August 6, 2025
Sara Gabler
It seemed like a strange group of people to invite to the first-ever Faith Office luncheon, an office with the stated mission of ensuring religious groups can “compete on a level playing field for grants, contracts, programs, and other Federal funding opportunities.” But this was a gathering for Christian nationalists who believe that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation”; that the government should reflect Christian values (narrowly defined as white evangelical Protestant values); and that businesses such as Hobby Lobby can impose religious beliefs.
“We believe God is raising up business leaders who don’t separate faith from enterprise, but who see their platforms and their pulpits as their businesses and their instruments for eternal impact,” stressed White-Cain. This was not an ecumenical or interfaith message because, unsurprisingly, the Faith Office’s leaders are all Christians, and their “faith” is the political ideology of white Christian nationalism.
In true prosperity gospel form, Trump assured the CEOs and cabinet members: “Together we’re going to continue the fight for Judeo-Christian values of our Founding Fathers, we’ll grow our economy, we’ll protect our children.”
Trump’s language about Judeo-Christian values is also operative in another extremist ideology at work in his administration: Christian Zionism. Whereas Christian nationalism gives Trump and his supporters a shared language to talk about issues like so-called “anti-Christian bias” and “parental choice,” Christian Zionism gives them a language to make their support of Israel the focus of U.S. foreign policy — a handy euphemism for U.S. empire.
Cashing In on Spiritual Blessings
Christian Zionists believe that Israel is God’s “chosen” nation whose lands should be returned to the Jews, and they base their unwavering support of Israel and the Israeli government on literal readings of the Christian Bible. They often turn to a passage in the book of Genesis in which God promises the patriarch Abraham protection and prosperity, telling him: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse.” Christian Zionists interpret “great nation” in an ahistorical way, conflating the Bronze Age “nation of Israel,” the modern-day nation state of Israel, the Israeli government, and Jews, all of whom, they say, become God’s “chosen people.”
Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), an organization with over 10 million members, loves to quote these verses. During CUFI’s 2025 national summit this summer, Hagee repeated this passage several times, building to a moral fervor in his warbling voice to announce: “We’re trying to be loyal to the state of Israel and loyal to the word of God.”
CUFI’s Christian Zionist message puts the prosperity gospel on steroids by yoking the U.S.’s material and spiritual success not just to the faith of its CEOs or political leaders, but to its support of the state of Israel. This reflects a desire on the part of Christian Zionists to write the United States into a biblical narrative. Because they struggle to find biblical grounds to explain the U.S.’s place in God’s divine plan, they’ve created a scenario in which American evangelical Christians become the champion of God’s original “chosen people,” and therefore reap God’s blessing.
And Dealing Out Curses
Christian Zionists then layer on a 19th-century apocalyptic theology known as “premillennial dispensationalism.” It’s a theory about how the world will end, and those who follow it believe that the return of Jews to Zion is a precondition for the rapture, tribulation, second coming of Christ, and the apocalypse. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the conquering of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, and now the annexation of Palestinian territory and destruction of Gaza all are interpreted by Christian Zionists as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
Though there were and are theological debates about the apocalypse, premillennial dispensationalism gained currency. In the early 2000s, the Left Behind series of adult and young adult novels about new Christians living through the tribulation popularized these views and demonstrated how this version of Christian Zionism was far from fringe. These ideas cropped up again after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. They surfaced yet again after the U.S. bombed Iran on June 21 — when evangelical Christians in the U.S. started commenting with glee about how we were entering the “end times.”
The disgraced evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll was one figure claiming geopolitical and spiritual victory after the June bombing. On his YouTube channel he decried Iran, repeated worn racist tropes about “jihadists,” and said that it was time for the U.S. to cut off the “head of the snake” (meaning Iran, which Driscoll claimed is backing Hamas) in order to trigger the battle of Armageddon. Driscoll said that for this to happen, “Iran needs to be obliterated.”
