The Tyranny of Christian Zionism
On an anti-American, anti-Christian ideology.
James W. Carden is the editor of The Realist Review. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Great Betrayal: How the Democrats Became the Party of War.
In the nearly two-and-a-half months since Donald Trump launched a war against Iran at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the iron grip that Christian Zionism has on Washington has become too obvious to ignore.
Briefly, Christian Zionism is a theo-political ideological construct[1] that posits a Christian duty to support the state of Israel, come what may, owing to a divine mandate for its existence that is said to derive from the Old Testament.[2] The political philosopher Nancy Fraser notes that for Christian Zionists, “Israel is the land where all Jews must be gathered in order for Christ to return and establish His Kingdom on Earth; whoever among them refuses to convert faces eternal torment in Hell, even as Christians are raptured to Heaven.” “Thus,” observes Fraser, “this form of philosemitism barely conceals its underlying antisemitism.”[3]
With tiring frequency, Christian Zionists also cite Genesis 12:3, in which God says to Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse,” as among the justifications for their fanatical support for a foreign country. Recent polling indicates that fully 80 percent of American Evangelicals (numbering somewhere between 50 to 80 million of our fellow citizens) believe that the founding of the state of Israel was a fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy that augurs the return of Jesus Christ.[4]
Anyone tempted to blame American Jews (2.4 percent of the US population) for Washington’s long and puzzling romance with Israel should look elsewhere. The Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies showed as recently as February 2026 that a mere 37 percent of American Jews identify as Zionists. A further 15 percent identified as either anti- or non- Zionists, while almost half of those polled identified with none of those categories.[5] Still more, American Jews have been sharply critical of Israel’s war on Gaza in the years since October 7, 2023. According to a Washington Post poll taken two years after the October 7th atrocities, 61 percent of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, while roughly 4 in 10 say Israel is guilty of genocide.[6] In other words, the attitudes of American Jews are rather more empathetic (one might even say more Christian) than the attitude of supreme insouciance exhibited by American Christian Zionists.
The water these and other high-profile Christian Zionists, such as the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), carry for Israel is getting heavier by the day.
Consider the following:
§ According to the Institute for Middle East Understanding, since October 7th, “the Israeli military has damaged or destroyed almost every house of worship in Gaza, including all three churches. In late October 2023, the Israeli military attacked the compound of the Church of St. Porphyrius, one of the oldest churches in the world, killing 18 people and injuring at least 20 others. In July 2024, Israel bombed the church again.” [7]
§ In April 2024, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security (the Institute’s namesake, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term ‘genocide’ following the Second World War) issued a Red Flag Alert for the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, where Armenian Christians have lived continuously for 1,600 years (albeit in the absence of a “divine mandate” from heaven). The Lemkin Institute cited the “Israeli state’s repeated attempts to evict indigenous Armenians from the Quarter.”[8]
§ In February 2026, Israeli settlers spat at the entrance of an Armenian church in Jerusalem.[9] The Armenian quarter of Jerusalem has been the target of serial attacks by Israelis, including an incident in November 2022 when Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers spat on the Armenian archbishop and other pilgrims during a procession in the Old City of Jerusalem.[10]
§ In early March, a Catholic priest, Fr. Pierre al-Rahi, was murdered by the IDF in the Christian village of Qlayaa, a few miles from the Israeli border in Lebanon.[11] This follows the IDF’s shelling of the only Catholic Church in Gaza, Holy Family Church, the previous July. That attack killed three and wounded nine, including a Catholic priest.[12]
§ In late March, Israeli police prevented Catholic leaders from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to celebrate a private Mass on Palm Sunday for the first time in centuries.[13]
§ In April, an IDF soldier was photographed taking a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus in the Christian town of Debel in Lebanon.[14] Weeks later, photos emerged of another IDF soldier desecrating a statue of the Virgin Mary in the same Lebanese village.[15]
§ In late April, footage emerged of an attack on a French nun by a 36-year-old Israeli settler in Jerusalem.[16]
§ In May, IDF forces attacked and bulldozed a Catholic convent in the southern Lebanese town of Yaroun. [17]
§ Also in May, Haaretz reported on comments made by IDF Major General Avi Bluth, who bragged that the IDF was “killing like we haven’t killed since 1967” in the occupied West Bank. Bluth noted that his forces had killed at least 42 Palestinians because they were throwing stones.
