary that had shaped American politics on this issue since Truman called himself Cyrus never belonged to just one party. “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist,” the 46th president said.

That language is now less common on the Democratic side — the party’s base has grown largely secular and moved away from support for Israel — but it has not vanished entirely. Senator Cory Booker has personally spent years studying Torah, keeps a Hebrew Bible on his desk, and once told a New Jersey delegation at an AIPAC summit: “If I forget thee, O Israel, may I cut off my right hand.” Booker is an outlier among modern Democrats; his party was always running on a different engine than the Republican one.

The Hardliners Take the Keys

Biden’s term was largely a holding pattern, and it ended in January 2025. Trump’s second term is where the dynamic truly accelerated. When the administration selected an ambassador to Israel, the name at the top of the list was Mike Huckabee — a former governor of Arkansas, a two-time Republican presidential candidate, and one of the most recognizable evangelical figures in American politics. Huckabee had spent over four decades personally leading pilgrimages through the Holy Land, by his own count taking more than 100 trips.

Since taking the post, Huckabee has systematically refused to use the term “West Bank,” deferring instead to the biblical terminology of Judea and Samaria. In his framing the land is not occupied — he argues it cannot be, because it is part of Israel. The embassy was quick to clarify that this was not an official change in US policy, but the ambassador’s underlying beliefs are nonetheless relevant: he does not say “settlements,” preferring “communities” of Israelis living in Israel. Most strikingly, asked whether he would support an expanded Israeli map stretching from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq, he said: “It would be fine if they took it all.”

A Wild Quote and Where It Came From

To be clear, the odds of anything like that happening are essentially zero. Not even the most hardline Israeli hawks dream of such a plan. The IDF is already stretched thin and facing manpower shortages from ongoing conflicts with Gaza, Lebanon, and now Iran; the idea of rolling into Egypt is out of the question. Huckabee himself walked it back: “They don’t want to take it over. They’re not asking to take it over.”

But it remains a remarkable thing for a sitting US Ambassador to Israel to say — not some random pastor. Where did it come from, if not the Israeli government? It is an explicitly theological claim: one reading of scripture that holds the Covenant with Abraham included the physical borders as a guaranteed right for his descendants.

This is the radicalism that the conspiracy-minded narrative about Jewish-controlled lobbying entirely misses. Just as theologically driven Christians championed a Jewish state before Herzl ever picked up his pen, today evangelicals are often pushing a more hardline stance than most Jews — the sort of thing that leaves a commentator like Thomas Friedman shaking his head.

Huckabee’s stances are not isolated quirks. “Judea and Samaria” has been working its way into State Department communications, executive orders, and committee staff documents throughout the second Trump term, and the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee reportedly instructed his staff to stop using “West Bank” entirely. Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Claudia Tenney introduced legislation retitling the territory in federal usage, and a “Friends of Judea and Samaria” caucus was convened in Congress to formalize the rebranding.

Beyond Terminology

The shift has gone well beyond words on paper. Since taking office, Trump revoked the Biden executive order that had sanctioned violent West Bank settlers and the organizations supporting them. The modest friction Biden had built into the relationship — and, remember, he was himself an avowed Zionist — was gone, and Jerusalem wasted little time approving 20 new settlements in a single cabinet session, the largest single-session expansion in decades.

Beyond Huckabee, others share the worldview. House Speaker Mike Johnson is probably the most theologically explicit Christian Zionist ever to hold the Speaker’s chair; he told an interviewer in 2024 that he believed Genesis 12 — God’s promise to bless those who bless Abraham’s descendants and curse those who curse them — was “great foreign policy” and a US “biblical admonition” to help Israel. The point is not to fault a politician for being religious, which has been true of American leaders throughout history. The question is what happens when that worldview becomes the operating framework for a global superpower’s foreign policy.

They are far from alone. Senator Lindsey Graham, deeply influential on foreign policy across multiple Republican presidencies, is a frequent CUFI speaker. At one pro-Israel rally he warned, “If America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us.” Representative Mike Collins, confronted by a reporter about his stance, said: “I’m a Christian.

My job is to protect Israel 100%.” These are not outlier views in the Republican caucus. How much is sincere conviction and how much is the language politicians learn to speak when a base expects it is genuinely hard to say — almost certainly the former for some, Huckabee front and center, and likely the latter for others. But in practice it makes little difference: a settlement gets built whether the senator backing it believes in Genesis 12’s geopolitical implications or simply in winning his next primary.

The View From Jerusalem

What does Israel itself make of all this — a movement of tens of millions of Christians whose theology holds that the Jewish state is a warm-up act for the end of the world? It is worth remembering that the Jewish world is hardly monolithic and has never been of one mind. Herzl and most of Israel’s founders were thoroughly secular; they wanted a state as a national project, not a theological one. Plenty of religiously practicing Jews do view the land as biblically promised and the return as divinely ordained, a camp that began as a small minority but grew over the years.

