In A Short History of Christian Zionism, scholar of Victorian evangelicalism Donald Lewis provides an overview of the history of Christian Zionism from its intellectual roots in the Reformation era to the twenty-first century. In doing so, Lewis defines Christian Zionism as “a Christian movement which holds to the belief that the Jewish people have a biblically mandated claim to their ancient homeland in the Middle East” (3). His argument is that the movement—and its predecessor Christian restorationism—has been closely intertwined with Protestant identity formation from its very beginning.

Lewis traces restorationism to second-generation Calvinist Reformers who distinguished their movement from Catholicism through novel understandings of the place of Jews in God's plan for history—arguing that the Bible pointed to the eventual conversion and restoration of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland. In the sevententh century, English Puritans elaborated on these ideas in forging an English national identity—claiming a special role for England in the future restoration of the Jews—which New England Puritans soon adapted to the American context. Beyond these millennial interests, English Puritans also promoted what Lewis calls a “teaching of love and esteem” toward Jews that ran counter to the “teaching of contempt” that had characterized medieval Catholicism. In German lands, Pietist Lutherans channeled similar ideas into activism—mainly through evangelizing Jews.

In the nineteenth century, British evangelicals pulled these strands together into something approaching Christian Zionism. Central to this development was the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, who both sponsored missions to Jews and used his political connections to urge several British interventions in Ottoman Palestine, including the establishment of a British consulate and joint Anglican-Lutheran bishopric in Jerusalem. Through Shaftesbury, Christian Zionism played a direct role in shaping British interests in the Holy Land. More generally, it shaped a British evangelical culture that was amenable to Zionism when the movement emerged. In this indirect way, Lewis argues, Christian Zionism would contribute to the Balfour Declaration—Britain's World War I commitment to help build a Jewish “national home” in Palestine.

In the United States, American Protestants’ interest in restorationist thinking was revived in the decades following the Civil War. Much of that interest was tied to the spread of dispensational premillennialism, a theological system developed and brought to the United States by John Nelson Darby in the mid-nineteenth century. While early scholarship on American Christian Zionism traced the movement's origins to Darby's system, Lewis notes that the apolitical Darby was no Christian Zionist. Rather, it was American interpreters of Darby—most especially Chicago layman William Blackstone—who adapted dispensationalist ideas into an activist Christian Zionism. In 1891, for example, Blackstone presented a petition to President Benjamin Harrison calling on the US to help suffering Russian Jews migrate to their ancient homeland, later reviving it at the behest of American Zionists during World War I.

Blackstone, though, was exceptional in his political activism. In the decades following World War I, most American dispensationalists maintained a passive approach to the fulfillment of prophecy—and to their interest in Zionism. Still, Lewis argues that Christian Zionism nonetheless served as a crucial identity marker for the emerging fundamentalist movement and the new evangelical movement that grew from it after World War II, leaving American evangelicals prepared to celebrate the establishment of Israel in 1948 as part of God's plan.

Over the following decades, American evangelicals grew activist in their support for Israel. Events—especially Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War—dispelled any lingering uncertainty over Israel's biblical significance, while the development of actual relationships between Jews and evangelicals led to substantial interfaith cooperation in support of the Jewish state. When American religious conservatives—especially evangelicals—began organizing into the Christian Right in the late 1970s and 1980s, they made support for Israel a cornerstone of their identity and built the movement into a political force. While organizations such as Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority lobbied aggressively on Israel's behalf, more focused Christian Zionist groups proliferated, building ever more extensive connections with American Jews and Israelis.

As Christian Zionism has taken on more (and varied) institutional forms since the last decades of the twentieth century, charismatic and Pentecostal Christians in the US and beyond have reoriented it away from dispensationalism and towards an emphasis on the personal and national blessings to be secured through support for the Jewish people and Jewish state. This renewalist Christian Zionism, according to Lewis, has helped to take today's Christian Zionism “glocal”—transforming it into a global movement with distinct local iterations—and ensure its continued relevance.

A Short History of Christian Zionism is a work of synthesis. Lewis's approach is to talk through the work of individual scholars on each topic under examination—an approach that does have some drawbacks. At times, Lewis's deference to other scholars inhibits the synthesis of their work into his own narrative, as well as the exploration of tantalizing patterns that emerge over the course of the book. For example, Lewis is very attentive to the role of Jewish converts to Christianity at crucial points in the development of restorationism and Christian Zionism. However, he does not analyze what this pattern means for understanding the movement over time—including the extent to which it might anticipate in some way the interfaith collaborations that shaped both the liberal Protestant Christian Zionism of the 1930s and 1940s (which Lewis gives little attention to) and the more familiar post-1948 evangelical variety.

Still, Lewis's approach also has benefits. It allows him to effectively decentralize the role of dispensationalism in Christian Zionism's history—one of Lewis's priorities—as well as more fully explore the movement in its distinct historical and cultural contexts. And it simply makes for an accessible guide to the scholarship on the movement, offering Lewis's insightful reflections on a field that has grown rapidly in the decade since his first book on the subject. Lewis unfortunately passed shortly after the publication of A Short History of Christian Zionism. Through it, though, he has left us much to think about.