How the same Bible is read through covenant, prophecy, slavery, Exodus and liberation

White evangelical Christians and Black Protestants often read the same Bible, affirm many of the same doctrines and speak reverently about the land of Israel. Yet they do not approach the modern State of Israel in the same way. Pew’s 2022 survey found that 70 percent of white evangelical Protestants said God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people, compared with 36 percent of Black Protestants. Twenty-eight percent of white evangelicals said the best outcome of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would be a single state governed by Israel; only 6 percent of Black Protestants chose that outcome.

Those numbers do not mean that white Christians are uniformly Zionist or that Black Christians are uniformly pro-Palestinian. They point to a deeper distinction: Christian support for Israel is filtered through different racial histories, political traditions and biblical imaginations. The same scripture can be read through covenant and prophecy, through Exodus and emancipation, or through combinations of all four.

White Christian Zionism and the Theology of Covenant

Contemporary white evangelical Christian Zionism has a well-developed institutional theology. Christians United for Israel, the largest American Christian pro-Israel organization, explains support for Israel through God’s continuing covenant with the Jewish people, biblical promises concerning the land and the command to bless Abraham’s descendants. In some strands of evangelicalism, Israel also occupies an eschatological role connected to prophecy and the return of Jesus. Scholars of American Christian Zionism have shown that these ideas developed through several theological traditions, including dispensationalism, and became closely associated with the conservative evangelical political movement after 1967.

That theology can produce a political orientation in which support for Israel is understood not primarily as an inference from foreign-policy analysis but as faithfulness to scripture. This helps explain why white evangelical support for Israel can remain strong even when white evangelicals disagree with American Jews on other religious or domestic political questions. The modern state becomes connected to a biblical story whose authority precedes contemporary politics.

Black Christians Read the Same Bible Through Another History

Black Christianity also knows covenant, prophecy and the Hebrew Bible, but the biblical imagination of the Black church was formed under slavery and segregation. Enslaved Black Christians heard Exodus as a story in which God hears the cry of an oppressed people and delivers them from Pharaoh. Spirituals, sermons and civil-rights preaching repeatedly identified the journey from slavery........

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