Our American Israel 6 APOCALYPSE SOON

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CONTENTS

0 Introduction
1 Lands of Refuge
2 Founding Israel in America
3 Invincible Victim
4 “Not the Israel We Have Seen in the Past”
5 The Future Holocaust
6 Apocalypse Soon
7 Homeland Insecurities
8 Conclusion
9 NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
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6 

 

APOCALYPSE SOON 

 

LONG BEFORE the State of Israel was founded in 1948, American Christians of all denominations had identified its terri- 

tory with the biblical geography of the Holy Land. Puritan settlers in colonial America cast themselves as the chosen people of the Old 

Testament and imagined the New World as the Promised Land. Colonists engraved this identity on the North American landscape with 

biblical names—Salem, Jericho, Canaan. Manifest Destiny draped national expansion in biblical garb, as Herman Melville observed: 

“We are the peculiar chosen people, the Israel of our time. We bear the ark of the liberties of the world.” The rise of historical criticism 

in the nineteenth century spawned a popular obsession with the Holy Land. Archeologists unearthed material evidence of the biblical 

past, and tourists thrilled to walk in Jesus’s footsteps. To experience these lands vicariously, one could read the historical novel Ben- 

Hur: A Tale of the Christ, the most popular book of the late nineteenth century—or watch it performed on stage and later on film. One 

could visit Palestine Park, built in Chautauqua, New York, in 1874, the first of many Holy Land models throughout the United States, or 

wander through a replica of Jerusalem’s Old City at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. In Sunday school, children pored over colorful at- 

lases, memorized strange place names, and charted Bible stories as geographical journeys. Through all these different media, millions 

of American Christians were prepared to form images of modern Israel from their familiarity with the mythic landscape of the Holy 

Land.¹ 

Israel has come to embody Holy Time as well as the Holy Land. Since the rise of the Christian Right in the late 1970s, evangelical 

Christians have become fervent political supporters of Israel, and many of them have looked to Israel both as the setting for the Second 

Coming of Jesus Christ, and as the primary actor in hastening that event. For evangelicals who believe in biblical prophecy, the Bible not 

only literally records divine history, it also accurately foretells the divine future. Since Israel’s founding, evangelicals have combed its 

political landscape for forecasts of the end times. This temporal geography relies less on the New Testament chronicles of Jesus’s life 

and death than on the book of Revelation and the Old Testament prophets to map a landscape of impending apocalypse.² 

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 proved to believers the accuracy of the ancient prophecy that God would restore the 

Jews to Zion and that this ingathering would trigger a chain of events culminating in the end of days. This restoration of the Jews to 

Zion meant something very different from secular Zionism. The significance of Israel was not in realizing the political goal of Jewish 

sovereignty, but in manifesting God’s sovereignty and making it possible for some Jews to convert to Christianity to correct the fatal 

mistake they had made in rejecting Christ two millennia ago. In this prophetic narrative, Israel is the epicenter of the apocalypse, where 

Christ will launch the final battle of Armageddon and vanquish the Antichrist to inaugurate God’s kingdom on earth. Conjoining escha- 

tology and geopolitics, this old belief system energized the movement called Christian Zionism, which has become one of the most 

powerful sources of American support for Israel’s right-wing politics from the 1980s into the new millennium.³ 

Christian Zionism did not evolve in a world apart from mainstream American culture. As we have seen, it was the popular crooner 

and born-again Christian Pat Boone who wrote and recorded the famous lyrics to the film Exodus, “This land is mine, God gave this land 

to me.” His evangelical audience would have taken the lyrics literally, as God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis (13:15): “For all the land 

you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever.” They understood this decree not as a metaphor or a past event, but as an endur- 

ing promise for Abraham’s future descendants. Throughout his career, Boone worked to promote Israel to American Christians, includ- 

ing in his 1972 musical production The Pat Boone Family in the Holy Land, and in his official position as spokesman for Israel’s tourism 

ministry in the 1990s. At the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he entertained Israeli troops camped on the Golan Heights with rock- 

and-roll hits and a rousing rendition of Exodus. Some years later, after Israel had annexed the Golan Heights, Boone mentioned this visit 

to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. According to Boone, Rabin consulted a map and responded: “You sang a prophecy.… Where you were 

singing, ‘God gave this land to me’ is now part of the map of Israel.”⁴ In Boone’s belief system, the knowledge that “God gave this land 

to me” transcends history and geography, but is verified by current events and geopolitics. In prophetic time, Israel’s wars look back- 

ward to fulfill ancient prophecy, and look forward to the final cosmic war on the horizon. 

Pat Boone’s lifelong involvement with Israel exemplifies the potent mix of popular culture, masculine militarism, and belief in biblical 

prophecy that bonds conservative American evangelicals to the modern nation of Israel. In the right-wing turn in both countries, evan- 

gelicals equated support for Israel’s expansionist policies with the revival of military power in the United States. Israel, they believed, 

had a special role to play both at the end of times and in the present, by combatting America’s decline and renewing belief in American 

exceptionalism. 

Boone contributed to the emergence of the Christian Right as a political force on the national scene. His was a well-known public 

face on cable television’s evangelical circuit, where he appeared with celebrity preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart. 

Boone also worked behind the scenes in California with a coterie of businessmen, politicians, and evangelical leaders to help elect his 

good friend Ronald Reagan as governor of California in 1967 and president of the United States in 1980. In the presidential election, the 

influence of Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority helped a group of neoconservatives make Israel central to Reagan’s foreign policy. 

In 2013, Boone donated the Christmas card on which he had composed the original lyrics of Exodus to Israel’s Holocaust memorial, 

Yad Vashem.⁵ The symbolism of this donation is not hard to decipher. The evangelical anticipation of the end times parallels the apoca- 

lyptic fear that Israel is facing the existential threat of a second Holocaust. Both ways of thinking interpret the past—whether the Bible 

or twentieth-century history—as a sign of Israel’s future. And both see catastrophe on the horizon. Memory of the Holocaust solidifies 

Israel’s status as history’s ultimate victim. Evangelicals, in contrast, view Israel as ultimately invincible, in accordance with God’s plan 

to end history. Holocaust memory evokes the dread of recurring atrocities, while biblical prophecy welcomes the hastening of Armaged- 

don’s gory end. Both apocalyptic narratives assume an uncompromising conflict between good and evil. Apocalypse begets redemp- 

tion. In the Holocaust narrative, protecting Israel from the threat of annihilation can redeem America from its past failures. In the 

prophecy narrative, recognizing Israel’s divine status can redeem America from moral and military decay. 

 

Apocalypse Now 

 

Christian Zionism became a phenomenon in popular culture a decade before the Christian Right became a force in American politics. 

The evangelical leader Hal Lindsey was the most influential proponent of the movement. In his book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), 

Lindsey transformed an arcane belief in biblical prophecy into a diagnosis of the crises besetting modern society. Lindsey placed the 

State of Israel at the center of an esoteric eschatology called premillennial dispensationalism, and he exhorted Americans to watch the 

end times unfold in the escalating crises between Israel and its Arab neighbors.⁶ 

The first blockbuster about Israel since Exodus, The Late Great Planet Earth focuses not on the country’s heroic founding but on its 

apocalyptic future. Lindsey identifies the birth of Israel and the decline of America as the two major signs that the end is near. Catas- 

trophe and salvation loom together on the horizon. While America careens toward World War III, Israel is gearing up for the final cos- 

mic conflict, in which a militant Christ will defeat the Antichrist and establish his kingdom on earth. 

Hal Lindsey was an unlikely candidate to write a mega-bestseller. A veteran of the Korean War, he had a Mark Twain–like start as a 

Mississippi River tugboat captain and then studied at the Dallas Theological Seminary. In the late 1960s, he lectured on California cam- 

puses, recruiting alienated students to evangelical youth groups. The Late Great Planet Earth, which is written in the colloquial idiom of 

the counterculture and stocked with historical and scientific evidence, offers the Bible as “history written in advance,” the authoritative 

guide to humanity’s future. Issued by a small Christian publishing house, the book appealed far beyond the intended audience of Chris- 

tian youth, selling a million copies in a month and ten million over the course of the decade, to become the bestselling work of nonfic- 

tion in the 1970s. Lindsey became a star on the evangelical circuit and an outspoken booster for Israel, leading many trips to the Holy 

Land. He produced a film version of The Late Great Planet Earth with Orson Welles as the narrator, and he has written at least twenty 

more books that update biblical prophecy to match geopolitical change. Israel never veers far from the center of his books.⁷ 

The Late Great Planet Earth addresses contemporary fears of the atomic bomb and civilization’s collapse. Nuclear weapons, environ- 

mental degradation, and overpopulation promise to destroy the earth. Third World nations and revolutionary movements threaten the 

West, just as crime menaces the streets of America. Global threats are matched by social decay at home: the disaffection of youth, the 

deluge of drugs, pornography, and mental illness, with no moral authority to stem this tide. All of these events are predicted in the 

Bible, an infallible guide that makes “future events that were predicted hundreds of years ago read like today’s newspaper.”⁸ 

For prophecy believers, if you read the Bible literally, you have no need to fear impending disasters. Instead, you welcome them as 

omens of a cosmic drama carefully scripted by God. In this divine script, the rise of Israel is the bright spot that counters the gloom and 

doom of the coming end times. If decline results from humanity’s abandonment of God, the restoration of Jews to Zion is evidence of 

God’s presence. Old-time Bible scholars, Lindsey claims, misinterpreted earlier upheavals as heralding the return of Christ. They 

missed the “paramount prophetic sign: Israel had to be a nation again in the land of its forefathers.”⁹ Only when Jews were restored to 

Zion could the “countdown” to Armageddon begin. Israel’s establishment was the temporal precondition, and its land the geographical 

setting, for the apocalypse. 

The belief in the restoration of Jews to Zion as a precondition for the millennium had roots in the nineteenth century, before the rise 

of the secular Jewish Zionist movement. Irish evangelical John Nelson Darby popularized the idea of premillennial dispensationalism 

on both sides of the Atlantic. He claimed that God had never transferred his favor and promises from the Jews to the Christian 

Church—the traditional narrative of the Catholic Church and most Protestant sects. Jews would thus have a crucial role in the final “dis- 

pensation,” when their return to Zion marked the beginning of the end. Darby introduced the idea of the Rapture that Lindsey adopted. 

Christians would be swept up to Heaven without dying before the Tribulation and the rule of the Antichrist, when immense devastation, 

foretold in the book of Revelation, would bring human society close to annihilation. At this time, Jews would have their last chance to 

convert. A significant remnant would accept Christ as their Messiah, but the rest would be destroyed along with other unbelievers. 

Christ would then return to defeat the Antichrist at Armageddon and inaugurate the thousand-year reign of God’s kingdom on earth, 

ending with the Last Judgment.¹⁰ 

Prophecy belief had an impact on the development of political Zionism at the turn of the twentieth century. In the United States, 

William Blackstone, a Chicago businessman and author of the popular prophecy book Jesus Is Coming, worked to convince American 

Protestants to help Jewish people emigrate to Palestine. In 1891, drawing on humanitarian outrage at Russian pogroms, Blackstone col- 

lected signatures from over four hundred prominent men for a petition, known as the Blackstone Memorial, which called for returning 

Jews to Palestine. This document, which was presented to President Benjamin Harrison, combined aspects of biblical prophecy with 

concern for Jewish persecution, attention to developments in the Ottoman Empire, and unease over the possibility of increased Jewish 

immigration to America. Blackstone was one of the first to publish a statement that would later become a Zionist slogan: he described 

Palestine under Ottoman rule as an “astonishing anomaly—a land without a people for a people without a land!”¹¹ Premillennial dis- 

pensationalism also had a profound influence on the British circle of leaders who came together behind the Balfour Declaration in 1917, 

which set out the aim to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Their belief in biblical prophecy bolstered their political interest in 

establishing a foothold in the region for the British Empire.¹² 

By 1948, dispensationalism had primed millions of evangelicals to welcome the founding of Israel as a great piece of prophetic news. 

At that time, however, some were concerned about Israel’s origins in “unbelief,” that is, its founding by secular Zionists. When Israel 

conquered the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, they saw world history taking a gigantic leap forward. L. Nelson Bell, Billy Graham’s father- 

in-law, exclaimed in Christianity Today: “That for the first time in more than 2,000 years Jerusalem is now completely in the hands of the 

Jews gives a student of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and the validity of the Bible.”¹³ For Lindsey, the conquest of 

Jerusalem paved the way for one more event that would “completely set the stage for Israel’s part in the last great act of her historical 

drama. This is to rebuild the ancient Temple of worship upon its old site.” There was one obstacle, however, standing in the way. “That 

obstacle,” wrote Lindsey, “is the second holiest place of the Moslem faith, the Dome of the Rock.” According to prophecy, however, 

God would remove the obstacle, perhaps by earthquake. Some prophecy believers have since argued that the Dome of the Rock and 

neighboring mosque could remain while the new temple was rebuilt on a nearby site, while others have applauded Jewish extremists’ 

plots to blow up the mosque.¹⁴ 

The Six-Day War galvanized evangelicals, who believed that Israel’s miraculous triumph was a literal miracle. They believed that God 

had intervened to save his chosen people and hasten the world’s end. Secular Americans may have welcomed Israel’s victory as a psy- 

chological lift out of the Vietnam quagmire, but prophecy believers hailed it as proof of God’s agency in the world. The conjunction of 

American decline and Israeli restoration corresponded to the signs predicted in the Bible of impending catastrophe for most of human- 

ity and the ultimate victory for God and his believers. 

