The war in Gaza has forced a conversation about Israel among American Christians.
Christians make up 72% of the United States electorate, and 56% of Americans who identify as Christian voted for Donald Trump in 2024, according to a report by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. Although this conservative segment initially signaled strong support for Israel’s war in Gaza, its thinking on the issue is becoming increasingly diverse. With the stratification of echo-chamber outlets and unfiltered, instantaneous news, multiple social, ethnic, religious and political cleavages are starting to tear up Trump’s big tent.
As the president forms his new administration, he is stepping into a very different Middle Eastern landscape than he encountered in his first term. And the American public, which has become less religious in recent years — and specifically less Christian — isn’t nearly as pro-Israel as it was just a year ago. Christians who trend progressive or liberal on domestic issues like racial, gender and economic equality are among those who first began questioning the “ironclad” U.S. alliance with Israel as Gaza turned into a humanitarian catastrophe. Now, even those loyal to MAGA are starting to ask questions about the relationship. Some conservatives who consider themselves pro-Israel are expressing concerns about the U.S. getting further entangled in yet another Middle Eastern war.
But there is another section of the MAGA movement with yet stronger feelings, driven by a seething criticism of Israel and its role in American domestic and foreign politics. This “America First” cohort of Christians are fuming about ongoing U.S. support for Israel amid the destruction in Gaza, most notably the damage done to the Palestinian practitioners of their shared faith. And they are turning on Trump.
Some of the disagreement about Israel among America’s 200 Christian denominations comes down to interpretation of biblical prophecy. Some fundamentalist and evangelical communities, including certain Pentecostalists and Baptists, see the survival of the state of Israel as a precondition for the return of Jesus, and therefore a foundation for their own salvation. Others — such as Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and mainline Protestant denominations like Lutherans and Methodists — do not.
In the Book of Genesis, the first book in the Jewish Torah and Christian Old Testament, the Prophet Jacob — grandson of Abraham — wrestles overnight with a divine entity interpreted as being either an angel or God. He pleads with the figure to bless him before he finally releases his grip. Jacob is renamed as Israel — or “one who struggles with God” — and his descendants, the Israelites, are thereafter given the promised land by God. During the successive reigns of David and Solomon this territory was later ruled as a united kingdom from Jerusalem.
Over the 19th and 20th centuries in the U.S., Christians came to frame God’s covenant with Israel in a new and specific way. Their position is based nearly completely on a single verse regarding Abraham — Genesis 12:3 — that reads: “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” In the Christian Zionist interpretation, all are commanded to bless Abraham’s lineage and the nation it will produce — in this case assumed to be modern-day Israel — or else be cursed. “It’s a transactional view of how God treats humanity,” the religious historian Daniel Hummel told New Lines. Hummel is the author of the books “Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews and U.S.-Israeli Relations” (2019) and “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation” (2023).
Other passages referencing the Israelites and the Judaic Messiah in Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Daniel and Jeremiah are also interpreted to fit a narrative about Israel’s role in the return of the Christian Messiah, the crucified and risen Jesus of the New Testament. A “premillennial dispensationalist” reading of these texts and the prophecy in Revelation rests on the idea that the history of the world is made up of a series of dispensations, or distinct periods in God’s dealings with humanity, and that Christ will return before the millennium, or thousand-year binding of Satan. For Christian Zionists, after a period of tribulation, the return of the Jewish diaspora and the restoration of Judea and Samaria, Jesus will return to Jerusalem to reign for a thousand years with Christian believers, including converted Jews. Unrepentant and unconverted Jews will either be thrown into the Lake of Fire upon the second coming or face a final day of judgment at the end of the millennial kingdom, a position either unknown to or ignored by modern Israelis.
An important boost to this reading and to Christian Zionism came from Cyrus I. Scofield’s annotated Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909, which called for the formation of a Jewish state for the purpose of setting that stage. The desire to precipitate Christ’s return has driven the position of most American Christians on modern-day Israel above all else. And although the idea of a final end-time reckoning was promoted by evangelicals, “it seeped into [the] American psyche and popular culture,” Hummel told New Lines.
