From Prophecy to Policy: Christian Zionism and American Middle East Politics

Part II of a Seven-Part Series

Part I followed Christian restorationism from biblical interpretation into advocacy, diplomacy, and the politics surrounding Jewish statehood. After 1948, the question changed. Christians who had expected a future Jewish restoration could now point to a sovereign Jewish state, and for some believers Israel’s existence became evidence that biblical promises concerning the Jewish people retained historical meaning. The more important political development, however, came gradually. A religious interpretation of Israel attached itself to an increasingly organized American constituency, and over time that constituency acquired institutions, political relationships, and access to policymakers.

Prophecy conferences, Bible institutes, annotated Bibles, missionary organizations, and Holy Land ministries were eventually joined by television preachers, voter networks, lobbying organizations, and relationships with Israeli leaders. The movement from prophecy to policy did not occur in a single moment, nor can it be reduced to one theological system. Dispensationalism provided one especially influential route, but Christians also supported Israel through ideas of covenant, opposition to supersessionism and antisemitism, gratitude toward Judaism, democratic solidarity, and strategic partnership.

That broader framing is important because Christian support for Israel should not be mistaken for control over American foreign policy. U.S.-Israeli relations have also been shaped by Cold War strategy, military and intelligence cooperation, congressional politics, American Jewish advocacy, Iran, terrorism, regional alliances, electoral considerations, and presidential judgment. The more defensible claim is substantial enough: biblically informed Christian support helped create a large American constituency for Israel; 1948 gave that constituency a contemporary focus; 1967 dramatically intensified it; and from the 1970s forward organized Christian supporters of Israel became one of the constituencies American policymakers had reason to consider.

1948: Prophecy Acquires a Contemporary Referent

Israel’s establishment made a powerful impression on American evangelicals. Scholarship on evangelical missions between 1948 and 1967 shows that the new state intensified Christian interest in Israel and drew greater attention, personnel, and resources toward the country. For Christians shaped by dispensational theology, the significance was especially strong. A Jewish state now existed in the land that restorationists and prophecy teachers had discussed for generations.

Angela Lahr’s study of Cold War evangelicalism identifies 1948 as an important turning point in prophetic thought. Israel’s creation stimulated renewed speculation about biblical prophecy and influenced the ways some evangelicals interpreted international events during the Cold War. Yet the establishment of Israel did not immediately produce the political Christian Zionism familiar today. American evangelicalism had not yet developed into the organized national political force it would become, and institutions capable of mobilizing large numbers of Christian voters around Israel policy were still years away.

During the first period of Israeli statehood, Christian engagement was therefore more theological, missionary, cultural, and educational than overtly political. Israel entered sermons, Bible teaching, religious publishing, missionary work, and evangelical imagination before it became a regular subject of organized electoral politics. That sequence matters because it helps explain how a religious attachment could later become a political constituency.

1948–1967: The Nineteen-Year Bridge

Between Israeli independence and the Six-Day War, modern Israel became increasingly embedded in American evangelical consciousness. Christians encountered the country through sermons, prophecy literature, Bible schools, religious radio, missionary organizations, Holy Land study, and travel. The continuing popularity of dispensational interpretation offered many believers a way to connect modern Israel to biblical texts concerning Jewish restoration and the future of Israel.

The period also produced forms of engagement that went beyond prophecy speculation. G. Douglas Young offers an instructive example. Raised in a fundamentalist environment, Young developed an intense commitment to Jews and Israel and in 1957 founded the American Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem, now Jerusalem University College. Historian Daniel Hummel describes Young as bringing dispensationalism, emerging neo-evangelicalism, and Jewish-Christian relations together in a practical form of Christian Zionist activism.

Young’s importance lies in what his career reveals about the larger transition. Israel was becoming more than a location on a prophecy chart. It was a place Christians could visit, study, support, and encounter directly. Personal contact with Israelis and with the geography of the Bible could reinforce the conviction that Israel occupied a unique place in Christian religious consciousness.

The theological motivations were also becoming broader than classical dispensationalism. Stephen Spector’s research shows that evangelical support for Israel has drawn from several sources: biblical covenant, prophecy, gratitude toward Jews for Christianity’s scriptural inheritance, rejection of Christian antisemitism, affection for the Jewish people, and later political and strategic considerations. By the mid-1960s, therefore, American evangelicals did not need the Six-Day War to introduce them to Israel. The religious infrastructure was already present. What 1967 did was magnify its intensity.

1967: The Accelerant

Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, together with its capture of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights, electrified many prophecy-oriented Christians. Jerusalem carried particular biblical importance, and events that had previously belonged primarily to sermons, books, and prophetic expectations could suddenly be connected to places appearing on television and in newspapers.

