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A
Definitely in a moment of change between the American evangelical community and their support for Israel.
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B
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the sky pod, brought to you by Holy Post Media. I'm Sky Jutani. Joining me today, I've been really looking forward to this conversation is Daniel Hummel. Daniel is at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. All right, let me get to all your credentials here. You got your doctorate from Wisconsin. You're the director of the Lumen center, which I'm assuming has nothing to do with severance or Lumen Industries.
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A
It doesn't.
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B
What is the Lumen Center?
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A
Makes you more interested. And then it does.
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B
It kind of does. What is the Lumen Center?
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A
So we're a Christian research center in Madison, right on campus. We're funded separately by the Stephen and Laura Brown Foundation. We also run the same foundation, runs a Christian study center center called Upper House, and we work in the same space. So, yeah. So we are a team of scholars, all Christians, all in different fields, who are eager to engage in sort of our fields at uw, but also write for publications like Christianity Today or books for IVP and other things like that. So it's really cool. Sort of not a lot of comparisons to it in the landscape right now.
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B
And related to that, you are a research fellow in the history department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I was a history major as an undergrad, although not at Madison. However, you Madison, Wisconsin, Madison is one of my favorite campuses in the country. It's such a beautiful place. You've authored a number of books. You were on the Holy Post a few years ago, episodes 563 and 564, where Phil interviewed you about the rise and fall of dispensationalism. The subtitle, how the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. If people haven't gone and listened to those two interviews or read your book, obviously they should go purchase your. Your book and read it. But super informative. And then back in 2019, you wrote a book called Covenant Evangelicals, Jews and US Israeli Relations, which is going to get into some of what I want to talk to you about today. Anyway, thank you for your time today. And I've been looking, I've been jealous, frankly, ever since Phil got to talk to you on those two episodes because there's so much here I want to engage with you about. We only have about an hour, but we'll do the best we can. Let me kind of lay some groundwork for our conversation. We seem to be in a moment right now in America and in American politics where a lot of people are reevaluating our country's alliance and relationship with the modern state of Israel. So to retrace some of the steps that have gotten us here, there was the attack on October 7th by Hamas against a lot of Israeli civilians. October 7th, 2023, in retaliation to that, Israel attacked Gaza. And many believe that their attacks, their war there, fit the definition of a genocide. There's debate about that, but a lot of controversy over how Israel retaliated. That triggered all kinds of protests in the United States, including on college campuses where there was deep sympathy for Palestinians. And concurrent with that, there seemed to be a dramatic rise of anti Semitism in the United States. And then, to bring things up to speed, President Trump made a decision earlier this year, by the prompting of Israel's President, Bibi Netanyahu, to attack Iran, a war which, to put it generously, has not gone as planned. And many Americans, the majority of Americans, including those who voted for Donald Trump, did not support this war and continue to not be a fan of the war or its unfolding consequences. And in the wake of all of that, a lot of folks, including in Trump's own political base, have come out strongly against Israel and accusing the state of Israel of having disproportionate control and influence over the American government, American foreign policy, all kinds of decisions which, whether there's a grain of truth to that or not, can also bring out a lot of anti Semitic conspiracy theories. Okay, now, with all that in place, here's what I really want to do with you today. Daniel. One, I want to help our audience understand why evangelicals, especially in the US have historically been so supportive and aligned with the modern state of Israel. Secondly, how that alignment is now being questioned because of all the stuff I just covered in recent years and how very significant conservative media influencers like Tucker Carlson are fueling that disengagement of evangelicals from the state of Israel. And then finally, what's fair and what may be unfair about those critiques of Israel that are now flooding a lot of our media, particularly the ones that slide into some really grotesque anti Semitism, but which ones are legitimate that we really need to think about. So, to get the whole thing started, can you get us a relatively succinct definition of Christian Zionism? Because that seems to be at the heart of a lot of these conversations right now. And you've written books on this. So when you, you know, you're sitting on an airplane with somebody and they ask what you do, you say, I write books on Christian Zionism. And they go, what's that? How do you. What's your elevator pitch on Christian Zionism?
