Last month, more than 1,000 U.S. Christian pastors and influencers traveled to Israel, becoming “the largest group of American Christian leaders to visit Israel since its founding.” According to Fox News, Israel’s government paid for the trips to “provide training and prepare participants to serve as unofficial ambassadors for Israel in their communities.”
This group was composed of Christian Zionists, mostly evangelicals who believe the state of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy, blending contemporary politics with ancient theology. For them, loyalty to Israel is key to their faith. The United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is a leading Christian Zionist.
Last week, a statement from leaders of some of the most ancient Christian churches condemned “damaging ideologies, such as Christian Zionism” that “mislead the public” and “sow confusion” that “have found favor among certain political actors in Israel and beyond who seek to push a political agenda which may harm the Christian presence in the Holy Land and the wider Middle East.”
Certain political actors indeed.
The statement was signed by the “Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in the Holy Land,” can be found on the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s website. This group includes the Roman Catholic Pierbattista Cardinal Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and leaders from various Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, non-Latin Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran denominations.
These Mideast Christian leaders are not the only ones who have a problem with Christian Zionism.
In an interview with the evangelical influencer Bryce Crawford this month, Tucker Carlson said “if you think that murdering tens of thousands of children, which the Israeli government has done, is consistent with Christianity, we’re reading a different manuscript. I just don’t see that at all.”
Carlson continued, “What gets me going is watching Christian preachers who are paid by the government of Israel take free vacations to Israel where they stock up on talking points and propaganda and then inflict all of that propaganda on their congregations and then use the Bible to justify it.”
“You’re justifying violence,” he insisted. “Yeah, against innocents.”
Carlson made similar remarks during his speech at the Turning Point USA conference in December.
“But there are people, particularly Christian ministers, I have noticed, who are preaching a political message and pretending that it's the gospel,” Carlson told a large conservative and largely Christian youth audience. “So let me just say, and I think my theology is right, I’m hardly a theologian, God is not on any country’s side. Certain countries can decide to be on God’s side. And that is true for people too. Okay? God doesn’t have a partisan affiliation. He doesn’t have a nationality. And if someone is telling you otherwise, that is just not true.”
He emphasized that killing innocents cannot be merely rationalized within a Christian framework.
“Because killing people who committed no crime is immoral,” said Carlson, who is Episcopalian. “It will always be immoral. And people who do it will be punished for it. And nations that endorse it will be punished for it. That’s a fact.”
“And you are seeing now, you are seeing now a very intense effort to convince you otherwise. Oh, it’s fine. They deserved it,” Carlson continued, delving into the moral reality of the war in Palestine. “Really, did their children deserve it? If a man commits a crime, do we kill his kids? I don’t care if it's in Minneapolis or Gaza City. No, we don’t.”
Christian Zionists generally deny that a genocide has been happening in Gaza, and thus appear to prioritize loyalty to Israel over biblical prohibitions against taking innocent life.
“And to see Christian pastors make excuses for that is one of the most—” Carlson trailed off. “And that's not a partisan question. That is not a political question. That is the only question that matters. Do we have the right to murder people?”
“And the resounding answer that Christianity provides us is no,” he said.
Carlson, as a Christian, clearly has a significant problem with how Christian Zionists seem to justify or just ignore the taking of so many innocent lives in Gaza in the same way the Jerusalem church leaders did in their statement.
Carlson is by no means the only American right-wing figure expressing this frustration. The former Republican representative Matt Gaetz made similar criticisms in a recent interview with Carlson. Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly has long described herself as an Israel supporter but has pushed back against the narrative that criticizing that country and its policies is antisemitic. She has also said that “everybody under 30 is against Israel.”
The influential populist personality Steve Bannon drew a line between these groups of Israel Firsters and America Firsters during his own fiery speech at the TPUSA conference.
And he wasn’t afraid to name names—starting with the most prominent pro-Israel voice at the Daily Wire.
“Benji Shapiro sat up here last night and he was all, you know, I’m going to, you know, it’s all about the truth.” Bannon said. “Ben, you can’t handle the truth.”
Bannon got into the Israel issue and the American right, including the late Charlie Kirk: “What is ‘Greater Israel’? It’s not about Israel itself. It’s about an expansionist Israel, an imperial Israel that Netanyahu and that crowd have thought up. And the Israel first crowd is Ben Shapiro, Tel Aviv Mark Levin, and many others that want to put that ahead of America’s interests. Charlie Kirk fought that.”
He continued: “You know where Charlie Kirk fought it? In the White House. I know, because I was there. When I went back, Charlie Kirk was working with [former Trump White House Personnel Office’s Sergio Gor] to make sure that we didn’t get sucked into a land war, a decapitation of the Iranian elites that would lead to a massive civil war that American troops would get sucked into, because that was Netanyahu's plan from the beginning.”
There is now a line, or a line that continues to develop, pitting American “Israel First” Christian Zionists and neocons against “America First” right-wingers in the U.S. who also find common cause with ancient traditional churches who seek to put their own Christians in Jerusalem first.
The pro-Israel evangelicals and their neoconservative allies seem to insist being zionist is simply part of the Christian package, while those belonging to older Christian churches—the oldest, actually—are saying that’s simply not true. In fact, they believe Zionism is heresy and idolatry.
The rift continued to unfold even on Tuesday when the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who is Catholic, declared that he is not a Christian Zionist.
“I don’t think the Jews are entitled to the Holy Land because of some religious premise,” Knowles said.
Mark Levin—who is Jewish and yet seems heavily invested in American Christians buying into theological Zionism—shared Knowles’s clip, adding, “No offense but nobody gives a sh*t. Just saying.”
Knowles’ fellow Catholic and Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh wasn’t having it. Walsh’s response, who is 39, to Levin, who is a longtime talk radio veteran, was brutal.
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“It’s pretty clear that a lot of people give a shit what Michael has to say,” Walsh claimed. “On the other hand I’m not sure that I’ve ever met anyone under the age of 70 who cares much about what you say, Mark. Probably best to leave these kinds of insults to people who are far more relevant.”
Expect this debate to get nastier and the gap to widen, including regarding the older Zionist crowd and the America Firsters who veer younger.
But it’s worth noting that if Israel’s government has a certain kind of right-wing Christians as allies in the United States, a very different type of Mideast Christians who still live “in the very land where our Lord lived, taught, suffered, and rose from the dead” have conservative Christian American allies too—including arguably the most popular and influential conservative voice in the United States.
