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aza has been bombarded indiscriminately by Israel for more than a month. Israel’s cruelty is not surprising but the unwavering support to Tel Aviv by the United States is outraging. The U.S. administration supports Israel financially, diplomatically, and it even helps the Israeli army in Gaza. While the reason seems to be an overlap of interests, it is certainly more than the United States’ foreign interests. This article argues that religion is a basic factor in the U.S. support for Israel.

In particular, some American Evangelicals, known as Christian Zionists, see support for Israel as a religious obligation for the realization of Apocalyptic prophecies. Some Evangelical Christians support the Republican Party, and although Democrats are now in power, Evangelicalism is so deeply rooted in U.S. foreign policy that even the Democrats can’t ignore their demands.

Why do Evangelicals support Israel?

Historically, some American Evangelicals support Israel due to verses like Genesis 12:2-3, which reads “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee.” They claim that the establishment of the state of Israel is a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Since Christian Zionists are the biggest religious group in the country, exceeding Catholics and other mainline Protestants, and accounting for 23% of the electorate, U.S. governments cannot ignore their demands. According to dispensationalist theology, humanity is currently in the last dispensation of the Book of Revelation, that is to say, we are experiencing the end times. Evangelical Christians claim that the Second Coming of Christ can only occur after the fulfillment of certain prophecies.

Such major prophecies include the return of Jews to the “Promised Land,” the foundation of Israel, the preaching of the Bible to the entire world, and so on. Another prophecy foretells that Armageddon, the end-of-the-world battle, will take place at the plains of Megiddo in Northern Israel. In the battle, Christ will defeat the Anti-Christ and each side will lose 200 million soldiers including nine million Jews; only 144,000 Jews will acknowledge Christ as the Messiah. In fact, different Evangelical groups offer different interpretations, but they all share the belief that to support Israel is a Biblical obligation: God says in Genesis 15:18-19, “To your descendants, I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.”

Evangelicalism is a movement within Protestant Christianity. In fact, the birth of Evangelicalism and the support of Israel by Protestants go back to the 19th century. It should be noted that  many great Christian thinkers like Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin did not read prophecies in the Bible as foretelling the establishment of an earthly state of Israel. For them, Israel meant “people of God” and “returning to Israel” meant returning to the Church; they never referred to Jews when talking about Israel.

It was John Nelson Darby, an Anglican British priest, that introduced dispensationalist theology, the basic ideology of Christian Zionism, in the 19th century. However, Cyrus Ingerson Scofield is a more famous name in Dispensationalism as he greatly contributed to the spread and consolidation of this theological school in the United States. There are strong claims that Scofield wrote the book with the sponsorship of Samuel Untermeyer, a Jewish lawyer and staunch Zionist. According to those critical of Evangelicalism, Scofield’s book was deliberately written to insert Zionism into Protestant theology.

While Evangelical support for Israel was not so overt in earlier times, following the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War (1967), which they saw as a miracle and actualization of Biblical prophecy, defending Israel became their top priority. By adopting the verse of the Old Testament “To stand against the Jews is to stand against God” as one of their basic tenets, Evangelicals, have turned supporting Israel into worship. When Israel was trying to improve its image in the 1970s, the Israeli government discovered how influential Christian Zionists were in U.S. politics and allied with them. The Jewish lobby also began to collaborate with Evangelical Christians to influence U.S. politicians.

Many analysts agree that Christian Zionists defend Israel more than Jewish Zionists. For example, at the Christian Zionist Congress held in Jerusalem in 1985, when Christians in attendance said that Israel must annex the West Bank, a Jewish attendant asked for the use of a more moderate language. In response, a Christian spokesperson said, “We don’t care what the Israelis vote! We care what God says, and God gave that land to the Jews!”

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 67% of Evangelicals has a positive view of Israel, 80% believes that the state of Israel is the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, and 45% states that the Bible influences their opinions about Israel. Since Evangelicals are the biggest political bloc in the U.S. and have strong ties among themselves and with political parties, particularly Republicans, their demands are not ignored. Jewish lobbies also encourage them to mobilize and put pressure on the government.

U.S. politicians and Zionism

Regarding how U.S. politicians and governments have received such pressure, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter famously once said, “The Judeo-Christian ethic and the study of the Bible were bonds between Jews and Christians which had always been part of my life.” He went on, “I considered this homeland for the Jews to be compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God.” Ronald Reagan also felt an affinity with Israel and looked at the Middle East from a Christian Zionist perspective. He believed that there were signs of an impending Armageddon.

On the other hand, former president George W. Bush believed that the United States was God’s chosen nation, and that he was chosen by God to become president. He frequently referred to Biblical verses in his speeches, hinting that the Bible was a major guide for his policies related to the Middle East. Donald Trump was perhaps the U.S. president who was the staunchest supporter of Israel; after all, during his presidency the U.S. embassy was moved to Jerusalem. Trump also chose his team from Evangelical Christians like Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, who argued that Trump was chosen by God. The current U.S. president, Joe Biden, is another staunch supporter of Israel and calls himself a Zionist.

The end of the Cold War in the 1990s and the emergence of religiously motivated political groups on the international scene, made us aware of the role of religion in international conflicts. The Clash of Civilizations written by Samuel Huntington around this time, became central to decipher the political role of religion. Although it has been invalidated by numerous surveys that show that actually clashes occur mostly within civilizations (which are far from operating as homogenous monoliths), the thesis nevertheless remains politically influential.

