God sent Trump his message on Jerusalem

1) an interview with a professor who studies the ‘strange alliance’ between evangelical Christians and the orthodox Jews who are stridently pro-Israel, 2) an anti-Trump evangelical Christian

Christian supporters of Israel march during a parade for the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem in 2006. Thousands of Evangelical Christians participate in an annual pilgrimage to support Israel. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90

This is why evangelicals love Trump’s Israel policy

By Sean Illing,  Vox
December 12, 2017

President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last week made little sense to most Middle East experts. His own national security team opposed the decision. But for many white evangelical Christians, 81 percent of whom voted for Trump, it was great news.

According to a recent poll released by the Brookings Institution, 53 percent of American evangelicals supported Trump’s decision, while only 40 percent opposed it. (Sixty-three percent of all Americans opposed the decision.)

To understand why evangelicals are so enthusiastic about this move, I contacted Elizabeth Oldmixon, a politics professor at the University of North Texas. Oldmixon studies the rather strange alliance between evangelical Christians and people in the orthodox Jewish community who are stridently pro-Israel.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

I don’t fully understand why evangelical Christians are so supportive of Israel. Can you walk me through it?

Elizabeth Oldmixon So I would really focus here on a subset of the evangelical community for whom the status of Israel is really, really important because of the way they understand the end of time.

Sean Illing: And how large is that subset?

E.O. Roughly a third of the American evangelical population, which is something like 15 million people.

Why are these evangelicals so interested in the fate of Israel?

E.O. These are the folks who believe that there will be a millennium in the future, a golden age, where Christ reigns on Earth, [and] they believe that before Christ will return, there will be a tribulation where Christ defeats evil. There will be natural disasters and wars, and perhaps an Antichrist, as the book of Revelations notes. Then at the end of that period, the people of the Mosaic covenant, including the Jews, will convert. Then after their conversion, the great millennium starts.

And what about the people who don’t convert? What becomes of them?

E.O. Well, according to the evangelicals who believe this, they’ll end up with the rest of the unsaved, which means they’ll be wiped out and sent to hell.

So politics is a means to what they see as a religious goal?

E.O. Yes. This is a movement in Christianity that’s as old as Christianity itself. You have this group of people looking around for signs of the end time, and in the 20th century when Israel was founded, this was seen as a major sign. This was electrifying for that community because the gathering of all the Jews in exile to the Holy Land is a prerequisite for all of these events unfolding. So for the subset of evangelicals in the 20th century, support for Israel became a really, really important political position.

A Palestinian holds a portrait of Donald Trump during protest on December 9, 2017, in Jerusalem.  Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images

Why is Jerusalem in particular so crucial?

E.O. Well, the whole area is important. The tenet of Christian Zionism is that God’s promise of the Holy Land to the Jews is eternal. It’s not just something in antiquity. When we talk about the Holy Land, God’s promise of the Holy Land, we’re talking about real estate on both sides of the Jordan River. So the sense of a greater Israel and expansionism is really important to this community. Jerusalem is just central to that. It’s viewed as a historical and biblical capital.

How do people on the Israel side justify their alliance with fundamentalist Christians? After all, the Christian prophecy implies the destruction of Jews who don’t convert.

E.O. There’s something that these Christians have in common with religious Zionists in Israel. The founding generation in Israel was fairly secular. Their support for a Jewish state wasn’t about biblical prophecy. It was about physical security. David Ben-Gurion [the first prime minister of Israel] came up with an accommodation for the religious community so they would support the formation of Israel and the establishment of Israel, but his motivations weren’t religious per se.

But religious Jews were always unhappy that the founding generation wasn’t really motivated by a religious understanding of the Jewish people in the world. That’s something that evangelicals in this country share. They support Israel for religious reasons, not secular reasons.

But orthodox Jews don’t share the evangelical conception of hell, which includes literal lakes of fire, right?