The Late Great Planet Earth addressed contemporary concerns about global challenges to American power. Lindsey’s interpretation 

of biblical conflicts reproduced a Cold War interpretation of the free world as being threatened by communists and their Third World al- 

lies. The Bible, in his view, predicted an assault on Israel by a Russian-led confederation that included “the Egyptian plan to unite the 

Arabs and the black Africans into a ‘third world force.’ ”¹⁵ God would intervene to destroy the attackers, leaving Israel totally unscathed. 

In a chapter called “The Yellow Peril,” Lindsey ingeniously mines the Bible to predict that hordes from communist China, two hundred 

million in force, will cross the Euphrates to attack Israel during the battle of Armageddon. In these apocalyptic projections, American 

readers could imagine Christ defeating the same enemies that appeared to be besting them in Southeast Asia: the Soviet Union, China, 

and Third World nations. In this scenario, Israel becomes a proxy for America, as the target of its enemies and the recipient of divine 

salvation. 

Although known for his countercultural cadences, Lindsey in fact reveled in militarism, and his book reads like an anti-antiwar book. 

It presents war as the engine of human history and as part of God’s design for ending human history. Lindsey welcomes each new ther- 

monuclear weapon as evidence of the unearthly plagues predicted in the Bible. He avidly describes the blood flowing for miles in the 

valley of Megiddo, site of the battle of Armageddon, and he heralds global nuclear destruction as the ultimate proof of God’s power as 

described in the book of Revelation: “Imagine Cities like London, Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago—obliterated!” Lindsey 

indulges his readers in an orgy of violence inflicted on others, offering them a ringside seat where they remain unscathed while watch- 

ing the apocalypse unfold. Anyone who accepted Christ would have been spared the horror of the Tribulation, having been spirited away 

during the Rapture—“the ultimate trip,” an experience akin to walking on the moon, better than “mind expansion drugs!”¹⁶ From this 

vantage point, the destruction of nonbelievers becomes a spectacle of divine intervention, where Israel provides the stage setting and 

plays the starring role. 

As the “fuse of Armageddon,” Israel’s escalating conflicts will lead to World War III. The Arabs’ implacable “unwillingness to accept 

the Israeli occupation of what they consider to be their land,” together with Israel’s iron determination to resist them, make the conflict 

inevitable. According to Lindsey, the Bible predicts that “the Middle East crisis will continue to escalate until it threatens the peace of 

the whole world. The focus of all nations will be upon this unsolvable and complex problem which keeps bringing the world to the 

precipice of a thermonuclear holocaust.” Not until mankind is “on the brink of self-annihilation” will Christ return “to put an end to the 

war of wars called Armageddon.” In the final global battle, the Jews “will be on the verge of annihilation when God gives them super- 

natural strength to fight.”¹⁷ Lindsey transforms the peril of Israel’s earthly vulnerability into the Christian promise of divine invincibility, 

casting Jewish warriors for Christ in the image of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). 

Jews also have another warrior role, as militant proselytizers for Christ. God will “reveal Himself in a special way to 144,000 physical, 

literal Jews,” writes Lindsey, “who are going to believe with a vengeance that Jesus is the Messiah. They are going to be 144,000 Jewish 

Billy Grahams turned loose on this earth—the earth will never know a period of evangelism like this period. These Jewish people are 

going to make up for lost time.”¹⁸ Those Jews who refuse to convert—a predicted two-thirds—will perish in gruesome plagues and 

massacres along with all nonbelievers. 

War unites Christians with a militarized Israel through the figure of the militant Christ. The Bible, Lindsey claims, paints pictures of 

two Messiahs: the suffering Messiah of the First Coming is the “humble servant” who was sacrificed on the Cross. Prophecies of the 

Second Coming refer to the “reigning Messiah” or the “political deliverer,” the Messiah as “conquering king with unlimited power, who 

comes suddenly to earth at the height of a global war and saves men from self-destruction.” It is this militant Christ who favors the “Is- 

raelites who believe in Him”—those who had converted to Christianity—and makes them “the spiritual and secular leaders of the 

world.”¹⁹ 

The identification of the militant Christ with the Israeli military was connected with the movement to invigorate a masculine Chris- 

tianity. In Tender Warrior: God’s Intention for a Man, Pastor Stu Weber critiqued the curly-haired, feminine images of Christ found every- 

where from Renaissance paintings to Hollywood films. His first visit to Israel in 1974 radically changed this portrait when he met an Is- 

raeli driver, David, who inspired his vision of a muscular Christ. A “Jewish male in his prime,” David was a “native born sabra” recov- 

ering from wounds received in the Yom Kippur War. With dark skin, black hair, and piercing, dark eyes “hard as black steel,” he re- 

minded Stu of the biblical David, the “great warrior.” After Weber encountered David, “the pale, limp-wristed Galilean faded like a bad 

dream and the laughing, dark-skinned Son of David took over the picture in my mind. The Greater Sabra. The real Tender Warrior.” For 

this former Green Beret, the modern Israeli soldier, an incarnation of biblical Israelite warriors, rescued Christ’s image from centuries of 

feminization.²⁰ 

Many conservative evangelical leaders admired the IDF and prided themselves on access to its inner circle.²¹ In the prophetic land- 

scape, the Israeli military is often represented as the sole part of modern Israel worthy of note, as in Lindsey’s illustrated book A 

Prophetical Walk through the Holy Land (1983). The only people appearing in the photographs are Orthodox Jews and Palestinian 

shepherds, elements of the picturesque past. Modern photographs exclude urban scenes and portray only military scenes, including 

fighter jets over Masada, a tank on the Golan Heights, and Haifa Bay, described as the location where “the Soviets will make an am- 

phibious invasion of Israel as part of the all-out War of Armageddon.” The title page shows an Israeli fighter jet in camouflage colors fly- 

ing directly above the Dome of the Rock, which glistens beneath like a golden bull’s eye. Lindsey notes that he received this picture 

from a personal friend, “one of the greatest jet fighter pilots in history,” and the caption reassures readers that “modern Israeli warriors 

guard their ancient capital.”²² 

 

“America’s Key to Survival” 

 

Many prophecy believers were concerned that America did not appear in the Bible, and that the holy text did not reveal a divine agenda 

for reversing the nation’s worrisome moral and military decline. Indeed, The Late Great Planet Earth interpreted America’s deterioration 

as a major sign that the end was near. By 1980, however, Lindsey cast Americans in the more active role of helping to redeem their na- 

tion. In his next bestseller, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, he argued that the Bible advocated political action to “ensure our na- 

tion’s survival” against the twin threats of social decay and military impotence. In a world hell-bent on self-destruction, America could 

still regain its preeminence in time for the Second Coming; it could do this by restoring Christian morality and “creating the world’s 

strongest military.”²³ 

This vision of renewal informed the worldview of the Moral Majority, a political organization of the Christian Right that was founded 

in 1979 to advance a conservative social agenda at home and restore American military power abroad. Its leaders and grassroots sup- 

porters had a hand in electing President Ronald Reagan, who fluently spoke their language, with references to the “evil empire” and nu- 

clear Armageddon. Many of the founders of the Moral Majority, including Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and Pat Robertson, were premil- 

lennial dispensationalists. They claimed a special dispensation for the United States, a window of time that had opened for activism just 

before the end. During this period, which LaHaye dubbed the “pre-tribulation tribulation,” Christians would perform a kind of dress re- 

hearsal for Armageddon. They would fight the same battle against the dark forces of secularism and disarmament that the Antichrist 

would lead during the final Tribulation.²⁴ 

Staunch support for Israel formed the lynchpin of the Moral Majority’s foreign policy. “You can’t belong to Moral Majority without 

being a Zionist,” Falwell told ABC TV.²⁵ To these committed Cold Warriors, Israel represented the best line of defense against Soviet ag- 

gression in the Middle East and Arab power as displayed by the OPEC boycott in 1973. Israel’s divine status elevated it above other anti- 

communist regimes supported by the Christian Right, such as Guatemala, Taiwan, and apartheid South Africa. “Whoever stands against 

Israel, stands against God,” Falwell declared.²⁶ In an influential book, Israel—America’s Key to Survival, Christian Zionist Mike Evans 

called on Christians to recognize not only what America could do for Israel, but what Israel could do for America.²⁷ Christians had an 

obligation to arm Israel in its battle for survival, while Israel in turn played a crucial role in saving America as it struggled for survival 

against secularists at home and communists abroad. 

Cold War politics met eschatology in the belief that standing up for Israel could revive America’s status as an exceptional nation. A 

foundational prophecy for Christian Zionists is God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and 

curse him that curseth thee.” As proof of the Bible’s success in predicting the future, they point to the eventual decline of every empire 

that has mistreated Jews, from Babylon and Rome to the Third Reich. The eclipse of the British Empire also serves as a cautionary tale, 

its decline attributed to its failure to uphold the Balfour Declaration. America, in contrast, has flourished because it has treated Jews well 

both at home and abroad. Tim LaHaye went so far as to claim that the United States had rescued Jews from the Holocaust.²⁸ The Unit- 

ed States could avoid the fate of all other empires in history if it continued to “bless Israel,” but, warned Falwell, if the country aban- 

doned Israel, it would lose its position of world leadership “for a place in history books alongside of Rome.”²⁹ 

The Christian Right envisioned the United States in Israel’s image, as both vulnerable and invincible. “National survival is the issue,” 

exhorted Falwell in his 1980 jeremiad Listen, America! Faltering military defense and moral corruption had led America to the “threshold 

of destruction or surrender.”³⁰ Falwell’s narrative of decline, shared by many conservatives, started at the end of World War II, when 

Roosevelt negotiated with Stalin. It was downhill from there: the abandonment of China to the communists, the failure to follow Dou- 

glas MacArthur to victory in Korea, and the debacle of Vietnam, when a weak government prevented the generals from deploying full 

military force. 

The nadir of this trajectory occurred in the 1960s, when military weakness met moral decay. The counterculture, liberal media, Black 

Power, and the antiwar movement induced a failure of nerve on every front, from helping Fidel Castro to flourish, to relinquishing the 

Panama Canal, to allowing the Shah of Iran to be toppled. Failure to rescue the American hostages who had been taken during the Is- 

lamic Revolution was the crowning blow. On the nuclear front, “disarmament” was seen as synonymous with “suicide.” Anything short 

of victory over the Soviets—including nuclear treaties and détente—would lead to America’s total capitulation. “The Miracle called Is- 

rael,” in Falwell’s words, offered salvation in two ways. It showed that the United States was not in total decline, since its foreign policy 

had gotten it right in supporting Israel. And Israel’s robust militarism provided a model to emulate, since it had proven that pursuit of 

invincibility was the only alternative to the threat of extinction.³¹ 

On the domestic front, “blessing Israel” could also save America from moral decline. In a foundational text for Christian conser- 

vatives, Battle for the Mind, Tim LaHaye sounded a clarion call to redeem America from the sinfulness and permissiveness that the false 

religion of secular humanism had promulgated. He and his colleagues blamed this ideology for all forms of moral decay: “drugs, crime, 

pornography, children’s rights over parents, homosexuality rites, prostitution, gambling and the equal rights amendment for women.”³² 

Evidence of such degradation led to the conundrum of why God would continue to favor America. In The Coming Peace in the Middle 

East, LaHaye addressed this problem and related it to the absence of America in the Bible. He explained that America could maintain its 

favored status in God’s eyes only as long as it upheld its historical commitment to God’s original chosen people. He warned Americans 

that “if we ever change our policy toward the Jews, we will become like Sodom and Gomorrah.”³³ Defending Israel protected America 

from descent into moral perdition. 

Conservative evangelicals often compared their own precarious status in America with Israel’s vulnerable position internationally. 

Feeling besieged by the liberal institutions that had been undermining American society since the 1960s, they saw themselves as right- 

eous underdogs fighting the Goliath of secular humanism. They often described themselves as persecuted outcasts; John Hagee 

claimed that “Christians are the only group in America that it is politically correct to hate, discriminate against and lampoon.” Pat 

Robertson controversially described the Holocaust as “the work of Satan prefiguring the coming holocaust of American Christians at 

the hands of diabolical liberals, including liberal Jews.” According to Robertson, the Nazis’ methods for isolating Jews were “being used 

already against Christian people” in the United States.³⁴ Many people were offended by such claims. Yet Robertson was voicing a com- 

mon notion: conservative Christians saw themselves as a persecuted minority who had to battle the courts, the education system, and 

the media to keep from being wiped out, just as Israel had to defend itself from hostile surrounding nations. American Christians, just 

like Israel, would ultimately triumph through their own militant rebellion and the miraculous intervention of God. 

Identification with Israel did not mean identification with actual Jews, however—either in America or in Israel. LaHaye warned that 

Jews as a group “have often yielded to secularistic, even atheistic spirit. Brilliant minds have all too frequently been dedicated to 

philosophies that have proved harmful to mankind. Consider for example, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud.” This apostasy, La- 

Haye claimed, explained why God had punished the Jews over the ages, in addition to the more traditional explanation that they had 

crucified Christ. Once Jews had been restored to Zion, they would have a second chance to redeem themselves from the sin of “choos- 

ing Caesar over Jesus Christ.”³⁵ 

Just as Israel enabled God to fulfill his promise to the Jews, so could America become the Promised Land for Christians. “America is 

tied by a spiritual umbilical cord to Israel,” Jimmy Swaggart preached on television. “The Judeo-Christian concept goes all the way back 

to Abraham and God’s promise to Abraham. The Jewish people represent Judaism. The American people represent Christianity.”³⁶ 

Swaggart viewed “the American people” as white evangelical Christians, while Israel alone represented Jews and Judaism. 

Many conservative evangelicals understood their movement as bringing America back to its Christian roots, just as Zionism repre- 

sented the restoration of Jews to their biblical birthright. The reign of secular humanism was to the Christian Right what the Diaspora 

was to Zionists—a time of powerlessness, persecution, and marginality that could only be overturned by a militant struggle for redemp- 

tion. While evangelicals projected the prophetic future onto Israel, they imagined returning America to a harmonious past of security 

and social order. The restoration of Christian values was their Zion. 