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A
Yeah, I don't know if I've ever led that way. Maybe I'll try that in the next airplane ride. It can put people off, I guess, if you say Christian Zionism right at the front end. But I think the most succinct definition would be that Christian Zionism as a belief is that someone believes that there should be a national sovereign state of Israel for the Jewish people. And they make the case for that by appealing to Christian theological or biblical arguments. And this would separate it from a Jewish Zionist who would still believe that first part about a state for the Jewish people, but would not rely on Christian theology, maybe relies on Jewish theology, maybe relies on just arguments within the Jewish community for why that's the case. But the Christian part of that is really important when we're thinking about evangelicals, because evangelical Christians have developed a few different sort of particular theological or biblical interpretation methods that have led them to think that God wants a modern state of Israel. That's part of his plan, that it's in biblical prophecy that this should come about. And that would make a distinctly Christian form of Zionism.
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B
Okay, so to back up a little bit in the history Zionism, forget Christian Zionism. Zionism as a movement starts in Europe in the 19th century, and it's primarily a secular movement. And the idea is nationalist movements are happening all over Europe and different groups are forming into states. Italy, Germany, these other states are forming during this era. And Jews who are scattered throughout Europe and have no. They're a tiny minority, persecuted minority, and they have no chance of actually coalescing around a single geographic location and forming a state. Start getting this idea. The only way we're really ever going to be safe is if we can form our own statehood, our own geographic region where we can be autonomous. That's Zionism. But it's primarily secular. And by the late 19th century, early 20th century, there's a movement to actually reclaim the historic geographic Kingdom of Israel in the Middle east centered around Jerusalem. And Zionism takes off as a movement to resettle. And of course, the Holocaust during World War II and other things just expedite all of this. But in the early and mid 20th century, this parallel idea of Christian Zionism that you're mentioning comes about, which has an interesting relationship with secular Zionism. So Jews in Europe and elsewhere in the world want their own state. And then Christians come along and say, yeah, I think we want to Support that, but not for nationalistic reasons, not for security reasons, but for theological reasons. Talk about how this is fueled by dispensationalism and where that came from.
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A
Yeah, yeah. There's an even, you know, scholars talk about even before we get to Zionism. There's a. Particularly in the Protestant world, there's an idea of Jewish restorationism that can go back to the Reformation. And this is, you know, it's always a minority view in the Reformation era. But there are writers you can go back to the 16th, 17th century who talk about a sense that they're reading a particularly biblical prophecy that God promises to regather his people, his chosen people in the land covenanted to them. So this is an idea floating around the Protestant world going all the way back to the Reformation. But when we get to the 19th century at this, you know, same basic era that Zionism's emerging as a political idea, you have this theology developing in the Christian world that we call dispensationalism. The guy who is often credited as starting it is John Nelson Darby, the founder of the Plymouth Brethren, a very small, in terms of numbers, dissenter sect in Great Britain, but has huge influence in both Great Britain and the us And Darby's idea, which isn't political in any sense, he's got other things he's thinking about. He's particularly critiquing the Church of England, is that the church and Israel in the Bible are separate entities always. And what this means, how it cashes out and how he reads the Bible is whenever the word Israel is mentioned in both the Old and New Testament, for Darby, it's always referring to the ethnic Jewish people. And then the church is an entirely separate entity from that. And in his scheme, the church is sort of a. It's often called like a parenthetical plan or sort of an audible that God calls when. When Jesus is rejected as the Messiah. Audible is not the right word because he also believes that God knows everything that's going to happen, but it's not the main plan, you could say. And so, in Darby's view, and this is what dispensationalists end up picking up, is that God was in covenant with Israel, the Jewish people, and he remains in covenant with them. And actually that's how he's going to complete. He's going to have his second coming. It'll happen in Jerusalem. Jesus will come to become the king of a. That same entity, the national Israel. And so this makes dispensationalists very interested in Zionism because It seems to be the thing that would need to happen before a literal kingdom is around that Jesus can return to. And so people like Darby are interested in the. He dies in 1882, so he only sees sort of the earliest glimpses of the political Zionism. But people after him, particularly in the us, people like Cyrus Scofield of the Scofield Bible, there's a guy named William Blackstone who created the Blackstone Memorial, which was given to President Benjamin Harrison in 1891, calling for the US to help create a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. And then as you go on into the 20th century, the idea here is they're really anticipating the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and seeing the Zionist movement as an unexpected because of the non religious nature of political Zionism, an unexpected but still divine movement that is going to culminate in the return of Jesus.
