Days before the Trump administration bombed three nuclear sites in Iran, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tried to defend his unblinking support of Israel by telling Tucker Carlson that the Bible gives him no other choice and that Zionism is part of his Christian faith, though he could not recall the precise verse that bolsters his arguments.

Christian Zionism is not a new phenomenon, and it can’t take all the credit for the United States’s bloody foreign policy. But it is once again salient as Donald Trump surrounds himself with Evangelicals who profess the ideology and he pays lip service to it, as he does to other popular Evangelical convictions. Many Christian Zionists are influenced by dispensationalism, a relatively new doctrine that bestows the fate of Israel with prophetic significance. The end-times are nigh, and Israel has a key role to play in Armageddon — these are ideas popularized by the Left Behind series, which sold millions of copies at the beginning of this century. Followers such as Cruz vote, run for office, and shape foreign policy, and often they make excuses for Israel’s war crimes.

I spoke with scholar Daniel G. Hummel of the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, about his 2019 book, Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations, and the history of Christian Zionism in the U.S. and the rest of the world. In Covenant Brothers, Hummel traces the movement from its origins and early popularity in the 19th century to the rise of the contemporary Christian right and beyond.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the idea of dispensationalism, which is key to the rise of Christian Zionism. What is it, and how does support for Israel factor into it?
Dispensationalism is a system of theology that’s quite popular among conservative Protestants — Evangelicals and what we call Fundamentalists. It started in the early 19th century on the fringes of dissenter Protestantism in Great Britain. When John Nelson Darby broke from the Church of England and founded the Plymouth Brethren sect, he developed a way of reading the Bible that led to a distinct set of teachings about who Israel is, who the Church is, and, for the sake of simplicity, what the future holds based on the Bible.

Dispensationalists starting with Darby believe God has had basically two chosen peoples throughout history: One of those is Israel, and one is the Church. The payoff is that any prophecies relating to Israel in the Old Testament prophets or wherever Israel is mentioned in Revelation or elsewhere, are, for dispensationalists, always referencing the ethnic Israel, what we call the Jewish people today.

The Church is to gather all Gentiles to God to follow him. Then, at some point soon, God will hit “unpause” on his plans with Israel. The thing that will launch that is the Rapture, which will take away the Church from the world. It will go up into Heaven and then God will resume his plans with Israel through the prophecies.

Dispensationalism, at least as I learned about it, also holds that the end-times events will happen in a specific order. Can you talk about that a bit?
On paper, dispensationalists say nothing needs to happen in the world right now before the Rapture happens. It’s an imminent event. In practice, it’s very common in dispensational circles to try to glean where the world is going because of the assumption that the Bible really does lay out in pretty specific detail what will happen at the end-times. For at least a hundred years, there has been a strong tradition in dispensationalism of speculating about global events, world wars, the Cold War, or conflicts in the Middle East but also elsewhere. The European Union was a source of speculation because it seemed to align with the beast with ten horns in Revelation.

They’re not saying that this has to happen before the end comes but that these are the types of things we would expect to happen as the world ramps up to its climactic phase as prophesied. Some dispensations have veered into date setting, though that is considered a no-no. The one people make a lot of fun of is a famous book........

© Daily Intelligencer