Christian Zionism Draws Evangelical Support for Israel Into Interfaith Cooperation, Essay Argues

The meeting took place on 23 June 1969 at the Midtown Manhattan headquarters of the American Jewish Committee. The evangelist Billy Graham met with two dozen rabbis and Jewish leaders. According to one rabbi, the purpose was to let Graham convey “the need for dialogue and communication” between American evangelicals and American Jews, and to find common ground by explaining “his relationship with Israel.”

Some of the Jewish leaders were wary of Graham, whom one described as a “wild raving fundamentalist,” but the essay reports that he won them over. He cited the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament, to describe his understanding of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, and he presented his support for Israel as recompense for past Christian anti-Judaism. “All Christians are guilty as far as Jewish experience was concerned,” he said. This admission of past wrongs reflects the value of truth and fairness (Proverbs 18:17). Graham also spoke of his conversations with the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and assured the Jewish leaders that the United States president, Richard Nixon, was “extremely sympathetic” to Israel.

The essay argues that for many evangelicals today, Christian Zionism is far from a side issue. Those who hold it, the author writes, believe they are correcting the ancient injustice of anti-Semitism and contributing to the salvation of the world and the completion of God’s redemptive plans. For many, it serves as a framework that explains the biblical narrative and current events and offers a guide to the future.

According to the essay, the 1969 meeting contained the essential elements of the strong support that evangelical Protestants in the United States give to the state of Israel, and its spirit has since been repeated dozens of times. The author says Graham combined an evangelical reading of the Bible, a strong desire to aid Israel, and the self-interested power calculations of both communities into a language of interfaith rapprochement. The Jewish leaders, concerned about Israel’s future and aware of evangelical influence, were eager to build new lines of cooperation.

The essay notes that Graham would have affirmed the exclusive truth claims of Christianity, and that the American Jewish leaders retained their own theological exclusivity. Despite these differences, the author describes the alliance as powerful and lasting, and as one of the most notable instances of interfaith cooperation in recent history. The essay also cites Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s view in *The Social Contract* (1762) that exclusive religious claims are hard to reconcile with civil peace, and argues that the evangelical-Jewish alliance shows that this view is not necessarily true. Close to 50 years after the meeting, the essay says, evangelicals and Jews still disagree on most theological and cultural questions, yet they have drawn closer in cooperation over support for Israel. Many of Graham’s successors lead influential Christian Zionist organisations, which the author describes as among the most successful single-issue movements in modern US politics.

According to the essay, Christian Zionists have achieved notable unity and influence in support of Israel by combining religious, historical and political elements. They emphasise covenantal language drawn from the Bible and present a simplified version of the Jewish-Christian past, while directing their work toward the practical goal of increasing political influence. The author also observes that liberal social scientists and journalists have tended to describe the movement as apocalyptic, as a right-wing political grouping, or even as a neocolonial venture. The essay says these analyses offer useful insights, but it presents Christian Zionism as an important case of Jewish-Christian interfaith engagement.

The essay situates this view within a broader account of interfaith cooperation, which it describes as a modern liberal ideal rooted in the twentieth century. It contrasts that ideal with Christian Zionism, which the author says rejects progressive ideals and holds a different understanding of the world. In the author’s account, the movement makes God’s covenantal promises more specific and more exclusive, and this specificity explains its affinity with a certain understanding of Jewish identity. The essay says that this emphasis produces its clearest interfaith effect on the question of Jewish possession of Israel’s covenanted land. For Christian Zionists, this land includes the sites of biblical history and the borders that Genesis describes as granted to Israel’s patriarchs, and these, the essay says, make up the ideal borders of the state of Israel, including the contested West Bank.

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