The split does not track neatly with religiosity. The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, have historically been among the most skeptical of the entire Zionist project because of their reading of Torah, and many Haredim oppose the state’s existence on theological grounds. The evangelical alliance therefore lands very differently depending on where one stands.

For nationalists it feels relatively natural — these are people who share a prophetic vocabulary, even if the two timelines diverge somewhat at the end. For secular Israelis the whole thing is stranger, but the political establishment made its peace with the arrangement long ago.

A State-Sanctioned Apparatus

The Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus, founded in 2004, has grown into the largest caucus in the Knesset. Israeli ministries now run pilgrimage campaigns, annual Christian media summits, and explicit outreach to American evangelical communities — an entire state-sanctioned, state-funded apparatus built around an alliance the government judged too valuable to leave to personal relationships between prime ministers and pastors.

This extends well beyond Netanyahu and his party. Yair Lapid, the centrist former prime minister and a longtime Netanyahu critic, came out in February 2026 to explicitly endorse Huckabee’s framing of biblical Israel’s borders, saying he wanted a Jewish state “as broad as possible” along scriptural lines. The Bennett-Lapid government of 2021 and 2022 maintained the same evangelical engagement Netanyahu had built, with no discernible change. The caucus pulls members from across the spectrum — Likud, Religious Zionism, Yesh Atid, National Unity — and even the Israeli left, when in power, has not called to walk it back.

The friction that does exist tends to come from a different direction, much of it tied to Hagee himself. For all of CUFI’s political utility, Hagee’s theological record has made many Jews, Israeli and American alike, deeply uncomfortable. In a 1990s sermon that resurfaced during the 2008 presidential cycle, he preached that God had sent Adolf Hitler as a divine “hunter” to drive Jews back to Israel — that the Holocaust itself was, in his framework, God’s instrument for forcing the return to the Promised Land.

He has argued in print and from the pulpit that the broader pattern of historical antisemitism was God’s discipline for Jewish disobedience. The sermon followed him onto the stage at the November 2023 March for Israel in Washington, where he was given a marquee speaking slot alongside Chuck Schumer, Mike Johnson, and Israel’s own president. Not a single rabbi spoke at that rally.

Hagee did.

A Price Worth Paying

None of this, remarkably, has stopped the relationship from deepening. Netanyahu has personally addressed Hagee’s CUFI summit nearly every year since the late 2000s, and the Zionist Organization of America continues to host Hagee regularly. The political establishment’s calculation has been consistent: whatever baggage the alliance carries is a price worth paying for what evangelicals deliver in Washington. Critics exist — from parts of the religious establishment to secular Israelis who find the whole thing a head-scratcher — but they have made few inroads given the return on investment.

Which brings the story back to what Dermer has put more bluntly than most Israeli officials would risk in public: the real backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is no longer the Jewish community. It is the evangelicals. How sustainable that is, though, is the question now occupying minds across the political spectrum in both Washington and Jerusalem.

Cracks in the Coalition

The numbers suggest sustainability may be less favorable for Jerusalem than it would like. Sixty percent of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, according to Pew’s March 2026 survey, up from 42 percent four years earlier. Those holding a strongly unfavorable view have nearly tripled over the same span. In 2026, Gallup’s tracking poll showed that for the first time since it began measuring the question, more Americans sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis.

Part of this is partisan. Netanyahu’s close relationship with Trump has soured many on the American left, and 80 percent of Democrats now view Israel unfavorably — nearly a complete inversion from a decade ago, and unlikely to reverse soon. Republicans have been affected less; a clear majority still view Israel favorably. But even they are feeling the pressure, especially through an age filter.

Republicans under 40 flipped to majority unfavorable for the first time, while older Republicans remain solidly supportive.

A Generational Drift

Some of the shift is simply generational. Younger Americans are less likely to hold the near-sacrosanct view of Israel that older counterparts carried for much of their lives. The polling on evangelicals is especially telling: surveys of under-30 evangelicals have found support for Israel dropping by roughly 30 points over the past several years, with a plurality now saying they support neither side.

Part of that is the footage from Gaza circulating on TikTok and Instagram. Part is exposure to Arab Christian voices that earlier generations never encountered. And part is that the theological vocabulary itself — rapture, tribulation, the prophetic significance of 1948 — simply does not land the way it once did.

Some pressure comes from a place that would have been unimaginable in Republican politics five years ago. When Tucker Carlson called Christian Zionism “a dangerous heresy” and “a brain virus” in late 2025, the reaction split the right like few single moments have. Ted Cruz called it “remarkable, and sad.”

The Heritage Foundation’s president initially defended Carlson before facing a staff revolt and partially reversing himself, and the Antisemitism Task Force severed ties with Heritage entirely. Carlson also drew attention for a two-hour interview with open Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes that was watched more than twenty million times across platforms. That is the danger of this fault line: there is a legitimate, serious case against unconditional support for any foreign country, and against one strain of Christianity driving American foreign policy — but the space has also attracted darker voices, from Fuentes’s open antisemitism to Candace Owens’s alleged promotion of nineteenth-century anti-Talmudic texts.