E.O. No. Jewish people have their own theology of the end times. There is an understanding that the Messiah will come, but it won’t be a second coming of the sort Christians believe in. But the state of Israel has welcomed the political support of evangelical Christians nevertheless. They even encourage Christians to visit Israel, to tour the holy sites.

So this is an alliance based on political expedience?

E.O. I think that’s basically right.

President Donald Trump and pastor Robert Jeffress participate in the Celebrate Freedom Rally at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on July 1, 2017, in Washington, DC. Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool via Getty Images

How do Arab and Israeli Christians feel about all this?

E.O. I’m less sure about that. We’re talking about a relatively small community here. I haven’t seen poll data, and I haven’t studied Arab Christians who are Israeli citizens to a great degree, but they tend not to be of the evangelical variety. End times prophecies aren’t especially important to them.

Do you think this political gamble will pay off for Trump?

E.O. I think it depends, first, on how long this process takes. It could just fade away to the background. Second, and this is really key, it depends upon whether or not the administration down the road is willing to say, “Okay, East Jerusalem can be controlled by Palestinian Arabs, and West Jerusalem will be controlled by Israel.” If the administration plans for a united Jerusalem under the sovereignty of Israel, that will be pretty problematic for the peace process. So it depends upon whether they’ll concede to divided control.

And do you think this move made political sense for Trump at home? 

E.O. Yes, I do. I’m not sure it’s good for the Republican Party in the long run, but I do think it maintains the support of high-profile evangelical leaders, such as Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress. That will be key as the president’s support drops among other groups. In other words, this contributes to a floor below which Trump’s support cannot drop.

You Can Be an Evangelical and Reject Trump’s Jerusalem Decision

Conservative evangelicals may see the embassy move as in line with their reading of scripture. But there’s more than one way to read scripture—and more than one scripture to read.

Gary M. Burge, The Atlantic
December 06, 2017

Few developments could have excited President Trump’s evangelical base more than his intention to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This base came through for him in the 2016 election, with 81 percent of white evangelicals voting for him. When he promised during his campaign that moving the embassy was high on his agenda and even said it would be one of his first acts as president, many evangelicals cheered.

But other evangelicals—myself included—were cautious, viewing this move as an idea that needs to be left on the shelf. And they are worried now. Despite media portrayals giving the impression that evangelicals have one point of view when it comes to Israel, in reality there is a wide range of perspectives.

Some conservative evangelicals have built a remarkable theology around the modern state of Israel. It’s as if a biblical story has come alive again from the scriptures. In the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), Jerusalem was established as Israel’s capital by King David about 1,000 years before Christ. Notwithstanding various wars and a Babylonian exile that led to the loss of the city, Jerusalem remained Israel’s de facto capital in the Jewish imagination. Even in the New Testament, Jerusalem is assumed to be Israel’s capital. But another war in 70 A.D. led to a longtime loss of the city. Modern Israel did not recapture Jerusalem until 1967.

American evangelicals in CUFI (Christians United for Israel) march in Jerusalem. Photo by Gali Tibbon / AFP / Getty Images

The key to understanding this perspective is to recognize that these conservative evangelicals are building a bridge from ancient biblical Israel to the modern secular State of Israel. So, promises made almost 4,000 years ago to Abraham apply to the modern Israeli state. “The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you,” God says in Genesis 17:8. For these evangelical interpreters, a verse like this one is not just something ancient; it provides a political mandate for Israel’s privileges today. And Genesis 12:3, “I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse,” originally intended as a word of protection for Abraham’s tribe, now can become a mandate for anyone living today. We are obligated, the argument runs, to bless modern Israel. In the U.S., blessing Israel means recognizing its sole ownership of Jerusalem.

These evangelicals’ perspectives stem partly from a high regard for the Bible and its story about the fate of the Israelites, which has led to an outsized fascination with Judaism. They believe that Israel has a unique place in history as God’s special people, so Israel deserves deferential treatment—and Jerusalem deserves the same. For some, Israel enjoys an exceptionalism that sets it apart from the entire world. There are even evangelicals who believe that promoting the importance of Jerusalem is one more building block in the fulfillment of prophecies that sets the stage for the Second Coming of Christ. The average conservative evangelical is filled with a tangle of commitments that are often tough to sort out. She just knows that if Israel wants something—in this case, Jerusalem—Israel deserves to have it.