It eventually became accepted among the more conservative strains within other denominations, which “set up a very apocalyptic perspective of the Middle East.” This philosophy is coupled with the dispensationalist conviction in the creative reading of Scripture that God will exact vengeance upon those who fail to bless the modern nation of Israel. And it has played a major role in the history of American Christian support for a pro-Israel U.S. policy since 1948.
It makes sense that those who tie their own individual and communal salvation to the survival of the state of Israel would seek to defend it from any threat of annihilation, real or perceived. The Christian believer’s solidarity with Israel is thus seen as a moral duty as well as an existential one. It would also make sense that successive Israeli governments have eagerly received support from a global superpower with a sizable and influential segment of the population that adheres to that belief. Above all, the political and military backing facilitates an assumed divine right to settle the biblical land. And although accepting this support conveniently ignores the assured damnation of unconverted Jews as outlined in the prevailing American Christian interpretation of prophecy, that religious position is simply dismissed as anathema to Judaic Scripture. For Jews, Jesus is not the Messiah and Christian prophecy is false — a position that is similarly either unknown to or ignored by American Zionist Christians.
This situation thus involves opposing biblical expectations between American Christians and Jewish Israelis. Yet despite this paradox, understanding the dispensationalist narrative helps to explain why so many American Christians — specifically Christian Zionists — have supported Israel even as their Christian brethren in Lebanon, Palestine and within Israel proper have been killed and victimized.
Eastern Christians like John Munayer, a theologian and director of international engagement at a Jerusalem-based interfaith peacebuilding organization called the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, have a difficult time understanding this way of thinking. “There’s a denial that the oppression of Christians in Palestine is happening, and then they [Christian Zionists] just say, ‘Oh well, it’s part of God’s plan,’” he told New Lines.
Some American Christian denominations, like Catholic and mainline Protestant branches, may be politically conservative and supportive of Israel, but do not adhere to the cataclysmic dispensationalist idea. Yet Hummel says that for those who do not buy into the apocalyptic narrative, support for the Jewish community out of which Jesus was born makes sense, “even if the end-of-times stuff doesn’t.” The popularized cultural affinity of Jesus with Judaism across denominations “translates into sustaining a foreign policy for Israel that supports both the religious and strategic-geopolitical reasons.”
Trump has drawn support from across the spectrum of Christian views on this issue. His biggest supporters with alternative public platforms are self-described Zionists like Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire, or fundamentalist Christian outlets like the 700 Club’s CBN News. Even among American Christian Zionists, a split is apparent. Fundamentalist conservatives typically associated with evangelical Christianity back Israel to facilitate the second coming of Jesus. There are also many Christians whose denominations might formally adhere to the dispensationalist doctrine, yet are unmarried to the ideological fervor. This grouping might nevertheless express support for Israel based more on the belief that it is a victim of Arab Muslim violence, a vital security partner and a government that shares political and institutional values like the rule of law and democracy.
There is another subgroup among Christian supporters of Trump who possess a thinly veiled disdain for Jews, yet remain pro-Israel because of the promise of Christ’s millennial kingdom. Pulpit influencers with public platforms like nondenominational evangelist John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, who once claimed that God sent Hitler to force Jews back to the Holy Land, fall into this category. This threading of antisemitic signals is commingled with support for Israel against its Arab Muslim opponents, all to accommodate the redemption narrative. It is a suite of attitudes that appears to be most common among older Americans and evangelical Christians (demographics that intersect with one another). Douglas Wilson, a septuagenarian pastor and podcaster out of Idaho, is a popular faith leader who also treads these fine lines.
On a scripted June 2024 recording, Wilson reported: “I’ve noted a considerable uptick in the number of my fellow Christians who don’t want to hear from anybody who likes the Jews. … There’s a real angst out there.” He went on to explain the innate differences between their peoples. A refrain throughout his talks is that Jews have done many good things for humanity, but “when Jews are bad, they are really, really bad,” in a way that Christians simply cannot muster. At the end of the day, though, the salvation of the believer is dependent on the niche biblical interpretation that God commands them to bless Israel.
