For many, perhaps most, American Jews, Christian Zionists are fanatics who pursue an end-times scenario in which all Jews will make aliyah, possess every inch of the land of their biblical patrimony, then either convert or die horribly at the hands of the Antichrist. In this view, evangelicals love Jews and esteem Israelis not as actual people but as players in an eschatological drama. While Conservative evangelicals are enormously generous with their charitable gifts and strongly committed to Israel's survival, their critics argue that their true goal is to bring on the Rapture, Armageddon, and the Millennium.
An array of notable scholars, including Tom Driver, Paul Boyer, and Karen Armstrong, have presented this argument. Some Jewish leaders have criticized Christian Zionists for applying their biblical literalism to today's politics, especially in opposing a two-state solution. Gershom Gorenberg, the author of End of Days, has perhaps had the broadest popular impact. He argues that, because they utterly reject any exchange of land for peace, Christian Zionists are an existential threat to Israel, indeed, a greater danger than terrorists.
On the other side of the argument are many Israeli officials, including Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as several American Jewish leaders who have accepted evangelicals' support without worrying about their theology. Zev Chafets, in his recent book A Match Made in Heaven, similarly concludes that evangelicals are offering a wartime alliance that Jews should seriously consider despite any concerns about their beliefs. A few prominent American Jews who work with Christian Zionists go further, assuring us that eschatology is not a major factor motivating them. I would not go quite that far. But survey data do suggest that only a minority of evangelicals believes in the end-of-days scenario described above. In reality, Christian Zionists have a range of cultural and political reasons for supporting Israel, as well as religious motives that are deeply embedded in their reading of Scripture.
Many Jews are aware of this controversy over evangelical support of Israel. What they may not know is that the debate rages internally among Christians too. Many mainline Protestant elites and liberal evangelicals are deeply opposed to Christian Zionists. Each side accuses the other of being in grave theological error, and the dispute is often contentious.
In The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel, Caitlin Carenen provides a very welcome contribution: a balanced, temperate, well-written account of the history behind the split between Christian Zionists and progressive Protestants in the United States from the 1930s until today. Most of this history has been discussed in excellent earlier studies by Timothy Weber, Yaakov Ariel, and others. But Carenen has conducted careful archival research in order to add extremely interesting detail to the existing accounts. She has mined unpublished sources: the Reinhold Niebuhr Personal Papers at the Library of Congress, the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, the Israeli State Archives, the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College, the Truman Archives at Hebrew University, the Fundamentalist Files at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, the Presbyterian Historical Society Archives in Philadelphia, and the U.S. Department of State Archives. She also has combed through mainline Protestant, fundamentalist, and evangelical journals from the 1930s until 1980. This allows her to trace the evolution in attitudes toward Jews and the Jewish homeland from one year to the next.
She begins by citing an editorial from the Christian Century at the end of the 1930s, which sternly directed Jews to celebrate Christmas. Religious difference will not be tolerated, said the editors, reflecting the general view of America as a Protestant country. Antisemitism was on the rise at that time in the U.S. and, Carenen argues, it was a factor in many liberal American Protestants' hesitancy to condemn the Nazi persecution of Jews. Some mainline Protestants did speak out, though, among them Reinhold Niebuhr, who boldly rebuked German Christians for their failure to denounce antisemitism and for supporting National Socialism.
Mainline Protestants in the 1930s were inclined to deny any claim that the Old Testament anticipates or validates the restoration of modern Jews to Palestine. Fundamentalist Protestants, by contrast, accepted the literal truth of the biblical promises and prophecies about Jews and the Holy Land. Their journals also accurately reported the brutal mistreatment the Jews of Europe and the approaching catastrophe. Fundamentalists did little to actively oppose the Nazi persecution, however. Seeing events through the lens of prophecy, they viewed it as the precursor to the Jews' acceptance of Jesus; they rejected any human effort to intervene. And beyond that, many of them were antisemitic. Nevertheless, they increasingly abandoned their hostility to Jews as the Nazi persecution progressed. Their journals urged that the Jews be allowed to escape to Palestine (they did not advocate letting Jews immigrate to the U.S.).
The mainline Christian Century, by contrast, endorsed the British White Paper of 1939 (issued six months after Kristallnacht), which restricted Jewish emigration into Palestine, undermining hope for a Jewish homeland there. Moreover, shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, an article in the Christian Century warned American Jews not to agitate for the U.S. to intervene in the war in Europe. “The spirit of tolerance is hardly more than skin deep,” it declared, and Jews would run the risk of becoming scapegoats and suffering “a tragic social unassimilability” (20). But it is also true that some mainline Protestants took action to try to save the Jews of Europe. Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York founded the American Palestine Committee in 1941 to apply political pressure to bring hundreds of thousands of European Jewish refugees to Palestine in order to establish a national home. Harry Truman was a member and Neibuhr also advocated for this cause.
Carenen skillfully tracks the profound changes in mainline Protestant attitudes toward Jews following the Holocaust, including the reevaluation of their supercessionism and conversionist efforts. She also follows the work of pro-Israeli mainline Protestant groups as they attempted to outmaneuver those liberal Protestants who argued that Israel endangered U.S. policy in the Middle East and trampled on the rights of Palestinians. By the time of the Six-Day War in 1967, she observes, the liberal Protestant supporters of Israel were confident that they had succeeded: popular support for Israel was overwhelming in the U.S. But in the wake of the Six-Day War, with the territories under Israeli control, mainline liberal Protestant leaders reasserted their opposition to Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and became advocates for a Palestinian state.
Carenen describes the trajectory of Christian Zionism since 1967 as a shift from a mainly liberal Protestant movement inspired by humanitarian and politically pragmatic concerns to an evangelical one that emphasizes end-times theology. As Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee noted, after 1967 Jews felt abandoned by Protestant groups clustered around the National Council of Churches, but the vacuum was filled by fundamentalists and evangelicals. (Carenen points out, incidentally, that liberal Protestant leaders' criticism of Israeli policies represented a break with popular opinion in their congregations.)
A broad but brief survey of this kind necessarily compresses and omits much detail and nuance. More might be said, for example, about the religious motives of liberal Christians and the humanitarian and political considerations of traditionalists. Carenen also might have discussed liberal evangelicals who oppose right-wing Israeli policies today, and the recent alliance between these evangelicals, American mainline Protestant leaders, and Palestinian Christians who espouse Palestinian Liberation Theology. Indeed, the events of the last 30 years need far more attention than Carenen can provide in the 23 pages that she devotes to them. Still, this is a very valuable book that serious students of Christian Zionism should read.
