Christian Zionism, a powerful force in conservative politics, is a movement of evangelical and fundamentalist American Protestants who offer automatic and unshakeable support for the state of Israel. They do so for cultural, political, and geopolitical reasons, primarily in sympathy to the plight of Israelis but also as a reaction to anti-American Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. But perhaps most importantly, conservative Christians also support Israel for theological reasons. In the events leading up to the end of the world, foretold in the Book of Revelation at the very end of the New Testament, the re-establishment of a Jewish state is a necessary prerequisite. Christ will then return to earth, destroy the armies of Satan, and inaugurate the millennium, a 1000-year reign of peace and harmony. But if Israel plays an integral role in these events, its security must be inviolable, protected against all enemies and at all costs. For any Christian who takes their Bible seriously, let alone the large numbers of fundamentalists who believe in biblical inerrancy, this is pretty heady stuff.

Since September 11, 2001, journalists have had a field day with Christian Zionism, and it is not difficult to see why. For one thing, it purports to explain why large numbers of Christian Americans are more steadfast in their support of Israel and more one-sided in their views of the Middle East than are most American Jews. Christian Zionism, or at least the media's portrayal of it, also fits neatly into a caricature of the Religious Right and its hold on the Republican Party. By contrast, liberal mainline Protestants, who once dominated the nation's cultural and political life, are often critical of Israeli policies and more skeptical of the wisdom of a blindly pro-Israel foreign policy.

But as Caitlin Carenen reminds us in this timely and valuable book, Christian Zionism is not a new phenomenon; neither, she also points out, was it always the norm. Through an examination of religious periodicals, government records, and the activities of little-known groups like the American Christian Palestine Committee, The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel provides a thorough investigation of how and why American Protestants of nearly all political and theological persuasions came to promote a pro-Israel foreign policy for the United States. Most interesting are the shifts she traces in Protestant views of Jewish nationalism: while liberal mainline Protestants were initially Zionism's strongest supporters and conservative Christians its most vehement critics, their roles have now almost completely reversed.

Although Christian Zionism in the United States has a long history, and although it began in earnest as a political movement in the 1890s, Carenen begins in the Depression, when anti-Semitism reached a fever pitch among many liberals and conservatives alike. World War II, waged as an ideological crusade against German intolerance, began to change attitudes, because the Nazis had made religious prejudice illegitimate and unacceptable. Even before the war had ended and the full horror of the concentration camps was revealed, liberals reacted with anguish and guilt to the Holocaust, which in turn translated into a strong base of support for the Zionist enterprise. The mainline churches began reinterpreting their doctrinal (and mostly pernicious) assumptions about the role of Jews in Christian history and theology. Evangelicals also abandoned their anti-Semitism, mostly out of a sense of American patriotism (anti-Semitism was too close to official Nazi ideology) but partly in response to the Holocaust as well.

This bipartisan shift in attitudes, Carenen persuasively demonstrates, had an important effect on public opinion; initially, liberal Protestants were especially key. When Israelis declared their independence in 1948, and when President Harry S Truman immediately recognized their state's right to exist, the mainline churches for the most part rallied to the cause and provided a vital critical mass of popular support. Carenen illustrates that Truman himself was prone to such thinking, particularly on humanitarian and ecumenical grounds, and he recognized Israel against the virtually unanimous opposition of the State and Defense Departments, whose officials felt that provoking the Arab states of the Middle East would be detrimental to U.S. national security. The first Arab-Israeli War, however, resulted in another humanitarian crisis of refugees, this time of Palestinian Muslim rather than European Jews, prompting a great deal of soul-searching among mainline Protestants. Yet they remained mostly supportive of Zionism until the Six Day War in 1967 complicated matters yet again. From that point until the present, the liberal Protestant position on Israel was marked by a deep ambivalence, simultaneously sympathetic for the plight of international Jewry but often uncomfortable with the policies of the Israeli government.

Postwar evangelicals and fundamentalists, many of whom had once been viscerally anti-Semitic, felt no such ambivalence, and their transformation was even more remarkable. With Israel emerging as an ally against godless communism in the Cold War, with eschatological considerations becoming increasingly important to them, and with religious prejudice now stigmatized in a newly christened “Judeo-Christian America,” in 1948 conservative Christians began their long love affair with the state of Israel. Later, in 1967, as liberals were anguished by Israel's occupation of the West Bank, conservatives rejoiced that Jews now held all of Jerusalem, which seemed to mark a hugely important fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Carenen navigates all these shifts in Protestant attitudes about Judaism and analyzes their causes with tremendous sensitivity, skill, originality, and clarity. Despite being a relatively short book, given the importance of its topics and breadth of its chronology, The Fervent Embrace is thorough, and based upon extensive primary research. A few omissions are surprising (the reception of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is ignored entirely), and a few errors notwithstanding (for example, theologians Karl Barth and Willem Visser 't Hooft could not be representative of German Christian attitudes because Barth was Swiss and Visser 't Hooft was Dutch), overall The Fervent Embrace is a comprehensive treatment of an important but previously ignored subject. It will surely become the definitive account.