When historians look back on President Trump’s second term, they may see it as the pinnacle of the Republican Party’s enduring support for Israel. They may also see it as the moment when the partnership undergirding this support — between evangelical Christians and the Republican foreign-policy establishment — began to unravel.
For decades, the American right’s unwavering advocacy for Israel has effectively been a sure thing, and the Trump administration’s actions have only affirmed the strength of this bond. The president has given Israel free rein to bomb Gaza and to attack enemies across the Middle East, even joining an assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities this summer; he has negotiated a peace deal in Gaza that favors Israel; he has defended Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — a guest at Mar-a-Lago this week — in the face of his ongoing prosecution on corruption charges. Closer to home, the administration has pressured universities to crack down on pro-Palestinian activists.
But inside the Republican Party, something seems to be shifting. A recent Manhattan Institute survey of Republicans nationwide found that a majority of the party’s longstanding voters remain firmly pro-Israel, but that a “sizable minority” of new Republican voters — younger, more diverse and more likely to have voted for Democrats in the past — are more critical of the Jewish state.
Often, their sentiments are darker than mere criticism. The Manhattan Institute’s survey found that a significant number of young Republican voters reported openly racist or antisemitic views. Some of the comments during an accompanying focus group with 20 Gen Z conservatives were positively chilling: One participant praised Hitler’s “leadership values.” Another claimed that Israel had ties to human trafficking. Still another called Jews “a force for evil.”
Separating the right’s mounting criticism of Israel — often made on the grounds of American self-interest — from the rising antisemitism inside the Republican ranks can be difficult. Many of the ideologies revived by the Make America Great Again movement, such as nationalism, Christian nationalism and nativism, have not only helped fuel attacks on America’s support for Israel; they have given political cover to antisemitism that has been bubbling up since the days of the so-called alt-right.
The right-wing media and activist classes now appear to be in an open civil war over the matter of Israel. Candace Owens has called the Jewish state “demonic,” while spinning out wild anti-Israel conspiracy theories on her popular weekly YouTube show. Closer to the mainstream, Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential MAGA voices, has described Christian Zionism as a “brain virus” and characterized evangelical support for Israel as “Christian heresy.” In late October, he hosted the white nationalist influencer and prominent antisemite Nick Fuentes on his YouTube show; the fallout is still tearing apart the Heritage Foundation, an institution at the heart of the Republican establishment. This month, Carlson and Steve Bannon, a fellow nativist, traded insults with Ben Shapiro, a pro-Israel conservative and an observant Jew, at the Turning Point USA conference in Phoenix.
Vice President JD Vance — who is close to Carlson and is, for now, the de facto future leader of the MAGA movement — has been conspicuously noncommittal on the fight. Amid the continuing turmoil, he didn’t even mention Israel during his speech at the Turning Point conference, nor did he denounce the rising antisemitism on the right, saying instead that he didn’t believe in “purity tests.” “When I say I’m going to fight alongside of you,” he said, “I mean all of you — each and every one.”
For more than four decades, the alliance between evangelicals and pro-Israel conservatives has been an almost uniquely powerful force in American politics, shaping not only foreign policy but also domestic elections, with donations flowing freely every election cycle from pro-Israel Christian groups and individuals to pro-Israel Republican candidates.
Political coalitions are inherently perishable. They are created to advance common interests that invariably diverge at some point. But this particular coalition was unusual from the start. It was built not just on the belief that defending Israel was in America’s strategic interests, but also on faith: Many of the evangelical Christians who have long made up the core of the Republican Party’s base saw the Jewish people’s return to their biblical homeland and their subsequent, improbable military victories over their Arab enemies as divine providence, a sign that the second coming was imminent. Now, other kinds of Christianity are taking hold in conservative power circles. A growing number of evangelicals subscribe to a very different understanding of the biblical prophecies about Christ’s return, while other influential Christians — including Vance — have been gravitating toward Catholicism. At the same moment, many Republicans are pushing for a nationalist retreat from American commitments overseas.