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B
Yeah, that's a critical part. So as dispensationalism is taking off in the United States in the late 19th century, early 20th century, at the same time political Zionism is fomenting in Europe, the widespread acceptance of dispensational Christianity in the US lends more and more support for the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. But talk about the eschatological factors in all of this, because that's for people who are like, all your words are too big right now. Sky and Daniel, I don't get all these theological concepts. I know there's a ton of people listening right now who've read the Left behind books. They're familiar with the Rapture. They've seen the YouTube prophets talking about a new temple being built in Jerusalem and the return of Jesus. All of that is wrapped up in this stuff. And all of that comes from dispensationalism. People want to believe that these ideas date back thousands of years to the New Testament, but they really don't. They're very modern concepts. So talk about the role that dispensational end times theology has in American evangelical support for the modern state of Israel.
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A
Yeah, so, yeah. And the ideas that. So the ideas that dispensationalists talk about Left behind novels use, some of them might predate dispensationalism, but they're being used in a very different way when you talk to dispensationalists about it. So of course, the idea of like a second coming is not a dispensationalist thing. That's a very historic Christian belief that Christ will return again. But what dispensationalists think is Happening is that God is working out his plans for redeeming the whole world through a set of, like, prophesied wars and conflicts that are going to be centered in the Middle east, and that Israel and the Jewish people are going to be at the center of those conflicts. And they're more or less the good guys, but not in a clean way. And also a lot of Jews will die in these scenarios as well. So it's also quite an awkward thing to talk about in Jewish Christian dialogue settings, this whole thing. But this is what drives a lot of the support for Israel, is the idea that. That in the near future there will be a. Well, the Rapture will happen. Christians, who are the true Christians, will leave the Earth and that will sort of unleash all this chaos, and there will be a false peace treaty that will be signed between Israel and its enemies. That peace treaty will be brokered by the Antichrist, who is a literal person that is sort of the mirror negative image of Christ, who is animated by Satan, and that this will ultimately lead to a betrayal of Israel and a massive destruction and all that kind of stuff. And this will culminate in the Battle of Armageddon in Israel in a place called Tel Megiddo, which is where the Geddon, the Giddo, if you can hear the similarities there, come about. And that will be sort of the culminating battle where the forces of good Jesus will sort of come back down with the army of heaven and defeat the forces of evil and Satan, and that'll kick off the millennial kingdom after that. So this is what a lot of Christian Zionists understand to be the consequences of the wars that are happening today. Now, each war, each conflict, there have been many, many in the Middle east In the last 30, 40 years is different. And so the way that these different conflicts fit into that scenario are part of the grist of speculation and sermons and pamphlets and YouTube videos and all that kind of stuff. And that certainly happened after October 7th. On October 7th, that was a Saturday, a bunch of pastors sort of tabled whatever they were going to say on Sunday, got up and gave basically a prophecy sermon that Sunday. You can see people like Greg Laurie did this on October 8th, and basically pulled out the prophecy charts and the maps of the Middle east and tried to sort of make sense of what nobody really knew what was going on at that point. But try to make sense of all this and say, you know, I have the answer here. Like, my way of reading the Bible is it gives me the insight to be able to Tell you concern Christian. You know, what's going on right now.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And so I think that's one way this functions a lot within evangelical spaces is if you can be on the front end and say, I have an answer for what's going on in this chaotic world. Because if you read prophecy the way I do this all fits in and God's in control, then it actually, you know, it's a little less about Israel and supporting Israel, and it's more about shoring up your biblical. Your authority as a good biblical expositor, as someone who knows sort of has the right way of reading the Bible.
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B
Exactly. So I remember being a freshman in high school back in 1990 and 91, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and Desert storm and George H.W. bush was president at the time, and there was this huge rallying of allies to invade Iraq. And I remember going to a Christian bookstore and there was a quickly published book with Saddam Hussein's face on the COVID identifying him as the Antichrist. And this is all leading up to Armageddon. And then fast forward a decade after 9, 11, same thing. Now it's Osama bin Laden is the Antichrist and this is the new war in the Middle east, and this is what's going to lead to Armageddon. And now here we are after October 7, and the new set of wars against the Palestinians or against Iran is now. So it's kind of just rinse and repeat. And we've been doing this for decades, trying to use Darby's system of interpretation, dispensationalism to explain everything that's going on. But the key point here is evangelical, at least white evangelical support for the state of Israel hasn't been primarily fueled because it's a democratic state or because it's a democracy in a region of the world that historically has not really had functional democracies. It's not any geopolitical or cultural reason. It's this idea that the state of Israel serves as a. As a necessary chess piece in dispensationalism's view of what must occur for the return of Christ to happen. And it's a very utilitarian approach, but it's dominated so much American culture, evangelical culture, the books, the fiction, the movies, the late great Planet Earth. We go on and on down the list of things. Now, in leading up to our conversation today, I found an article that you wrote back in 2017 in First Things about how Christian Zionism is changing. And I thought this was so fascinating, and this is quite a few years ago now, almost a decade. And I'd love to hear your updated thoughts on this. But you make the case there that Zionism is changing because Christianity, especially Pentecostal Christianity, is really spreading quickly throughout the global South. And a lot of Pentecostal Christianity ends up being supportive of Zionism of the state of Israel. But not exactly for the eschatological reasons that you and I just talked about, not just the end time stuff. Explain what it is that Pentecostalism emphasizes and why so many Christians in the global south are becoming supporters of the state of Israel.