Reviving America as a Christian nation meant freeing it from the shackles of domination by a cabal of secular elites. Conspiracy theo- 

ries are common among conservative evangelicals, who have implicated vast networks of institutions, including the Trilateral Commis- 

sion, the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Council of Churches, and the American Civil Liberties Union. While particular con- 

spiracies can get quite elaborate, they all assume the existence of a shadow state ruled by, in LaHaye’s words, “a small but very influ- 

ential cadre of committed humanists … determined to turn America into an amoral, humanist country ripe for merger into a one-world, 

socialist state.”³⁷ 

For Christian Zionists who believe in these dark networks that are strangling America, Israel offers a shining counterforce. Prophecy 

and conspiracy both offer the certitude of a controlling center in a world spinning out of control. The satanic cabal governing America 

finds its counterpart in the divine designs for Israel’s future. The infernal plot bringing down America finds its inversion in the divine 

plot elevating Israel. “The Nation of Destiny,” wrote LaHaye, is the only one in the world that God chose to manipulate directly, so “un- 

like other nations, Israel has a guaranteed future.” While evil forces may drag America into historical oblivion, “all human history began 

with Israel, and it will also end with Israel.”³⁸ 

Prophecy and conspiracy, the Rapture and Armageddon, the restoration of the Jews, and the revival of America all came alive in the 

hugely popular Left Behind series, a set of sixteen novels authored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins and published between 1995 and 

2007. Like The Late Great Planet Earth, these novels have had an astonishing appeal beyond the ranks of the prophecy believers. They 

ascended the bestseller lists and spawned a cottage industry of websites, tie-in products, and spinoffs, including films, video games, 

and specialized series for teens and for military personnel. More than 65 million copies have sold to date. Rivaling the international 

publication success of the Harry Potter books, the Left Behind series has flourished primarily in the American market.³⁹ 

 

 

Cover of the novel Assassins, by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, part of the Left Behind series. 

 

The concept of the Left Behind phenomenon is simple: Hal Lindsey meets Leon Uris. American and Israeli characters unite as nat- 

ural allies in these futuristic action-thrillers about the seven years of Tribulation between the Rapture and the Second Coming. Arcane 

biblical prophecies play out in a high-tech setting, and formulaic romantic plots and family dramas unfold with apocalyptic gore. A 

small band of heroic Christians deploys faith and technological know-how to outwit the devious machinations of a global evil empire. 

White Americans and converted Israelis are the major protagonists, although the series includes a wide cast of minor characters of dif- 

ferent races, ethnicities, and nationalities. The Israeli characters become the most pious proselytizing Christians, while the Americans 

behave like ace Israeli commandos. Together they form a mighty guerrilla group bent on saving souls for Christ and thwarting the 

tyranny of the Antichrist on the road to Armageddon. Where Puritan settlers once conceived of America as the new Israel, at the turn of 

the twenty-first century, the Left Behind novels reimagine Israel as the new America. 

The novels take place in a post-apocalyptic future that features the major dilemmas of the post–Cold War 1990s. Refurbishing the 

prophetic narrative that Lindsey had modernized for the 1970s, LaHaye and Jenkins address a diffuse set of threats identified with glob- 

alization and an increasingly interconnected world. The novels imagine a secular dystopia where America has forfeited its sovereignty to 

the seductive conspiracy of the Antichrist, a young Romanian diplomat, Nicholae Carpathia, who heads the United Nations. Carpathia 

institutes a one-world government with a single currency and an ecumenical embrace of all religions. In a world colonized by secular 

forces and ravaged by physical calamities, only the State of Israel remains intact as God’s special nation and a bulwark against the nefar- 

ious networks of globalization. 

The miraculous survival of Israel serves as a counterweight to the awful destruction of the United States. The first novel opens 

aboard an airplane, where a number of passengers mysteriously vaporize into thin air. It is the Rapture, and true Christians have been 

taken directly to heaven. The characters remaining on earth return to an America decimated by the disappearance of ordinary people 

who kept the wheels of everyday life turning and maintained social order: drivers, pilots, traffic controllers, police officers, nurses, and 

doctors have suddenly disappeared from their jobs, and disasters ensue. As soon as the main characters realize that they were “left be- 

hind,” they become believers and form the Tribulation Force to fight against the Antichrist. An American journalist comes to Christ after 

witnessing a prophecy fulfilled in Israel: the entire Russian air force was on its way to attack the unprepared nation, but the fighter jets 

fell out of the sky and left Israel unscathed. 

As the characters travel back and forth between America and Israel, the contrasting landscapes are striking. Nuclear bombs level 

American cities, and crime becomes rampant in burnt-out urban zones. Earthquakes destroy whatever infrastructure remains, as 

plagues spread. The Holy Land, in contrast, “had been spared damage from the wrath of the Lamb,” leaving Israel “the one place that 

looked normal … since the earthquake and the subsequent judgments.”⁴⁰ Israel is to other nations what believers are to unbelievers. 

When demonic locusts swarm over the earth gnawing at human flesh, they miraculously pass over anyone who has become a believer, 

just as when rivers turn to blood all over the world, water runs clear in the Holy Land. 

The novels describe Israel as a familiar landscape, placing modern landmarks in a biblical topography. American pilots fly in and out 

of Ben Gurion Airport, Israeli soldiers guard the Western Wall, the proclamation of the Messiah takes place before a huge crowd at 

Teddy Kollek stadium in Jerusalem, and the protagonists stage a daring escape on a boat up the Jordan River to the Sea of Galilee. Is- 

rael’s territory extends into the Sinai Peninsula and Jordan. In accordance with prophecy, the Antichrist tries to rebuild the Temple in 

Jerusalem as a site of idolatry after he persuades all Muslims to move away. In a possible allusion to Palestinian resistance, an uniden- 

tified terrorist yelling “Allah” starts shooting indiscriminately near the Western Wall and is promptly incinerated by two fire-breathing 

prophets. The novels magically fulfill the Zionist fantasy of a land without Palestinians.⁴¹ 

The Left Behind novels display a relationship to modern Israel that is ambivalent at best. The authors glorify Israel’s exceptional 

place in biblical prophecy and appropriate Zionist myths, while solidly rejecting secular Zionism. LaHaye had warned in 1984 that Israeli 

Jews were “still in a state of disbelief,” and that “we Christians must remember that many of Israel’s leaders are Zionists: consequently, 

some of them are as secular as America’s humanists.”⁴² By showing Israeli Jews converting to Christianity, the novels redeem them 

from Israel’s secular past and present. Among the main characters, Jewish converts to Christianity are the most devout proselytizers. An 

Israeli Orthodox rabbi, Tsion Ben-Judah, becomes the spiritual guide of a worldwide rebel community of believers. A renowned scholar 

of world religion, he publicly proclaims Jesus to be the true Messiah. Incurring the wrath of the Antichrist, he goes underground with 

his American comrades and then converts millions of unbelievers via the worldwide web. The technical ingenuity of another converted 

Israeli keeps these stealth broadcasts under the radar of the Antichrist’s extensive media empire. 

Throughout the novels, the authors adapt secular Zionist tropes, imbuing them with Christian meaning. Consider the central char- 

acter, Chaim Rosenzweig, an internationally revered Israeli scientist. Rosenzweig invents a chemical that makes crops grow when ap- 

plied directly to barren soil. His discovery literally makes the desert bloom. Nations around the world covet his formula as the solution 

to world hunger, and because he is an idealist, he makes it freely available in order to secure an international peace treaty. 

An intellectual committed to nuclear disarmament, Rosenzweig unwittingly abets the rise of the Antichrist. The Antichrist, Carpathia, 

is a cosmopolitan celebrity and mesmerizing orator who speaks multiple languages and is hailed by popular magazines as the sexiest 

man on the planet. Backed by a shadowy cabal of financiers, he rapidly ascends to power as the head of the United Nations with his 

promise to establish a one-world government based on one currency and one religion that preaches tolerance for all beliefs. Espousing 

every tenet of secular humanism, a conservative Christian nightmare, Carpathia rules the world as a welfare state writ large, one that en- 

courages free abortions, among other abominations. 

Conservatives have long reviled the United Nations as a threat both to America sovereignty and to Israel’s existence. These fears 

come to fruition in the novels, as Carpathia’s humanitarian mask falls away and he becomes the leader of the most tyrannical regime in 

human history. He deploys nuclear weapons against the nations that had surrendered them under the lure of disarmament, controls the 

world population through terror and surveillance, forces his subjects to have computer chips implanted as a measure of loyalty, and in- 

sists on being worshipped as the Messiah. 

In the meantime, after maintaining his faith in science rather than religion throughout the first five novels, Rosenzweig finally con- 

verts to Christianity and assassinates Carpathia (who comes back to life after three days). The tale of Rosenzweig’s subsequent actions 

turns the traditional Zionist narrative into a Christian one. As a new Moses, he presides over an Exodus in reverse and leads thousands 

of converted Jews, known as “the Remnant,” out of Israel, which is being ruled by the Pharaoh-like Antichrist. He takes them to the an- 

cient Jordanian city of Petra—a staple of prophecy since the late nineteenth century—where they feast on manna from heaven, their 

clothing never gets dirty, and the earth parts to protect them from relentless bombing by Carpathia’s Global Forces. In the Petra scenes, 

returning to “days of old,” converted Jews dress in flowing robes and speak in the cadences of biblical characters. When Christ appears 

on earth to command the final battle, they accompany him on a journey likened to the original Exodus, re-entering the Promised Land 

as Christian conquerors.⁴³ 

Transforming the secular landscape of Zionist iconography, the authors turn the ancient hilltop fortress of Masada into a staging 

ground for the conversion of Jews to Christianity. Masada is a celebrated Israeli historical site, where Jewish rebels committed mass sui- 

cide rather than surrender to the legions of the Roman Empire. In Israel’s national mythology, this story symbolizes Zionist fortitude, 

and the self-sacrifice of the rebels represents a heroic act of national liberation. In the Left Behind novels, a recalcitrant group of Ortho- 

dox Jews refuse to bow to the Antichrist but also resist accepting Christ as the Messiah. At Masada they have their last chance to con- 

vert, and rather than commit suicide, this time they are born again as Christians. 

As more Israelis convert, the authors use Holocaust references to describe the Christian martyrdom of these converts under the An- 

tichrist’s dictatorship. In persecuting those who defy him, the Antichrist displays special animus toward Jewish converts, for whom he 

plans a “final solution.”⁴⁴ His police force rounds up converted Jews to take them to concentration camps, and he plans to starve out 

the refugees in Petra, led by the now Christian Rosenzweig, and turn it into “the largest Jewish concentration camp in history.”⁴⁵ Refer- 

ences to the Holocaust not only signal the Antichrist’s absolute evil, but also bestow on the newly converted Christian martyrs the re- 

spect typically accorded to Jewish Holocaust victims. 

While Jews recover their spiritual identity in Christ as a result of the violent upheavals of the Tribulation, American characters reclaim 

their rugged frontier identity and behave like tough Israeli soldiers. In the first novel, the president of the United States blindly submits 

to Carpathia’s humanitarian blandishments, leading to the destruction of most of the country. When the president belatedly realizes 

that he has sacrificed American sovereignty to the United Nations, he joins forces with independent militia groups to stage an insur- 

rection. Carpathia brutally crushes the rebellion with nuclear weapons. The remaining members of the underground Tribulation Force, 

which takes on characteristics of the modern militia movement, live off the grid in secret communities and continue the battle. Many 

are veterans, who stage daring rescue missions and escape from captivity by smashing guards to death with their body weight. As Ar- 

mageddon approaches, they blend characteristics of American cowboys and Israeli commandos, brandishing Uzis and speaking the 

lingo of Westerns, saying things like “Howdy” and “Let’s get out of Dodge.” One character even prefaces a remark with, “I know this is 

gonna sound like a cowboy movie.”⁴⁶ Finally at the end of days, American men will be able to regain their mettle. 

As the armed forces of the world amass for the climactic battle of Armageddon, Israel’s wars against its Arab enemies are reenacted 

on a cosmic scale. The “rebels” defending Jerusalem are “outnumbered a thousand to one,” and at Petra, a “ragtag bunch of earnest 

impassioned believers” faces “the largest fighting force in the history of mankind.”⁴⁷ At Megiddo, believers confront “the greatest mili- 

tary power ever assembled on the face of the earth.”⁴⁸ Despite the military might of their antagonists, they feel confident that they are 

fighting “on the right side” of the “battle between good and evil.”⁴⁹ This time, the Christian David bests the unbelieving Goliath, and 

Christ’s arrival on a white horse (literally) transforms any traces of vulnerability into indomitability. During the battle, Christ’s words be- 

came swords that ripped open the bodies of millions, who “dropped in heaps of bones”; “even as they struggled, their own flesh dis- 

solved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated.”⁵⁰ This bloody battle ushers a gathering of Christian believers into the New 

Jerusalem, the seat of God’s kingdom on earth. 

Although the United States never recovers, the New Jerusalem is reborn, and it looks much like small-town America. Throughout the 

novels, the language of American exceptionalism fuses with the language of Christian redemption in which it was first formulated. 

Rosenzweig and Ben-Judah translate their own conversions into a classic American idiom of westward expansion while hiding out in an 

Illinois safe house. “The history of this country carries much discussion of a manifest destiny,” proclaims Ben-Judah. “Well, my broth- 

er,” he continues, “if ever a people had a manifest destiny, it is our people! Yours and mine! And now we include our Gentile brothers 

who are grafted into the branch because of their belief in Messiah and his work of grace and sacrifice and forgiveness on the cross.”⁵¹ 

In the prophetic plot of the Left Behind novels, America disappears as a modern nation, but its destiny is indeed manifest at the end of 

time in the New Jerusalem. As the main characters reunite in Jerusalem at the dawn of the millennium, Israel becomes the new America. 