The Divide Inside the Administration

The more consequential divisions are playing out inside the administration rather than on podcasts. Marco Rubio runs American foreign policy as Secretary of State, and his record on Israel is hawkish enough that one might mistake him for a core member of this movement. He is not — not really.

Rubio’s support for Israel has meaningful differences from the others. When he speaks about Israel publicly, the framework he reaches for is civilizational and strategic — shared institutions, a common Judeo-Christian heritage — and he argues that an attack on Tel Aviv is conceptually no different from an attack on Paris, London, or Miami. That does not mean he is about to wave a Palestinian flag, but it is a rupture from the theologically driven, apocalypse-oriented approach of evangelicals.

Catholic and Orthodox belief carries none of the prophetic end-times views found in the world of Hagee, Cruz, or Huckabee, and that has real consequences. In October 2025, when Israeli officials began signaling movement toward formal annexation of parts of the West Bank, Rubio publicly pushed back, telling reporters the US was not supportive because it threatened peace negotiations and risked being counterproductive to American interests. He has also expressed concern about settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

Vice President JD Vance fits the same pattern. He is not an evangelical either, and he has teamed up with Rubio to criticize annexation attempts — using the term “West Bank,” not Judea and Samaria, to do it. Calling any such attempt “very stupid,” he did not mince words: “The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel. The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel.”

It is not the language of European leaders, but it is a far cry from what comes from Hagee, Huckabee, and Cruz.

What Comes Next

This is not a one-off. While the Catholic-evangelical divide on Israel is more porous than it might appear, it tracks closely enough that it is hard to dismiss as coincidence. Religious differences are usually peripheral to Western geopolitics, but the issues of the Middle East are so wrapped up in theology that they keep surfacing. And with Rubio and Vance the two frontrunners for the 2028 Republican presidential ticket, the question of where US policy on Israel heads is very much front and center.

Combine that with the increasingly negative view younger Americans of both parties hold toward Israel, and the hardline approach embodied by Huckabee looks to be at the zenith of its power, unlikely to be repeated in a future administration. The hardliners remain in the coalition, and many will be around for years — Speaker Johnson is just 54, which in DC is practically a teenager. So far the less-hardline camp has shown no inclination to risk a rupture over these differences.

The people holding the pen on American Israel policy right now genuinely believe in what they are doing, and for the moment they have the votes, the personnel, and the president to do it. What they may not have is time.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. HomeFronts is his deep dive into geopolitics, modern conflict, military history, and the civilian and societal dimensions of global events.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Christian Zionism? It is a strand of Christianity, strongest among American evangelicals, that holds the modern State of Israel to be the visible fulfillment of biblical prophecy. In its hardline form it reads the Jewish return to the land as the opening act of an end-times sequence — building toward Armageddon and the physical return of Christ — which makes support for Israel a matter of cosmic stakes rather than ordinary foreign policy.

How does Christian Zionism differ from AIPAC’s influence? AIPAC operates as a polished, well-funded Beltway organization built on corporate donors and professional policy staff. Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the leading Christian Zionist body, is far more grassroots; it raises a fraction of AIPAC’s money but mobilizes turnout in primaries and general elections, keeping the Republican Party aligned with Israel in a way money alone cannot.

What concrete policies has the movement helped produce? Under Trump, evangelical influence helped drive the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem in 2017-2018, recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the 2019 reversal of the 1978 State Department opinion on settlements, and a second-term effort to rebrand the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” across federal usage, along with the revocation of sanctions on violent settlers.

How did the US-Israel relationship begin, and was it always close? The US recognized Israel within eleven minutes of its 1948 founding under President Truman, who likened himself to the Persian king Cyrus. But the early relationship was rocky: Israel’s founders were secular socialists whose foreign policy leaned closer to Moscow, and it was not clear for years which side of the Cold War the country would join. The 1967 war helped settle that question.

What does the modern State of Israel think of the evangelical alliance? The Jewish world is not of one mind — secular founders, religious nationalists, and skeptical ultra-Orthodox Haredim all view it differently. The Israeli political establishment, however, made peace with the alliance long ago, building a state-funded apparatus around it, including the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus, now its largest. Friction tends to center on Hagee’s theological statements rather than the alliance itself.

Why is American support for Israel changing? A majority of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, with 80 percent of Democrats and a growing share of younger Republicans among them. Drivers include Gaza footage on social media, exposure to Arab Christian voices, and a theological vocabulary that resonates less with younger evangelicals, whose support has dropped sharply.

Who inside the administration pushes back on the hardline approach? Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, both Catholic and both 2028 frontrunners, frame their support for Israel in civilizational and strategic terms rather than prophetic ones. Both have publicly opposed West Bank annexation, with Vance calling it “very stupid” — a notable rupture from the apocalypse-oriented evangelical approach.