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A
Yeah, and that what we'll be talking about here also does affect a lot of American Christians as well.
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B
That's what I said.
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A
Particularly the more Pentecostal Christians. Someone like John Hagee, who's the founder of Christians United for Israel, sort of the face person for Christian Zionism in the US would be Pentecostal. So the other animating theological motivation besides the eschatology is what a few scholars have called a national blessing theology. And this really fixates on this verse, Genesis 12:3, where God's talking to Abraham and he says, I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you, I will curse. And if you read that as someone who might be primed to be more of in the prosperity gospel camp or sort of looking for God's revealing in the Bible how he blesses people, this seems to be pretty clear at least. If you make a couple jumps and you see Abraham as a stand in for the Jewish people and the modern state of Israel as a stand in for, for that as well, then it seems pretty clear that God will bless those who bless the state of Israel. And whoever curses the state of Israel, God will curse. And so you'll hear, certainly you'll hear this in other countries, places like Brazil or Nigeria, which have very large support bases for the state of Israel. But you'll hear it in the US as well. You'll hear someone like John Hagee say, you know, we want a, a moral revolution, we want a revival in the US well, bless blessing Israel. Supporting Israel is going to be a key to that happening. He ties it into culture war issues. You know, we have declining morality, we have declining views on culture. How do we fix that? Let's bless Israel, let's support Israel. And so he connects it in a really powerful way, you can say. So it's not just this fringe foreign policy issue. Right. But it's actually sort of at the heart of how people like him understand the culture wars, the fate of the west, all that kind of Stuff is bound up into how favorable are you to Israel? And usually the favor is always supporting Israel and what Israel understands its interest to be. So it's not. You could imagine another way of saying blessing someone is to correct them or to somehow critique them in a way that will be better for them in the long run. That's rarely how it's talked about in these circles. It's blessing is giving Israel support so that Israel can prosecute its own interests as it understands them.
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B
Yeah.
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A
All right.
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B
There's so much to unpack here. And it's. First of all, I like what you just ended on there. Like, I don't know if you're, if you have children, but anyone who has children and loves those children knows that to bless those children means sometimes you have to bring correction. You don't just let a child have whatever it is they want. That's actually very malformative and a way of ensuring that child's harm. But there is sort of this ridiculous, almost magical thinking that some of these voices have about the state of Israel that says Israel, right or wrong, we're going to support them regardless of what they do. They can be engaged in terrible injustice. Israel is overwhelmingly a highly secularized country. It does not follow the covenant as outlined in the Hebrew Bible. But the attitude of a lot of Christian Zionists in America is we don't care whatever Israel does. We're just going to support it because that's what they think Genesis 12:3 means. So that's error number one. But probably the more profound error, and this is the one that drives me up the wall about all the different various forms of prosperity gospel teaching that's out there, is, how stupid do these people think God is? It's this vision of God as an infant, frankly, who's having a tantrum. And if we just give Israel more money, if we give Israel more bombs and F22 fighters, if we give them more political and military support, it's like putting a pacifier in God's mouth and he'll be happy with us again and he'll calm down and we will have less, you know, inflation at home or fewer abortions or more harmony on the home, whatever. Like, it's such an infantilized, ridiculous vision of how God operates and it turns him into some kind of a totem, a genie in a bottle. And he can be so easily manipulated through American foreign policy that it's such a profoundly unbiblical vision of God's intelligence and wisdom that it's hard for me to believe that these teachers who read the Bible are actually communicating this in good faith. But it seems like many times they are. They genuinely believe this is how God operates and that they can control him through American foreign policy.
