By Mimi Kirk 

The writing is on the proverbial wall: Support for Israel among Americans, even young white evangelicals, is decreasing rapidly. Though this shift has been evident for years, Israel’s response to October 7 and the US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon has helped accelerate it.

Undoubtedly some of the shift stems from young evangelicals’ growing understanding of events on the ground, given the vast documentation by, for instance, Palestinians in Gaza of the genocide they are enduring, as well as the myriad reports concluding that Israel is committing genocide. 

But the trend is not all about social justice and human rights. For one, premillennial dispensationalism, which includes the idea that Jews must gather in Israel to bring about the return of Jesus and which has been a mainstay of ensuring support for Israel among a majority of evangelicals, has been on the decline for the last decade. There’s also the appeal of the anti-Israel strain currently found among the right, demonstrated by such personalities as Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose criticisms of Israel – sometimes obviously and sometimes more subtly – demonstrate antisemitism and a desire for a white Christian nation. This strain threatens to mainstream antisemitism (and here I mean actual antisemitism, such as tropes about “Jewish oligarchy,” not criticism of the Israeli state) and Christian nationalism. 

Some American Christian Zionists are concerned about the fading appeal of dispensationalism and the turn within the right as they desire continued support for Israel at the behest of US empire. One such Christian Zionist is Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a think tank that fought communism in the 1980s and is now primarily concerned with sexual “morality” and support for Israel. 

Tooley is part of a movement touting a “new Christian Zionism” – one that focuses less on the end times and is more about urging Christians to support Jews because biblical theology requires that they possess Israel. As theology professor Gary Burge told me in 2019, “What [the new Christian Zionists] have done is slip out the eschatology and lead with the theological promise.” 

Tooley published an article this week in which he again touts the need for a new Christian Zionism, but with more urgency and a somewhat different take in the face of the lure of right-wing anti-Israelism and the very real threat of losing young evangelicals’ support for Israel. 

His July 26 piece in The Dispatch, “We Need a New Defense of Christian Zionism,” notes that “young men, including evangelicals, now openly speak against Jews as ‘too powerful.’” While here Tooley’s sounding of the alarm is well-founded, he also conflates Jews with Israel and bemoans the potential loss of support for the state that dispensationalism helped safeguard. “Who now in Christianity is crafting new theological perspectives to rebut animus against Israel and the Jewish people?” he asks. “Almost nobody.” 

Tooley goes on to argue for the need for a compelling and simple online narrative that can sway young evangelicals the way dispensationalism used to. He then asserts that potential messaging is Christian teaching about human dignity and universal human rights: “[This] Christian teaching…rejects othering Jews or any minority group. Christians must explain and defend this stance…” 

Tooley similarly touched on these issues on the “What Gives?” podcast from the Jewish Funders Network last week. When questioned about his concern about the drift in young evangelicals regarding Israel, he replied,

I’m very, very concerned…We need some new arguments. The arguments may not be exciting or bracing, but they may just be as basic as, God created us all in his image and we have to treat each other as brothers and sisters, and so to stigmatize any particular religious group as somehow sinister because of who they are is unacceptable for Christians.

Tooley also depicted Israel as a rights-loving democracy on the podcast: “The Christian case for American friendship for Israel…can be…that Israel is a fellow democracy that shares many of our values and that it’s preferable to the authoritarian alternatives,” he said, adding that “it’s a friend to America and believes in human rights, so we should be friends with those who share our basic values.” 

It all sounds pretty good until you think about what and who is missing in Tooley’s sentences: Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. And I don’t think he or the podcast host ever used the word “Palestinian.” It’s as if the conversation is occurring in a space completely devoid of context and reality, and one in which Palestinians (even Palestinian Christians) don’t exist. 

This new defense of Christian Zionism is not for a kinder, gentler Christian Zionism as Tooley wants us to believe, or one that can be used to combat real antisemitism. Firstly, the consequences of it are the same. As Mitri Raheb has eloquently argued, one must look at the lobbying actions of this ideological movement, not its beliefs, to define it effectively. A “new” Christian Zionism that purports to recognize human rights but continues to fuel Israeli genocide and settler colonialism is, after all, still Christian Zionism. 

And support for Israeli violence against Palestinians while conflating Judaism with Zionism is not a way to fight real antisemitism. By identifying Israel as what it is – a settler colonial, genocidal state based on Jewish supremacism – and correctly decoupling Jews and Judaism from this European imperial project is what can, in reality, help stem the impetus for antisemitism that the right is fostering.

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