Earlier this month, Robert Stearns took a group of a hundred young Americans to Israel, where they met with Ambassador Mike Huckabee, spent time in the Knesset, and toured the Friends of Zion Museum. Stearns received the Shield of David Award from the Jerusalem Post at their Miami Summit for his commitment to Christian and Jewish relations and his solidarity with Israel through his ministry, Eagles’ Wings. As a Pentecostal minister who pastors an Assemblies of God congregation, Stearns is one link in the network that forms Christian Zionism in America.
Despite the efforts of political conservatives like Tucker Carlson to brand Christian Zionism a dangerous heresy, the movement continues to capture large numbers of evangelicals and exercise significant influence. Pew’s recent survey found that 74 percent of evangelicals retained a positive view of Israel. Although this was down ten points from Pew’s 2024 survey, it was higher than the 67 percent LifeWay Research found in their 2017 survey. Overall evangelical support for Israel has remained around three-fourths, which is still much higher than any other group of Americans besides Jews.
What is clear among all surveys over the past decade is a growing generational divide between Millennials and Gen Z and older generations. Younger generations of evangelicals increasingly have a less favorable view of Israel and a more favorable view of Palestine. This drop has occurred when antisemitism is on the rise, especially on the far right and left. The result is what Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy has described as a crisis of burgeoning antisemitism, especially among young Christian men. Pastors are not doing enough to reach them.
There are several dimensions to this crisis, but at its core is the fact that for much of the post-WWII era, dispensationalism has been the dominant strain of Christian Zionism within evangelicalism. In the past decade, however, Christian Zionism has started to shift away from dispensationalism. Many observers have failed to recognize this shift.
Two other aspects of the crisis are a lack of understanding and attentiveness to the movement’s ongoing changes. The network of Christian Zionist organizations and their continuing political activism is growing, not receding. Their growth is partly related to expanding the network committed to Israel. The lack of understanding stems from not recognizing that there is more than one form of Christian Zionism. While some forms are receding, newer forms of Christian Zionism are emerging, providing a different theological ground for the movement as a whole.
There is no doubt that Christian Zionism is embattled. It is caught up in the generational shifts occurring within Protestantism as a whole. It would be a mistake, however, to see it as fading. The rise of antisemitism has breathed new life into its rationale even as the October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel by Islamic Hamas militants led to a conflict producing a fresh wave of anti-Israeli sentiment.
Christian Zionism is far from over. The theological shifts many Christian Zionists have made place it on a different footing while the networks of organizations and institutions espousing Christian Zionism continue to expand their work. To see these moves requires a closer examination of these organizations and theological shifts.
The Organizations Supporting Christian Zionism
Christian Zionism used to have support within mainline Protestantism, but it now largely exists within organizations connected to American evangelicalism. These organizations form an institutional and relational network that brings together Jews and Christians in common cause, both in general and for Israel in particular.
The largest organization is Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Founded in 2006 by the Pentecostal pastor John Hagee, the organization now boasts over ten million members. The number is probably accurate given that membership involves submitting one’s name and email to receive communications from CUFI. Although CUFI bills itself as evangelical, its leadership and board remain within the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement. CUFI’s focus has been training, education, and advocacy, which it continues to push out through an annual summit, training for pastors, and over three-hundred college and high school groups.
Older organizations include the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ). Based in Jerusalem since 1980, the organization is led by the German Pentecostal Jürgen Bühler. Its annual Feast of Tabernacles celebration has averaged around two thousand attendees for the past five years, although before the outbreak of war the numbers were higher.
Susan Michael, a graduate of Oral Roberts University, leads the U.S. branch of ICEJ and is a key leader of the Christian Zionism movement. Michael has written several books and pamphlets for the organization. She also directs American Christian Leaders for Israel (ACLI), which has close to three thousand participants.
Another older organization is the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ). Founded by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein in 1983, it is now led by Eckstein’s daughter Yael Eckstein. According to IRS filings, the organization had a total revenue of over three hundred million in 2024. With this strong donor base, it brings together Christians and Jews to engage in charitable activities for Holocaust survivors, Israeli families, and emergency assistance. While IFCJ is not strictly Christian Zionist, it has strong institutional ties.
