Kingdom Now

The genocide in Gaza and the war on Iran and Lebanon have reshaped the political order in the Middle East and around the world. Christian Zionism is a core driver of the US-Israeli war machine. But its influence remains little understood.

For over a century, Christian Zionists have set the stage, fanned the flames and kept the fires burning in the Middle East, convinced that God is on their side. Today they work at the highest levers of power to keep the arms and blood flowing, driven by a toxic stew of End Times fantasies, Islamophobia and antisemitism, and Christian supremacy.

Christian Zionism is older than today’s Christian Right; older than the state of Israel; and older even than the Jewish Zionist movement itself. When the first Puritan colonists sailed to conquer the Americas in the 1630s, they saw themselves as a ‘new Israel’— a special nation singled out by God to build a new Promised Land. And they insisted that the Jewish people would soon usher in the End Times by returning en masse to Palestine, converting to Christianity and waging an apocalyptic war against the enemies of God.

That vision was cherished and refined by generations of Western Protestants. In the mid-1800s— half a century before European Jews like Theodore Herzl launched the Zionist movement— English evangelicals and statesmen lobbied tirelessly for the British Empire to establish Jewish colonies in Palestine. In America, too, Protestant elites clamored for the White House to advance the Zionist vision years before Herzl put pen to paper.

For Christian Zionists, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was part of God’s plan. So too, apparently, was the mass expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians at the hands of Zionist militias— which Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe— creating a refugee crisis which remains at the heart of present-day injustices. Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, beginning in 1967, was another step forward in their prophetic timeline.

With the rise of the Christian Right in the 1980s, Christian Zionism helped solidify a new consensus of unquestioned US support for the Israeli Right and its supremacist agenda. Today, tens of millions of MAGA evangelicals remain a rock-solid constituency backing the unending carnage in Gaza, Iran and beyond. And beyond American shores, the rapid growth of non-denominational, Neo-Pentecostal Christianity is conscripting hundreds of millions of Christian Zionist foot soldiers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Christian Zionism is part and parcel of the rise of Christian nationalism, helping to corrode the foundations of democratic pluralism in the US and around the world. Its adherents demonize Palestinians, Muslims and anyone who opposes their dystopian vision as instruments of the devil, enemies of the ‘Judeo-Christian West’, to be swept aside in a 21st-century Crusade. And their fervent proclamations of love for Jews are laced with antisemitism, conscripting our communities as cannon fodder in their ‘clash of civilizations’.

Today, the movement isn’t just about the Rapture— there are new theologies underwriting Christian support for Israeli domination in Palestine. It isn’t just MAGA evangelicals— Christian Zionism shows up in ‘liberal’ mainline churches, and other denominations as well. And it isn’t going unchallenged. Palestinian Christians are voicing theologies of liberation, grounded in a vision of justice and collective thriving for all who live on the Land. Progressive Christians are answering their call, organizing to move their communities, and introducing new ways of reading the Bible and living their faith. Many Christian nationalists, too, are backing away from supporting Israel, and helping ignite a ‘civil war’ in the MAGA camp. Christian Zionism is in crisis, and the need to understand where it came from and where it’s going is greater than ever.

KINGDOM NOW will provide a 400-year narrative history of a movement that has crisscrossed the Middle East and both sides of the Atlantic, leapt from the pews to the heights of power, and offered a Biblical script for Empire. Drawing on my work as an analyst of the authoritarian Right, I will introduce readers to the key politicians, prayer-warriors and movement leaders at the front lines of Christian Zionism today.

As an American Jewish anti-Zionist, I will share my own experiences wrestling at the crossroads of identity, community and faith. And I will profile some of the courageous Christians, in Palestine and around the world, who are standing shoulder-to-shoulder and building movements for justice and freedom in the Land.

I’m honored to get to work on this with Broadleaf Books, an imprint of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, at a time when these issues are more important than ever. Stay tuned!