 

“Israel’s Only Safety Belt” 

 

Otherworldly narratives about the end of time have real-world consequences. When the Christian Right started to flex its muscles in 

American politics, the dispensationalists in the movement did not sit back passively to watch for signs of the impending apocalypse in 

the Middle East. They started working to hasten God’s design through political organizing on behalf of Israel’s most far-right policies. 

Their map of the Holy Land had never stopped at the borders designated in 1948, and, since 1967, they have fervently opposed Israel’s 

relinquishing any territory, viewing it as God’s original gift to Abraham and as the final setting for the battle of Armageddon. As the Left 

Behind series dramatized, the peace process itself smacked of the Antichrist’s machinations. 

In 1983, Jerry Falwell announced that “the best friends Israel has in the world today are Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians.” 

He stated this in a book of interviews directed toward American Jews, many of whom opposed the Christian Right’s conservative social 

agenda. Falwell was responding to a question about what the interviewer, Merrill Simon, called the “hysterical reaction by the Free 

World press” to the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Israel was desperate for new friends at the time, as Falwell well recognized, after the 

invasion of Lebanon had tarnished its image in the eyes of so many Americans.⁵² 

Over a decade earlier, the Israeli government had already been seeking out new friends in the evangelical community. Their apoca- 

lyptic fervor for Israel’s conquests contrasted starkly with international calls for Israel to withdraw from those territories that were cap- 

tured during the Six-Day War. In 1971, Israel hosted the Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy, a gathering of 1,500 evangelical 

Christians who were addressed by Israeli leaders and evangelical notables. The tourism ministry eagerly solicited Christian visitors to 

visit major biblical sites that were now in Israel rather than Jordan. The ministry also enlisted well-known evangelicals like Pat Boone 

and Billy Graham, who produced a feature film called His Land, a love letter to Israel.⁵³ 

When Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, was running for president in 1976, the cover of Newsweek declared it the “Year of the 

Evangelical” and claimed that one-third of Americans had been “born again” and 38 percent believed the Bible should be taken 

literally.⁵⁴ The following year, Menachem Begin became prime minister, and the Israeli government began to cultivate the Christian 

Right as a political ally in a serious way. Like members of the Christian Right, however, Begin was disappointed that President Carter did 

not see the Israeli-Arab conflict through the same prism that he did. When Begin talked to him of the divine right to the Holy Land, 

Carter responded with the biblical injunction to make peace. And when Carter referred to the “Palestinian right to a homeland,” conser- 

vative Christians were as aghast as American Jews, whose antagonism galvanized Carter’s proposal for a national Holocaust memorial. 

In reaction to Carter’s support for Palestinian rights, Christian Zionists launched an advertising campaign in major U.S. newspapers, 

placing a full-page ad stating that “the time has come for evangelical Christians to affirm their belief in biblical prophecy and Israel’s di- 

vine right to the land.” The advertisement was signed by leading dispensationalist theologians and public figures like Pat Boone. Fi- 

nancing and publicity for the campaign brought together a Jerusalem-based Christian Zionist organization and American supporters of 

Begin’s Likud Party. An American Jewish coordinator of the campaign was quoted in Newsweek as saying that Carter had better listen to 

his constituency of evangelicals, and that “the real source of strength the Jews have in this country is from the evangelicals.”⁵⁵ 

Begin did meet a kindred spirit in Jerry Falwell, who was thrilled to see Israeli soldiers capture Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in 1967. Ac- 

tively courting Falwell as the “man who represents 20 million Americans,” the Likud government paid for Falwell to visit Israel dozens 

of times and helped him conduct “Friendship Tours” for hundreds of ministers and laypeople. The IDF flew Falwell by helicopter over 

the Golan Heights, where he planted saplings for a forest in his honor. He visited new settlements in the occupied territories, where he 

endorsed Israel’s right to Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank. Falwell received a gift of a Lear jet from the Israeli 

government, and in 1981, he became the first non-Jew to win the Jabotinsky Award, in honor of the founder of right-wing Zionism.⁵⁶ 

Falwell reciprocated with unfaltering support. When Begin launched the controversial strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, Falwell 

was one of the few public figures to congratulate him. Identifying the raid as a victory for America, he lauded Begin “for a mission that 

made us very proud that we manufacture those F-16s. In my opinion, you must’ve put it right down the smokestack.” On a broadcast 

that Sunday, Falwell urged eighty thousand pastors in the Moral Majority to preach favorable sermons in defiance of the condemnation 

of Israel’s attack by both President Reagan and the United Nations.⁵⁷ 

Christian Zionists offered crucial support during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In Israel—America’s Key to Survival, Evans 

called the invasion a “miracle” and a “dress rehearsal for Armageddon,” and he applauded Israel’s mighty blow against heavily armed 

Soviet proxies in its defense of oppressed Lebanese Christians.⁵⁸ In 1979, Pat Robertson had started a radio station in southern 

Lebanon for a right-wing Christian militia, and during the invasion, he and Falwell visited Lebanon as guests of the IDF. When the news 

broke of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, Falwell protested that the “Israelis were not involved” and dismissed reports as “media 

bias.”⁵⁹ On his Old Time Gospel Hour show, he compared the massacre to My Lai, with a strange twist: since people didn’t call for 

Nixon’s resignation after My Lai, he argued, only anti-Semites would call for Begin to resign.⁶⁰ 

Christian Zionists have consistently opposed any Israeli efforts to trade land for peace, for they share with the Israeli religious right 

the belief that “Greater Israel” was divinely deeded to the Jews. Some also believe that peace efforts are the work of the Antichrist, a 

theme in the Left Behind novels. When the Israeli parliament approved a bill in 1980 declaring Jerusalem to be the nation’s undivided 

capital, in defiance of international law, the few foreign embassies remaining in that city protested by joining the majority in Tel Aviv. To 

support Israel’s declaration, a Dutch evangelical established the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, with financial contri- 

butions from Americans, who still use the thriving institution as the umbrella organization for Christian Zionist activities in Israel. Offi- 

cially committed to “comforting” Israel, restoring Jews to Zion, and spreading the prophetic word, the “embassy” has also provided a 

meeting ground for evangelicals committed to conservative causes throughout the world. A 1987 Bill Moyers documentary showed 

footage of supplies labeled ICEJ crossing at the Honduras border en route to the right-wing contras in Nicaragua.⁶¹ 

On the home front, Christian Zionists led the battle to convince the U.S. government to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal cap- 

ital. Testifying before a congressional hearing in 1984, Falwell attested that “there are hundreds of references to Jerusalem” in the Bible, 

but God “made no reference to Tel Aviv.” While that city is the “brainchild of man; Jerusalem is the heartthrob of God.” Adept at com- 

bining political and religious language, he concluded that “moving our embassy from exile in Tel Aviv to its rightful home in Jerusalem 

would tell the world that our commitment to this single democracy in the Middle East is irrevocable.”⁶² At the end of 2017, evangelicals 

found a champion for this cause in the White House. President Donald Trump, with Vice President Mike Pence, a Christian Zionist, by 

his side, formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and ordered the U.S. embassy moved there, reversing nearly seven decades of 

American foreign policy. 

Christian Zionists have continuously opposed relinquishing any territory as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. They ob- 

jected to the Oslo Accords of 1993 and criticized Prime Minister Rabin for negotiating with Yasser Arafat. After Rabin’s assassination in 

1995, John Hagee published a book detailing how the Bible predicted the assassination, which would trigger the end times. Hagee de- 

scribed Rabin’s killer, Yigal Amir, a right-wing Israeli settler, as a man of faith who was committed to keeping the land God had 

promised to his people.⁶³ When Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996, he revived the close relationship with 

conservative evangelicals that Begin had initiated. As ambassador to the United Nations, Netanyahu had been a popular guest speaker 

at the National Prayer Breakfast for Israel, an annual event held in Washington, D.C., where he highlighted the “impact of Christian 

Zionism on western statesmen that helped modern Jewish Zionism achieve the rebirth of Israel.” Within months of taking power, Ne- 

tanyahu flew Christian Zionist leaders to Israel; when they returned, they took out full-page ads supporting the settlements and Israel’s 

claim to Jerusalem. On a visit to Washington in 1998, he snubbed President Clinton in order to attend a gala celebration of Christian 

Zionists. There Falwell declared that asking Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories would be like “asking America to give Texas 

to Mexico.” Netanyahu told the group that Israel had “no greater friends and allies than the people sitting in this room.”⁶⁴ 

Netanyahu spoke prophetically—in a sense. Organized Christian Zionism would grow tremendously in the new millennium, in terms 

of membership, finances, and political clout. In addition to giving moral and political support to Israel, Christian Zionists supplied the 

country with ample financial aid and boosted its tourism industry with prophecy-oriented tours. To hasten the restoration of Jews to 

Zion, Christian organizations with names like Exobus have helped transport immigrants from Russia, Ethiopia, India, and anywhere they 

can find hidden Jewish communities. American churches have also adopted and provided aid to individual settlements in the occupied 

territories. In 2006, John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel, which has developed significant lobbying power in the United 

States. Christian Zionist organizations have routinely endorsed the Israeli government’s perspective on its use of force and have ap- 

proved of all military incursions, often seeing them as part of the divine plan. They have also opposed all efforts at diplomatic negoti- 

ations, including the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. 

American Jewish organizations have been more ambivalent than the Israeli government about allying with the Christian Right. In the 

1980s and 1990s, they swung back and forth between opposing the Right’s conservative domestic agenda and welcoming a pragmatic 

alliance with it as a way to strengthen Israel’s security. In 1982, the head of the American Jewish Congress warned that the Moral Major- 

ity “threatens the freedoms that make Jews safe in America,” freedoms that include the separation of church and state, keeping prayer 

out of public schools, and supporting pro-choice policies and women’s rights. At the same time, Nathan Perlmutter, director of the 

Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), wrote that allegiance to Israel trumps domestic politics and theological beliefs: “We need 

all the friends we have to support Israel.… If the Messiah comes, on that day we’ll consider our options. Meanwhile, let’s praise the 

Lord and pass the ammunition.” In an influential article in Commentary in 1984, Irving Kristol urged American Jews to set aside their 

political reservations and welcome the Moral Majority’s support for Israel, which “could, in the near future, turn out to be decisive for 

the very existence of the Jewish state.”⁶⁵ 

This alliance between American Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists stemmed from more than political expediency. The rise of the 

Christian Right dovetailed with the emergence of the neoconservative movement. Both groups launched a crusade to rebuild America’s 

military power and prestige around the world, and both found a champion in Ronald Reagan. Neoconservatives, like Kristol, made the 

strongest intellectual case for American Jews to align with Christian conservatives, as part of a broader appeal to Jews to break away 

from liberalism. 

Despite deep differences in background and belief, neoconservatives shared with Christian conservatives a remarkably similar narra- 

tive about the decline of American power and morality. They both blamed the counterculture and social movements of the 1960s for the 

breakdown of moral authority at home, and they held liberals responsible for undercutting American military power abroad. These two 

crises had converged in the failure of Vietnam. In the 1980s, both groups imagined a vital role for Israel in reversing this crisis. 

Neoconservatives also shared with evangelicals an apocalyptic sensibility. Ultimately attuned to national rather than divine triumph, 

neoconservatives viewed American military might as the singular force for good in a world beset by evil, and as the only power standing 

between the survival of democracy and worldwide anarchy. They also saw annihilation looming as the world lurched from one crisis to 

the next—from Soviet military expansion in the 1980s to Islamic terrorism in the aftermath of the Cold War. Just as dispensationalists 

interpreted contemporary events as a biblical sign of the approaching apocalypse, neoconservatives read most conflicts, whether polit- 

ical, military, or cultural, as potential threats to the survival of Western civilization. 