Meantime, Catholic pastoral leaders here and abroad have voiced their opposition both to the genocide in Gaza and the US-Israeli war on Iran:
§ In October 2025, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin condemned the “ongoing massacre” in Gaza, noting that, “The war waged by the Israeli army to eliminate Hamas militants disregards the fact that it is targeting a largely defenseless population, already pushed to the brink, in an area where buildings and homes are reduced to rubble.”[18]
§ On April 10th of this year, Pope Leo XIV condemned the US-Israeli war, saying, “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ…is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”[19]
§ In April, Washington Archbishop Cardinal Robert McElroy condemned the war in a homily at the Cathedral of St. Matthew. The archbishop argued that, “We are in the midst of an immoral war. We entered this war not out of necessity but rather out of choice. We failed to ardently pursue the pathway of negotiation to its end before turning to war.”[20]
§ In an interview that aired on Easter Sunday, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, head of the Catholic Archdiocese for the US Military, said that in his view the war on Iran failed to meet the requirements (jus ad bellum, jus in bello) set out by St. Augustine. Broglio further commented, “I do think that it’s hard to cast this war – you know – as something that would be sponsored by the Lord.”[21]
By way of contrast, consider the reactions to—and characterizations of— Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, and to the Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran, by prominent Christian Zionists:
§ In December 2025, Mike Evans, an evangelical ally of President Trump and the founder of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center in Jerusalem, organized an all-expenses-paid (by Israel) trip to Israel for 1,000 American Christian pastors and Christian Zionist activists to receive training and instruction on how to serve as unofficial ambassadors for Israel back home.[22]
§ In May 2025, an Anglican priest, Gerald McDermott, took to the pages of the Christian-Zionist journal First Things to protest the idea that there is a genocide taking place in Gaza. No, according to McDermott, the murder of (per the medical journal The Lancet) over 75,000[23] people in Gaza is actually evidence that Israel is “conducting a war against genocide.” According to McDermott, “everything in the Gaza war suggests the absence of this intent.”[24]
§ The evangelical preacher Franklin Graham responded to the Pope’s criticism of the war by noting that, “King David…he prayed that God would train his hands how to fight his enemies. We know that God does take sides in history, certainly as it relates to biblical history. God gave great favor to David, great wisdom to David, every time he went into battle.” [25]
§ Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Evangelical pastor, Doug Wilson, is of the opinion that “Pope Leo needs to read his Old Testament more. Psalm 144:1, ‘Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my fingers for battle.’” “Pope Leo, before he was the pope,” continued Wilson, “was just sort of an ordinary Democratic leftist critic of Trump.”[26]
§ Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel responded to Leo’s comments this way: “Well, first, that is simply not biblically accurate. The Bible contains over 400 references to war, frequently depicting God as authorizing, commanding, intervening in battles, like one that we know — the battle between David and Goliath.”[27] (One course cannot rule out the possibility that this was just a shameless attempt by Hannity at product placement—after all, FNC has been busy promoting a none-too-subtle piece of Israeli hasbara, David: King of Israel, a four-part docudrama series appearing on its sister network, Fox Nation.)
§ In addition to his editorial policy of genocide denial, First Things editor RR Reno, a Catholic convert[28], sprang into action to defend the US-Israeli war on Iran. “The Iranians,” said Reno, “were determined to force the issue by rejecting curtailment of their nuclear program. Under the circumstances, perhaps it was reasonable to decide that another round of hot war was necessary to force Tehran back to the negotiating table, this time with a willingness to abandon its nuclear weapons program.” Reno left out a few salient facts, such as (a) Iran has every right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (a Treaty which the only Middle Eastern power with nuclear weapons, Israel, refuses to sign) (b) the now-deceased Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, declaring their development as a violation of Islamic law[29] (c) there is zero evidence that Iran was pursuing such a capability.[30]
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There are (at least) two things going on here. For one, we can discern a certain propensity on the part of self-styled conservative Catholic intellectuals to run interference for the Trump administration because they, like their Protestant fundamentalist brethren, are in thrall to the political ideology of Christian Zionism. The risible series of attacks on what is said to be Pope Leo’s insufficient understanding of Just War Theory[31] that have appeared with increasing frequency in such journals as Telos, First Things, and Providence has only served to further expose these people for what they are: Religious fundamentalists in the service of Greater Israel who will let neither the US Constitution (see, for e.g., Article 1, Section 8), nor a modicum of decency stand in their way.
