When the Bible Enters the Situation Room

Christian Belief, Israel, and Political Power

Part V of a Seven-Part Series

The first four essays in this series traced a progression. Christian restorationism preceded modern political Zionism. After Israel’s creation, Christian support for the Jewish state became an organized American political constituency. Criticism of Israeli conduct, however severe, does not by itself establish that abolition of the state is the required remedy. Nor do arguments about Israel’s compromised origins become general principles unless we are prepared to examine where those principles lead when applied elsewhere.

There is another question, however, that cannot be answered simply by studying Christian organizations or voting blocs. What happens when biblical interpretations of Jews, Israel, covenant, restoration, or the land are held not only by pastors and activists but by people who exercise political power?

The question requires care. Being Christian does not make a politician a Christian Zionist. Supporting Israel does not establish belief in biblical prophecy. Nor should every evangelical who favors Israel be labeled a dispensationalist. Political leaders can support the same policy for very different reasons: national security, domestic politics, historical sympathy, military cooperation, democratic affinity, religious conviction, or some combination of them.

The broader category is more useful: political leaders whose understanding of Israel has been materially informed by biblical interpretation. Once the question is framed that way, the historical record extends well beyond a fringe movement. It reaches British prime ministers and foreign secretaries, American presidents and vice presidents, secretaries of state, and, today, the American ambassador to Israel.

Before Dispensationalism Became the Question

The British example demonstrates why “dispensationalist” is too narrow a category. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 did not emerge from John Nelson Darby’s theology alone, and neither Arthur Balfour nor Prime Minister David Lloyd George should simply be called Darbyite dispensationalists. Yet their biblical formation belongs in the history.

Historian Donald Lewis documents the evangelical Protestant worlds from which both men emerged. Balfour was raised in a strongly evangelical Scottish Presbyterian household. Lloyd George grew up in Welsh Baptist culture and later recalled that his schooling and Sunday school had immersed him so thoroughly in the Hebrew Scriptures that he knew more about the kings of Israel than the kings of his own country. In 1925, reflecting on British support for Zionism, Lloyd George acknowledged both political self-interest and a “natural sympathy” shaped by that biblical education.

The qualification matters as much as the connection. Britain had wartime objectives, imperial interests, and strategic calculations. The Balfour Declaration cannot responsibly be explained as the direct conversion of Bible reading into foreign policy. Yet it would be equally misleading to assume that biblical formation disappeared when statesmen entered the Foreign Office. Political judgment is rarely produced by a single cause. Religious imagination can be one element within a larger political calculation.

That is the first lesson of this history. The relevant question is often not whether theology caused a policy by itself, but whether theology helped shape the mental and moral world within which policymakers interpreted their choices.

Truman: Scripture, Sympathy, and Statecraft

The same caution applies to Harry S. Truman. His recognition of Israel on May 14, 1948, followed intense disagreement inside his administration. State Department officials warned about Arab opposition, regional stability, and oil; political advisers emphasized other considerations; the Holocaust and the condition of Jewish displaced persons weighed heavily on Truman’s thinking. The Truman Library’s record makes clear that recognition was made amid competing humanitarian, diplomatic, strategic, and domestic-political pressures.

Yet Truman was also a serious Bible reader whose moral language was frequently drawn from Scripture. Educational materials produced by the Truman Library describe him as reading the Bible frequently and interpreting it as history, while also connecting his sympathy for Jewish suffering to his decision regarding Israel. That evidence should not be inflated into the claim that prophecy alone produced American recognition. It does demonstrate that biblical belief and presidential decision-making were capable of occupying the same political mind.

Truman is especially useful because he complicates any simple formula. He could see biblical and moral significance in Jewish restoration while still supporting negotiation over disputed claims. In October 1948 he publicly endorsed efforts at the United Nations to achieve an “amicable settlement” through negotiation. Religious conviction, therefore, does not automatically eliminate diplomacy.

That qualification will become important.

Pence: Israel as Evidence of God’s Faithfulness

By the first Trump administration, the connection between biblical interpretation and high office became much more explicit.

Addressing Christians United for Israel in 2017, Vice President Mike Pence did not speak of Israel merely as an ally. He told the audience that looking at Israel demonstrated that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob keeps his promises, and he invoked Ezekiel in describing the modern Jewish state as evidence of divine faithfulness.

The point is not that Pence lacked conventional political arguments for supporting Israel. He spoke about shared values, national security, Iran, and the U.S.-Israel alliance. But those arguments existed alongside an explicitly biblical interpretation of modern Israel. When he addressed the Israeli Knesset in 2018, he again presented Israel through biblical language, describing Jewish restoration in the land of the forefathers and concluding with a prayer for the peace of Jerusalem.

Pence therefore represents something different from a constituency lobbying government from the outside. The biblical interpretation had entered the vice presidency itself.

Pompeo: A Secretary of State Tells the Christian Story

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo provides another revealing case. In July 2019 he addressed Christians United for Israel not simply as a government official appearing before an interest group but as someone who situated American policy within a Christian historical narrative.

Pompeo told the gathering that American Christian support for a Jewish homeland stretched back to early Protestant history. He specifically invoked William Blackstone, the nineteenth-century evangelist whose 1891 petition had asked the American government to support Jewish restoration.

The historical progression is striking. Blackstone had stood outside government trying to persuade presidents. More than a century later, the secretary of state stood before a Christian pro-Israel organization and invoked Blackstone as part of the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Even here, however, causal discipline is necessary. Pompeo’s support for Israel also incorporated arguments about democracy, religious liberty, national security, Iran, and American strategic interests. A biblical worldview and a geopolitical worldview do not necessarily compete inside a policymaker; they can reinforce one another.