Granted, different blueprints underlay the construction of these parallel worldviews. For neoconservatives, the historical lessons of 

the 1938 Munich Agreement, which permitted Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia, provided an indispensable guide to future action 

that was as fully revealed as Scripture was for prophecy believers. By appeasing Hitler, they argued, England and France failed to com- 

bat absolute evil and thus enabled the Holocaust, which could have been averted had the West, including the United States, had the 

foresight and courage to use force. Wielding this blueprint, neoconservatives have interpreted most choices to pursue diplomatic ne- 

gotiation over military force as acts of appeasement—particularly the policy of détente with the Soviet Union and nuclear disarmament 

treaties, and more recently the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. They feared that diplomatic concessions to evil forces could have cata- 

strophic consequences, just as dispensationalists viewed such diplomatic efforts as the work of the Antichrist.⁶⁶ 

The imperative to avert a second Holocaust in Israel epitomizes this neoconservative way of thinking. Kristol, after all, advocated ally- 

ing with the Moral Majority not merely as a pragmatic coalition for particular political aims, but as “decisive for the very existence of the 

Jewish state.” In the same article nudging Jews closer to conservative Christians, he urged them to abandon their allegiance to interna- 

tional law and to the Enlightenment ideal of a “community of nations,” as represented by the United Nations. If support for Israel was 

the paramount value, this meant endorsing Israel’s flouting of international law, and by extension unshackling America from interna- 

tional restrictions to its sovereignty. If American Jews expected the United States to shore up Israel’s military security, argued Kristol, 

they had to support full-throated American militarism, just like Christian conservatives, and get over their moralistic squeamishness 

against anticommunist interventions in Central America and other places. American Jews had to support “the indispensable precon- 

dition for the exercise of American influence on behalf of Jewish interests in the world: a large and powerful military establishment that 

can, if necessary, fight and win dirty, little (or not so little) wars in faraway places.” Kristol concluded that it was time for American Jews 

to leave behind their traditional commitment to liberal allies and internationalist ideals and to seek a “new home, however uncom- 

fortable, in the conservative and neoconservative politics that, in reaction to liberalism’s leftward drift, seems to be gaining momen- 

tum.” That meant forging an alliance with Christian conservatives, for whom Israel and America were inseparably bound together in 

military might and divine favor.⁶⁷ 

The Jewish American alliance with Christian conservatives hit some rocky spots during the 1990s, when the culture wars at home and 

negotiations toward a two-state solution found liberal Jews and Christian Zionists on opposite sides. In 1994, the ADL became alarmed 

by the crude anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of Pat Robertson, who founded the Christian Coalition to succeed the Moral Majority in 

1989. Abraham Foxman, director of the ADL, warned of the imposition of a “Christian nation” on America’s democracy in his book The 

Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America. While Norman Podhoretz defended Robertson, and AIPAC held meet- 

ings with him, Foxman refused his demand for an apology.⁶⁸ 

After September 11, 2001, however, when President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror,” mainstream Jewish organizations 

overcame their suspicions of the Christian Right. In the American geopolitical imagination, the al-Qaeda operatives who attacked the 

World Trade Center merged with Palestinian suicide bombers attacking Israelis during the second intifada. Once the front line against 

Soviet communism, Israel now became the front line against Islamic terrorism. When Israel faced worldwide condemnation for its dis- 

proportionate punitive attacks on Palestinian civilians during the second intifada, Christian Zionists went into action. In 2002, President 

Bush criticized Israel’s invasion of the West Bank and its bombardment of Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah. Jerry Falwell im- 

mediately rallied his base to protest Bush’s condemnation. That year, Foxman changed his view on the Christian Right, writing an article 

titled “Why Evangelical Support for Israel Is a Good Thing.”⁶⁹ 

On a 2003 60 Minutes broadcast, Falwell branded Mohammed a “terrorist,” and said that “Jesus set the example for love, as did 

Moses. And I think that Mohammed set an opposite example.” The war on terror, for some Christians and Jews, redefined the meaning 

of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a war against Islam. On the same broadcast, Falwell warned that “the Bible Belt in America is Israel’s 

only safety belt right now.” Foxman agreed with him that “on this specific issue on this day we come together. And what is the issue? 

The issue is fighting terrorism.”⁷⁰ 

6

APOCALYPSE SOON

LONG BEFORE the State of Israel was founded in 1948, American Christians of all denominations had identified its territory with the biblical geography of the Holy Land. Puritan settlers in colonial America cast themselves as the chosen people of the Old Testament and imagined the New World as the Promised Land. Colonists engraved this identity on the North American landscape with biblical names—Salem, Jericho, Canaan. Manifest Destiny draped national expansion in biblical garb, as Herman Melville observed: We are the peculiar chosen people, the Israel of our time. We bear the ark of the liberties of the world. The rise of historical criticism in the nineteenth century spawned a popular obsession with the Holy Land. Archeologists unearthed material evidence of the biblical past, and tourists thrilled to walk in Jesus’s footsteps. To experience these lands vicariously, one could read the historical novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, the most popular book of the late nineteenth century—or watch it performed on stage and later on film. One could visit Palestine Park, built in Chautauqua, New York, in 1874, the first of many Holy Land models throughout the United States, or wander through a replica of Jerusalem’s Old City at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. In Sunday school, children pored over colorful atlases, memorized strange place names, and charted Bible stories as geographical journeys. Through all these different media, millions of American Christians were prepared to form images of modern Israel from their familiarity with the mythic landscape of the Holy Land.¹

Israel has come to embody Holy Time as well as the Holy Land. Since the rise of the Christian Right in the late 1970s, evangelical Christians have become fervent political supporters of Israel, and many of them have looked to Israel both as the setting for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and as the primary actor in hastening that event. For evangelicals who believe in biblical prophecy, the Bible not only literally records divine history, it also accurately foretells the divine future. Since Israel’s founding, evangelicals have combed its political landscape for forecasts of the end times. This temporal geography relies less on the New Testament chronicles of Jesus’s life and death than on the book of Revelation and the Old Testament prophets to map a landscape of impending apocalypse.²

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 proved to believers the accuracy of the ancient prophecy that God would restore the Jews to Zion and that this ingathering would trigger a chain of events culminating in the end of days. This restoration of the Jews to Zion meant something very different from secular Zionism. The significance of Israel was not in realizing the political goal of Jewish sovereignty, but in manifesting God’s sovereignty and making it possible for some Jews to convert to Christianity to correct the fatal mistake they had made in rejecting Christ two millennia ago. In this prophetic narrative, Israel is the epicenter of the apocalypse, where Christ will launch the final battle of Armageddon and vanquish the Antichrist to inaugurate God’s kingdom on earth. Conjoining eschatology and geopolitics, this old belief system energized the movement called Christian Zionism, which has become one of the most powerful sources of American support for Israel’s right-wing politics from the 1980s into the new millennium.³

Christian Zionism did not evolve in a world apart from mainstream American culture. As we have seen, it was the popular crooner and born-again Christian Pat Boone who wrote and recorded the famous lyrics to the film Exodus, This land is mine, God gave this land to me. His evangelical audience would have taken the lyrics literally, as God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis (13:15): For all the land you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. They understood this decree not as a metaphor or a past event, but as an enduring promise for Abraham’s future descendants. Throughout his career, Boone worked to promote Israel to American Christians, including in his 1972 musical production The Pat Boone Family in the Holy Land, and in his official position as spokesman for Israel’s tourism ministry in the 1990s. At the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he entertained Israeli troops camped on the Golan Heights with rock-and-roll hits and a rousing rendition of Exodus. Some years later, after Israel had annexed the Golan Heights, Boone mentioned this visit to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. According to Boone, Rabin consulted a map and responded: You sang a prophecy.… Where you were singing, ‘God gave this land to me’ is now part of the map of Israel.⁴ In Boone’s belief system, the knowledge that God gave this land to me transcends history and geography, but is verified by current events and geopolitics. In prophetic time, Israel’s wars look backward to fulfill ancient prophecy, and look forward to the final cosmic war on the horizon.

Pat Boone’s lifelong involvement with Israel exemplifies the potent mix of popular culture, masculine militarism, and belief in biblical prophecy that bonds conservative American evangelicals to the modern nation of Israel. In the right-wing turn in both countries, evangelicals equated support for Israel’s expansionist policies with the revival of military power in the United States. Israel, they believed, had a special role to play both at the end of times and in the present, by combatting America’s decline and renewing belief in American exceptionalism.

Boone contributed to the emergence of the Christian Right as a political force on the national scene. His was a well-known public face on cable television’s evangelical circuit, where he appeared with celebrity preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart. Boone also worked behind the scenes in California with a coterie of businessmen, politicians, and evangelical leaders to help elect his good friend Ronald Reagan as governor of California in 1967 and president of the United States in 1980. In the presidential election, the influence of Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority helped a group of neoconservatives make Israel central to Reagan’s foreign policy.

In 2013, Boone donated the Christmas card on which he had composed the original lyrics of Exodus to Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.⁵ The symbolism of this donation is not hard to decipher. The evangelical anticipation of the end times parallels the apocalyptic fear that Israel is facing the existential threat of a second Holocaust. Both ways of thinking interpret the past—whether the Bible or twentieth-century history—as a sign of Israel’s future. And both see catastrophe on the horizon. Memory of the Holocaust solidifies Israel’s status as history’s ultimate victim. Evangelicals, in contrast, view Israel as ultimately invincible, in accordance with God’s plan to end history. Holocaust memory evokes the dread of recurring atrocities, while biblical prophecy welcomes the hastening of Armageddon’s gory end. Both apocalyptic narratives assume an uncompromising conflict between good and evil. Apocalypse begets redemption. In the Holocaust narrative, protecting Israel from the threat of annihilation can redeem America from its past failures. In the

prophecy narrative, recognizing Israel’s divine status can redeem America from moral and military decay.

Apocalypse Now

Christian Zionism became a phenomenon in popular culture a decade before the Christian Right became a force in American politics. The evangelical leader Hal Lindsey was the most influential proponent of the movement. In his book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), Lindsey transformed an arcane belief in biblical prophecy into a diagnosis of the crises besetting modern society. Lindsey placed the State of Israel at the center of an esoteric eschatology called premillennial dispensationalism, and he exhorted Americans to watch the end times unfold in the escalating crises between Israel and its Arab neighbors.⁶

The first blockbuster about Israel since Exodus, The Late Great Planet Earth focuses not on the country’s heroic founding but on its apocalyptic future. Lindsey identifies the birth of Israel and the decline of America as the two major signs that the end is near. Catastrophe and salvation loom together on the horizon. While America careens toward World War III, Israel is gearing up for the final cosmic conflict, in which a militant Christ will defeat the Antichrist and establish his kingdom on earth.

Hal Lindsey was an unlikely candidate to write a mega-bestseller. A veteran of the Korean War, he had a Mark Twain–like start as a Mississippi River tugboat captain and then studied at the Dallas Theological Seminary. In the late 1960s, he lectured on California campuses, recruiting alienated students to evangelical youth groups. The Late Great Planet Earth, which is written in the colloquial idiom of the counterculture and stocked with historical and scientific evidence, offers the Bible as history written in advance, the authoritative guide to humanity’s future. Issued by a small Christian publishing house, the book appealed far beyond the intended audience of Christian youth, selling a million copies in a month and ten million over the course of the decade, to become the bestselling work of nonfiction in the 1970s. Lindsey became a star on the evangelical circuit and an outspoken booster for Israel, leading many trips to the Holy Land. He produced a film version of The Late Great Planet Earth with Orson Welles as the narrator, and he has written at least twenty more books that update biblical prophecy to match geopolitical change. Israel never veers far from the center of his books.⁷

The Late Great Planet Earth addresses contemporary fears of the atomic bomb and civilization’s collapse. Nuclear weapons, environmental degradation, and overpopulation promise to destroy the earth. Third World nations and revolutionary movements threaten the West, just as crime menaces the streets of America. Global threats are matched by social decay at home: the disaffection of youth, the deluge of drugs, pornography, and mental illness, with no moral authority to stem this tide. All of these events are predicted in the Bible, an infallible guide that makes future events that were predicted hundreds of years ago read like today’s newspaper.⁸

For prophecy believers, if you read the Bible literally, you have no need to fear impending disasters. Instead, you welcome them as omens of a cosmic drama carefully scripted by God. In this divine script, the rise of Israel is the bright spot that counters the gloom and doom of the coming end times. If decline results from humanity’s abandonment of God, the restoration of Jews to Zion is evidence of God’s presence. Old-time Bible scholars, Lindsey claims, misinterpreted earlier upheavals as heralding the return of Christ. They missed the paramount prophetic sign: Israel had to be a nation again in the land of its forefathers.⁹ Only when Jews were restored to Zion could the countdown to Armageddon begin. Israel’s establishment was the temporal precondition, and its land the geographical setting, for the apocalypse.

The belief in the restoration of Jews to Zion as a precondition for the millennium had roots in the nineteenth century, before the rise of the secular Jewish Zionist movement. Irish evangelical John Nelson Darby popularized the idea of premillennial dispensationalism on both sides of the Atlantic. He claimed that God had never transferred his favor and promises from the Jews to the Christian Church—the traditional narrative of the Catholic Church and most Protestant sects. Jews would thus have a crucial role in the final dispensation, when their return to Zion marked the beginning of the end. Darby introduced the idea of the Rapture that Lindsey adopted. Christians would be swept up to Heaven without dying before the Tribulation and the rule of the Antichrist, when immense devastation, foretold in the book of Revelation, would bring human society close to annihilation. At this time, Jews would have their last chance to convert. A significant remnant would accept Christ as their Messiah, but the rest would be destroyed along with other unbelievers. Christ would then return to defeat the Antichrist at Armageddon and inaugurate the thousand-year reign of God’s kingdom on earth, ending with the Last Judgment.¹⁰

Prophecy belief had an impact on the development of political Zionism at the turn of the twentieth century. In the United States, William Blackstone, a Chicago businessman and author of the popular prophecy book Jesus Is Coming, worked to convince American Protestants to help Jewish people emigrate to Palestine. In 1891, drawing on humanitarian outrage at Russian pogroms, Blackstone collected signatures from over four hundred prominent men for a petition, known as the Blackstone Memorial, which called for returning Jews to Palestine. This document, which was presented to President Benjamin Harrison, combined aspects of biblical prophecy with concern for Jewish persecution, attention to developments in the Ottoman Empire, and unease over the possibility of increased Jewish immigration to America. Blackstone was one of the first to publish a statement that would later become a Zionist slogan: he described Palestine under Ottoman rule as an astonishing anomaly—a land without a people for a people without a land!¹¹ Premillennial dispensationalism also had a profound influence on the British circle of leaders who came together behind the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which set out the aim to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Their belief in biblical prophecy bolstered their political interest in establishing a foothold in the region for the British Empire.¹²

By 1948, dispensationalism had primed millions of evangelicals to welcome the founding of Israel as a great piece of prophetic news. At that time, however, some were concerned about Israel’s origins in unbelief, that is, its founding by secular Zionists. When Israel conquered the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, they saw world history taking a gigantic leap forward. L. Nelson Bell, Billy Graham’s father-in-law, exclaimed in Christianity Today: That for the first time in more than 2,000 years Jerusalem is now completely in the hands of the Jews gives a student of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and the validity of the Bible.¹³ For Lindsey, the conquest of Jerusalem paved the way for one more event that would "completely set the stage for Israel’s part in the last great act of her historical

drama. This is to rebuild the ancient Temple of worship upon its old site. There was one obstacle, however, standing in the way. That obstacle, wrote Lindsey, is the second holiest place of the Moslem faith, the Dome of the Rock." According to prophecy, however, God would remove the obstacle, perhaps by earthquake. Some prophecy believers have since argued that the Dome of the Rock and neighboring mosque could remain while the new temple was rebuilt on a nearby site, while others have applauded Jewish extremists’ plots to blow up the mosque.¹⁴

The Six-Day War galvanized evangelicals, who believed that Israel’s miraculous triumph was a literal miracle. They believed that God had intervened to save his chosen people and hasten the world’s end. Secular Americans may have welcomed Israel’s victory as a psychological lift out of the Vietnam quagmire, but prophecy believers hailed it as proof of God’s agency in the world. The conjunction of American decline and Israeli restoration corresponded to the signs predicted in the Bible of impending catastrophe for most of humanity and the ultimate victory for God and his believers.

