The Difference Between Black and White Christian Zionism
How the same Bible is read through covenant, prophecy, slavery, Exodus and liberation
White evangelical Christians and Black Protestants often read the same Bible, affirm many of the same doctrines and speak reverently about the land of Israel. Yet they do not approach the modern State of Israel in the same way. Pew’s 2022 survey found that 70 percent of white evangelical Protestants said God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people, compared with 36 percent of Black Protestants. Twenty-eight percent of white evangelicals said the best outcome of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would be a single state governed by Israel; only 6 percent of Black Protestants chose that outcome.
Those numbers do not mean that white Christians are uniformly Zionist or that Black Christians are uniformly pro-Palestinian. They point to a deeper distinction: Christian support for Israel is filtered through different racial histories, political traditions and biblical imaginations. The same scripture can be read through covenant and prophecy, through Exodus and emancipation, or through combinations of all four.
White Christian Zionism and the Theology of Covenant
Contemporary white evangelical Christian Zionism has a well-developed institutional theology. Christians United for Israel, the largest American Christian pro-Israel organization, explains support for Israel through God’s continuing covenant with the Jewish people, biblical promises concerning the land and the command to bless Abraham’s descendants. In some strands of evangelicalism, Israel also occupies an eschatological role connected to prophecy and the return of Jesus. Scholars of American Christian Zionism have shown that these ideas developed through several theological traditions, including dispensationalism, and became closely associated with the conservative evangelical political movement after 1967.
That theology can produce a political orientation in which support for Israel is understood not primarily as an inference from foreign-policy analysis but as faithfulness to scripture. This helps explain why white evangelical support for Israel can remain strong even when white evangelicals disagree with American Jews on other religious or domestic political questions. The modern state becomes connected to a biblical story whose authority precedes contemporary politics.
Black Christians Read the Same Bible Through Another History
Black Christianity also knows covenant, prophecy and the Hebrew Bible, but the biblical imagination of the Black church was formed under slavery and segregation. Enslaved Black Christians heard Exodus as a story in which God hears the cry of an oppressed people and delivers them from Pharaoh. Spirituals, sermons and civil-rights preaching repeatedly identified the journey from slavery toward freedom with Israel’s escape from Egypt and movement toward the Promised Land. That history does not dictate a modern position on Israelis and Palestinians, but it means Black Christians often approach biblical Israel through a tradition in which liberation from domination occupies unusual moral weight.
The result can be a paradox. A white Christian Zionist may begin with Genesis and God’s covenant with Abraham; a Black Christian may begin with Exodus and God’s judgment on Pharaoh. Both readings are genuinely biblical, but they highlight different parts of the canon because the communities carrying them have lived different histories. When the modern conflict is interpreted through those histories, one reader may see Jewish restoration and covenantal promise while another sees stateless people, military occupation and a struggle for liberation.
There Is a Black Christian Zionism
It would be a mistake, however, to treat Christian Zionism as exclusively white. Sociologist Roger Baumann’s fieldwork documents an identifiable African American Christian Zionist movement that draws on both religious and racial motivations to support Israel. His research is important precisely because it complicates the usual assumption that politically engaged Black churches operate only through a social-gospel framework of emancipation. Some Black pastors understand solidarity with Israel as theological faithfulness, Black–Jewish bridge-building and a rejection of what they regard as false racial analogies between Zionism and white supremacy.
The Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel provides one example, explicitly seeking to strengthen ties between Israel, the Jewish people and people of African descent while rejecting the equation of Zionism with racism. The newer Black Christian Leadership Council on Israel Relations offers another. Its founders include pastors and advocates with long histories of Black Christian engagement with Israel, and the council is organizing an “Unfinished Business” tour for November 4–11, 2026. The organization frames the trip as a continuation of the large Holy Land pilgrimage King planned but never led and says five hundred Black American and African Christian clergy will participate.
The historical symbolism is powerful, but it should be handled carefully. King strongly defended Israel’s security and right to exist, yet the private record surrounding his canceled 1967 pilgrimage shows that he was also worried about how a visit would be interpreted in the Arab world, Africa and Asia. To invoke King as a simple endorsement of any contemporary Israeli policy would therefore flatten the same history this series is trying to recover.