This status quo narrative is becoming a bit wobbly in today’s world. The Rev. Dr. Mae Elise Cannon, an American historian and director of Churches for Middle East Peace, says that the diversified information space has shaken up previously fixed notions. “The discourse about Israel in the U.S. has become much more robust in the past year, it’s multifaceted and less monolithic,” she told New Lines. This is more the case with left-leaning and progressive communities, but she notes that even among those who support Trump and U.S. military support for Israel, “they are saying that the death toll of civilians and the level of destruction has gone beyond what is right or necessary.” Cannon is also the author of and contributor to multiple books, including “Evangelical Theologies of Liberation and Justice” (2019) and “Comprehending Christian Zionism: Perspectives in Comparison” (2014).
Munayer in Jerusalem agrees that the tone has changed. He points out that the Americans who visit Christian Palestine to connect with Jesus’ origins have historically been shown “a very sanitized version” of what life is like under occupation. “There is a dissonance between the reality and what they’ve been exposed to, but slowly, because of today’s instant access to information, they’re realizing this is part of the story. Apartheid is hard to hide.”
Factoring into that shifting awareness across the political spectrum is the lasting damage to the Eastern Christian community from these “forever wars.” The Rev. Munther Isaac, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, is one such voice consistently posting on social media about settler violence against Palestinian Christian villages. “The great fear of the church in the Holy Land today is that Christians are disappearing right in front of our eyes. … The Christian community in Gaza is down to only a few hundred people,” said the Rev. Cannon of Churches for Middle East Peace.
News of the deaths, destruction and discriminatory treatment of Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese Christians under Israeli occupation, incursion and governing structures has shocked many Americans heretofore unaware of their existence and plight. Munayer welcomes American Christians waking up to what is happening in the Middle East and hopes they advocate for policy change. Yet he fears that the message he wants to send to Christians abroad could get lost or misinterpreted amid America’s partisan political battles that demonize the enemy. “Our mandate as Christians isn’t to promote one religious, ethnic or national group over the other,” he told New Lines. “Our mandate is to promote liberation, reconciliation, freedom, equality for all people. If we truly follow Jesus we are to love our neighbors. Oftentimes our neighbors are our enemies, and we are to love them, too.”
For many American Christians who agree with this theme, the newfound awareness about the plight of Palestinians has driven sincere inquiry and criticism of Israel’s policies. For some others, it has provided an opportunity to drive forward an America First brand of nationalism in the name of Christianity. The dividing line is also starting to blur.
Some MAGA Christian nationalists have taken the same data points and established a new narrative in direct challenge to Trump, Israel and the prevailing Christian Zionist position, even suggesting it is heretical. This cadre, which embraces the America First creed — drawn largely from millennials and Gen-Z but expanding — says the U.S. has been brainwashed by dispensationalist and Zionist narratives that have bled its resources dry for the sake of Israel. Their sentiment goes beyond expressing sympathy for Palestinians. Some openly call the assault on Gaza a genocide and support Palestinian statehood. Some have also demonstrated a capacity to espouse unabashedly antisemitic views in the same breath.
A handful of Hitler-philic, Holocaust-denying Christian nationalists with hundreds of thousands of backers are charging fellow pro-Zionist Christians with apostasy. The commentator Stew Peters — a millennial man of MAGA and vehement critic of Christian Zionism who advocates monarchical rule in America — is one example. He has drifted away from Trump in recent months due to his embrace of nonwhite, non-Christian supporters like biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. But Trump’s ties to Jewish campaign megadonors like Miriam Adelson — owner of a massive Las Vegas casino complex and one of the 10 richest women in America, who backed Trump’s 2024 race with over $100 million — has been a major nail in that coffin. He chides successive American governments and Christian Zionists for backing Israel at U.S. taxpayer expense while Americans struggle to cover their bills. He has also drawn particular attention to the historic and ongoing damage to Palestinian and Lebanese Christians under Israeli bombardment.