The Late Great Planet Earth addressed contemporary concerns about global challenges to American power. Lindsey’s interpretation of biblical conflicts reproduced a Cold War interpretation of the free world as being threatened by communists and their Third World allies. The Bible, in his view, predicted an assault on Israel by a Russian-led confederation that included the Egyptian plan to unite the Arabs and the black Africans into a ‘third world force.’ ¹⁵ God would intervene to destroy the attackers, leaving Israel totally unscathed. In a chapter called The Yellow Peril, Lindsey ingeniously mines the Bible to predict that hordes from communist China, two hundred million in force, will cross the Euphrates to attack Israel during the battle of Armageddon. In these apocalyptic projections, American readers could imagine Christ defeating the same enemies that appeared to be besting them in Southeast Asia: the Soviet Union, China, and Third World nations. In this scenario, Israel becomes a proxy for America, as the target of its enemies and the recipient of divine salvation.

Although known for his countercultural cadences, Lindsey in fact reveled in militarism, and his book reads like an anti-antiwar book. It presents war as the engine of human history and as part of God’s design for ending human history. Lindsey welcomes each new thermonuclear weapon as evidence of the unearthly plagues predicted in the Bible. He avidly describes the blood flowing for miles in the valley of Megiddo, site of the battle of Armageddon, and he heralds global nuclear destruction as the ultimate proof of God’s power as described in the book of Revelation: Imagine Cities like London, Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago—obliterated! Lindsey indulges his readers in an orgy of violence inflicted on others, offering them a ringside seat where they remain unscathed while watching the apocalypse unfold. Anyone who accepted Christ would have been spared the horror of the Tribulation, having been spirited away during the Rapture—the ultimate trip, an experience akin to walking on the moon, better than mind expansion drugs!¹⁶ From this vantage point, the destruction of nonbelievers becomes a spectacle of divine intervention, where Israel provides the stage setting and plays the starring role.

As the fuse of Armageddon, Israel’s escalating conflicts will lead to World War III. The Arabs’ implacable unwillingness to accept the Israeli occupation of what they consider to be their land, together with Israel’s iron determination to resist them, make the conflict inevitable. According to Lindsey, the Bible predicts that the Middle East crisis will continue to escalate until it threatens the peace of the whole world. The focus of all nations will be upon this unsolvable and complex problem which keeps bringing the world to the precipice of a thermonuclear holocaust. Not until mankind is on the brink of self-annihilation will Christ return to put an end to the war of wars called Armageddon. In the final global battle, the Jews will be on the verge of annihilation when God gives them supernatural strength to fight.¹⁷ Lindsey transforms the peril of Israel’s earthly vulnerability into the Christian promise of divine invincibility, casting Jewish warriors for Christ in the image of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Jews also have another warrior role, as militant proselytizers for Christ. God will reveal Himself in a special way to 144,000 physical, literal Jews, writes Lindsey, who are going to believe with a vengeance that Jesus is the Messiah. They are going to be 144,000 Jewish Billy Grahams turned loose on this earth—the earth will never know a period of evangelism like this period. These Jewish people are going to make up for lost time.¹⁸ Those Jews who refuse to convert—a predicted two-thirds—will perish in gruesome plagues and massacres along with all nonbelievers.

War unites Christians with a militarized Israel through the figure of the militant Christ. The Bible, Lindsey claims, paints pictures of two Messiahs: the suffering Messiah of the First Coming is the humble servant who was sacrificed on the Cross. Prophecies of the Second Coming refer to the reigning Messiah or the political deliverer, the Messiah as conquering king with unlimited power, who comes suddenly to earth at the height of a global war and saves men from self-destruction. It is this militant Christ who favors the Israelites who believe in Him—those who had converted to Christianity—and makes them the spiritual and secular leaders of the world.¹⁹

The identification of the militant Christ with the Israeli military was connected with the movement to invigorate a masculine Christianity. In Tender Warrior: God’s Intention for a Man, Pastor Stu Weber critiqued the curly-haired, feminine images of Christ found everywhere from Renaissance paintings to Hollywood films. His first visit to Israel in 1974 radically changed this portrait when he met an Israeli driver, David, who inspired his vision of a muscular Christ. A Jewish male in his prime, David was a "native born sabra recovering from wounds received in the Yom Kippur War. With dark skin, black hair, and piercing, dark eyes hard as black steel, he reminded Stu of the biblical David, the great warrior. After Weber encountered David, the pale, limp-wristed Galilean faded like a bad dream and the laughing, dark-skinned Son of David took over the picture in my mind. The Greater Sabra. The real Tender Warrior." For this former Green Beret, the modern Israeli soldier, an incarnation of biblical Israelite warriors, rescued Christ’s image from centuries of feminization.²⁰

Many conservative evangelical leaders admired the IDF and prided themselves on access to its inner circle.²¹ In the prophetic landscape, the Israeli military is often represented as the sole part of modern Israel worthy of note, as in Lindsey’s illustrated book A Prophetical Walk through the Holy Land (1983). The only people appearing in the photographs are Orthodox Jews and Palestinian

shepherds, elements of the picturesque past. Modern photographs exclude urban scenes and portray only military scenes, including fighter jets over Masada, a tank on the Golan Heights, and Haifa Bay, described as the location where the Soviets will make an amphibious invasion of Israel as part of the all-out War of Armageddon. The title page shows an Israeli fighter jet in camouflage colors flying directly above the Dome of the Rock, which glistens beneath like a golden bull’s eye. Lindsey notes that he received this picture from a personal friend, one of the greatest jet fighter pilots in history, and the caption reassures readers that modern Israeli warriors guard their ancient capital.²²

America’s Key to Survival

Many prophecy believers were concerned that America did not appear in the Bible, and that the holy text did not reveal a divine agenda for reversing the nation’s worrisome moral and military decline. Indeed, The Late Great Planet Earth interpreted America’s deterioration as a major sign that the end was near. By 1980, however, Lindsey cast Americans in the more active role of helping to redeem their nation. In his next bestseller, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, he argued that the Bible advocated political action to ensure our nation’s survival against the twin threats of social decay and military impotence. In a world hell-bent on self-destruction, America could still regain its preeminence in time for the Second Coming; it could do this by restoring Christian morality and creating the world’s strongest military.²³

This vision of renewal informed the worldview of the Moral Majority, a political organization of the Christian Right that was founded in 1979 to advance a conservative social agenda at home and restore American military power abroad. Its leaders and grassroots supporters had a hand in electing President Ronald Reagan, who fluently spoke their language, with references to the evil empire and nuclear Armageddon. Many of the founders of the Moral Majority, including Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and Pat Robertson, were premillennial dispensationalists. They claimed a special dispensation for the United States, a window of time that had opened for activism just before the end. During this period, which LaHaye dubbed the pre-tribulation tribulation, Christians would perform a kind of dress rehearsal for Armageddon. They would fight the same battle against the dark forces of secularism and disarmament that the Antichrist would lead during the final Tribulation.²⁴

Staunch support for Israel formed the lynchpin of the Moral Majority’s foreign policy. You can’t belong to Moral Majority without being a Zionist, Falwell told ABC TV.²⁵ To these committed Cold Warriors, Israel represented the best line of defense against Soviet aggression in the Middle East and Arab power as displayed by the OPEC boycott in 1973. Israel’s divine status elevated it above other anticommunist regimes supported by the Christian Right, such as Guatemala, Taiwan, and apartheid South Africa. Whoever stands against Israel, stands against God, Falwell declared.²⁶ In an influential book, Israel—America’s Key to Survival, Christian Zionist Mike Evans called on Christians to recognize not only what America could do for Israel, but what Israel could do for America.²⁷ Christians had an obligation to arm Israel in its battle for survival, while Israel in turn played a crucial role in saving America as it struggled for survival against secularists at home and communists abroad.

Cold War politics met eschatology in the belief that standing up for Israel could revive America’s status as an exceptional nation. A foundational prophecy for Christian Zionists is God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee. As proof of the Bible’s success in predicting the future, they point to the eventual decline of every empire that has mistreated Jews, from Babylon and Rome to the Third Reich. The eclipse of the British Empire also serves as a cautionary tale, its decline attributed to its failure to uphold the Balfour Declaration. America, in contrast, has flourished because it has treated Jews well both at home and abroad. Tim LaHaye went so far as to claim that the United States had rescued Jews from the Holocaust.²⁸ The United States could avoid the fate of all other empires in history if it continued to bless Israel, but, warned Falwell, if the country abandoned Israel, it would lose its position of world leadership for a place in history books alongside of Rome.²⁹

The Christian Right envisioned the United States in Israel’s image, as both vulnerable and invincible. National survival is the issue, exhorted Falwell in his 1980 jeremiad Listen, America! Faltering military defense and moral corruption had led America to the threshold of destruction or surrender.³⁰ Falwell’s narrative of decline, shared by many conservatives, started at the end of World War II, when Roosevelt negotiated with Stalin. It was downhill from there: the abandonment of China to the communists, the failure to follow Douglas MacArthur to victory in Korea, and the debacle of Vietnam, when a weak government prevented the generals from deploying full military force.

The nadir of this trajectory occurred in the 1960s, when military weakness met moral decay. The counterculture, liberal media, Black Power, and the antiwar movement induced a failure of nerve on every front, from helping Fidel Castro to flourish, to relinquishing the Panama Canal, to allowing the Shah of Iran to be toppled. Failure to rescue the American hostages who had been taken during the Islamic Revolution was the crowning blow. On the nuclear front, disarmament was seen as synonymous with suicide. Anything short of victory over the Soviets—including nuclear treaties and détente—would lead to America’s total capitulation. The Miracle called Israel, in Falwell’s words, offered salvation in two ways. It showed that the United States was not in total decline, since its foreign policy had gotten it right in supporting Israel. And Israel’s robust militarism provided a model to emulate, since it had proven that pursuit of invincibility was the only alternative to the threat of extinction.³¹

On the domestic front, blessing Israel could also save America from moral decline. In a foundational text for Christian conservatives, Battle for the Mind, Tim LaHaye sounded a clarion call to redeem America from the sinfulness and permissiveness that the false religion of secular humanism had promulgated. He and his colleagues blamed this ideology for all forms of moral decay: drugs, crime, pornography, children’s rights over parents, homosexuality rites, prostitution, gambling and the equal rights amendment for women.³² Evidence of such degradation led to the conundrum of why God would continue to favor America. In The Coming Peace in the Middle East, LaHaye addressed this problem and related it to the absence of America in the Bible. He explained that America could maintain its favored status in God’s eyes only as long as it upheld its historical commitment to God’s original chosen people. He warned Americans

that if we ever change our policy toward the Jews, we will become like Sodom and Gomorrah.³³ Defending Israel protected America from descent into moral perdition.

Conservative evangelicals often compared their own precarious status in America with Israel’s vulnerable position internationally. Feeling besieged by the liberal institutions that had been undermining American society since the 1960s, they saw themselves as righteous underdogs fighting the Goliath of secular humanism. They often described themselves as persecuted outcasts; John Hagee claimed that Christians are the only group in America that it is politically correct to hate, discriminate against and lampoon. Pat Robertson controversially described the Holocaust as the work of Satan prefiguring the coming holocaust of American Christians at the hands of diabolical liberals, including liberal Jews. According to Robertson, the Nazis’ methods for isolating Jews were being used already against Christian people in the United States.³⁴ Many people were offended by such claims. Yet Robertson was voicing a common notion: conservative Christians saw themselves as a persecuted minority who had to battle the courts, the education system, and the media to keep from being wiped out, just as Israel had to defend itself from hostile surrounding nations. American Christians, just like Israel, would ultimately triumph through their own militant rebellion and the miraculous intervention of God.

Identification with Israel did not mean identification with actual Jews, however—either in America or in Israel. LaHaye warned that Jews as a group have often yielded to secularistic, even atheistic spirit. Brilliant minds have all too frequently been dedicated to philosophies that have proved harmful to mankind. Consider for example, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud. This apostasy, LaHaye claimed, explained why God had punished the Jews over the ages, in addition to the more traditional explanation that they had crucified Christ. Once Jews had been restored to Zion, they would have a second chance to redeem themselves from the sin of choosing Caesar over Jesus Christ.³⁵

Just as Israel enabled God to fulfill his promise to the Jews, so could America become the Promised Land for Christians. America is tied by a spiritual umbilical cord to Israel, Jimmy Swaggart preached on television. The Judeo-Christian concept goes all the way back to Abraham and God’s promise to Abraham. The Jewish people represent Judaism. The American people represent Christianity.³⁶ Swaggart viewed the American people as white evangelical Christians, while Israel alone represented Jews and Judaism.

Many conservative evangelicals understood their movement as bringing America back to its Christian roots, just as Zionism represented the restoration of Jews to their biblical birthright. The reign of secular humanism was to the Christian Right what the Diaspora was to Zionists—a time of powerlessness, persecution, and marginality that could only be overturned by a militant struggle for redemption. While evangelicals projected the prophetic future onto Israel, they imagined returning America to a harmonious past of security and social order. The restoration of Christian values was their Zion.