In other words, the very forces that built this coalition — geopolitics and theology — are the ones tearing it apart.
A Messianic Vision
The Republican Party wasn’t always reliably pro-Israel. It was a Democratic president, Harry S. Truman, who first recognized the Jewish state in 1948. In the immediate years after its establishment, Israel, founded under an ideology of Labor Zionism, was viewed by many conservatives as too socialist. And besides, an explicitly Jewish state wasn’t exactly a natural ally for the WASP-dominated Republican establishment. William F. Buckley Jr. was deeply skeptical of Israel during its early years; in 1956, his magazine, National Review, called it “the first racist state in modern history.”
The Arab-Israeli war of 1967 helped turn Buckley and many other conservatives around. Israel defeated the Soviet-backed forces in just six days, and Cold War hawks immediately identified a new ally in the struggle against Communism. “Now Israel could be grafted onto the correct side of the only war that mattered — the Cold War,” said Sam Tanenhaus, author of “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.”
The 1967 war also captured the attention of evangelical Christians, then a growing force in American life. Israel had not only beaten back a coalition of well-armed Arab states; it had also extended its control over Jerusalem, reunifying the holy city. To many evangelicals, this was more than an unlikely military victory. It was an unmistakable sign that history was moving, inexorably, toward its final climax.
A few years later, a graduate of the Dallas Theological Seminary and former campus ministry worker, Hal Lindsey, popularized this belief — known as premillennial Dispensationalism — in his mass-market paperback “The Late Great Planet Earth.” Lindsey aimed his book squarely at baby boomers — “the searching generation,” he called them — offering a divine truth based on his own reading of biblical prophecies. Now that the Jewish people had returned to their homeland and taken control of Jerusalem, all they needed to do was rebuild the temple destroyed by the Romans to enable the rapture (“the ultimate trip,” as Lindsey called it) to commence. It became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s.
Televangelists like Jerry Falwell took up Israel’s cause around this time. They saw the Cold War through a religious lens, casting Israel as the hero against Soviet atheists and their Muslim proxies. They offered a new theological paradigm for evangelicals, de-emphasizing the Christian tradition of trying to convert Jews and instead stressing the divine importance of supporting the State of Israel. These evangelicals spoke of Judeo-Christian civilization out of a belief that America (to them, of course, a Christian nation) and Israel were both uniquely privileged in the eyes of God. Falwell folded support for Israel into the “Biblical Plan of Action” underpinning the Moral Majority, his political organization that helped ensure Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and effectively gave birth to the modern Christian Right.
It was during the Reagan years that the G.O.P. truly became America’s pro-Israel party. Reagan claimed Israel as a democratic partner in the Cold War against totalitarianism, and forged an alliance with the conservative Likud party, which took power in 1977 and shared his free-market ideology. He also stocked his foreign-policy team with neoconservatives, many of whom were Jewish and steadfast Israel supporters. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel’s powerful lobbying group in Washington, had been a Democratic institution since its inception in 1963; in 1982, the organization named its first Republican leader.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the ties grew stronger. President George W. Bush was a born-again evangelical himself and had also put neoconservatives into important positions in his administration. When the United States began its global war on terror, Israel — then in the midst of the second intifada — became a natural ally in the fight against radical Islam. The two countries’ causes were seen as effectively intertwined. In 2006, John Hagee, the megachurch pastor who founded the influential group Christians United for Israel, called the Book of Genesis “God’s foreign-policy statement.”
‘Really What They Should Do Is Become Christians’
But throughout, strains of skepticism toward Israel persisted on the right, animated sometimes by an “America first” foreign policy, sometimes by outright antisemitism — and sometimes by a mix of the two.
In 1988, the influential conservative political philosopher Russell Kirk accused the neoconservatives of mistaking Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States. During the 1990s, the neo-isolationist Pat Buchanan, a two-time Republican presidential candidate, referred to Capitol Hill as “Israel-occupied territory” and blamed “the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States” for dragging the United States into the first gulf war. Significantly, both men were Catholics who did not share the dispensationalist view of modern-day Israel.