The legitimacy of this position rests entirely on the legitimacy of the theological move from antiquity to the 21st century. If the theological bridge can be built, modern secular Israel enjoys the biblical promises and privileges no other nation can enjoy, including the privilege of having all of Jerusalem despite an international outcry. The problem is that this bridge is fundamentally unsound. It uses the Bible for modern political ends that many of us find illegitimate.

Numerous evangelicals like me are less enamoured of the recent romance between the church and Republican politics, and worry about moving the U.S. embassy. For us, peacemaking and the pursuit of justice are very high virtues. We view the ethical teachings of the scriptures as primary, and recognize that when biblical Israelites failed in their moral pursuits, they were sorely criticized by the Hebrew prophets and became subject to ejection from the Holy Land. Amos 5:24 shows that even the use of the Jerusalem Temple can be problematic to God: “Take away from me [God] the noise of your songs; I will not even listen to the sound of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Many of us look at modern Israel today and see a country that Amos would barely recognize. How, we wonder, can anyone build a bridge from ancient Israel to modern Israel today? Amos would hardly recognize in Tel Aviv a city based on biblical ideals.

What’s more, anything that detracts from the movement toward a peaceful resolution of conflict must be avoided. We do not promote what we call the “territorialism” of the Bible. We anchor our thinking not in the Old Testament’s land-based promises, but in the gospel, where the tribal or local theologies about Israel become global and universal, welcoming all people from every tribe and every land into a divine promise of blessing. Paul can refer to gentiles as children of Abraham (Romans 4:11) because it’s through faith, not ethnic lineage, that one gains access to the blessings of God. This shift in emphasis, which challenges the exclusivity of any one tribe and universalizes blessing, explains the world-mission of the ancient church and the inclusion of gentiles in Jesus’s Jewish messianic movement. From this vantage, arguments for ethnic land claims—such as disputes over Jerusalem—sound foreign.

Finally, although there is little doubt that Jerusalem is the historic capital of biblical Israel, the ancient world did not view “capitals” as we do today. Tribal societies like Israel had one major city that generally housed a palace and a temple. Life orbited around this city and its defeat was the defeat of the nation itself. Today things are considerably different. Modern Tel Aviv, where all Israel’s embassies are located, did not exist in biblical times and now it is a substantial city of 500,000. Nevertheless, Jerusalem is the religious or perhaps the emotional capital of Israel.

But Jerusalem is also the religious and emotional capital of Palestinian life. The east side of the city is home to Palestinians who are either Muslim or Christian. Although their functional capital is in Ramallah, it is Jerusalem they look to for both churches and mosques. In Islam, Jerusalem is the third-holiest city (after Mecca and Medina). The 7th-century Dome of the Rock is there, as well as the historic Al-Aqsa mosque. Palestinian Muslims are defensive about protecting their portion of the city and they see an embassy move as another step toward identifying all of Jerusalem fully with Israel. To say it troubles them is to put it mildly. Some Palestinians view it as a “declaration of war.”

Moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is simply provocative. And this is a part of the world where the peace process requires us to avoid provocation at all costs. There’s a reason why the world’s embassies have stayed out of Jerusalem. It’s not based on anti-Israel antagonism; it’s a pragmatic decision to support the peace process and to view Jerusalem as a shared city that respects everyone’s privileges.

I’ve had career diplomats in the State Department tell me privately that an embassy move would be foolish. Unfortunately, many of these seasoned men and women are leaving their careers, or are being pushed out. We need people like them now to remind the White House that in the Middle East, even symbolic gestures can have very real, dangerous consequences. But we also need evangelicals to do this. Trump listens to his evangelical advisers—and they are the ones who can lead him back to the Hebrew prophets, where a different point of view can be found.