The more consequential question arises when they do not.

Huckabee and the Biblical “Title Deed”

That question has become especially visible with Mike Huckabee, whom the Senate confirmed as U.S. ambassador to Israel in April 2025. Huckabee has long spoken about Israel in explicitly biblical terms, but his nomination placed those beliefs inside an official diplomatic role.

His Senate confirmation hearing provides unusually direct evidence. Senators questioned him about an earlier statement that Israel possessed a “title deed” to Judea and Samaria, the biblical names he uses for the West Bank. Huckabee explained that he had been referring to what he called a biblical mandate reaching back to Abraham.

This is precisely the kind of example that requires us to distinguish biblical interpretation from dispensationalism. One does not have to establish Huckabee’s position on every technical feature of dispensational theology to understand the political significance of his statement. He was grounding a modern territorial claim in a biblical narrative.

At the same hearing, senators pressed him about what such a belief might mean for Palestinians and for possible Israeli annexation of West Bank territory. Huckabee distinguished his biblical claim from a right to confiscate privately owned Palestinian land, but the exchange exposed the deeper issue: what happens when diplomatic questions about territory are understood simultaneously as matters of contemporary international politics and as claims reaching back to Abraham?

When Political Questions Become Sacred Questions

This does not justify the sweeping conclusion that religious policymakers are incapable of negotiation. History provides too many counterexamples, including Truman himself. Religious belief can motivate compromise, reconciliation, restraint, and concern for justice just as it can strengthen attachment to particular territorial claims.

The narrower concern is about sacralization. Negotiation ordinarily assumes that competing political claims can be weighed against security, law, demographics, national interests, and possible concessions. A claim understood as historically important may still be traded against another objective. A claim understood as a command or promise from God occupies a different moral category.

If a border is strategic, it can potentially be negotiated. If territory is valuable, compensation or security arrangements may alter the calculation. If a claim is understood as a divine promise, however, compromise can raise a theological question in addition to a diplomatic one.

That does not tell us how any particular official will behave. It tells us why the religious premises of policymakers matter.

Foreign policy analysis routinely examines ideology, nationalism, historical memory, party affiliation, economic interests, and security doctrine. There is no obvious reason religious interpretation should become analytically invisible when it influences how a decision-maker understands the history or moral status of the territory under negotiation.

Not a Fringe Outside the Room

This is the larger historical point. Biblically informed Christian support for Jewish restoration began long before modern American evangelical politics. It appeared among British restorationists before Balfour, within the religious formation of Balfour and Lloyd George, in American Christian lobbying through Blackstone, and in the biblical culture surrounding Truman’s understanding of Jewish history. In recent decades it has been expressed explicitly by a vice president, invoked historically by a secretary of state, and articulated in territorial terms by an American ambassador to Israel.

These figures did not share a single theology. Calling all of them dispensationalists would obscure more than it clarifies. Their policies were also shaped by considerations that had nothing to do with religion. The important continuity lies elsewhere: biblical narratives concerning Jews, covenant, restoration, and land have repeatedly been present among people with access to the machinery of foreign policy.

That is different from saying that the Bible controls policy. It means the Bible has sometimes been one of the sources through which influential political actors understand the problem policy is trying to solve.

Recognizing that influence should not be controversial in principle. We would not study American foreign policy while refusing to examine anticommunism because officials also had economic interests, or ignore nationalism because strategic calculations were present. Multiple influences can operate simultaneously. Religion deserves the same analytical seriousness.

The Bible Does Not Speak With One Political Voice

Yet this argument creates another problem. If the Bible can be used to support Jewish restoration, sovereignty, and territorial claims, Christians must ask whether that is the only political conclusion Christians have drawn from Scripture.

It is not.

Palestinian Christians read the same Bible. So do Christian leaders elsewhere who emphasize the image of God, the Exodus, the Hebrew prophets, the teachings of Jesus, peacemaking, liberation, equality, and justice. Their theological starting points can produce very different political conclusions concerning occupation, Palestinian self-determination, refugees, land, and human dignity.

That means the real Christian political debate is not between people who use the Bible and people who do not. Christians on different sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appeal to different biblical texts, different theological traditions, and different understandings of how Scripture should relate to modern statecraft.

The first Christian biblical tradition examined in this series has enjoyed remarkable access to political power. Its language can be heard not only in churches but in the words of prime ministers, presidents, vice presidents, secretaries of state, and ambassadors.

Part VI turns to the other biblical case: the Christians who argue that Scripture leads them toward Palestinian freedom and rights, and to the striking question of why that Christian theological tradition has had a different relationship to governmental power.

Notes

1. Donald M. Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland (Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially the introduction on Arthur Balfour and David Lloyd George.
2. Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, “Recognition of the State of Israel” collection and educational materials concerning Truman’s recognition decision.
3. Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President on Israel,” October 24, 1948.
4. Mike Pence, remarks to the Christians United for Israel Washington Summit, July 17, 2017.
5. Mike Pence, remarks to a special session of the Israeli Knesset, January 22, 2018.
6. Michael R. Pompeo, “The U.S. and Israel: A Friendship for Freedom,” remarks to Christians United for Israel, July 8, 2019.
7. U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, nomination hearing of Mike Huckabee to be U.S. Ambassador to Israel, March 25, 2025.
8. U.S. Senate, confirmation of Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel, April 9, 2025.