Where are these Christian Zionists? I have been a Christian for 85 years, and I'm not familiar with that particular branch of Christian Theology. I do know, however, that Apocalypticism, and talk of Armageddon, is limited to a few small sects, seen by the rest of us as demented.
Anne, thank you — and you’re right about your own tradition, which matters.
If you’ve spent your life in a mainline church, you would never have met this theology. Mainline Protestantism rejected it, and several mainline denominations have taken positions critical of Israeli policy. That’s exactly why I was invited to speak at a Presbyterian church this month.
But it isn’t a few small sects.
The theology is called dispensational premillennialism. It was assembled in the nineteenth century by an Anglo-Irish preacher named John Nelson Darby and came into American Christianity largely through the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. From there it spread through a great deal of American evangelicalism — which is roughly a quarter of American adults, depending on how you count.
For scale: the Left Behind novels, which run on this theology, sold in the tens of millions. Christians United for Israel, founded in 2006 by Pastor John Hagee, reports millions of members — you can check their current figure on their own site.
And it has political weight. Hagee gave the benediction at the dedication of the American embassy in Jerusalem. The current American ambassador to Israel is Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister.
The reason I write about it is not that I find the theology strange. It’s that the oldest Christian communities in the world are Palestinian, and they are being driven out of the land with the financial and political support of American Christians who have never met them.
If you’d like to read Palestinian Christians in their own words, A Moment of Truth — the Kairos Palestine document — is where I’d start.
Where are these Christian Zionists? I have been a Christian for 85 years, and I'm not familiar with that particular branch of Christian Theology. I do know, however, that Apocalypticism, and talk of Armageddon, is limited to a few small sects, seen by the rest of us as demented.
Anne, thank you — and you’re right about your own tradition, which matters.
If you’ve spent your life in a mainline church, you would never have met this theology. Mainline Protestantism rejected it, and several mainline denominations have taken positions critical of Israeli policy. That’s exactly why I was invited to speak at a Presbyterian church this month.
But it isn’t a few small sects.
The theology is called dispensational premillennialism. It was assembled in the nineteenth century by an Anglo-Irish preacher named John Nelson Darby and came into American Christianity largely through the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. From there it spread through a great deal of American evangelicalism — which is roughly a quarter of American adults, depending on how you count.
For scale: the Left Behind novels, which run on this theology, sold in the tens of millions. Christians United for Israel, founded in 2006 by Pastor John Hagee, reports millions of members — you can check their current figure on their own site.
And it has political weight. Hagee gave the benediction at the dedication of the American embassy in Jerusalem. The current American ambassador to Israel is Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister.
The reason I write about it is not that I find the theology strange. It’s that the oldest Christian communities in the world are Palestinian, and they are being driven out of the land with the financial and political support of American Christians who have never met them.
If you’d like to read Palestinian Christians in their own words, A Moment of Truth — the Kairos Palestine document — is where I’d start.
Coby