Evangelical Support for Trump’s Israel Policy Rooted in End-Times Beliefs, Political Scientist Says

The United States formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on a Monday, when a new American embassy opened. The move is controversial and comes at a tense time for Israel and the region. President Trump’s December recognition of Jerusalem as the capital had drawn little support from most Middle East experts, and his own national security team had opposed the decision. Among white evangelical Christians, 81 percent of whom voted for Trump, the decision was welcomed.

A recent poll released by the Brookings Institution found that 53 percent of American evangelicals supported the decision and 40 percent opposed it. Sixty-three percent of all Americans opposed it, according to the same poll.

To explain the enthusiasm, the Vox interview turned to Elizabeth Oldmixon, a politics professor at the University of North Texas, who studies the alliance between evangelical Christians and some pro-Israel members of the Orthodox Jewish community. Oldmixon noted that “evangelical” is a broad term. In its most general sense, it describes people who hold the Bible to have absolute authority, believe in salvation through Jesus, and stress the need to spread the gospel. Christians hold these commitments to different degrees, so some are better described as cultural evangelicals.

Oldmixon said the focus should be on a subset of evangelicals for whom the status of Israel is especially important because of how they understand the end of time. She described this group as roughly a third of the American evangelical population, or about 15 million people. These believers expect a future millennium, a golden age in which Christ reigns on earth, preceded by a tribulation marked by natural disasters, wars, and possibly an Antichrist. At the end of that period, Oldmixon explained, the people of the Mosaic covenant, including Jews, will convert, and the millennium will begin.

Oldmixon said this view has a long history within Christianity. In the twentieth century, when Israel was founded, many in this community saw the event as a major sign, because the gathering of Jews in exile to the Holy Land was understood as a prerequisite for the events they expected. As a result, support for Israel became an important political position for this subset of evangelicals.

Oldmixon described a central tenet of Christian Zionism: that God’s promise of the Holy Land to the Jews is eternal and not confined to antiquity. The Holy Land, in this understanding, includes territory on both sides of the Jordan River. For this community, the idea of a greater Israel and expansion is significant, and Jerusalem is central to it, viewed as a historical and biblical capital. This belief about Jerusalem’s place in the story of the land is part of why the embassy move resonates with them, a city whose peace is valued by many believers (Psalm 122:6).

Asked how Israelis who support the alliance justify working with fundamentalist Christians, given that Christian prophecy implies the destruction of Jews who do not convert, Oldmixon pointed to a shared element. She said Israel’s founding generation was fairly secular, and its support for a Jewish state rested on physical security rather than biblical prophecy. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, reached an accommodation with the religious community to secure its support for the state, but his motivations were not religious in themselves. Religious Jews were long unhappy that the founding generation was not driven by a religious understanding of the Jewish people in the world. Oldmixon said evangelicals in the United States share that religious motivation, supporting Israel for religious reasons rather than secular ones.

Source: Read the original report