But these Catholic intellectuals who fetishized Joseph Ratzinger now scorn the stolid, decent Chicago-born missionary—a member, one might note, of the Augustinian Order whose namesake crafted the aforementioned theory prohibiting wars of choice. Parenthetically, Saint Paul’s injunction against “doing evil so that good may come” (Romans 3:8) would also seem to prohibit complicity in the US-Israeli onslaught, much less the Israeli genocide.
The second thing we can glean from the above items is the powerful attraction the Hebraic books of the Bible hold for an entrenched and influential faction of Protestant evangelicals in and around the Trump administration. It is no coincidence that Hegseth, Graham, Wilson, Hannity, and their ilk immediately reached for the Old Testament to try to score debating points with the Pope. This attraction helps to explain (but then again, who knows what really goes on in the minds of our homegrown radical clerics like the Reverends McDermott and Huckabee?) the eager, indeed pathetic, subservience with which these men treat Israel and its Supreme Leader, Mr. Netanyahu.
This is an old story indeed, one that goes back long before the founding of the United States in the closing decades of the 18th century, to the sect of furious Protestant fundamentalists who braved the Atlantic and landed at Plymouth. Indeed, the North American theocracy they founded was shot through with the ethos of the Old Testament.
The mid-twentieth-century critic Edmund Wilson, in a widely praised study of the literature of the American Civil War, examined the absolutist mindset of pre-Revolutionary New England that was so influential among fire-breathing abolitionists such as John Brown. Wilson noted that to read John Calvin’s Institutes:
…is to be struck by the brutal audacity of his efforts to eliminate this spirit [of Jesus] from the Gospels. Christ’s gospel of forgiveness quite disappears, as does his offering to all human sinners the possibility of eventual repentance…One feels that it would be easier for Calvin if the Gospels did not exist—he is obliged to explain so much of them away.”[32]
As early as 1676, Increase Mather referred to his fellow New England settlers as the “English Israel,” while his son, Cotton, sought confirmation in the Old Testament that New England “fulfills the type of Israel materially.”[33] It was said (by the junior Mather) of the long-serving governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Bradford, that Bradford studied Hebrew so that “he would see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in their native beauty.”[34] The belief that America was a new Zion[35] persisted well into the next century (and, sadly, beyond). An early president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles, proclaimed that the new nation was “God’s American Israel.”[36]
As the heretic Christ rebelled against the Hebraic notions of vengeance, fear, collective guilt, and divine punishment, the American Founders took their cue from the Puritan heretic Roger Williams[37], who recommended a “wall of separation” be built between Church and State. The Founders flatly rejected the idea of theocracy—as did Christ, via his injunction to “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21). That said, the Founders—Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, among them—were not Christian in any real sense[38]- but Deists; they were products of the Enlightenment and insisted on a separation of Church and State, enshrined (to the dismay of our current crop of theocrats) in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The Founders of this country (particularly among the descendants of the Cavaliers who were, after all, Church of England, and therefore less po-faced and not obsessed with the Old Testament as were their Puritan counterparts up North) would have been incredulous in the face of claims that certain passages from some Bronze Age book of divine revelation would weaponized in order to legitimize and sanction the settlement and colonization of a part of West Asia by terrorists[39] from the Pale of Settlement—by people who heretofore had no connection (aside from said claims from their own book of divine revelation) to that land for nearly two millennia. One suspects the Founders would have gone from incredulous to distraught at the thought—now widely accepted by leaders of both parties in Washington—that it is the job of the United States of America to help carry out the project.
