Evangelical theology drove US support for Israel and Palestinian dispossession

Evidence

As early as 1917, the Methodist Evangelist leader Rev. Henry Clay Morrison (not to be confused with the 19th-century Tennessean Methodist bishop Henry Clary Morrison) announced that the pending collapse of the Ottoman Empire would bring the end of times and the rise of the Antichrist. In the 1930s, the Evangelical leader Rev. Charles S. Price told his followers that the Bible ordained that Palestinians be removed from Palestine so that the children of Israel could rebuild the temple where the Dome of the Rock now stood. Keith Brooks, editor of Prophecy magazine, stated in 1936 that the “Arab and Moslem world is not only anti-Semitic, but is out and out anti-Christ.” By 1974, the American Evangelist, Rev. Billy Graham was arranging conferences with more than two thousand Christians, focused on aiding Jews in the Arab-Israeli conflict. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 636 (#expands, via linked claim)

In short, race, racelessly conceived in relation to and through religion, steers the interests of geostrategic positioning. Evangelical Christianity can seek superciliously to satisfy its own apocalyptic vision while asserting its support for Israel. Their sharing a mutual goal is predicated on a putatively common heritage, religious and cultural, evidence of America’s distance from its own antisemitic history. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 596 (#expands, via linked claim)

The evangelical Left and the Christian Right would pursue divergent trajectories, building their own networks and alliances. A common evangelical heritage and shared theological commitments diminished in significance as Christian nationalism, militarism, and gender “traditionalism” came to define conservative evangelical identity and dictate ideological allies. Conservative evangelicals would find they had more in common with conservative Catholics, Mormons, and with other members of the Silent Majority who were not particularly religious. Elements of class conflict also helped define these emerging coalitions. As children of blue-collar workers gave their lives in Vietnam, children of the elite protested the war on college campuses across the nation. In the early decades of the twentieth century, conservative Protestants had tended to lag behind other white Americans economically, but thanks to a thriving postwar economy, growing numbers of evangelicals were moving into the middle class. Still, many were only one generation removed from humbler circumstances, and in the 1960s and 1970s, as patriotism took on a populist dimension, conservative evangelicals were drawn to the values of the white working class. For these new allies, nostalgic celebrations of rugged masculinity would come to symbolize a shared identity, and a political agenda. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 121 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Evangelical Christian messianic doctrine directly shapes US foreign policy on Israel — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1022; US Zionism’s political base shifted from liberal Democrats to the Christian Right — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 687; American evangelical leaders framed Zionism as biblically ordained Palestinian removal — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 636 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• American evangelical leaders framed Zionism as biblically ordained Palestinian removal #expands (0.95) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 636
• Evangelical support for Israel serves an apocalyptic religious vision rather than Jewish interests #expands (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 596
• Political coalitions replaced shared theology in defining conservative evangelical identity #complicates (0.78) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 121
• Secular Zionism replicated Protestant supersessionist theology toward Jews #complicates (0.76)
• Secular Zionism reinterpreted theology rather than departing from it #complicates (0.74)