Smaller organizations include Joel Rosenberg’s The Joshua Fund alongside his online news outlets All Israel News and All Arab News. Rosenberg continues to bring different groups together for dialogue, including leading several delegations of evangelicals to Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to meet with their political leaders. Robert Stearns’ Eagles’ Wings also regularly takes groups to Israel for training, education, and pilgrimage.
These organizations’ board members reveal how widespread and interconnected the network is. This evangelical network of Christian Zionism largely consists of Pentecostals, Charismatics, Baptists, and independent Bible churches. For example, the ACLI board includes Robert Stearns, Joel Rosenberg, Stephen Strang of Charisma Publications, Gordon Robertson of CBN, Samuel Rodriguez, and Carlos Moran of the National Hispanic Pastors Alliance.
Skip Heitzig, the pastor for Calvary Albuquerque, which is part of the Calvary Chapel Network, is on the board of directors for All Israel News. The prominent Republican strategist and former Iowa gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats is also on the advisory board. Vander Plaats runs THE FAMiLY LEADER and organizes annual conferences that support Iowan GOP candidates.
Even though IFCJ has a larger number of Jewish members, Johnnie Moore is on the board. Moore grew up Baptist and currently is part of Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy. Last year he led the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was backed by the U.S. and Israel to distribute food in Gaza in 2025.
These organizations form a strong network that retains political and cultural influence. They continue to aggressively reach out to various parts of the evangelical world, although their outreach is broadly confined to the Baptist-Bible church-Pentecostal alliance on Christian Zionism. This does not mean one cannot find Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, or Methodists within Christian Zionist circles, but their numbers are relatively small. Part of the challenge has been the ongoing misconception that Christian Zionism is exclusively connected to premillennial dispensationalism.
The Theologies supporting Christian Zionism
What escapes most accounts of Christian Zionism is the diversity of views. One can divide these views into three broad and overlapping accounts: dispensational Zionism, covenantal Zionism, and natural-law Zionism. What holds these differing accounts together is a commitment to the belief that Israel and ethnic Jews remain part of God’s plan, and that the establishment of the nation of Israel fits within that plan. To bless Israel and to bless Jews is to recognize that God’s covenant promises continue even if their full realization awaits a future time.
Dispensational Zionism stems from dispensationalism, but the meaning has developed over the twentieth century. In a recent article, Craig Blaising charted its development from classical dispensationalism under C. I. Scofield’s view, to the revised dispensationalism Charles Ryrie articulated in 1965, to the progressive dispensationalism that he and Darrell Bock now espouse.
All forms of dispensationalism retain a strong distinction between Israel and the church and resist supersessionism in which the church replaces Israel. Dispensational Zionists do not support Israel primarily as a function of their view of the end times, but because of their distinction between Israel and the church. For progressive dispensationalists, the church is a “Spirit-created communion” that retains ethnic, national, and corporate identities, which has its counter in ethnic, national, and corporate Israel. The ongoing existence of Jews and the creation of the nation of Israel reinforce the church’s identity as such.
Dallas Theological Seminary is still the home of dispensationalism, with some faculty espousing the more progressive form while others hold to Ryrie’s revised view. With a current student head count of over 2,500, it exercises a strong influence on independent Bible, Baptist, and other non-denominational community churches. Recently, DTS started a Jewish studies program to promote more understanding and dialogue.
Covenantal Zionism first formed among the Puritans, but its most prominent contemporary representatives are the Anglican theologian Gerald McDermott and Messianic Jewish theologians like Mark Kinzer. Messianic Judaism began in the late 1960s as a feature of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement, but it has developed its own theological identity as standing between Christians and Jews.
For McDermott and Kinzer, God’s covenant with Israel remains in effect, and this includes its development in Rabbinic Judaism. They also argue that the phrase “body of Christ” means the one body of the messiah in Jewish and Gentile expressions. Likening it to different rites in the Catholic Church, Kinzer referred to it as a “bilateral ecclesiology,” in which Jesus-believing Jews retain their Judaism, including following Torah, while Gentiles develop their distinctive assemblies.
