MAGA: Split Over Israel
The Make America Great Again movement is splintering over its view of Israel.
Ever since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the United States has treated the Jewish state as one of its closest allies. But now, both Democrats and Republicans are questioning whether America should support the Israelis as they battle violent Islamic extremism. The bonds of brotherhood are breaking.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy coined the term “special relationship” to describe the unusually close partnership between America and Israel. (Interestingly, the only other such “special relationship” he noted was with Britain.) Yet ever since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the Democratic Party has portrayed the Jewish state as an evil colonial movement oppressing “indigenous Palestinians.”
The Republican Party rejected that neo-Marxist treatment of the Jews and remained a resolute ally of Israel throughout the Obama years. However, since the emergence of “America first” thinking under President Donald Trump, many conservatives assert that this means the U.S. should stay out of most foreign conflicts, including the Jewish nation’s fight for survival. These isolationists want to focus on U.S. interests and do not want a “special relationship” with Israel.
Some leading voices—such as JD Vance, Steve Bannon and Matt Walsh—assert that America should stop policing the world, even in Israel. Others—such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene—are motivated by religious animosity against Zionism, the movement to reestablish a Jewish state in the Middle East.
During an interview with a Palestinian Lutheran pastor in April, Carlson highlighted how Israel’s war on Hamas terrorists in Gaza was negatively affecting ancient Christian communities in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel proper. He unequivocally blamed Israel for the violence and made clear he wanted American evangelicals to disfavor the Jews and embrace the Arab Christian communities in the Middle East who view the Promised Land as theirs by divine right.
The worsening maga divide—and the fact that it is over Israel—is relevant not only to conservative Americans, the Republican Party and President Trump, but also to the nation and the world because it relates directly to Bible prophecy!
Herbert W. Armstrong’s book The United States and Britain in Prophecy explains that the Americans and Jews (and the British) share a special relationship: They are all descendants of the ancient nation of Israel. And God had and has a special plan for the Jewish nation, the rest of the modern Israelite nations and the true Christian Church—yet few Christians know anything about it!
Replacement Theology
Carlson hosted Sen. Ted Cruz on June 18 and engaged him in a fiery debate over whether the U.S. should intervene to save Israel from Iran. The two men clashed for two hours, including over a specific passage in the Old Testament. Some viewers thought this debate came out of nowhere. In fact, it encapsulates the core conflict within maga over Israel.
“As a Christian growing up in Sunday school,” Cruz said, “I was taught from the Bible, ‘Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.’ And from my perspective, I’d rather be on the blessing side of things.”
This was a loose paraphrase of Genesis 12:1-3: “Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
Cruz and many other Christians believe that this passage applies to the Jewish people, even specifically to the Jewish state called Israel. Carlson and many others believe it applies to the Christian church.
Evangelical Protestants like Cruz, a Southern Baptist, view God’s covenant with Abraham as continuing today in His relationship with the Jewish people. They believe the creation of the Jewish state fulfills Bible prophecy. Meanwhile, mainstream Christians like Carlson, an Episcopalian, disagree. They believe the sacrifice of Jesus Christ ended God’s pact with physical Israel and transferred all the promises God made to Abraham to spiritual Israel (the Christian church).
Most Christians in Israel are Arabs. This means that mainline Christians, as well as Catholics, tend to favor the Palestinians against the Jews.
The belief that God’s covenant with Abraham now applies to the Christian church rather than to Abraham’s physical descendants is called “replacement theology,” or “supersessionism.” It was popularized in the second century by Pseudo-Barnabas, Melito of Sardis and Justin Martyr.
Christ’s disciples were mostly Jews who kept the seventh-day Sabbath and the Old Testament holy days. Yet after the second temple was destroyed and public sentiment turned against the Jews, Catholic fathers started teaching that the new covenant superseded the Mosaic covenant and the Abrahamic covenant; therefore, the Jews were no longer the chosen people.
The Catholic view that they have replaced the Jews as the rightful heirs to God’s promises to Abraham has sparked strife between Jews and Catholics for 1,900 years. In the seventh century, the strife led the Jews to support the enemies of the Catholic Byzantines, who then lost control of Jerusalem. Catholics and Orthodox Christians were thus further embittered against the Jews. Later, from the 11th century through the 13th century, Catholics launched more than eight crusades to reconquer the Holy Land, which by then was controlled by Islamic powers. The Catholics were and still are powerfully motivated by the belief that the promises to Abraham belong to Catholicism—as do the holy sites of Jerusalem.
In the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, several groups split from the Roman Catholic Church, forming the Anglican, Calvinist and Lutheran mainstream Protestant denominations. They have largely retained Roman Catholicism’s replacement theology doctrine. This is one reason why so many Christians are unsympathetic to Jewish claims to the Holy Land.
One of the hottest current controversies in high-level American politics and Middle Eastern security comes straight from Genesis 12! Is that promise really in force today? And if so, what does it really mean?
Christian Zionism
Tucker Carlson was raised Episcopalian, an American branch of Anglicanism. Senator Cruz comes from a very different religious background. He is a Southern Baptist, a denomination that originated in the English Puritan movement. The Puritans studied Bible prophecy more than the mainstream denominations. They understood that God promised Abraham not only that one of his descendants (Jesus Christ) would be a blessing to “all the families of the earth,” but also that his descendants would become great physical nations. Some few of them—such as Vincenzo Galilei, Henry Spelman and John Sadler—argued that the British were one of the lost tribes of Israel. But most adopted the belief that God’s promises to Abraham and other prophecies could be fulfilled only if and when the scattered Jewish people regathered in the Holy Land before the Messiah returns. This is likely the view Senator Cruz learned in Sunday School, where he heard that “those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.”
Johanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, two Baptists who spent time in Amsterdam, encapsulated this sentiment when they wrote in 1649, “[T]his nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Israel’s sons and daughters on their ships to the land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for an everlasting inheritance.”
This type of thinking began the Christian Zionist movement, whose supporters believed that Christians had a role to play in returning Abraham’s physical descendants to the Promised Land. Among those predicting a Jewish return to Palestine and the rebuilding of Jerusalem were Sir Henry Finch, Thomas Brightman and Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Arthur Balfour acted on these predictions in 1917 when he signed the declaration allowing Jews to resettle the Holy Land more than 18 centuries after the Romans expelled them in the first century.
The Roman Catholic Church has never been supportive of Jewish control over Jerusalem, arguing during the Crusades that it should be administered by a Catholic king, or today, as an “international city.” American Anglicans, Calvinists and Lutherans are not as dogmatic in their view of the Middle East, but as a rule offer the Jewish state little support.
American evangelicals are different. Ever since they emerged from the English Puritan movement about three centuries ago, they have been among Israel’s strongest supporters. They are largely the reason for the “special relationship” and the diplomatic and security support that has helped keep the State of Israel alive.
Pete Hegseth said in 2018, “There’s no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible. I don’t know how it would happen; you don’t know how it would happen. But I know that it could happen.” He is now U.S. secretary of defense.
For years, U.S. leaders have made foreign-policy decisions that ultimately trace back to the belief that it is America’s destiny to help the Jewish state. This makes Hegseth similar to Senator Cruz and other prominent evangelicals (Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, etc) who make up about half of President Donald Trump’s inner circle.
The other half are from mainstream denominations (Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Orthodox, etc), pulling the president’s foreign policy on Israel in the opposite direction.
This explains why the Trump administration’s Israel policy vacillates between support for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and seemingly inexplicable diplomacy overtures to Hamas terrorists. The Israel-Arab conflict and control over Jerusalem is always a “burdensome stone” (Zechariah 12:3), especially when half your supporters think it is their Christian duty to help the Jews return to the Promised Land and the other half think the Jews have been replaced as God’s chosen people.
Abrahamic Promises
“Few indeed realize that hundreds of years before Christ, God had made certain unbreakable and irrevocable promises to the descendants of the patriarch Abraham,” Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in the May 1983 Plain Truth. “This has never been realized or proclaimed by ‘traditional Christianity.’ Abraham is designated in the New Testament as the ‘father of the faithful,’ since all of God’s promises of salvation and eternal life through Christ were made to Abraham—and Jesus Christ was directly descended from Abraham. But what not even theologians understand is that God made dual promises to Abraham. He made the promise of grace, to come through Abraham’s descendant Jesus Christ—but also He made unbreakable promises of race—overlooked entirely by ‘traditional Christianity’ and theological ‘scholars.’”
Mr. Armstrong explained that God’s promise in Genesis 12:2 to make Abraham’s descendants into a great nation applied to his physical descendants, but His promise in verse 3 to bless all nations through Abraham applied to his spiritual descendants. Most mainstream denominations teach that both verses are promises of grace that apply to the Church, while some evangelical leaders apply both verses to physical Israel. Yet verse 2 is clearly about a “great nation,” while verse 3 is about “all families of the earth” being blessed. These passages are about Israel and the Messiah.
Every Christian should read The United States and Britain in Prophecy, which also explains God’s promise to multiply Abraham’s seed as the stars of heaven (Genesis 15:5); to make Abraham the father of many nations (Genesis 17:1-4); to give Abraham’s descendants control over strategic gates (Genesis 22:17); to grant Abraham’s descendants “the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine” (Genesis 27:28); and to make Abraham’s great-great-grandsons Manasseh and Ephraim into a nation and a company of nations (Genesis 35:11).
Evangelicals are correct in understanding that these promises were made to Abraham’s physical descendants. But what most evangelicals do not understand is that the Jews are only one of the 12 tribes of ancient Israel—the tribe of Judah. As God kept His promise to Abraham, He multiplied his descendants into the nation of Israel. Judah was only one of its 12 tribes. It absorbed two of the other tribes (Levi and Benjamin), yet the remaining tribes were and are separate from the Jewish nation!
God fulfilled the promises of national greatness: Manasseh and Ephraim became the United States and British Commonwealth—the greatest nation and company of nations in world history. This is the real reason President Kennedy noted a special relationship between America, Britain and Israel: These are three brother nations descended from Jacob.
The prophesied regathering of Israel did not occur in 1948, as some teach, because only three of the 12 tribes returned (Judah, Levi and Benjamin). So the time to rebuild the temple is not yet come. Yet the Jews do have a right to live in the Promised Land. God delivered the Promised Land from the Ottoman Empire in 1917 and placed it in the hands of the tribe of Ephraim (the British Empire), which in turn made a decree that their Jewish brothers could return.
Today, radical Islamic extremists are trying to destroy the Jewish nation with the tacit support of many mainstream Christian denominations. It is the duty of Judah’s brother Joseph (i.e. America and Britain) to defend the Jews.
The Prophet Isaiah described a dramatic unraveling to occur just before the end-time appearance of the prophesied Messiah. “Manasseh shall devour Ephraim, and Ephraim Manasseh; Together they shall be against Judah …” (Isaiah 9:21; New King James Version). The growing maga divide over Israel may play an important role in this unraveling.
But as dire and deep as these divisions are, think about this: The God who made these promises millenniums ago is still the same today! He does not change (Hebrews 13:8). Think seriously about the power and faithfulness of the God who can and will bring His promises to pass. It says a great deal about the reliability of biblical prophecy and of the soundness of all God’s promises in Scripture. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts,” God says. “For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it” (Isaiah 55:9-11).