In the current international context, this simplified vision of religion on the international scene has led to the exclusive focus on Islam and terrorism. This contributes to the misleading perception, that the scope and reach of terrorism in the name of God has grown out of control, that this violence is inspired by the specifics of the Islamic tradition and resilient to usual forms of compromise or negotiation. The reality is that all religious traditions can partake into political violence and challenge democracy.

Case in point: in the 1960s, the Catholic Church was seen as a major obstacle to democratization because of its support to authoritarian and military regimes from Franco in Spain to Pinochet in Chile. The ongoing radicalization of Buddhism in Myanmar or Hinduism in India are highlighting that shift to radicalism that can affect all traditions, not to mention the rise of global Orthodoxy that pursues international projects in contradiction with the international order. Regretfully, the systematic comparison of these modes of radicalization has yet to be undertaken.

I have repeatedly shown that the relevance of religion is not in the content of the religious  tradition per se but in the interactions between religious and political actors, institutions, and ideas. From this perspective, limiting Islam or any other religious tradition to beliefs or texts proves to be a dead end as the text can lead to opposite interpretations and mobilizations.

Instead, looking at the ways religious belonging and behaving intersect with political identities and behaviors solve the puzzle of apparently very secular projects leading to political battles over Islamically correct social behaviors, which are currently happening not only in Egypt, Iraq, Sudan to name a few but also India, Myanmar or Israel.

In other words, the social and political visibility of religion is not caused by an increase in personal beliefs or religiosity. People are not more fervent believers than they used to be, but their identification to religion has certainly shifted, creating a conjunction of religious and political identities that facilitate political mobilization and sometimes radical actions.

The politicization of religion in Muslim countries can be traced back to the building of the nation-state and the active role of “secular rulers” in reshaping the Islamic tradition.

Such a perspective requires a “longue durée”, historicized analysis that drastically challenges the rational choice centered theories that still dominate the field of radicalization and security studies.

To be more specific, the radicalization of religion is related to its nationalization. To be clear, most of religions within nations operate peacefully but to understand how and when religious identities or practices become radicalized, the starting point is the establishment of the modern political community a.k.a.  the nation.

Religion and National Community

For example, the politicization of religion in Muslim countries can be traced back to the building of the nation-state and the active role of “secular rulers” in reshaping the Islamic tradition. Nation-building put an end to the political  autonomy of religious institutions  that dominated the caliphal periods. It also went hand-in-hand with the homogenization of the populations inhabiting the nation’s territory.

That is why nation-building systematically omitted and sometimes eradicated particular ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups in order to create one nation defined by one religion and one language. This homogenization led to a politicized narrative of religion, that I have called political Islam.

With the rise of the nation-state, a congruence was created between Muslims of a certain religious obedience (for example, in the Sunni groups, Maleki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, and Hanafi schools) and bounded territory. Although the westernized elites were not always pious, they understood that they could not build a nation without including the belonging to Islam. To be clear, this readjustment to the national territory happened to all religious traditions but with different outcomes.

For example, Christianity in Europe at the time of the Reformation, saw its societal influence reordered by the nation-state, but also its doctrinal content redefined to make room for the state sovereignty over mundane matters. In the case of Islam, what I have called hegemonic forms of religion appeared.

Religious hegemony is not reflected in whether a state has an official religion but in a wide range of government religion policies found in many states without official religions.

It entails three main features:

– Absorption of the institutions and personnel of the religion into the state system while the other religions at best do not benefit from the same status or at worst lack legal recognition

– Inclusion of some of religious prescriptions within the legal system (family law, blasphemy)

– Shaping of the national narrative by making the belonging to the hegemonic religion the by default civic and national identity of all citizens.

In other words, religious hegemony refers to exclusive legal and political privileges granted to a specific religious group, and the association of this religion with citizenship and national belonging, while all other religious groups are marginalized. This nationalization of religion also happened in Buddhist countries like Thailand, Myanmar or Butan. Surveys show that states with hegemonic religions tend to be less democratic, independently of the specificity of the religious tradition.

Judaism, along the same line, has become a hegemonic religion in Israel, hence fueling discrimination against other religious minorities as well as uncompromising positions vis-à-vis the Palestinian claims. That is a sharp departure from the status of Jewish minorities in Europe where they had adapted to the secular national contexts by disconnecting their religious belonging from allegiance to the European political communities. We see the same trend of hegemonic Hinduism expressed in Hinduist movements that now dominate the political scene in the originally secular Indian democracy.

Additionally, global radical groups like Al Quaida or ISIS do not represent a return to pre-national forms of Islam. Quite the contrary: They are the result of dissemination of concepts that were originally framed within nations but now have spread beyond national boundaries. In other words, the existing forms of global Jihad are the transnational versions s of the interpretations of Sayyid Qutb (initially aimed at fighting against the national unjust ruler), combined with the Wahhabi doctrine which is also a modern (albeit not a modernist) religious interpretation.

Unlike the forms of national Jihad, the transnational dimension of the global Jihad appeals to young Muslims across countries because it offers and idealized and imagined Community of Believers all united in one single goal. In other words, to understand the radical forms of Islam today, it is more relevant to look into the political and cultural socialization of the activists than into their level of piety or the content of the Islamic tradition.

This nationalization and globalization of religion is also visible in Christian majority countries. Although religious diversity and pluralism in the U.S. has increased over recent decades, Christians remain the largest religious group in the country. Seemingly paradoxically, this increase in religious diversity has also been accompanied by an increase in the view of America as a Christian country. Like in Muslim countries, such a perspective remains for most Christian citizens symbolic without becoming intolerant or radical.