Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel by Walker Robins (review)

One of the United States’ most fervently pro-Israel denominations is the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which also happens to be its largest Protestant sect. For over half a century, prominent Southern Baptist ministers, denominational leaders, and politicians have promoted a political theology that is extremely Zionistic and supportive of the policies of Israel. While the reasoning behind this pro-Israel ideology is, in fact, diverse among contemporary Southern Baptists—it may derive from premillennial eschatology, anti-Islamic sentiment, the imbrication of Republican foreign policy with Protestant fundamentalsm, or a combination of these forces—former Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer is correct in asserting that Israel has some of its strongest allies amongst contemporary evangelicals in general, and the Southern Baptist Convention in particular.

Yet, as elaborated in Walker Robins’s informative new work, Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel, this synonymous association between Christian Zionism and the Southern Baptist Convention is a relatively modern and assuredly post-Israeli independence development. In 1948, in the immediate aftermath of declaring itself a new, autonomous nation-state, the Southern Baptist annual convention “repeatedly and overwhelmingly [shot] down resolutions expressing support for Israel …” (2). The purpose of Robins’s book is to thus uncover and recover the characters, content, and controversies amongst Southern Baptists— domestic and in missionary contexts—concerning the Palestinian question during the “Mandate era,” which encompasses the British occupation of the region from the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I until the establishment of the state of Israel. Unlike today, there was no consensus position on Israel, Zionism, and the political status of Palestinians, Christian or Muslim. Instead, there were a variety of competing claims about how the Southern Baptists should relate to the notion of Israel and Zionism, as well as the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim inhabitants of the locality. The structure of Robins’s book focuses primarily on the various participants and their mutually competing claims about the form and function of that relation. However, the arguments are not employed just for their religious and political content, as Robins “prioritiz[es] encounters … [to] better contextualize what Southern Baptists had to say about Palestine and better recognize the broader patterns that emerged across different types of encounters” (3). The broader pattern that Robins discerns is orientalism, a cultural studies concept derived from the research of Edward Said. Mandate-era Southern Baptists— from the on-the-ground missionary to fundamentalist preacher to SBC denominational authority—held onto a bifurcated view of the world: “the West … seen as the realm of civilization, progress, Christianity, and modernity” in distinction to “the East … seen as a backward and superstitious realm in need of the civilizing influence of the West” (4). Within these orientalist presuppositions, Southern Baptists had an ambivalent relationship to Zionism. In one sense, they supported Zionist policies and projects, then seen as ushering westernized modernization into the Holy Land, which Baptists saw as degraded via centuries of “Turkish misrule, Islamic fanaticism, Jewish impotence, and Eastern Christian idolatry” (4). Simultaneously, Baptists believed that only their brand of Protestantism was able to solve the manifold crises and contentions of the region.

Yet Robins is quick to note that while the Southern Baptists employed the same orientalism in the discourse of Palestine, each “encounter” by a different representative of the denomination was diverse. Indeed, Robins contends that the ways and purpose in which Southern Baptists interacted with Palestine and Palestinians influenced what they considered of the region, the shape of its future, and the ideology of Zionism. Thus, each chapter focuses on one faction of the SBC, examining how its encounters with Palestine influenced that faction’s perception of the region.

The text begins with pre-Mandate era impressions from Southern Baptist tourists to the “Holy Land,” discussing their reactions to supposed Zionist modernity compared to Arab primitiveness. Then, Robins discusses the original missionaries to...