One question that rarely, if ever, gets asked: What about those of us who don’t believe in or care about the supposedly divine books of revelation of the three Abrahamic religions? The promise of the First Amendment was that American citizens wouldn’t be obliged to give them much thought. Among the other problems with Christian Zionism is that it erodes those rights and protections promised by the 1787 Constitution. Doubt it? Please then consult the numerous anti-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions laws[40] and free speech prohibitions[41] enacted on college campuses across the United States, which are premised on the absurd notion that criticism of a foreign country amounts to hate speech.
The Constitution (authored by the descendants of Cavaliers) was meant to temper political and religious absolutism, not enflame sectarianism. It wasn’t Christianity that the United States was founded on; it was political and cultural pluralism, the spirit of which is nicely captured by a letter sent to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island by President Washington in 1790, in which Washington noted, “The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy…All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”[42]
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The absolutism of Puritan America, which Christian Zionists exemplify, not only precludes pluralism but continues to reinforce and excuse the violent absolutism of modern-day Israel.
In his 2005 classic, The New American Militarism, the scholar and career US Army officer Andrew Bacevich observed that after the calamity of Vietnam, conservative evangelicals “assumed the role of church militant.” “Abandoning their own previously well-established skepticism about the morality of force and inspired in no small measure by their devotion to Israel,” wrote Bacevich, “they articulated a highly permissive interpretation of the just war tradition, the cornerstone of Christian thinking about warfare.”
Bacevich went on to observe that:
…as a result of the Religious Right’s fetish for the Jewish state, the distinctive Israeli strategic style—the way that Israelis conceive of military power and its uses—has colored Christian thinking about these same subjects. By extension, this evangelical appropriation of Israeli strategic precepts has altered the terms of religious discourse about war and the use of force in ways that have contributed to the militarization of US policy.”[43]
The Christian Zionist ethos has manifested itself in increasingly absurd ways under Trump II. It is no coincidence that the passage Trump chose (or, more likely, chosen for him by his Christian Zionist minister, Paula White-Caine, a Florida televangelist) to read during a live-streamed Bible-reading in April was a passage from the Hebraic Testament rather than one from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.[44] In those books, he would have found scant support for his war.
And then there was the spectacle of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a 45-year-old veteran of the Bush-Cheney Global War on Terror, who, on the morning of April 16th, took to the podium of the Pentagon press room and condemned the assembled reporters as little more than modern-day Pharisees.
As Hegseth put it,
Our press are just like these Pharisees…Your politically motivated animus for President Trump nearly completely blinds you from the brilliance of our American warriors…
The Pharisees scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative. The hardened hearts of our press are calibrated only to impugn. I would ask you to open your eyes to the goodness, the historic success of our troops, the courage of this president.”[45]
The implied comparison was hard to miss. But the Good Word has clearly gone out from the E-Ring to the rank and file: The war on Iran is part of a “divine plan.” In March, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a non-profit watchdog, reported it had received over 200 complaints from servicemen at over 50 military bases and installations that US military commanders were citing the Bible to justify the war. One combatant commander reportedly opened a combat readiness briefing by telling the assembled officers that, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” The commander, according to the complaint, “specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.”[46]
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The stranglehold Christian Zionism has on the Armed Forces is no less pernicious than the hold it has on political Washington. The military historian Michael Vlahos believes that Christian Zionism has achieved a “central salience in the Trump administration.”
Even under the best of circumstances, Mike Huckabee comes across as a character straight out of Deliverance. The Reverend’s journey from the holler to the US Embassy in the Holy Land is perhaps unique in the annals of American diplomacy, with the Arkansas theocrat acting as defender of and publicist for a genocidal regime. Not since Joseph Davies filed his ‘nothing-to-see-here’ dispatches from Stalin’s show trials has a US Ambassador done such a disservice to his country.
Here is a social media message Huckabee sent to the President last June:
You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice. I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts.
No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don’t reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you. I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s.
