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Julia Demaree Nikhinson

For 60 years, U.S. evangelicals have focused money, prayers and political heft on an alliance with Israel, driven by what they say is a command from God to protect the Jewish state.

That evangelical project has reached its pinnacle with the planned appointment of one of their own, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/12/trump-huckabee-ambassador-israel/" target=_blank>Mike Huckabee, as ambassador to Israel</a>.

Speaking after President-elect <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> announced the pick, the former Southern Baptist pastor and onetime Arkansas governor underscored the evangelical effort when he cast his selection in a religious context.

“Without any apology, I believe those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel will be cursed. I want to be on the blessing side,” Huckabee told podcaster and activist <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=9071276872905783" target=_blank>Charlie Kirk</a>. “I really believe it was the hand of God” that put Trump back in office, Kirk said. “It was,” Huckabee agreed.

If confirmed, Huckabee, a former Fox News host and Israel tour guide for Christian visitors, will be the first evangelical in the ambassador role. Evangelicals and other Christian Zionists — those who use Christian reasoning to argue for a Jewish state in some part of biblical Israel — could have only dreamed of this moment a half-century ago, said University of Wisconsin religious historian Daniel Hummel.

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“Christian Zionists have never been as close to the center of the conversation, so in that sense, it’s a real victory for them,” Hummel said. “To have him representing evangelicals and to be in the rooms where high-level policies are shaped … this is their time.”

Huckabee did not respond to messages asking for comment. In choosing the former Arkansas governor for the post, Trump said in a statement that Huckabee would work “tirelessly to bring about Peace in the Middle East,” adding that “the people of Israel love him.”

Even among more conservative evangelicals like Huckabee, there is diversity of thought about both the theology that connects them to Israel and their policy preferences. But those in Huckabee’s milieu say he and the incoming president share a clear underlying worldview.

“Evangelicals believe Israel is good and that people killing Jews are evil. There is no middle ground. Trump has that worldview,” said Michael Evans, a Texas author and longtime friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who runs multiple organizations meant to strengthen the bond between Israel and Christian Zionism.

The intense support for Israel by U.S. evangelicals — especially White ones — barely existed before the 1967 war.

In the preceding decades, liberal Protestants were the main Christian supporters of Israel, said Samuel Goldman, a political scientist at George Washington University who has written a book on Christian Zionism. The liberals, he said, were motivated by Christian guilt over the Holocaust and the history of Christian antisemitism. Conservative Protestants, meantime, were skeptical of the Socialist character of early Israel, and didn’t like the Jewish state’s discomfort with evangelizing.

But in general, “before the ’70s, Israel wasn’t a partisan issue,” Hummel said.

Oded Balilty

However, Israel’s overwhelming defeat of three of its larger neighbors in a 1967 war triggered excitement among evangelicals who saw biblical prophecy unfolding in real time. In the same period, the United States was mired in the quagmire of Vietnam; the contrast between U.S. struggles and Israel’s success was striking to evangelicals looking for evidence of God’s influence on world affairs, Goldman said.

The shift was supercharged by pop culture. The best-selling 1970 book “The Late Great Planet Earth” and the multimedia empire based on the Left Behind books in the ’80s and ’90s both centered on the modern state of Israel playing a role in the second coming of Jesus Christ. The promise of Jesus returning is a tenet of Christian belief.

The scriptural warning about blessings that Huckabee echoed to Kirk, from Genesis, started to be read — and preached — much more urgently, as did scripture’s reference to God’s covenant with the Jews promising them land.

For some, Israel’s creation in 1948 and its success in wars in 1967 and 1973 fed into passionate theories about Jesus returning and a rapture that would bring all Christians into heaven. There are multiple evangelical rapture, or “end times,” scenarios, some very specific, some vague, many involving war and great suffering for Jews and Israel.

At the same time, there was a key political pivot that would profoundly shape U.S. evangelicalism for the next half-century: Religious activists including the Rev. Jerry Falwell and televangelist Pat Robertson, both Southern Baptists, wedded that sense of apocalyptic expectation to conservative politics. Falwell convened one of the early meetings of U.S. conservative evangelical leaders with an Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, in 1980.

Over the decades, the Christian Zionist movement became more organized, consolidated and influential. A major factor was the creation in 2006 of the San Antonio-based Christian Zionist group Christians United for Israel, by the Rev. John Hagee, an influential televangelist.

Top Republican politicians regularly appear at the annual Washington-area fundraisers of CUFI, which claims to have 10 million members. CUFI has raised tens of millions of dollars, with the proceeds going to Israeli and U.S. Jewish groups that support Israel. It also lobbies, brings members to meet people in Congress and organizes at the state level to advance what it sees as pro-Israel legislation and to advocate for new Holocaust memorials.

Among the big names who have come to the events are former vice president Mike Pence, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

“There was no widespread Christian Zionist movement before CUFI,” said Todd Deatherage, an evangelical veteran of the George W. Bush State Department who runs an organization trying to persuade evangelicals to be more evenhanded between Israel and the Palestinians.

Hummel said leaders including Hagee and Huckabee were key in making a strategic shift: They started de-emphasizing exactly what modern Israel’s role might be in Jesus’ return — if any. That brought a wider range of Christians to the pro-Israel cause.