Years later, during the 2016 presidential election, similarly nativist, anti-Israel sentiments spread across the internet, inspired in part by Trump’s “America First” campaign — even as the future president cast himself as a “lifelong supporter” of Israel. At the time, the anti-Israel contingent seemed like a marginal force within the party, largely confined to a resurgent white nationalist movement. In fact, these were just the first tremors of a much broader realignment motivated by both ideology and religion.
“Part of the power of the moment is that the politics are driving this just as much as the theology,” says Daniel Hummel, a historian of U.S. religion at the Lumen Center, a Christian research institute, and the author of “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation.” “There are political consequences to the conversation.”
Evangelical Christians remain a powerful voting bloc for the Republican Party. White evangelicals make up more than 20 percent of the total electorate, and Trump won about 80 percent of their votes in 2024. And for the moment, they remain overwhelmingly pro-Israel.
Israel is trying to keep things that way, spending millions of dollars on a public-relations campaign targeting U.S. churches. Older evangelicals, meanwhile, are trying to shore up the base, reminding Christians that a person doesn’t have to subscribe to a specific end-times scenario to be a Zionist. “Evangelicals support Israel because they love God, cherish their country and believe faith and freedom are inseparable,” Ralph Reed, the founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal. “Israel, like the U.S., is a beacon for those timeless and, one hopes, eternal values.”
As the head of the Christian Coalition, founded by Pat Robertson, in the 1990s, Reed once wielded enormous influence among Christian voters. But today, the religious right’s political power is far more diffuse. The towering figures who once served as its theological and political gatekeepers, shaping American Christian thought about both the Bible and the ballot, are largely gone. They have been replaced by a wide range of online figures like the Texas pastor Joel Webbon, who advocates a breaking of geopolitical ties between America and Israel and has written on X that Jews are “generally marked by subversion, deceit, and greed.”
A growing number of Christians are turning away from premillennial Dispensationalism and toward other theological frameworks that see, at most, a diminished role for Israel and the Jewish people in God’s plan for redemption. Many believe that God abrogated his covenant with Abraham when the Jews rejected the Gospel of Jesus and that the church replaced ancient Israel as the vessel of God’s will.
Some of these Christians are known as “postmillennialists.” Premillennialists believe that the second coming will occur before the 1,000-year reign of peace referred to in the Book of Revelation as the millennium. Postmillennialists believe that Christ will return after the millennium, and that it’s their duty to prepare for this moment by making the earth fit for him. Many postmillennialists don’t see Judaism and Christianity as complementary, but as at odds with each other.
“They are much more likely to think that Jews are in a state of theological incompleteness and really what they should do is become Christians sooner rather than later,” said Samuel Goldman, an associate professor at the University of Florida and the author of “God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America.”
This is by no means a new framework. It was the default position throughout most of Christianity, and it laid the foundation for the church’s long history of persecuting Jews, justifying their expulsion from Christian societies and playing into countless anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. “The Jews are suffering and stateless because Christ came to them first and they rejected him,” said Mark Tooley, a lifelong member of the United Methodist Church and the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, describing the theology.
A new cohort of religious leaders and thinkers are now repurposing this theology for our contemporary politics, arguing that America should embrace Christianity as its national religion. They are, in a sense, the Protestant answer to liberalism’s Catholic critics — like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule — who have gained prominence during the Trump era. They include Stephen Wolfe, the author of “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” and Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist pastor in Idaho who recently opened a branch of his church on Capitol Hill — and counts Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth among his admirers. “I am no kind of Zionist,” Wilson has written.
Carlson, a Protestant, is also tapping into this new, post-Dispensationalist energy to buttress his own anti-Israel views. One of the repeat guests on his podcast, the country singer John Rich, has amplified an unfounded conspiracy theory that it was a Jewish family, the Rothschilds, who underwrote the publication of the first Bibles with study notes that advanced the theology of Dispensationalism.