Nick Fuentes, another right-wing influencer with half a million followers on X, is a self-proclaimed Catholic America First Christian nationalist. A longtime MAGA backer, he has turned critical of Trump because of the president’s embrace of nonwhite groups. Fuentes cast doubt on the president’s commitment to white Christians, for example, in choosing a vice presidential running mate in JD Vance who is married to and has children with a Hindu. His recent row with the irreligious tech bro and Trump confidant Elon Musk over the expansion of H-1B visas to employ tech-savvy Indian immigrants has fueled even more division.
The America First ideology driving Fuentes’ ire — and that of millions like him — has been increasingly directed at Christian Zionists, Israel, “the Jews” and Republican politicians tied to the pro-Israel advocacy organization AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). He has also declared Israel’s war on Gaza a full-blown genocide of Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, funded by the U.S. While this view on its own is more frequently found on the left and among progressive Christians, his position is undercut by his call for holy war against Jews as the remedy. The concern he expresses for Eastern Christians may seem sincere, but it is simultaneously aggrandizing an American religious and ethnic political ideology.
The vibe has resonated with influential voices that have far more reach. The political commentator and provocateur Candace Owens is among those leading the charge with her more than 6 million X followers and prolific media spots. Within a matter of months, she flipped the script from loyal advocate for Israel to public critic, even earning the title “Antisemite of the Year” from the U.S.-based pro-Israel website StopAntisemitism.org. She parted ways with Shapiro’s Daily Wire following her open criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza and hosting of guests such as the Israel critic and author Norman Finkelstein, whose views challenged the show’s fixed narrative. Her religiously toned tweets like “Christ is King!” — which her opponents claim is a Jew-hating dog whistle for Christian supremacism — may have played a part as well. Like many others in her orbit, she rejects the allegation of antisemitism as little more than an ad hominem, anti-Christian smear to discredit her and defend a genocide. In a December interview with Piers Morgan Uncensored, Owens asserted that these labels no longer carried weight in America because there was “a major awakening happening as it pertains to our foreign policy in the Middle East.”
Owens described feeling “disgusted” with herself for being so blind to Israeli atrocities, just like so many other Americans before October 2023. And she pointed to some of the generational reasons behind the growing rift between the pro- and anti-Zionist camps: “Social media has completely transformed my perspective on what is happening in Israel and Palestine. … For the first time ever, we were able to see what was happening in Palestine. Before we just had to rely on legacy media.”
Owens has since arrived at the conclusion that the war in Gaza has been a deliberate attempt by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to erase all things Palestinian, including descendants of the first practicing Christians. She went as far as to announce to the 2 million and counting viewers of the interview on YouTube that “what Bibi Netanyahu has done to the Palestinians since Oct. 7 is a holocaust.” Her use of this highly charged historical appropriation drew censure, primarily from Jewish commentators, as dangerous. But the social media blowback overall appeared far more muted than it would have been even in the recent past.
This momentum is starting to stain the Trump brand and the popularity of his pro-Israel appointees. Pete Hegseth, the now-confirmed defense secretary with Crusader tattoos who also happens to be a follower of Wilson’s church in Idaho, emerged as an unexpected focal point of derision among America First Christians for that reason. The appointments of the Zionist Baptist minister Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Jerusalem and the pro-Israel Catholic convert Marco Rubio as secretary of state have also raised hackles. And Trump tapped Steve Witkoff, a pro-Israel Jewish multimillionaire real estate developer who donated to his campaign, as his Middle East Special Envoy. In short, the America First Christian nationalist cohort feels betrayed by Trump and dismayed by his coziness with billionaire Jewish campaign donors and Christian Zionists.