Hagee also focused on Iran at the CUFI summit and quoted from Isaiah 62:1, which says, “For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,” to rationalize ending the peace process and sending more military aid to Israel. He repeated multiple times that, “Israel and Israel alone is the only friend we have in the Middle East,” further entrenching the orientalist idea of “civilized nations” (the U.S. and Israel) embattled against “uncivilized” religious and ethnic “others.” Both Driscoll and Hagee use the Bible to make their anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism morally permissible.
For many lay Christian Zionists, the idea of a “holy war” between Israel and Iran has become their primary way of understanding U.S. foreign policy. And holy war can give America First-ers a rationale for supporting the U.S. wars in the Middle East, which would otherwise clash with their isolationist beliefs. We see this when Driscoll claims that the bombing of Iran is doubly successful because the U.S. has protected Israel and put no “boots on the ground” in the process. But this doesn’t mean that there were or are no U.S. troops or interests in the region. As Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute notes, there are plenty of U.S. contractors in the region causing further violence. In June, the U.S. deployed warships and aircraft to the Mediterranean Sea and the region to defend Israel. Further, nearly 40,000 U.S. troops are stationed in the Middle East across almost 30 bases, according to one count.
The fetishization of Jewish people and their history, the gatekeeping around what it means to be Jewish and attacks on anti-Zionist Jews, and Christians’ belief that Jews will have to convert to Christianity in order to be saved are all actual instances of antisemitism. Hagee has even promoted the idea that Hitler was a Jew. And at the CUFI summit, Hagee called for the passing of the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” which uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to effectively silence speech, against the wishes of the IHRA’s author. As lawyers Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona write, Christian nationalists, not Jewish people, serve to benefit from this proposed policy.
The fact that Israel is actively engaged in the genocide of Palestinians doesn’t seem to bother Christian Zionists because they believe in “the Jewish people’s right to return to their homeland,” which includes Gaza and the West Bank (or as Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist and now ambassador to Israel, prefers to call it, “Judea and Samaria”) — a settler and Christian Zionist revisioning of geography and language. As historian Thomas Lecaque writes, Christian Zionists “make the murder of Israelis and Palestinians — including children — about them and their religious ideas.”
Supremacist Ideology at Work
Christian Zionism was at the core of the lessons of my childhood in an evangelical community in Texas. I prayed for the “persecuted church” in the Middle East and longed to go on a Holy Land vacation. I watched John Hagee on TV and read books on spiritual warfare. I didn’t know any Jewish people, and, though my church put on a yearly Seder, it was only a kind of cultural tourism, an appropriation of a Jewish ritual.
I learned that Christian Zionists have little interest in actual, living Jewish people; they treat Jews as pawns on the way to Christians’ spiritual blessing or instrumental to the fulfillment of ancient prophetic texts. It took years to see this ideology for what it really was: supremacist and nationalist. There was a reason I wasn’t taught the history of the Bible or U.S. empire: Christian Zionist theology crumbles under the weight of fact and history. But in order to fully leave that world behind, I had to physically leave, get an education, and meet people who were different from me.
Repetition With a Difference
Christian Zionists’ rhetoric of holy war isn’t new and has shaped U.S. foreign policy since the 1970s, as American Studies scholar Amy Kaplan documented. Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye wrote best-selling books about the impending apocalypse and introduced several generations of evangelicals to the importance of Israel in political life. Other leaders like Jerry Falwell supported Menachem Begin’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor and opposed the Oslo Accords of 1993, further entrenching Christian Zionists within the Republican Party. Hagee backed the transfer of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018. And the movement’s Islamophobia was revived by 9/11 and the Iraq War.
But what is new for Christian Zionists is Donald Trump. He is more than willing to use Christian Zionist prosperity-gospel messaging as a cover for the settler colonial project of turning the Gaza strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Sending bombs and fighter jets to Israel is making this possible, and it’s a plan that has the support of Israeli politicians. If you’re Trump, supporting Israel is simply good for business, and he can bring his Christian base along by letting the Christian Zionists explain away war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide as spiritual matters.
Sara Gabler
Christian
Zionists see Israel as the focus of US foreign policy — a handy euphemism for
US empire.