The final position stems from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. I have called it “natural-law Zionism” because Niebuhr held to a moral realism in which the particularities of natural justice may be discussed, debated, and applied. He resisted what he thought were the certainties of Catholic approaches to natural law in light of the doctrine of sin. All definitions of justice are provisional and must be transformed by divine love. Niebuhr’s Christian Zionism was an outworking of this basic perspective.
Niebuhr had held to a version of Zionism at least since 1929, and therefore before the Holocaust. He had already argued that the nation-state was the best safeguard for group identity in Moral Man and Immoral Society. When he saw what Naziism was doing to European Jews, he began to argue for a Jewish state as a bulwark against antisemitism. Niebuhr concluded that the very history of antisemitism required a just arrangement that involved a homeland where Jews could protect themselves and their particular way of life.
As Samuel Goldman has pointed out, Niebuhr would later claim that Judaism was itself so linked to the land that it could not advance authentically without a political presence in the land. The land became the embodiment of its people, a principle Niebuhr derived from his view of human nature. Finally, he argued that Israel’s status as a democracy was a strategic anchor in world politics and thus in the American national interest. In the final analysis, the establishment of a Jewish state was a “miracle” in the sense that it was a convergence of historical forces that gestured toward the presence of God in history.
Shortly after the Georgetown University conference in Washington D.C. that produced The New Christian Zionism (2016), McDermott wrote for First Things that at the heart of this new perspective was resistance to hard supersessionism, which claims that God's new covenant with the gentile Church replaces (hence, supersedes) his former covenant with the Jewish people, and that the land of Israel is no longer a Holy Land.
McDermott and his fellow authors argued that it is the New Testament—not just the Old Testament—that teaches that the Jewish people are still the Chosen People, and that there will be a future return to the land. They also claimed that the return of Jews to the land in large numbers beginning in the eighteenth century was a fulfillment of New Testament prophecy.
Christian Zionism and Antisemitism
Christian Zionism may be embattled, but it is holding its ground by pushing back against supersessionism and creating new networks. It is also shifting the theological ground of the movement. Susan Michael’s recent booklet Christian Zionism draws on McDermott’s theology to establish the theological basis for her position. The appeal to covenantal Zionism shows the theological shift in the movement.
Just as important is the connection between antisemitism and hard supersessionist positions. Antisemitism on the far right is partly a product of hard supersessionist views. This hard form of supersessionism holds that the church fully replaces Israel as the true spiritual seed, and that Jews have no legitimate standing as the people of God. In “Supersessionism Hard and Soft,” David Novak noted that maximal supersessionism, in which God has elected Christians to replace Jews in the covenant, can offer no ground for compromise with Judaism.
Recently, Tucker Carlson interviewed Jordan D. Hall on Christian Zionism. Hall is part of a group of Reformed Christian nationalists who hold that Judaism ended with the destruction of the temple, making Rabbinic Judaism illegitimate. It was clear that Hall was confirming Carlson’s view that Christian Zionism is a heresy. Hall’s history of Christian Zionism was itself a caricature stitched together from ad hoc appeals to historical episodes without any understanding of the whole.
Hall co-wrote The Hyphenated Heresy with Joel Webbon, arguing that appeals to a Judeo-Christian heritage are a form of secularism that reshaped Christian identity. This view was also articulated by Andrew Isker and Andrew Torba in their 2022 defense of Christian nationalism.
Webbon founded Right Response Ministries. The main speaker at this year’s conference is the far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whom the Anti-Defamation League has condemned for his antisemitic tropes and comments. It should not surprise anyone that this kind of theology has become fertile soil for antisemitism. It was so extreme that Doug Wilson, typically a supporter of Christian nationalism, stood against it by issuing the Antioch Declaration condemning antisemitism. As McDermott has pointed out, however, Wilson’s hard supersessionism is itself part of the problem.
Christian Zionism is on much stronger theological ground. What journalists and other outsiders have failed to see is the theological shifts. Pointing to John Hagee, many journalists explain the waning of Christian Zionism because of dispensationalism, but they don’t even understand the shifts that have occurred within dispensationalism, let alone in Christian Zionism. One need only look at a recent Politico article on “how the rapture explains the rupture” between younger and older generations. They also fail to see how programs at DTS inform Christian Zionist organizations, and how they together form a network that brings scholars and political advocates together. This is the Protestant mind in action.
