In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

| 213 Notes Introduction 1. George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 1. See also Alan Mittleman, Byron Johnson, and Nancy Isserman, eds., Uneasy Allies? Evangelical and Jewish Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield , 2007). 2. For a more thorough and cogent analysis of evangelicalism, see Gary Dorrien, “Evangelical Ironies: Theology, Politics, and Israel,” in Mittleman, Johnson, and Isserman, Uneasy Allies, 103–126. 3. James Davison Hunter, “Operationalizing Evangelicalism: A Review, Critique & Proposal,” Sociological Analysis 42, no. 4 (winter 1981): 363–372. 4. Ibid., 369–370. Hunter notes that the following denominational list serves as a fairly (although not entirely exhaustive) assessment of the major evangelical denominations in the United States: the Baptist tradition includes the Southern Baptist Convention of the United States, the Disciples of Christ, many of the Churches of Christ, Plymouth Brethren , the Independent Fundamentalist Churches of America, the Independent Fundamentalist Bible Churches, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Worldwide Church of God, and the Church of God International; the Holiness-Pentecostal traditions include the Churches of God in North America, Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), the Wesleyan Church, the Church of the Nazarene, and the Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A., and (Pentecostal ) the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Church of God of Prophecy, the Full-Gospel Church Association, and the Assemblies of God; the Reformed-Confessional tradition includes the Christian Reformed Church, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Reformed Presbyterian Church, the Evangelical Synod, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches; and denominations representative of the Anabaptist tradition include the Mennonite Church, the General Conference Mennonite Church, the Brethren in Christ Church, the Evangelical Mennonite Church, and the churches of the Evangelical Friends Alliance. 5. David Harrington Watt, “The Private Hopes of American Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, 1925–1975,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 1, no. 2 (summer 1991): 155–175. 6. Scholarship on the issue has been hitherto limited. In American Protestantism and a Jewish State (1973), historian Hertzel Fishman traced the reaction of liberal Protestantism to the idea of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine through the establishment of the State of Israel and the Six-Day War. Fishman concluded that “standard Protestant theology” 214 | Notes to the Introduction rejected the idea of a modern Jewish nation for theological reasons. Characterizing any theology as “standard Protestant theology” is, of course, problematic, as reviewers of Fishman ’s book have pointed out, including Melvin I. Urofsky in Reviews in American History 3, no. 3 (September 1975): 383–388. See Hertzel Fishman, American Protestantism and a Jewish State (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973). Yaakov Ariel addresses the rise of pro-Zionist sympathies among premillennial dispensationalists in On Behalf of Israel: American Fundamentalist Attitudes Toward Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, 1865–1945 (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1991). Ariel examines the birth of dispensational premillennialism in England and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and emphasizes the negative aspects of Protestant sympathy for the Zionist cause. Ariel concentrates his study on three major figures in the premillennialists’ dispensationalist movement: John Nelson Darby, William Blackstone, and Arno Gaebelein. He argues that increased interest on the part of these Protestant leaders reflected ambivalence about Jews as individuals and concern for Israel only in the context of eschatological hopes. He adds that Israel’s welcoming embrace of contemporary pro-Israel dispensational premillennialists represents a grave error of judgment—a misunderstanding of “the connection between the aggressive missionary work premillennialists carry out among Jews and the political support they give the State of Israel.” Most recently, like Yaakov Ariel, historian Timothy Weber, in On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), has addressed evangelicals’ changing attitude toward Jews in light of endtimes eschatology and the birth of Israel. His study provides a broad analysis of American evangelicalism’s interest in Jews and Israel from the late nineteenth century to the present. He argues that, until 1967, fundamentalists were content to observe world events but did not act to affect political or foreign policies to their particular eschatological viewpoint. Yet the victory of Israel in the war of 1967 changed fundamentalists who now actively entered the game of global politics in order to speed up the end of days. Weber is concerned, however, only with fundamentalists and does not consider the role of liberal Protestants in laying the foundation for a close U.S.–Israeli...

Share