A 2022 <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/26/modest-warming-in-u-s-views-on-israel-and-palestinians/" target="_blank">Pew Research report</a> found that 86 percent of White evangelicals said they had a “very favorable” view of Israeli people, compared with 67 percent of adults overall. The same survey found 68 percent of White evangelicals said they had a favorable view of the Israeli government, compared with 48 percent of adults overall.

Deatherage said ideas about modern Israel’s holy purpose — as unspecific as they have been — became part of the cultural evangelical imagination. “And the same audience was organized more as a voting bloc,” he said. “People today see Israel as a lucky rabbit’s foot.”

If evangelical support for Israel became part of a bloc of causes — defending the traditional family and defining America as a Christian nation, among others — the alliance also hardened into a sharp skepticism of Islam, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, some pastors say.

Still, there are looming threats to the alliance between evangelicals and Israel — demographics and the continuing shift among younger Christians to become somewhat more neutral between Israelis and Palestinians.

Anna Moneymaker

The percent of adult Americans who identify as “born-again” or “evangelical” is shrinking,  from 28 percent in 2009 to 23 percent today, according to Pew Research.

Motti Inbari of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and Kirill Bumin of Boston University, who do polling on evangelical views about Israel, found that support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute among evangelicals age 18 to 29 fell from 68 percent in 2018 to 34 percent in 2021.

The change marked an evangelical population “more open to recognizing the humanity of Palestinians,” Deatherage said.

A March UNC-Pembroke poll, one of the few on evangelical views about Israel since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and the resulting offensive in Gaza, found evangelicals leaning toward Israel, but only by a plurality of 47 percent. Twenty-nine percent supported neither side, while 10 percent leaned toward Palestinians.

Whether evangelicals achieve their policy goals in a second Trump term may depend on two things: unifying their somewhat disparate views, and getting Trump to embrace those desires.

“The general sense that there is prophetic significance to what’s happening in the Middle East is widespread. But not a lot of consensus as to what that amounts to,” Hummel said.

Huckabee has long advanced the idea that there is “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4chxcXBDXM" target=_blank>no such thing</a> as a Palestinian.” In recent days he has repeated that “there is no ‘occupation’” in the West Bank because, as he said on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fh3WmzuSiU" target=_blank>Israeli television</a> recently, Jews have “had a rightful deed to the place for 3,500 years, since the time of Abraham.” He and Trump oppose the creation of a Palestinian state, he has said since his selection, a goal that has been favored by presidents as diverse as George W. Bush and Joe Biden as well as the <a href="https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-186742/" target=_blank>United Nations</a> and the European Union.

Trump’s views are harder to pin down. He has said he supports two states if “both sides” want it — a position that doesn’t seem to have support from either side now — but said during the 2024 campaign that his hope for a such a solution was fading. He has both encouraged Netanyahu to get the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/israel-hamas-war/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Gaza war</a> <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-i-told-netanyahu-get-your-victory-quickly-because-the-killing-has-to-stop/" target="_blank">“over with</a> … the killing has to stop,” and also told him “do what you have to do to,” words suggesting Israel should not feel restrained, regardless of the death and destruction in Gaza.

Inbari and Bumin’s research reflects the complex and sometimes blurry views evangelicals hold on Israel. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. evangelicals said they believe “the Jewish people today have the right to the land of Israel by virtue of the covenant God made with Abraham.” At the same time, only 32 percent said their religious beliefs influence how they see the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

In emailed responses to questions, Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, said his goal is for the elected government of Israel to be able to make whatever decisions it wants, without interference from the United States.

“Christian support for Israel is rooted in the promises of Genesis and throughout the Scriptures. We believe, as do many of the Jewish faith, that the land of Israel is promised to the Children of Israel,” he wrote. He added that the nation’s existence has aided the United States as well: “We stand with the sole democracy in the Middle East and with America’s one truly reliable ally in the region.”

Other evangelicals say the central goal must be freedom and health for  Jews and Arabs.

“There is no way out of this that doesn’t respect the fact that Jews and Arabs equally live in this land between the river and the sea,” Deatherage said. “It has to work for everyone.”

He said he hopes that if confirmed, Huckabee will expand the network of people he speaks with — “that he meets more Palestinians, Palestinian Christians and Jewish Israelis” who are open to sharing the territory.

“When you meet people and interact, you have the possibility to see things in a different kind of way,” he said.

JIM WATSON

Evangelicals say they view Trump as a trustworthy ally for Israel in part because of his actions in his first presidential term, including moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Yet some experts on diplomacy in the region predict they may wind up disappointed if a more pragmatic Trump emerges in a second term. Longtime U.S. State Department adviser Aaron David Miller said Trump “created a sugar high” with such moves that were more about symbolism.

That said, Miller predicted evangelicals will acquiesce to whatever Trump decides about the Middle East.

“Look at how they have adjusted to Trump. If there was any assault to people’s moral principles, they found a way around it,” Miller said.

Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.

Nieman Fellowship, 2016-2017

Religion Newswriters Association, overall excellence in religion reporting at large news organizations, first place, 2011, 2013 and 2017

University of Wisconsin at Madison, BA in journalism and history

New York University, MA in Near Eastern studies

Michelle Boorstein has been a religion reporter since 2006. She has covered the shifting blend of religion and politics under four U.S. presidents, chronicled the rise of secularism in the United States, and broken financial and sexual scandals from the synagogue down the street to the Mormon Church in Utah to the Vatican.

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