Carlson’s viral interview last summer with Ted Cruz, during which he pressed the evangelical senator to offer a religious defense of his support for Israel, did not happen in a historical vacuum. “Tucker is not leading this theological re-evaluation of Israel,” Hummel says. “He’s just participating in it and capitalizing on it.”
The Gaza Generation
What we are witnessing on the right is, as much as anything, a demographic shift, as a new generation of Christians comes of age, both theologically and politically.
“There is, and really has been for at least 20 years, a revolt of younger, more intellectual American Christians against the old-American style of evangelical Protestantism that became so familiar in the 1980s and ’90s,” Goldman said. “They are much less likely to see the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of the various biblical prophecies and promises.”
They are also less likely to see support for Israel as either a moral or strategic imperative. These are Christians who grew up in the shadow of America’s protracted involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at a historical remove from the horror of the Holocaust, which helped convince many older American Christians of the need for a Jewish homeland. Today’s young right-wing Christians complain that America is facing too many urgent crises at home — like the cost of living and illegal immigration — to justify sending billions of dollars a year to Israel. Over the past two-plus years, their social media feeds have been flooded with graphic images from Gaza — and no shortage of nationalist, nativist and antisemitic commentary.
The Democrats are engaged in their own civil war over America’s policies toward Israel. While the Republicans have been the more staunchly pro-Israel party in the modern political era, the Democratic establishment has also been broadly aligned with Israel. But it, too, is now finding itself under increasing pressure from the younger wing of the party. In recent months, congressional Democrats have divided over whether to block arms transfers to Israel, whether to accept money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and whether to recognize a Palestinian state. And the cracks are spreading. A number of progressive Democratic politicians are centering criticism of Israel in their primary challenges against pro-Israel incumbents.
Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor and an outspoken critic of Israel, has little in common with Fuentes, a white nationalist. Mamdani speaks a language of pluralism, human rights and social justice; Fuentes rails against immigration and women’s rights, and he has talked about the need to preserve America’s “white demographic core.” But both came of age in the years after the war on terror and have emerged into the political spotlight at a time when the old pieties in American politics about Israel are eroding.
“People tend to think of generational politics in a narrow way, as the arrival of a new voice who speaks to his generation in a different vocabulary,” Tanenhaus said. “But there’s another kind of generational politics, which is formed by shared experiences that can cut across ideological boundaries. This is the Gaza generation.”
Trump has shown no signs of turning against Israel, and there is still a powerful pro-Israel faction within the G.O.P. Four decades of consistent support won’t go quietly. But the party’s post-Trump future is up for grabs, and it’s easy to imagine the fight over Israel becoming a primary battleground in the larger war for the party. Will the isolationists or the interventionists win out? How much influence will Christian nationalists have? Will antisemites be allowed inside the tent — and if not, who will have the authority to draw the boundaries that keep them out?
Charlie Kirk saw it all coming. Last summer, with both anti-Zionism and antisemitism rising among young conservative activists, he convened a group of Turning Point USA chapter leaders from across the country for a focus group on Israel. “I’m trying to find this new path,” he said of his effort to reconcile hard-right America First nationalism with Zionism. “I love Israel, I’ve visited there, my wife and I had the best experiences ever. I saw where Jesus rose from the dead and he walked on water. But also, I’m an American, and I represent a generation that can’t afford anything. And we are flooded with illegals, and no one speaks English.”
Kirk never got to see this effort through. Within days of his death in September, a bitter fight had broken out on the online right over whether he had been in the process of turning against the Jewish state — complete with an unfounded conspiracy theory that the Mossad was behind his assassination.
Source photographs for illustration above: Sipa/Alamy; Nicholas Kamm/AFP, via Getty Images; Mega/Getty Images; Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images; Alex Wroblewski/AFP, via Getty Images; David Dee Delgado/Getty Images.
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