This is why scholarship frequently identifies 1967 as a decisive modern turning point. Sean Durbin argues that after the war the American base of Christian Zionism became increasingly concentrated among conservative evangelicals who interpreted Israel in explicitly biblical and prophetic terms. During the 1970s, that theological attachment increasingly intersected with the rise of conservative evangelical politics and the emerging Christian Right.

The chronology is therefore more important than any single date. 1948 supplied a contemporary referent; the years between 1948 and 1967 embedded Israel more deeply in evangelical religious culture; and the Six-Day War intensified that attachment at precisely the moment when conservative evangelicals were beginning to acquire greater political organization. The transformation from religious imagination to political influence took place because these developments accumulated rather than because one event suddenly created Christian Zionism.

From Religious Constituency to Political Constituency

During the 1970s, Israeli leaders increasingly recognized the political potential of American evangelical support. Prime Minister Menachem Begin cultivated relationships with conservative evangelical leaders, most famously Jerry Falwell, while evangelical politics itself was becoming more organized. Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded in 1979, helped move conservative evangelicals more deeply into national electoral politics, where support for Israel became part of a larger political identity that also included anticommunism, abortion, education, and other cultural concerns.

The important point is not that Begin created evangelical support for Israel. Its theological foundations were far older. Israeli leaders instead recognized that millions of American Christians already possessed unusually strong reasons for caring about the Jewish state. What changed was the existence of political organizations capable of mobilizing that sentiment and directing it toward elections, Congress, and presidential administrations.

Over time, that constituency developed institutions specifically designed to translate religious commitment into political activity. The most visible contemporary example is Christians United for Israel, founded in 2006 by John Hagee. CUFI presents itself as an organization devoted both to educating Christians about Israel and to ensuring that policymakers hear the views of Christian supporters of the Jewish state. Its membership figures are organizational self-reporting and should not be mistaken for an independent measurement of political power. Its institutional significance, however, is difficult to miss: a religious tradition that had once been expressed primarily through preaching, Bible study, and prophecy teaching now possessed grassroots networks, national advocacy, and regular access to elected officials.

Policy Influence Without Exclusive Causation

Two decisions during the first Trump administration illustrate how organized Christian support for Israel could reinforce policies favored by several constituencies at once. The first was Jerusalem. Congress had passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act in 1995, but successive presidents delayed implementing the embassy relocation. Christian Zionists consistently advocated recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and when President Donald Trump formally recognized Jerusalem and directed the embassy move in December 2017, Christian supporters of Israel celebrated the decision as a major victory.

It would nevertheless be inaccurate to attribute that decision to evangelicals alone. Israeli governments supported the move, Jewish pro-Israel advocates supported it, Congress had legislated for it, and Trump himself had campaigned on it. Christian Zionists mattered because they formed one part of a broader coalition that had kept the issue politically alive.

A similar pattern appeared with Iran. Christian-Zionist organizations were among the opponents of the 2015 nuclear agreement and favored a harder policy toward Tehran. In May 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and ordered the reimposition of sanctions. Again, Christian supporters of Israel were not the sole cause. Israeli leaders, Republican lawmakers, and national-security conservatives were also central to the coalition. The significance of Christian Zionism lies less in exclusive causation than in its capacity to reinforce policies that converged with the priorities of other influential actors.

Pompeo and Access to Government

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo provides a particularly revealing example of how far this constituency had traveled from the margins of American religious life. Speaking to Christians United for Israel in Washington in 2019, Pompeo placed contemporary Christian support for Israel within a longer American Protestant tradition and invoked William Blackstone, the nineteenth-century evangelist discussed in Part I who had lobbied President Benjamin Harrison for Jewish restoration.

The historical circle is striking. Blackstone attempted to influence presidents from outside government. More than a century later, an American secretary of state was invoking Blackstone before a national Christian pro-Israel organization. That fact does not establish that the State Department had become dispensationalist, nor does it prove that Pompeo’s theology determined any specific policy. It demonstrates something more careful and more useful: religious ideas and organizations that had once occupied the edges of American political life had acquired direct access to senior foreign-policy officials.

That development also points toward a question that Part II should not try to answer fully. There is a difference between a religious constituency influencing government and government officials themselves understanding Israel through biblical categories. The latter raises questions about how personal theology interacts with diplomacy, negotiation, territory, and foreign-policy judgment. That issue will receive separate treatment later in this series.

Influence Is Not Control

The distinction between influence and control remains essential. Christian supporters of Israel have not dictated American policy, and administrations have at times pursued policies they opposed. Strategic considerations—including military cooperation, intelligence sharing, regional alliances, technology, terrorism, and Iran—would remain important to Washington even if evangelical Christian Zionism disappeared.

