From the publication of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth (1970) to the end of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind series (2007), premillennial dispensationalism promoted Christian Zionism steadily until it peaked under the presidency of George W. Bush. As the final volumes of the Left Behind series appeared, the Pentecostal pastor John Hagee formed Christians United for Israel (CUFI). With over 10 million members, CUFI is currently the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States. Even with Christian Zionist organizations like CUFI, the movement has waned as increasing numbers of evangelical younger Millennials and Gen Zers withdraw support for Israel.
Just last year, Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin analyzed the results of three surveys conducted from 2018 to 2021 in their book Christian Zionism in the Twenty-First Century. They recorded a clear downward trend in support for Israel among eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds and a widening gap with older evangelicals. Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution noted a similar trend among evangelicals below thirty-five in two surveys conducted between 2015 and 2018 through the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll.
An important factor contributing to less support among young evangelicals was a shift away from premillennialism toward amillennialism and postmillennialism. Premillennialism holds that Jesus will return to earth to initiate his thousand-year reign and that God has not abrogated the covenant with Abraham, meaning Israel continues to have a role in God’s redemptive plan. Amillennialism holds that we are already in the messianic age. Jesus will return at its end, and the church is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Israel. Postmillennialism asserts that the church will establish a reign of peace through the gradual progress of the gospel, at the end of which Jesus will return. While some historic postmillennial advocates such as Jonathan Edwards have been supporters of Israel, most have advocated for conversion of Jews as part of the movement into this final reign of peace. Those who hold to premillennial eschatology are thus more likely to support Israel.
While Inbari and Bumin offer this shift in eschatology as one important factor, it is much more than that. Younger Millennials and Gen Z came of age after the height of premillennial dispensationalism. Instead, they have been shaped by a cultural landscape increasingly influenced by postmillennial themes.
A key feature of postmillennialism is the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth. Once the dominant Protestant position in the nineteenth century, postmillennialism merged with ideas of human progress to stimulate the social-gospel desire to create a world of justice. Grounded in a rehabilitation of the ethical vision of Jesus, the attempt to Christianize American society assimilated liberationist ideas in the 1970s and ’80s with the aim of building a just society from the margins to the center.
God had been collapsed into the movement of history, and Jesus came to be regarded as an enlightened teacher in touch with the divine to bring liberation. The gospel became activist progressivism for justice in cooperation with God’s lure of all things into justice through historical processes. Walter Wink’s trilogy on the language of principalities and powers in the 1980s had already connected the Bible’s reference to the demonic to structures, institutions, and ideologies. Liberal Christians and secular progressives could all speak of the universe bending toward justice against structural evil. It was postmillennialism watered down to collective action.
By the first decade of the new century, postcolonial perspectives became part of the social justice movement within liberal Christianity. Postcolonialism divided the world into colonizers and the colonized, which began to reframe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinian Christian writers like the Lutheran theologian Mitri Raheb started to refer to Israel as the settler nation. One can see this clearly in Resisting Occupation: A Global Struggle for Liberation, which Raheb co-edited with Miguel De La Torre. The plight of the Palestinian became part of a global struggle to liberate minorities from oppression on the path to a new future. This is the womb of the new anti-Semitism on the left, and it has impacted Millennials and Gen Z.
At the same time, Christian reconstructionism had developed a version of postmillennialism in the service of making America a Christian nation again. One of its architects, Gary North, referred to Christian reconstructionism as a new liberation theology in the mid-1980s. Also known as “theonomists” or “dominionists,” these Reformed thinkers wanted to reconstruct society around biblical law. Having replaced Israel, the church must facilitate the transformation of society into the kingdom through the nations. The most virulent forms of Christian nationalism stemmed from this group.
Recently, Rod Dreher, Gerald McDermott, and others have warned about anti-Semitism emerging on the alt-right. What is clear is that this anti-Semitism has grown in the fertile soil of Christian reconstructionism. One need only examine Andrew Torba and Andrew Isker’s 2022 book defending Christian nationalism from a Christian reconstructionist perspective. They argue for the removal of “Judeo” from the phrase “Judeo-Christian” on the basis of spiritual and theological opposition to Judaism. Repeating the older charge that Talmudic Judaism is not genuine Judaism, they argue that Christianity has no relationship to modern Judaism.
As the founder and CEO of Gab social media platform, Torba has been charged with anti-Semitism by the Anti-Defamation League for his rhetoric against Zionism, including phrases like “Zionist bootlicker.” This soil has also produced Thomas Achord, who co-hosted the podcast Ars Politica with Stephen Wolfe, another defender of Christian nationalism. Under the pseudonym Tulius Aadland, Achord posted anti-Semitic comments including falsehoods such as Antifa having Yiddish roots.
The turn away from Christian Zionism on the part of younger evangelicals stems from the overlap of two kinds of postmillennialism, both of which are trying to change the social order. Whether it’s the soft postmillennialism of theological liberalism or the hard postmillennialism of the Christian nationalists, the result is the same: a rise in anti-Semitism coupled with the waning of support for Israel.