Reviving America as a Christian nation meant freeing it from the shackles of domination by a cabal of secular elites. Conspiracy theories are common among conservative evangelicals, who have implicated vast networks of institutions, including the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Council of Churches, and the American Civil Liberties Union. While particular conspiracies can get quite elaborate, they all assume the existence of a shadow state ruled by, in LaHaye’s words, a small but very influential cadre of committed humanists … determined to turn America into an amoral, humanist country ripe for merger into a one-world, socialist state.³⁷

For Christian Zionists who believe in these dark networks that are strangling America, Israel offers a shining counterforce. Prophecy and conspiracy both offer the certitude of a controlling center in a world spinning out of control. The satanic cabal governing America finds its counterpart in the divine designs for Israel’s future. The infernal plot bringing down America finds its inversion in the divine plot elevating Israel. The Nation of Destiny, wrote LaHaye, is the only one in the world that God chose to manipulate directly, so unlike other nations, Israel has a guaranteed future. While evil forces may drag America into historical oblivion, all human history began with Israel, and it will also end with Israel.³⁸

Prophecy and conspiracy, the Rapture and Armageddon, the restoration of the Jews, and the revival of America all came alive in the hugely popular Left Behind series, a set of sixteen novels authored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins and published between 1995 and 2007. Like The Late Great Planet Earth, these novels have had an astonishing appeal beyond the ranks of the prophecy believers. They ascended the bestseller lists and spawned a cottage industry of websites, tie-in products, and spinoffs, including films, video games, and specialized series for teens and for military personnel. More than 65 million copies have sold to date. Rivaling the international publication success of the Harry Potter books, the Left Behind series has flourished primarily in the American market.³⁹

Cover of the novel Assassins, by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, part of the Left Behind series.

The concept of the Left Behind phenomenon is simple: Hal Lindsey meets Leon Uris. American and Israeli characters unite as natural allies in these futuristic action-thrillers about the seven years of Tribulation between the Rapture and the Second Coming. Arcane biblical prophecies play out in a high-tech setting, and formulaic romantic plots and family dramas unfold with apocalyptic gore. A small band of heroic Christians deploys faith and technological know-how to outwit the devious machinations of a global evil empire. White Americans and converted Israelis are the major protagonists, although the series includes a wide cast of minor characters of different races, ethnicities, and nationalities. The Israeli characters become the most pious proselytizing Christians, while the Americans behave like ace Israeli commandos. Together they form a mighty guerrilla group bent on saving souls for Christ and thwarting the

tyranny of the Antichrist on the road to Armageddon. Where Puritan settlers once conceived of America as the new Israel, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Left Behind novels reimagine Israel as the new America.

The novels take place in a post-apocalyptic future that features the major dilemmas of the post–Cold War 1990s. Refurbishing the prophetic narrative that Lindsey had modernized for the 1970s, LaHaye and Jenkins address a diffuse set of threats identified with globalization and an increasingly interconnected world. The novels imagine a secular dystopia where America has forfeited its sovereignty to the seductive conspiracy of the Antichrist, a young Romanian diplomat, Nicholae Carpathia, who heads the United Nations. Carpathia institutes a one-world government with a single currency and an ecumenical embrace of all religions. In a world colonized by secular forces and ravaged by physical calamities, only the State of Israel remains intact as God’s special nation and a bulwark against the nefarious networks of globalization.

The miraculous survival of Israel serves as a counterweight to the awful destruction of the United States. The first novel opens aboard an airplane, where a number of passengers mysteriously vaporize into thin air. It is the Rapture, and true Christians have been taken directly to heaven. The characters remaining on earth return to an America decimated by the disappearance of ordinary people who kept the wheels of everyday life turning and maintained social order: drivers, pilots, traffic controllers, police officers, nurses, and doctors have suddenly disappeared from their jobs, and disasters ensue. As soon as the main characters realize that they were left behind, they become believers and form the Tribulation Force to fight against the Antichrist. An American journalist comes to Christ after witnessing a prophecy fulfilled in Israel: the entire Russian air force was on its way to attack the unprepared nation, but the fighter jets fell out of the sky and left Israel unscathed.

As the characters travel back and forth between America and Israel, the contrasting landscapes are striking. Nuclear bombs level American cities, and crime becomes rampant in burnt-out urban zones. Earthquakes destroy whatever infrastructure remains, as plagues spread. The Holy Land, in contrast, had been spared damage from the wrath of the Lamb, leaving Israel the one place that looked normal … since the earthquake and the subsequent judgments.⁴⁰ Israel is to other nations what believers are to unbelievers. When demonic locusts swarm over the earth gnawing at human flesh, they miraculously pass over anyone who has become a believer, just as when rivers turn to blood all over the world, water runs clear in the Holy Land.

The novels describe Israel as a familiar landscape, placing modern landmarks in a biblical topography. American pilots fly in and out of Ben Gurion Airport, Israeli soldiers guard the Western Wall, the proclamation of the Messiah takes place before a huge crowd at Teddy Kollek stadium in Jerusalem, and the protagonists stage a daring escape on a boat up the Jordan River to the Sea of Galilee. Israel’s territory extends into the Sinai Peninsula and Jordan. In accordance with prophecy, the Antichrist tries to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem as a site of idolatry after he persuades all Muslims to move away. In a possible allusion to Palestinian resistance, an unidentified terrorist yelling Allah starts shooting indiscriminately near the Western Wall and is promptly incinerated by two fire-breathing prophets. The novels magically fulfill the Zionist fantasy of a land without Palestinians.⁴¹

The Left Behind novels display a relationship to modern Israel that is ambivalent at best. The authors glorify Israel’s exceptional place in biblical prophecy and appropriate Zionist myths, while solidly rejecting secular Zionism. LaHaye had warned in 1984 that Israeli Jews were still in a state of disbelief, and that we Christians must remember that many of Israel’s leaders are Zionists: consequently, some of them are as secular as America’s humanists.⁴² By showing Israeli Jews converting to Christianity, the novels redeem them from Israel’s secular past and present. Among the main characters, Jewish converts to Christianity are the most devout proselytizers. An Israeli Orthodox rabbi, Tsion Ben-Judah, becomes the spiritual guide of a worldwide rebel community of believers. A renowned scholar of world religion, he publicly proclaims Jesus to be the true Messiah. Incurring the wrath of the Antichrist, he goes underground with his American comrades and then converts millions of unbelievers via the worldwide web. The technical ingenuity of another converted Israeli keeps these stealth broadcasts under the radar of the Antichrist’s extensive media empire.

Throughout the novels, the authors adapt secular Zionist tropes, imbuing them with Christian meaning. Consider the central character, Chaim Rosenzweig, an internationally revered Israeli scientist. Rosenzweig invents a chemical that makes crops grow when applied directly to barren soil. His discovery literally makes the desert bloom. Nations around the world covet his formula as the solution to world hunger, and because he is an idealist, he makes it freely available in order to secure an international peace treaty.

An intellectual committed to nuclear disarmament, Rosenzweig unwittingly abets the rise of the Antichrist. The Antichrist, Carpathia, is a cosmopolitan celebrity and mesmerizing orator who speaks multiple languages and is hailed by popular magazines as the sexiest man on the planet. Backed by a shadowy cabal of financiers, he rapidly ascends to power as the head of the United Nations with his promise to establish a one-world government based on one currency and one religion that preaches tolerance for all beliefs. Espousing every tenet of secular humanism, a conservative Christian nightmare, Carpathia rules the world as a welfare state writ large, one that encourages free abortions, among other abominations.

Conservatives have long reviled the United Nations as a threat both to America sovereignty and to Israel’s existence. These fears come to fruition in the novels, as Carpathia’s humanitarian mask falls away and he becomes the leader of the most tyrannical regime in human history. He deploys nuclear weapons against the nations that had surrendered them under the lure of disarmament, controls the world population through terror and surveillance, forces his subjects to have computer chips implanted as a measure of loyalty, and insists on being worshipped as the Messiah.

In the meantime, after maintaining his faith in science rather than religion throughout the first five novels, Rosenzweig finally converts to Christianity and assassinates Carpathia (who comes back to life after three days). The tale of Rosenzweig’s subsequent actions turns the traditional Zionist narrative into a Christian one. As a new Moses, he presides over an Exodus in reverse and leads thousands of converted Jews, known as the Remnant, out of Israel, which is being ruled by the Pharaoh-like Antichrist. He takes them to the ancient Jordanian city of Petra—a staple of prophecy since the late nineteenth century—where they feast on manna from heaven, their clothing never gets dirty, and the earth parts to protect them from relentless bombing by Carpathia’s Global Forces. In the Petra scenes,

returning to days of old, converted Jews dress in flowing robes and speak in the cadences of biblical characters. When Christ appears on earth to command the final battle, they accompany him on a journey likened to the original Exodus, re-entering the Promised Land as Christian conquerors.⁴³

Transforming the secular landscape of Zionist iconography, the authors turn the ancient hilltop fortress of Masada into a staging ground for the conversion of Jews to Christianity. Masada is a celebrated Israeli historical site, where Jewish rebels committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the legions of the Roman Empire. In Israel’s national mythology, this story symbolizes Zionist fortitude, and the self-sacrifice of the rebels represents a heroic act of national liberation. In the Left Behind novels, a recalcitrant group of Orthodox Jews refuse to bow to the Antichrist but also resist accepting Christ as the Messiah. At Masada they have their last chance to convert, and rather than commit suicide, this time they are born again as Christians.

As more Israelis convert, the authors use Holocaust references to describe the Christian martyrdom of these converts under the Antichrist’s dictatorship. In persecuting those who defy him, the Antichrist displays special animus toward Jewish converts, for whom he plans a final solution.⁴⁴ His police force rounds up converted Jews to take them to concentration camps, and he plans to starve out the refugees in Petra, led by the now Christian Rosenzweig, and turn it into the largest Jewish concentration camp in history.⁴⁵ References to the Holocaust not only signal the Antichrist’s absolute evil, but also bestow on the newly converted Christian martyrs the respect typically accorded to Jewish Holocaust victims.

While Jews recover their spiritual identity in Christ as a result of the violent upheavals of the Tribulation, American characters reclaim their rugged frontier identity and behave like tough Israeli soldiers. In the first novel, the president of the United States blindly submits to Carpathia’s humanitarian blandishments, leading to the destruction of most of the country. When the president belatedly realizes that he has sacrificed American sovereignty to the United Nations, he joins forces with independent militia groups to stage an insurrection. Carpathia brutally crushes the rebellion with nuclear weapons. The remaining members of the underground Tribulation Force, which takes on characteristics of the modern militia movement, live off the grid in secret communities and continue the battle. Many are veterans, who stage daring rescue missions and escape from captivity by smashing guards to death with their body weight. As Armageddon approaches, they blend characteristics of American cowboys and Israeli commandos, brandishing Uzis and speaking the lingo of Westerns, saying things like Howdy and Let’s get out of Dodge. One character even prefaces a remark with, I know this is gonna sound like a cowboy movie.⁴⁶ Finally at the end of days, American men will be able to regain their mettle.

As the armed forces of the world amass for the climactic battle of Armageddon, Israel’s wars against its Arab enemies are reenacted on a cosmic scale. The rebels defending Jerusalem are outnumbered a thousand to one, and at Petra, a ragtag bunch of earnest impassioned believers faces the largest fighting force in the history of mankind.⁴⁷ At Megiddo, believers confront the greatest military power ever assembled on the face of the earth.⁴⁸ Despite the military might of their antagonists, they feel confident that they are fighting on the right side of the battle between good and evil.⁴⁹ This time, the Christian David bests the unbelieving Goliath, and Christ’s arrival on a white horse (literally) transforms any traces of vulnerability into indomitability. During the battle, Christ’s words became swords that ripped open the bodies of millions, who dropped in heaps of bones; even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated.⁵⁰ This bloody battle ushers a gathering of Christian believers into the New Jerusalem, the seat of God’s kingdom on earth.

Although the United States never recovers, the New Jerusalem is reborn, and it looks much like small-town America. Throughout the novels, the language of American exceptionalism fuses with the language of Christian redemption in which it was first formulated. Rosenzweig and Ben-Judah translate their own conversions into a classic American idiom of westward expansion while hiding out in an Illinois safe house. The history of this country carries much discussion of a manifest destiny, proclaims Ben-Judah. Well, my brother, he continues, if ever a people had a manifest destiny, it is our people! Yours and mine! And now we include our Gentile brothers who are grafted into the branch because of their belief in Messiah and his work of grace and sacrifice and forgiveness on the cross.⁵¹ In the prophetic plot of the Left Behind novels, America disappears as a modern nation, but its destiny is indeed manifest at the end of time in the New Jerusalem. As the main characters reunite in Jerusalem at the dawn of the millennium, Israel becomes the new America.

Israel’s Only Safety Belt

Otherworldly narratives about the end of time have real-world consequences. When the Christian Right started to flex its muscles in American politics, the dispensationalists in the movement did not sit back passively to watch for signs of the impending apocalypse in the Middle East. They started working to hasten God’s design through political organizing on behalf of Israel’s most far-right policies. Their map of the Holy Land had never stopped at the borders designated in 1948, and, since 1967, they have fervently opposed Israel’s relinquishing any territory, viewing it as God’s original gift to Abraham and as the final setting for the battle of Armageddon. As the Left Behind series dramatized, the peace process itself smacked of the Antichrist’s machinations.