There Is Also a Black Christian Palestinian Solidarity Tradition
Black Christianity contains another stream as well. Baumann’s 2024 book Black Visions of the Holy Land studies African American Christian Zionists alongside Black Christian Palestinian-solidarity activists and argues that “the Black Church” is better understood as a contested category than a single political voice. That diversity became especially visible after October 7. In November 2023, more than nine hundred Black Christian faith leaders backed a public call for an immediate bilateral ceasefire, humanitarian assistance and a peace process. Their language drew explicitly on the Black church’s prophetic tradition and its familiarity with suffering inflicted by state power.
Those clergy were not simply reading a different newspaper from Black Christian Zionists. They were often reading the Bible through a different moral emphasis. Where Christian Zionists may stress covenant, Jewish return and God’s faithfulness to Israel, Palestinian-solidarity clergy often emphasize the prophetic demand for justice, Jesus’s identification with the vulnerable and the Black freedom tradition’s suspicion of overwhelming state power. Neither stream exhausts Black Christianity, and neither can claim the Black church as a single political possession.
Race Changes Christian Zionism
This is why the difference between Black and white Christian Zionism cannot be reduced to skin color. African American Christian Zionists carry the memory of slavery, segregation and civil rights into their support for Israel. Some frame Black–Jewish solidarity as a continuation of a shared struggle against racism and antisemitism; some emphasize Ethiopian and other nonwhite Jews to challenge the idea that Israel is simply a white state; some connect Israel to Africa and to the history of Black-Jewish cooperation. Their Zionism may overlap politically with white evangelical Zionism, but the racial narrative through which it is explained can be substantially different.
The difference also exposes a problem for Black–Jewish dialogue. When Black critics of Israel assume all Christian support for Israel comes from white evangelical politics, they erase Black Christians who arrive at pro-Israel commitments through their own theological and racial histories. When Christian Zionists assume biblical covenant settles every political question, they risk treating Palestinian Christians and Black Christian concerns about occupation, civilian suffering or state violence as failures of biblical fidelity rather than serious moral arguments.
What the Bible Does Not Decide for Us
Scripture gives Christians moral obligations, narratives and theological convictions; it does not eliminate the need for historical knowledge or political judgment. Genesis cannot by itself tell an American voter what borders a modern state should have. Exodus cannot by itself determine whether every analogy between Palestinians and Black liberation is accurate. The prophets cannot substitute for facts about security, settlements, terrorism, civilian protection or competing national claims.
That may be where Black and white Christian Zionists, Black Christian supporters of Palestinians and Jewish partners can begin a more serious conversation. Christians can recognize a continuing Jewish relationship to the land and the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination without making Palestinian political rights disappear. Christians can recognize Palestinian dispossession and suffering without treating Jewish history as a colonial fiction. The Bible should deepen moral seriousness, not relieve us of the responsibility to distinguish ancient covenant, modern statecraft and the equal humanity of the people who live in the land now.
The Black church is especially well equipped to resist simple answers because its own history contains both profound attachment to the biblical story of Israel and a moral tradition formed by slavery, segregation and the struggle for freedom. That tension is not a weakness. It is an invitation to read more carefully, remember more history and refuse a theology that can see only one people’s fear or one people’s suffering at a time.
Selected Sources and Research Notes
- Pew Research Center, views on Israel and Palestinians, 2022 — https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/26/modest-warming-in-u-s-views-on-israel-and-palestinians/
- Christians United for Israel, “Why Support Israel? Because God Is Faithful” — https://cufi.org/resource/why-support-israel-because-god-is-faithful/
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, “Christian Zionism in the United States, 1930–2020” — https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/62249/chapter-abstract/551376605
- Roger Baumann, “Political Engagement Meets the Prosperity Gospel: African American Christian Zionism and Black Church Politics” — https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article-abstract/77/4/359/2632342
- Columbia University Press, Roger Baumann, Black Visions of the Holy Land — https://cup.columbia.edu/book/black-visions-of-the-holy-land/9780231198455/
- Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel, About — https://ibsi.org/about
- Black Christian Leadership Council on Israel Relations, “Unfinished Business” tour — https://bclcir.org/landing-page/
- Washington Post/Religion News Service, Black Christian leaders’ ceasefire call, Nov. 10, 2023 — https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2023/11/10/israel-gaza-conflict-black-christians/
- Rabbinical Assembly, Martin Luther King Jr. transcript, March 25, 1968 — https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/assets/public/resources-ideas/cj/classics/1-4-12-civil-rights/conversation-with-martin-luther-king.pdf