Carrie Prejean Boller, a Catholic antizionist politician, was recently removed from Trump’s religious liberty Commission for hijacking a session about religious freedom to push anti-Israel propaganda. Her comments misrepresent the Bible’s stance on supporting Israel, and reveals classic Christian misunderstandings of Zionism, and weaponizes the statement, “Christ is King” against the Jewish people.

In the session she confidently asserted, “I am a Catholic, and Catholics don’t embrace Zionism,” and then on X, “Christ is King!”  

Her vitriol continued, “I will never bend the knee to the State of Israel. Ever.” Portraying them as a villain while snapping at a fellow member in the room saying, “We do not tolerate Islamophobia!” Essentially applying a double standard towards the Jewish people. 

She has also said that Catholicism had opened her eyes to see that support for Israel was a “political agenda,” which is an egregious misinterpretation of the Bible’s stance on the people of Israel. 

She promoted Christian replacement theology which has led to antisemitism in Christian groups. Boller’s embarrassing debut in the commission of religious freedom did more than get her removed- it revealed the misconceptions that American religious communities are buying about Israel. 

Unfortunately, her opinions have been bouncing around Christian discourse for generations. I’ve observed this first hand. This sort of thinking is used to justify everything from conspiracies about Jewish power, “Zionism is not about just supporting their right to exist, that’s what they want you to believe; Zionism is about world domination,” to apathy and contempt, “The people who are a part of the body of Christ are those who believe in Jesus Christ. Jews are not a part of the body, and don’t really hold relevance now, religiously.” 

Some of my peers would rather let people like Boller and Candace Owens speak for them than actually investigate the truth, as if it was courageous to distort Christ’s teachings to rail against the Jews. This is 2026, not 1478. 

It all seems to come down to two core reasons:  

Many believe that the Israel of the Bible is fundamentally different from modern Israel and God’s support is only towards those who accept Jesus Christ. This way of thinking invites the adoption of replacement theology and primes Christians to view any current support for modern Israel as politically motivated and made in bad faith. 

Christians wrestle over the true definition of Zionism fearing it’s not as innocent as advocates claim. Common misconceptions of Zionism in the Christian world include seeing it as an unhealthy form of nationalism and manipulating pure faith and religion by mixing it with what they perceive to be unconditional devotion to a nation. 

Replacement Theology, also known as supersessionism, claims that the people of Israel no longer hold any relevance in the context of our faith, and that the Church is the “new” Israel or people of God. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul whose ministry was in large part focused on saving the gentiles, said in Romans 11:1, “I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! For I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.” For the rest of the chapter he warns gentiles not to think they have replaced the Jewish people.

Furthermore, the Vatican echoed these words with the Nostra Aetate in 1964, which formally positioned the Church against this objectively non-Christ-like contempt for Jews and the rest of the non-Christian world. “…thirty-five cardinals and bishops from twenty-two countries arose on the floor of St. Peter’s, and one after another…called upon the Catholic Church to condemn anti-Semitism as a sin against the conscience of the church.” all to affirm appreciation for the spiritual foundation of Jewish faith to the Church. 

The truth is that replacement theology only has one result: antisemitism. Within replacement theology there is an inseparable psychological process of “discarding” Jewish people, not merely  discarding them as irrelevant. This religious thinking infects the church and seeps into society.

The Spanish Inquisition, Christian American xenaphobia, and the overall inaction and collaboration toward the Holocaust, all share this undercurrent. 

Zionism too has been assailed and butchered as a concept within Christian discourse. While other nations are allowed the decency of fighting for their nation’s survival, it is beyond the pale for some Christian leaders when Zionists and Israelis do it. Religious leaders have called Zionism heretical and immoral. Figures who happen to be religious like Carrie Boller cannot and should not be our reference point for how a follower of Jesus Christ interacts with Jewish people. They are a shame and a disgrace to the religious community. Christians must rise above religious antisemitism by actively refusing replacement theology in their religious communities, and advocating for the right of the Jewish people to determine the fate of their future. 

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)