You’re very much into God in this
room and that’s very nice,” President Donald Trump told a group of business
leaders at a July 14 luncheon hosted by the White House Faith Office. In
attendance were dozens of corporate executives, including Hobby Lobby CEO David
Green and oil billionaire Albert Huddleston, along with senior administration
officials. “You’re more than just CEOs and business leaders and entrepreneurs.
You’re stewards on divine assignment,” praised Paula White-Cain, the former
televangelist who leads the White House Faith Office.
It seemed like a strange group of people to invite to the first-ever Faith Office luncheon, an office with the stated mission of ensuring religious groups can “compete on a level playing field for grants, contracts, programs, and other Federal funding opportunities.” But this was a gathering for Christian nationalists who believe that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation”; that the government should reflect Christian values (narrowly defined as white evangelical Protestant values); and that businesses such as Hobby Lobby can impose religious beliefs.
“We believe God is raising up business leaders who don’t separate faith from enterprise, but who see their platforms and their pulpits as their businesses and their instruments for eternal impact,” stressed White-Cain. This was not an ecumenical or interfaith message because, unsurprisingly, the Faith Office’s leaders are all Christians, and their “faith” is the political ideology of white Christian nationalism.
In true prosperity gospel form, Trump assured the CEOs and cabinet members: “Together we’re going to continue the fight for Judeo-Christian values of our Founding Fathers, we’ll grow our economy, we’ll protect our children.”
Trump’s language about Judeo-Christian values is also operative in another extremist ideology at work in his administration: Christian Zionism. Whereas Christian nationalism gives Trump and his supporters a shared language to talk about issues like so-called “anti-Christian bias” and “parental choice,” Christian Zionism gives them a language to make their support of Israel the focus of U.S. foreign policy — a handy euphemism for U.S. empire.
Cashing In on Spiritual Blessings
Christian Zionists believe that Israel is God’s “chosen” nation whose lands should be returned to the Jews, and they base their unwavering support of Israel and the Israeli government on literal readings of the Christian Bible. They often turn to a passage in the book of Genesis in which God promises the patriarch Abraham protection and prosperity, telling him: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse.” Christian Zionists interpret “great nation” in an ahistorical way, conflating the Bronze Age “nation of Israel,” the modern-day nation state of Israel, the Israeli government, and Jews, all of whom, they say, become God’s “chosen people.”
Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), an organization with over 10 million members, loves to quote these verses. During CUFI’s 2025 national summit this summer, Hagee repeated this passage several times, building to a moral fervor in his warbling voice to announce: “We’re trying to be loyal to the state of Israel and loyal to the word of God.”
CUFI’s Christian Zionist message puts the prosperity gospel on steroids by yoking the U.S.’s material and spiritual success not just to the faith of its CEOs or political leaders, but to its support of the state of Israel. This reflects a desire on the part of Christian Zionists to write the United States into a biblical narrative. Because they struggle to find biblical grounds to explain the U.S.’s place in God’s divine plan, they’ve created a scenario in which American evangelical Christians become the champion of God’s original “chosen people,” and therefore reap God’s blessing.
And Dealing Out Curses
Christian Zionists then layer on a 19th-century apocalyptic theology known as “premillennial dispensationalism.” It’s a theory about how the world will end, and those who follow it believe that the return of Jews to Zion is a precondition for the rapture, tribulation, second coming of Christ, and the apocalypse. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the conquering of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, and now the annexation of Palestinian territory and destruction of Gaza all are interpreted by Christian Zionists as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
Though there were and are theological debates about the apocalypse, premillennial dispensationalism gained currency. In the early 2000s, the Left Behind series of adult and young adult novels about new Christians living through the tribulation popularized these views and demonstrated how this version of Christian Zionism was far from fringe. These ideas cropped up again after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. They surfaced yet again after the U.S. bombed Iran on June 21 — when evangelical Christians in the U.S. started commenting with glee about how we were entering the “end times.”
The disgraced evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll was one figure claiming geopolitical and spiritual victory after the June bombing. On his YouTube channel he decried Iran, repeated worn racist tropes about “jihadists,” and said that it was time for the U.S. to cut off the “head of the snake” (meaning Iran, which Driscoll claimed is backing Hamas) in order to trigger the battle of Armageddon. Driscoll said that for this to happen, “Iran needs to be obliterated.”
