Talking to Evangelicals About Palestine

Moving beyond 'Left Behind.'

This is Clusterhuck, my newsletter about faith, culture and a flourishing future for all! I’m glad you’re here. I can only do this through the support of my readers, and I’m grateful for every one I’ve got. If you’d like to join, just click here. You’ll get a free seven-day trial, including access to all the archives. 

---

There’s this idea circulating the internet in what I think is still relatively small circles, but I’ve seen enough to take it on. It’s a little bit tricky to talk about, but I think it’s important that we get it right. The idea is basically this: American Christians only support Israel because they think that’s how they’ll get Jesus to come back. 

This idea shows up in a lot of places, but most recently in an essay from Talia Lavin and David Swanson. I’ve learned a lot from both Lavin and Swanson and they seem like cool people, but I don’t think they’re quite right here. Lavin writes: 

Evangelical “love” of Israel is the love of the consumer towards the consumed, a hungry man for bread. Their fantasy is ultimately one of destruction: the annihilation of the Jewish faith through death, save an elect of 144,000 who convert to Christianity — a number derived from the Book of Revelations. …The conversion and annihilation of the Jews must be preceded by their return to and absolute control of Israel; therefore the lives of Palestinians are worthless and forfeit from the start, a road-bump in this violent fantasy that was never accounted for in the Revelations map. …The conversion and annihilation of the Jews must be preceded by their return to and absolute control of Israel; therefore the lives of Palestinians are worthless and forfeit from the start, a road-bump in this violent fantasy that was never accounted for in the Revelations map.

“What it amounts to is cheering on Armageddon from the cheap seats—and directing funds to ensure it occurs,” Lavin memorably concludes. “It's a grotesquerie of geopolitics and religion, and it carries undue weight in American foreign policy, thanks to the merger of the Christian Right and the Republican Party. A game of chess with eternity at stake.”

What’s hard about this argument is that I don’t think it’s entirely incorrect. Lavin understands dispensational eschatology perfectly well here, along with a lot of other doctrinal -isms and -ologies swirling in the Christian Zionist stew. You can draw a pretty straight line from Christian dispensationalism to Hal Lindsay’s Late Great Planet Earth to the Left Behind books, all of which involve this thinking. And I think Lavin and Swanson are completely justified in side eyeing the Evangelical “love” of Israel.

But I think Lavin overestimates how prominent or animating this theology is among American Evangelicals at large. And while it’s true that lots of American Evangelicals indiscriminately support the nation of Israel, I’d be cautious about chalking too much of that support up to an attempt to jumpstart the Rapture.