In 1983, Jerry Falwell announced that the best friends Israel has in the world today are Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians. He stated this in a book of interviews directed toward American Jews, many of whom opposed the Christian Right’s conservative social agenda. Falwell was responding to a question about what the interviewer, Merrill Simon, called the hysterical reaction by the Free World press to the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Israel was desperate for new friends at the time, as Falwell well recognized, after the invasion of Lebanon had tarnished its image in the eyes of so many Americans.⁵²

Over a decade earlier, the Israeli government had already been seeking out new friends in the evangelical community. Their apocalyptic fervor for Israel’s conquests contrasted starkly with international calls for Israel to withdraw from those territories that were captured during the Six-Day War. In 1971, Israel hosted the Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy, a gathering of 1,500 evangelical Christians who were addressed by Israeli leaders and evangelical notables. The tourism ministry eagerly solicited Christian visitors to visit major biblical sites that were now in Israel rather than Jordan. The ministry also enlisted well-known evangelicals like Pat Boone

and Billy Graham, who produced a feature film called His Land, a love letter to Israel.⁵³

When Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, was running for president in 1976, the cover of Newsweek declared it the Year of the Evangelical and claimed that one-third of Americans had been born again and 38 percent believed the Bible should be taken literally.⁵⁴ The following year, Menachem Begin became prime minister, and the Israeli government began to cultivate the Christian Right as a political ally in a serious way. Like members of the Christian Right, however, Begin was disappointed that President Carter did not see the Israeli-Arab conflict through the same prism that he did. When Begin talked to him of the divine right to the Holy Land, Carter responded with the biblical injunction to make peace. And when Carter referred to the Palestinian right to a homeland, conservative Christians were as aghast as American Jews, whose antagonism galvanized Carter’s proposal for a national Holocaust memorial.

In reaction to Carter’s support for Palestinian rights, Christian Zionists launched an advertising campaign in major U.S. newspapers, placing a full-page ad stating that the time has come for evangelical Christians to affirm their belief in biblical prophecy and Israel’s divine right to the land. The advertisement was signed by leading dispensationalist theologians and public figures like Pat Boone. Financing and publicity for the campaign brought together a Jerusalem-based Christian Zionist organization and American supporters of Begin’s Likud Party. An American Jewish coordinator of the campaign was quoted in Newsweek as saying that Carter had better listen to his constituency of evangelicals, and that the real source of strength the Jews have in this country is from the evangelicals.⁵⁵

Begin did meet a kindred spirit in Jerry Falwell, who was thrilled to see Israeli soldiers capture Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in 1967. Actively courting Falwell as the man who represents 20 million Americans, the Likud government paid for Falwell to visit Israel dozens of times and helped him conduct Friendship Tours for hundreds of ministers and laypeople. The IDF flew Falwell by helicopter over the Golan Heights, where he planted saplings for a forest in his honor. He visited new settlements in the occupied territories, where he endorsed Israel’s right to Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank. Falwell received a gift of a Lear jet from the Israeli government, and in 1981, he became the first non-Jew to win the Jabotinsky Award, in honor of the founder of right-wing Zionism.⁵⁶

Falwell reciprocated with unfaltering support. When Begin launched the controversial strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, Falwell was one of the few public figures to congratulate him. Identifying the raid as a victory for America, he lauded Begin for a mission that made us very proud that we manufacture those F-16s. In my opinion, you must’ve put it right down the smokestack. On a broadcast that Sunday, Falwell urged eighty thousand pastors in the Moral Majority to preach favorable sermons in defiance of the condemnation of Israel’s attack by both President Reagan and the United Nations.⁵⁷

Christian Zionists offered crucial support during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In Israel—America’s Key to Survival, Evans called the invasion a miracle and a dress rehearsal for Armageddon, and he applauded Israel’s mighty blow against heavily armed Soviet proxies in its defense of oppressed Lebanese Christians.⁵⁸ In 1979, Pat Robertson had started a radio station in southern Lebanon for a right-wing Christian militia, and during the invasion, he and Falwell visited Lebanon as guests of the IDF. When the news broke of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, Falwell protested that the Israelis were not involved and dismissed reports as media bias.⁵⁹ On his Old Time Gospel Hour show, he compared the massacre to My Lai, with a strange twist: since people didn’t call for Nixon’s resignation after My Lai, he argued, only anti-Semites would call for Begin to resign.⁶⁰

Christian Zionists have consistently opposed any Israeli efforts to trade land for peace, for they share with the Israeli religious right the belief that Greater Israel was divinely deeded to the Jews. Some also believe that peace efforts are the work of the Antichrist, a theme in the Left Behind novels. When the Israeli parliament approved a bill in 1980 declaring Jerusalem to be the nation’s undivided capital, in defiance of international law, the few foreign embassies remaining in that city protested by joining the majority in Tel Aviv. To support Israel’s declaration, a Dutch evangelical established the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, with financial contributions from Americans, who still use the thriving institution as the umbrella organization for Christian Zionist activities in Israel. Officially committed to comforting Israel, restoring Jews to Zion, and spreading the prophetic word, the embassy has also provided a meeting ground for evangelicals committed to conservative causes throughout the world. A 1987 Bill Moyers documentary showed footage of supplies labeled ICEJ crossing at the Honduras border en route to the right-wing contras in Nicaragua.⁶¹

On the home front, Christian Zionists led the battle to convince the U.S. government to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal capital. Testifying before a congressional hearing in 1984, Falwell attested that there are hundreds of references to Jerusalem in the Bible, but God made no reference to Tel Aviv. While that city is the brainchild of man; Jerusalem is the heartthrob of God. Adept at combining political and religious language, he concluded that moving our embassy from exile in Tel Aviv to its rightful home in Jerusalem would tell the world that our commitment to this single democracy in the Middle East is irrevocable.⁶² At the end of 2017, evangelicals found a champion for this cause in the White House. President Donald Trump, with Vice President Mike Pence, a Christian Zionist, by his side, formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and ordered the U.S. embassy moved there, reversing nearly seven decades of American foreign policy.

Christian Zionists have continuously opposed relinquishing any territory as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. They objected to the Oslo Accords of 1993 and criticized Prime Minister Rabin for negotiating with Yasser Arafat. After Rabin’s assassination in 1995, John Hagee published a book detailing how the Bible predicted the assassination, which would trigger the end times. Hagee described Rabin’s killer, Yigal Amir, a right-wing Israeli settler, as a man of faith who was committed to keeping the land God had promised to his people.⁶³ When Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996, he revived the close relationship with conservative evangelicals that Begin had initiated. As ambassador to the United Nations, Netanyahu had been a popular guest speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast for Israel, an annual event held in Washington, D.C., where he highlighted the impact of Christian Zionism on western statesmen that helped modern Jewish Zionism achieve the rebirth of Israel. Within months of taking power, Netanyahu flew Christian Zionist leaders to Israel; when they returned, they took out full-page ads supporting the settlements and Israel’s claim to Jerusalem. On a visit to Washington in 1998, he snubbed President Clinton in order to attend a gala celebration of Christian Zionists. There Falwell declared that asking Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories would be like "asking America to give Texas

to Mexico. Netanyahu told the group that Israel had no greater friends and allies than the people sitting in this room."⁶⁴

Netanyahu spoke prophetically—in a sense. Organized Christian Zionism would grow tremendously in the new millennium, in terms of membership, finances, and political clout. In addition to giving moral and political support to Israel, Christian Zionists supplied the country with ample financial aid and boosted its tourism industry with prophecy-oriented tours. To hasten the restoration of Jews to Zion, Christian organizations with names like Exobus have helped transport immigrants from Russia, Ethiopia, India, and anywhere they can find hidden Jewish communities. American churches have also adopted and provided aid to individual settlements in the occupied territories. In 2006, John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel, which has developed significant lobbying power in the United States. Christian Zionist organizations have routinely endorsed the Israeli government’s perspective on its use of force and have approved of all military incursions, often seeing them as part of the divine plan. They have also opposed all efforts at diplomatic negotiations, including the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

American Jewish organizations have been more ambivalent than the Israeli government about allying with the Christian Right. In the 1980s and 1990s, they swung back and forth between opposing the Right’s conservative domestic agenda and welcoming a pragmatic alliance with it as a way to strengthen Israel’s security. In 1982, the head of the American Jewish Congress warned that the Moral Majority threatens the freedoms that make Jews safe in America, freedoms that include the separation of church and state, keeping prayer out of public schools, and supporting pro-choice policies and women’s rights. At the same time, Nathan Perlmutter, director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), wrote that allegiance to Israel trumps domestic politics and theological beliefs: We need all the friends we have to support Israel.… If the Messiah comes, on that day we’ll consider our options. Meanwhile, let’s praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. In an influential article in Commentary in 1984, Irving Kristol urged American Jews to set aside their political reservations and welcome the Moral Majority’s support for Israel, which could, in the near future, turn out to be decisive for the very existence of the Jewish state.⁶⁵

This alliance between American Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists stemmed from more than political expediency. The rise of the Christian Right dovetailed with the emergence of the neoconservative movement. Both groups launched a crusade to rebuild America’s military power and prestige around the world, and both found a champion in Ronald Reagan. Neoconservatives, like Kristol, made the strongest intellectual case for American Jews to align with Christian conservatives, as part of a broader appeal to Jews to break away from liberalism.

Despite deep differences in background and belief, neoconservatives shared with Christian conservatives a remarkably similar narrative about the decline of American power and morality. They both blamed the counterculture and social movements of the 1960s for the breakdown of moral authority at home, and they held liberals responsible for undercutting American military power abroad. These two crises had converged in the failure of Vietnam. In the 1980s, both groups imagined a vital role for Israel in reversing this crisis.

Neoconservatives also shared with evangelicals an apocalyptic sensibility. Ultimately attuned to national rather than divine triumph, neoconservatives viewed American military might as the singular force for good in a world beset by evil, and as the only power standing between the survival of democracy and worldwide anarchy. They also saw annihilation looming as the world lurched from one crisis to the next—from Soviet military expansion in the 1980s to Islamic terrorism in the aftermath of the Cold War. Just as dispensationalists interpreted contemporary events as a biblical sign of the approaching apocalypse, neoconservatives read most conflicts, whether political, military, or cultural, as potential threats to the survival of Western civilization.

Granted, different blueprints underlay the construction of these parallel worldviews. For neoconservatives, the historical lessons of the 1938 Munich Agreement, which permitted Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia, provided an indispensable guide to future action that was as fully revealed as Scripture was for prophecy believers. By appeasing Hitler, they argued, England and France failed to combat absolute evil and thus enabled the Holocaust, which could have been averted had the West, including the United States, had the foresight and courage to use force. Wielding this blueprint, neoconservatives have interpreted most choices to pursue diplomatic negotiation over military force as acts of appeasement—particularly the policy of détente with the Soviet Union and nuclear disarmament treaties, and more recently the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. They feared that diplomatic concessions to evil forces could have catastrophic consequences, just as dispensationalists viewed such diplomatic efforts as the work of the Antichrist.⁶⁶

The imperative to avert a second Holocaust in Israel epitomizes this neoconservative way of thinking. Kristol, after all, advocated allying with the Moral Majority not merely as a pragmatic coalition for particular political aims, but as decisive for the very existence of the Jewish state. In the same article nudging Jews closer to conservative Christians, he urged them to abandon their allegiance to international law and to the Enlightenment ideal of a community of nations, as represented by the United Nations. If support for Israel was the paramount value, this meant endorsing Israel’s flouting of international law, and by extension unshackling America from international restrictions to its sovereignty. If American Jews expected the United States to shore up Israel’s military security, argued Kristol, they had to support full-throated American militarism, just like Christian conservatives, and get over their moralistic squeamishness against anticommunist interventions in Central America and other places. American Jews had to support the indispensable precondition for the exercise of American influence on behalf of Jewish interests in the world: a large and powerful military establishment that can, if necessary, fight and win dirty, little (or not so little) wars in faraway places. Kristol concluded that it was time for American Jews to leave behind their traditional commitment to liberal allies and internationalist ideals and to seek a new home, however uncomfortable, in the conservative and neoconservative politics that, in reaction to liberalism’s leftward drift, seems to be gaining momentum. That meant forging an alliance with Christian conservatives, for whom Israel and America were inseparably bound together in military might and divine favor.⁶⁷

The Jewish American alliance with Christian conservatives hit some rocky spots during the 1990s, when the culture wars at home and negotiations toward a two-state solution found liberal Jews and Christian Zionists on opposite sides. In 1994, the ADL became alarmed by the crude anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of Pat Robertson, who founded the Christian Coalition to succeed the Moral Majority in

1989. Abraham Foxman, director of the ADL, warned of the imposition of a Christian nation on America’s democracy in his book The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America. While Norman Podhoretz defended Robertson, and AIPAC held meetings with him, Foxman refused his demand for an apology.⁶⁸

After September 11, 2001, however, when President George W. Bush declared a war on terror, mainstream Jewish organizations overcame their suspicions of the Christian Right. In the American geopolitical imagination, the al-Qaeda operatives who attacked the World Trade Center merged with Palestinian suicide bombers attacking Israelis during the second intifada. Once the front line against Soviet communism, Israel now became the front line against Islamic terrorism. When Israel faced worldwide condemnation for its disproportionate punitive attacks on Palestinian civilians during the second intifada, Christian Zionists went into action. In 2002, President Bush criticized Israel’s invasion of the West Bank and its bombardment of Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah. Jerry Falwell immediately rallied his base to protest Bush’s condemnation. That year, Foxman changed his view on the Christian Right, writing an article titled Why Evangelical Support for Israel Is a Good Thing.⁶⁹

On a 2003 60 Minutes broadcast, Falwell branded Mohammed a terrorist, and said that Jesus set the example for love, as did Moses. And I think that Mohammed set an opposite example. The war on terror, for some Christians and Jews, redefined the meaning of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a war against Islam. On the same broadcast, Falwell warned that the Bible Belt in America is Israel’s only safety belt right now. Foxman agreed with him that on this specific issue on this day we come together. And what is the issue? The issue is fighting terrorism.⁷⁰

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