More sophisticated and therefore far more dangerous are the MAGA-aligned concentric intellectual circles that justify and, to a disturbing extent, inform policy under Trump II. There is, of course, the influence of the coterie of self-serving intellectual entrepreneurs at the Claremont Institute, as the estimable editor and essayist Dan DeCarlo recently showed. These form part of the ‘family’ of Christian Zionist conservative intellectuals who form the core of the National Conservatism (NatCon) movement which is best understood as a group of overlapping ideologies (integralism, Zionism, fusionism, neoconservatism, Trumpism), funded and promoted by a number of well-funded think tanks, foundations, and online and social media outlets—the most influential of which is the inaptly named Edmund Burke Foundation, which was founded by David Brog, a former executive director of Christians United for Israel, and Yoram Hazony, a former speechwriter to Israeli Supreme Leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
An admirer of the violent Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane, Hazony and his family live among the illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. For the past several years, the Edmund Burke Foundation has sponsored a series of National Conservative conferences in Washington, Rome, London, Orlando, and Budapest. It is under this umbrella that (perhaps willfully) credulous ‘America First’ conservatives have laundered a violent strain of Israeli nationalism in order to incorporate it into the mainstream of conservative politics. Of course, there are other commonalities (besides Zionism) between Israelis like Hazony and Americans like the publicist Reno. One shared goal is the demolition of the wall between Church and State. At a breakout session at the 2024 NatCon conference titled ‘Separation of Church and State Has Failed,’ Reno argued that the US Supreme Court should “tear down that wall.”
The perhaps overused term ‘Israel Lobby’ might more accurately be referred to as the Christian Zionist Lobby, given the sheer size of its leading organizations. Christians United for Israel has over 10 million members. The National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel; the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem; the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews; the Zionist tourist outfit Passages; Eagles’ Wings, a New York-based Christian Zionist organization; and the Macabee Task Force are among the leading Christian Zionist organizations with a combined budget in the tens of millions of dollars.[47]
For once, Netanyahu wasn’t being disingenuous when he said that without the support of US evangelicals, “the State of Israel would not exist.”[48]
Yet shorn of the inherent compassion and empathy of Christ’s message, Christian Zionism amounts to little more than a Christianity without Christ. In their insane yearning for the apocalypse promised by the Book of Revelations, they not only turn a blind eye to the suffering of their fellow Christians in Palestine, but they also actively (and enthusiastically) seek to prolong it. But Christian Zionism is not merely anti-Christian; it is also deeply un-American, serving as a handy, go-to justification to crack down on free speech at home while promoting American military intervention in the Middle East without limit or logic. And with regard to what does and what does not construe a just or unjust war, the leading proponents of Christian Zionism would do themselves and our country a service by either relocating to the country that is the actual locus of their concern, Israel, or by otherwise embracing a prayerful silence on matters of US national security.
[1] The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt once quipped that ideology is “the knowledgeable dismissal of what is visible.”
[2] Now the present author stopped believing in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy sometime in his first decade. The Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow once wrote that “Each man has his own batch of poems.” And I agree. So if people want to believe that there is a divine mandate to colonize and terrorize a defenseless population in the Levant, fine, but please drop the pretense that it is a Christian or American duty to fund and justify the project.
[3] See Fraser’s excellent new essay in the New Left Review, https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii158/articles/nancy-fraser-gaza-as-world-event
[4] See, https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/evangelical-diversity-and-support-for-israel/#:~:text=Not%20all%20evangelicals%2C%20who%20are,(including%20Jews)%20will%20perish.
