Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism (review)

“God has blessed America because America has blessed the Jew,” preached the Rev. Jerry Falwell, as his Evangelical Moral Majority began to flex its political muscle. The year was 1980, when Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin awarded Falwell the Jabotinsky Prize as a friend of the State of Israel. How is it that American Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, whose cultural history is steeped in anti-Semitic bigotry and whose theology predicts future persecution of Jews worse than Hitler’s Holocaust, became allies of Jewish Zionism? Stephen Spector, a professor of English, surveys contemporary Evangelical rhetoric on Zionism, the future fate of Jews, and the current war with Islam as a kind of embedded academic journalist. The result is a combination of observations in church settings, interviews with politicians, religious leaders, and laymen, reading of post-9/11 Evangelical books, and website surfing. The value of the book is the range of views presented and the author’s decision not to grind an axe, but to let proponents speak for themselves.

Spector samples the most prominent Evangelicals, including media evangelists Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Billy Graham, and other politically prominent figures such as James Dobson, John Hagee, Gary Bauer, and Ralph Reed. Two chapters focus specifically on Evangelical views of contemporary Islam and how these affect the United States’ foreign policy. Two chapters are devoted to Evangelical support for George W. Bush’s policies on Israel and the War on Terror. Of particular significance is the author’s reporting on sermons and seminars by Evangelicals, followed up by his extensive list of interviews. Although there is a brief introduction to the dispensational eschatology of born-again Christians, the focus is on post-9/11 books and websites, with the exception of the widely read Hal Lindsay (most known today for the Left Behind novel series). Considerable attention is devoted to Israeli and American Jewish reactions to Evangelical support for Israel, thus providing views from more than one side.

As an author who on the first page (p. vii) acknowledges his personal identity as Jewish, Spector also wants to represent views he does not agree with in a way that Evangelicals “will consider accurate and fair.” His analysis treats born-again Christians as “radically individual” (p. ix), which is seldom the way that the Evangelicals he interviews treat “Jews.” As Spector notes, the term “Christian Zionism” is relatively new and not easily defined. His own use, which is primarily the political issue of support for a modern “Jewish homeland” (p. 3), widens the term to such an extent that it dilutes the fundamental “Biblical” interest that motivates virtually all Evangelical or born-again thinking about Israel. This downplaying of the eschatological interest in Jews may reflect his experience with Evangelicals who are at pains to convince him that they are not trying to convert all Jews or wish them harm. Yet, as noted in his discussion of dispensational views on future tribulation for the Jews, Evangelicals tend not to “disentangle the promises from the prophecies” (p. 185), which prompts a number of leaders to avoid “specific end-time stuff like an embarrassment” (p. 189). This may be the public face in the media, but what is said in church pews may very well be quite different.

Although well annotated, Spector’s survey is best read as an academically-minded journalist account. It as much about the author’s experiences as the phenomenon he describes. Although many individuals are mentioned under the umbrella of “Christian Zionism,” the focus is on what is being preached and not how the message is received in the pew. Missing from the analysis is the kind of ethnographic depth of a text like Susan Harding’s The Book of Jerry Falwell (Princeton, 2000), which the author did not consult. Another drawback of the text is its repetitive nature. For example the question “Is Bush a...