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A
Yeah, yeah, they definitely believe it. I don't think they're putting on a show. It's interesting how this works out and this logic works out in different ways. I remember, I might have even mentioned in that article, but I remember listening to a South African parliament member, actually black South African parliament member, who was at one of these Christian Zionist events that I. I lived in Israel for a year to do research. And so I attended some of these events and I got to hear sort of some of this language on the ground. And he talked about in. In his area in South Africa, they were getting Israeli farming equipment and Israel has very advanced technology on agriculture. And that was being used in his community to help his people to have more productive farms and rise out of poverty. He saw this as a fulfillment of Genesis 12:3. He says, I support Israel. I build these diplomatic ties with the state of Israel. We get farming equipment and new technology that we could never get any other way. This is God, you know, fulfilling his blessings. And that, you know, that might be more. That's a different context than someone like John Hagee saying it about the culture wars or something. They both do, though, really reduce God to sort of. It's like God's bound by some type of contract or something where he must do a certain thing if I fulfill a certain thing. And I just think of like the Book of Job where that's what some of Job's friends are saying. It's like you must have done something wrong. And it's seems to me that the end of the Book of Job is saying that's the wrong way to do this. The friends get rebuked and God, you know, basically has a long monologue where he describes how. How much higher his understand, you know, his. His way of. Of running the world is than such a simplistic type of contractual way. So it seems to me that. That there is definitely a simple simplifying effect to it, but it does really attract not just Americans, but other types of particularly Pentecostal Christians who are looking for, you could say, an edge up in how to curry God's favor. And this seems to be one that is really appealing right now.
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B
Yeah, what strikes me, Job's a great example, but there's so many others throughout both the Old and New Testaments. But even a basic reading of Isaiah, chapter 1 or Isaiah, chapter 58. These are examples of God saying to his people, you're worshiping me, you're praising me, you're sacrificing to me. You're saying all the right things, you're doing all the right things ritually. And I reject it all because you are not treating one another justly. You are not caring for the orphan and the widow.
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A
You are.
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You're hypocrites, essentially. And it shows that God looks beyond the surface of things to see what's really in the heart.
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A
And.
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B
And that inability to recognize that God can't be tricked into blessing you through ritual or prayer or manipulation, whatever it might be, is so. It permeates the Scriptures. And so this idea that, well, we can get God's. We can force God to bless us as a nation by just, you know, putting some quarters in this machine of the nation of Israel and he's obligated to give us our blessing is at the heart of all forms of prosperity gospel. And there's many different forms of it. We could spend all day on that. I want to pivot to what's been going on lately and what your most recent article in CT was about. And that is quite a few conservative voices, Tucker Carlson might be the most prominent of them, have come out and really gone on the attack against Christian Zionism. And he recently had a episode with a guy named J.D. hall. And I looked up some of his background. Carlson introduces him as a theologian. Best I could find is he holds an undergraduate degree in ministry from Williams Baptist University, a Southern Baptist school in Arkansas. He's got no post grad training, at least on record. So he's not a theologian. He's the founder of a website called Protestia. It's a blog, media outlets on substack. For years, he was the pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church in Sydney, Montana. And from what I've been able to see, he was fired from that role and disqualified from pastoral ministry after being arrested for driving under the influence and carrying a concealed weapon while intoxicated. There's other reporting back from 2022 that says he was dismissed because of an unresolved prescription drug dependency. Part of the reason I'm getting into this is because he uses various lines of attack against Scofield and his Bible that interestingly parallel his own life a little bit. He was found guilty for felony embezzlement and ordered to repay his former church $15,000 in 2024. And his basic credentials now is he's an online influencer, a prominent voice in Reformed Calvinist Christian nationalist influencer circles. So that's kind of who this guy is. But he got on with with Tucker Carlson in this episode that is titled the Origins of Christian Nationalism, How It Corrupted American Christianity and why It's Finally Collapsing. Okay, long introduction for Explain why this caught your attention. And as a historian of dispensationalism, as someone who's written about Christian Zionism, what did this conversation between hall and Carlson really go off the rails about, in your mind?
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A
Yeah. And if it's not evident this far into the conversation, I'm not a Christian Zionist. I'm not a dispensationalist, so I'm not someone who's just looking to defend those positions because I hold them and want to see them succeed.
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B
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