Hagee also focused on Iran at the CUFI summit and quoted from Isaiah 62:1, which says, “For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,” to rationalize ending the peace process and sending more military aid to Israel. He repeated multiple times that, “Israel and Israel alone is the only friend we have in the Middle East,” further entrenching the orientalist idea of “civilized nations” (the U.S. and Israel) embattled against “uncivilized” religious and ethnic “others.” Both Driscoll and Hagee use the Bible to make their anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism morally permissible.
For many lay Christian Zionists, the idea of a “holy war” between Israel and Iran has become their primary way of understanding U.S. foreign policy. And holy war can give America First-ers a rationale for supporting the U.S. wars in the Middle East, which would otherwise clash with their isolationist beliefs. We see this when Driscoll claims that the bombing of Iran is doubly successful because the U.S. has protected Israel and put no “boots on the ground” in the process. But this doesn’t mean that there were or are no U.S. troops or interests in the region. As Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute notes, there are plenty of U.S. contractors in the region causing further violence. In June, the U.S. deployed warships and aircraft to the Mediterranean Sea and the region to defend Israel. Further, nearly 40,000 U.S. troops are stationed in the Middle East across almost 30 bases, according to one count.
The fetishization of Jewish people and their history, the gatekeeping around what it means to be Jewish and attacks on anti-Zionist Jews, and Christians’ belief that Jews will have to convert to Christianity in order to be saved are all actual instances of antisemitism. Hagee has even promoted the idea that Hitler was a Jew. And at the CUFI summit, Hagee called for the passing of the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” which uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to effectively silence speech, against the wishes of the IHRA’s author. As lawyers Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona write, Christian nationalists, not Jewish people, serve to benefit from this proposed policy.
The fact that Israel is actively engaged in the genocide of Palestinians doesn’t seem to bother Christian Zionists because they believe in “the Jewish people’s right to return to their homeland,” which includes Gaza and the West Bank (or as Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist and now ambassador to Israel, prefers to call it, “Judea and Samaria”) — a settler and Christian Zionist revisioning of geography and language. As historian Thomas Lecaque writes, Christian Zionists “make the murder of Israelis and Palestinians — including children — about them and their religious ideas.”
Supremacist Ideology at Work
Christian Zionism was at the core of the lessons of my childhood in an evangelical community in Texas. I prayed for the “persecuted church” in the Middle East and longed to go on a Holy Land vacation. I watched John Hagee on TV and read books on spiritual warfare. I didn’t know any Jewish people, and, though my church put on a yearly Seder, it was only a kind of cultural tourism, an appropriation of a Jewish ritual.
I learned that Christian Zionists have little interest in actual, living Jewish people; they treat Jews as pawns on the way to Christians’ spiritual blessing or instrumental to the fulfillment of ancient prophetic texts. It took years to see this ideology for what it really was: supremacist and nationalist. There was a reason I wasn’t taught the history of the Bible or U.S. empire: Christian Zionist theology crumbles under the weight of fact and history. But in order to fully leave that world behind, I had to physically leave, get an education, and meet people who were different from me.
Repetition With a Difference
Christian Zionists’ rhetoric of holy war isn’t new and has shaped U.S. foreign policy since the 1970s, as American Studies scholar Amy Kaplan documented. Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye wrote best-selling books about the impending apocalypse and introduced several generations of evangelicals to the importance of Israel in political life. Other leaders like Jerry Falwell supported Menachem Begin’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor and opposed the Oslo Accords of 1993, further entrenching Christian Zionists within the Republican Party. Hagee backed the transfer of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018. And the movement’s Islamophobia was revived by 9/11 and the Iraq War.
But what is new for Christian Zionists is Donald Trump. He is more than willing to use Christian Zionist prosperity-gospel messaging as a cover for the settler colonial project of turning the Gaza strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Sending bombs and fighter jets to Israel is making this possible, and it’s a plan that has the support of Israeli politicians. If you’re Trump, supporting Israel is simply good for business, and he can bring his Christian base along by letting the Christian Zionists explain away war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide as spiritual matters.
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