These tensions might just rip the big tent. Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator with over 15 million X followers, appears to have been among the latest to become convinced. In April 2024, he hosted Isaac, the reverend from Bethlehem, to get the perspective of the Eastern Christian community. As he spoke of his incredulity at the lack of knowledge most Americans have about Palestine, Isaac mentioned an influential evangelical pastor who said Gaza should be flattened into a parking lot. “It makes us wonder, this obsession with war and violence, it’s the antithesis of everything that Jesus taught.”
Carlson paused, then delivered a response that shot to the heart of it: “So you have people in the United States, self-professed Christians, who are sending money [to Israel] to oppress Christians in the Middle East.”
“That’s the sad irony,” Isaac replied.
Carlson seized the opportunity to send a clear message to pro-Israel MAGA: “If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and Christians, I think you’ve lost the thread.”
A few months later, in December, Carlson interviewed Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist, on his show on X (“Tucker on X”). Sachs, who is Jewish, appears frequently on both left-leaning and right-leaning media outlets. He explained to Carlson what he believes are the Israeli government’s repeated attempts to drag the U.S. into multiple Middle East wars to expand Israel’s territory to biblical borders. Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and parts of Egypt and Iraq, said Sachs, collectively form the Greater Israel that Netanyahu’s backers seek to conquer. Anything getting in the way of that goal — namely Iran for backing Hamas and Hezbollah — is fair game.
Sachs’ critique of Israel’s interference in U.S. policy-making is gaining traction on the America First Christian right, and Trump appears to have picked up on it himself. On Jan. 8, 2025, Trump reposted on Truth Social a clip of Sachs calling Netanyahu a “deep dark son of a bitch” who has manipulated and goaded the American public time and again to get involved in Iraq and Syria, with the possibility of war with Iran always lurking in the background. “It’s a game of narrative … to scare the shit out of the American people,” Sachs charged. The post not only reached Trump’s more than 7 million followers but made international headlines the following day, seen by millions more.
This emerging segment of American Christians eager to turn the dispensationalist narrative and pro-Israel policies on their head might be dismissed as an outlier for the moment. But the fringe has somehow repeatedly found its way to the center in American politics with Trump at the helm.
Trump’s first-term foreign policy in the Middle East — and specifically with regard to Israel — was clear: Unite the wealthy Gulf Arab states and existing security partners in Jordan and Egypt around business interests. With the shuttling of peace deals by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, under the auspices of the Abraham Accords and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem paired with settlement expansion, Trump’s erstwhile uniformly pro-Israel American Christian base seemed satisfied. Even Saudi Arabia appeared on the path to normalization.
None of that past clarity is present today. The Saudi crown prince has accused Israel of “collective genocide,” and other Arab leaders previously keen to uphold Israel’s security are taking a far less conciliatory tone with the Netanyahu government. Trump’s extended family now includes a Lebanese Christian son-in-law whose father, Massad Boulos, has been named as a senior White House adviser on the Middle East, a role similar to the one held by Kushner. Most importantly, public support for Israel’s war in Gaza has dropped precipitously across the American electorate since it began in October 2023. In addition to general unhappiness with the humanitarian crises, more and more Christians are becoming aware of the abuses occupation has wrought on the descendants of the original practitioners of the faith. Instantaneous news of mutilated innocents is fueling that change.
Long seen as unwavering in their support for Israel, even if for self-serving reasons, American Christians’ attitudes are shifting in different directions based on varying premises. It appears that this dynamic is also hitting at something deeper, however. American Christians across the spectrum are soul-seeking within their own belief systems as the culling of a people at their expense is laid bare in real time. This diverse public is wrestling, like Jacob, with its own kind of inner strife — the complexities of the country’s national interest, generational divides, sociocultural identities, political alliances, religious beliefs and the respective value placed on each of them. Many have moved toward deeper questioning of Israeli expansion, empathy for Palestinians and action toward lasting change in U.S. policy. Others are using these attitudinal shifts as an opportunity to incite more animosity. As Trump assumes the presidency once again, he may soon be deep in a reckoning over U.S. policy on Israel from the corner least expected — his own.
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