[5] See, https://www.inss.org.il/social_media/jfna-survey-finds-just-37-of-jewish-americans-identify-as-zionists/
[6] See, https://archive.is/h5bx3#selection-413.82-417.1
[7] see, https://imeu.org/resources/key-issues/5-things-to-know-about-israels-oppression-of-christian-palestinians/462
[8] For report, see: https://www.lemkininstitute.com/red-flag-alerts/red-flag-alert---armenian-quarter-of-jerusalem
[9] see, https://www.thecaliforniacourier.com/israeli-settlers-spit-at-armenian-church-entrance-in-jerusalem/
[10] see, https://truthandaccountabilityleague.org/statement-2%3A-jerusalem-23
[11] see, https://www.ncronline.org/news/lebanese-maronite-catholic-priest-killed-israeli-tank-fire-southern-lebanon
[12] see, https://www.nbcnews.com/world/middle-east/pope-leo-gaza-israeli-strike-catholic-church-rcna219738
[13] see, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-police-prevent-catholic-leaders-from-celebrating-palm-sunday-mass-at-church-in-jerusalem
[14] see, https://www.themirror.com/news/world-news/disturbing-image-shows-idf-soldier-1797909
[15] See, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/7/israeli-soldier-desecrates-statue-of-virgin-mary-in-southern-lebanon
[16] For footage, see:
[17] See, https://news.antiwar.com/2026/05/03/israeli-troops-attack-catholic-convent-in-southern-lebanon-town-of-yaroun/
[18] See, https://www.timesofisrael.com/vaticans-top-diplomat-says-israel-carrying-out-massacre-in-gaza/
[19] See, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/catholics-pope-war-trump/
[20] See, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2026-04/cardinal-mcelroy-war-in-iran-is-morally-illegitimate.html
[21] See, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/03/us-military-archbishop-iran
[22] See, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-christians-gaza/
[23] See, https://politicstoday.org/lancet-study-estimates-75000-deaths-in-gazas-first-16-months/
[24] See, https://archive.ph/s7qSF#selection-875.103-875.166
[25] See, https://www.christianpost.com/news/franklin-graham-cites-king-david-in-response-to-papal-war-rebuke.html
[26] see, https://archive.is/bq8ii#selection-997.0-997.226
[27] see, https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/sean-hannity-embarrassingly-lectures-pope-37031102
[28] Reno is living proof of the adage that nothing compares to the zeal of the convert. Some of us who grew up in the Church are distinctly less enthralled.
[29] See Federation of American Scientists, https://fas.org/publication/nuclear_weapons_religiously_fo/
[30] On Iran’s nuclear capability, see Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iran-was-nowhere-close-to-a-nuclear-bomb-experts-say/#:~:text=Although%20President%20Trump%20has%20claimed,235)%20found%20in%20the%20material.
[31] See for example, https://firstthings.com/the-usccbs-just-war-error/
[32] Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore, Studies in the Literature of the Civil War, (WW Norton, 1994 paperback), pps. 40-41.
[33] See, Jim Sleeper, https://www.resetdoc.org/story/israel-puritans-dangerous-historical-romance-p-ii/
[34] The Literature of the United States, eds., Blair, Hornberger, Stewart, Miller (Scott, Foresman, 1969), pp. 9.
[35] Most famously articulated by Governor John Winthrop’s indelible phrase “We shall be as a City upon a Hill” (1630).
[36] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, (U. Chicago Press paperback 2008), pp. 25
[37] On Williams and the Founders, see: https://theamericanscholar.org/founder-of-our-freedoms/
[38] Nor was that other favorite of neocon and Christian Zionist ideologues, the American Bismark, Honest Abe Lincoln--but that is another story.
[39] See, among many examples, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230917-remembering-the-assassination-of-count-bernadotte/ and https://www.trtworld.com/article/15767166
[40] See, https://www.newsweek.com/pro-palestinian-protest-states-colleges-illegal-bds-1895292
[41] See, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/deep-dives/2026/02/24/war-student-speech; in September 2025 prosecutors in Texas (of course) sought a 10-year prison sentence for a Palestinian activist who spray painted ‘Fuck Israel’ on the wall of a nondenominational church, see, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/01/texas-activist-prosecuted-hate-crimes
[42] Full letter can be accessed here: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135
[43] Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism, (OUP paperback, 2013), pp.123-133.
[44] The passage, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land,” is from 2 Chronicles 7:11-22.
[45] See,
[47] See, https://www.boughtbyzionism.org/aipac-lobby-groups
[48] See, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/prime-minister-benjamin-netanyahu-assures-400-evangelical-leaders-in-a-zoom-meeting-hosted-by-mike-evans-the-founder-of-friends-of-zion-center-christians-are-israels-best-friends-301917645.html