Christian support for Israel is therefore best understood as one organized influence operating within a larger policy system. It mobilizes voters, reinforces particular policy choices, provides political support to sympathetic officials, and enlarges the domestic constituency favoring a close U.S.-Israeli relationship. Its influence becomes especially visible when its objectives coincide with those of Israeli governments, Republican administrations, congressional conservatives, and other pro-Israel organizations.

That distinction makes the argument stronger rather than weaker. Political constituencies rarely exercise power by controlling an entire policy apparatus. They matter because officials anticipate their preferences, seek their support, speak to their concerns, and find their objectives useful when those objectives coincide with broader strategic or partisan goals.

The Movement Today

The continuing importance of the constituency can be seen both institutionally and in public opinion. In April 2025, the Senate confirmed former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel by a vote of 53–46. Huckabee’s significance extends beyond the fact that he is an evangelical Christian; his public statements about Israel have repeatedly drawn on biblical language and biblical claims concerning the Jewish people and the land. His confirmation therefore represents an important contemporary example of the intersection between Christian biblical conviction and formal diplomatic authority.

Part II, however, is concerned primarily with how a religious constituency became politically organized. A later essay will examine more directly what happens when those exercising governmental authority understand Israel not only through strategy, international law, and national interest, but also through biblical conviction.

Public opinion confirms that white evangelical Protestants remain distinctive in their attitudes toward Israel. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in May 2026 found that 74 percent of white evangelical Protestants viewed the Israeli people favorably and 57 percent viewed the Israeli government favorably. White evangelicals were the only major religious group surveyed in which a majority expressed a favorable view of the Israeli government. At the same time, evangelical opinion is not uniform, and research by Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin documents meaningful differences by generation, theology, and political identity.

This diversity is another reason not to reduce Christian support for Israel to a single end-times doctrine. The movement grew partly out of a dispensational world, but over time it became broader than dispensationalism itself.

From Prophecy to Policy

The history after 1948 is therefore not a straight line from John Nelson Darby’s interpretation of Scripture to an American president’s foreign-policy decision. The development was cumulative. Israel’s establishment gave biblical restoration a contemporary referent. The years between 1948 and 1967 embedded Israel more deeply in evangelical religious culture. The Six-Day War intensified that attachment. The rise of the Christian Right helped convert religious identity into political organization. Israeli leaders cultivated the constituency, and organizations such as CUFI institutionalized it. By the time controversies over Jerusalem, Iran, and other Middle East policies reached the White House, organized Christian supporters of Israel had become participants in consequential American foreign-policy debates.

None of this requires the exaggerated claim that Christian Zionists control U.S. policy toward Israel. The more defensible conclusion is significant enough: a religious tradition helped create a constituency, the constituency became organized, and the organized constituency became one of the forces operating within American Middle East politics. The movement was therefore not simply from prophecy to fulfillment. It was from biblical interpretation to religious identity, from identity to constituency, from constituency to organization, and from organization to political influence.

Later in this series, we will return to a still more difficult question: what happens when biblical interpretation is not merely present among voters and advocacy organizations but is expressed by the people making or implementing foreign policy themselves? Before reaching that question, however, another distinction has to be established. Supporting Israel’s continued existence does not settle whether Israeli governments, laws, or military actions may be subjected to severe criticism, and criticism itself does not determine what remedy follows.

That is where Part III begins.

Notes

1. Angela M. Lahr, Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 5, “Next Year in Jerusalem?”
2. “Evangelists in a Strange Land: American Missionaries in Israel, 1948–1967,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 14 (Oxford University Press, 1999).
3. Daniel G. Hummel, “A ‘Practical Outlet’ to Premillennial Faith: G. Douglas Young and the Evolution of Christian Zionist Activism in Israel,” Religion and American Culture 28 (2018).
4. Stephen Spector, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism (Oxford University Press, 2009).
5. Sean Durbin, “Christian Zionism in the United States, 1930–2020,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2023).
6. Christians United for Israel, “Our Mission.” CUFI’s membership figures and descriptions of organizational scale should be treated as organizational self-reporting.
7. Presidential Proclamation Recognizing Jerusalem as the Capital of the State of Israel, December 6, 2017.
8. Presidential Memorandum, “Ceasing U.S. Participation in the JCPOA,” May 8, 2018.
9. Michael R. Pompeo, “The U.S. and Israel: A Friendship for Freedom,” remarks to Christians United for Israel, July 8, 2019.
10. U.S. Senate, Roll Call Vote 201, April 9, 2025.
11. Pew Research Center, survey conducted May 4–17, 2026.
12. Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin, Christian Zionism in the Twenty-First Century: American Evangelical Opinion on Israel (Oxford University Press, 2024).