By: Ralph Reed - wsj.com - November 7, 2025

The Pew Research Center reported in 2022 that more than twice as many white evangelical Protestants (70%) as Jews (32%) believe God gave Israel to the Jewish people. White evangelicals are far more likely than the public to have a favorable view (86%) of Israelis.

Given the size and dynamism of the evangelical vote, this has clear implications for U.S. foreign policy, and the backlash from the media and opinion elites has been fierce. The media routinely caricatures evangelical support for Israel as a function of their eschatology. In an article on Christian backing for Israel’s action in Gaza, two New York Times news reporters found it “impossible to disentangle” pro-Israel attitudes from “apocalyptic predictions” that interpret current events as “the culminations of prophecies recorded in the Bible.” A columnist for MSNBC warned that evangelicals believe “war is not something to be avoided, but something inevitable, desired by God, and celebratory.”

In this liberal fantasy, evangelicals embrace Israel because its existence begins the final countdown to Armageddon. This conflation of theology with allegedly hawkish foreign-policy views is no longer confined to the left. Tucker Carlsonrecently pronounced Christian support for Israel a “heresy” and a “brain virus.”

In truth, evangelical support for Israel is complex and nuanced, mixing humanitarian, theological and patriotic impulses. For most of the history of evangelicalism, Israel was a distant concern. In the 19th century, after the Second Great Awakening, few traveled to the Holy Land. A Jewish homeland in backwaters of the Ottoman empire seemed unattainable, and pressing domestic concerns like slavery and temperance took precedence.

That changed after World War II with the horrifying revelations of the Holocaust. The creation of a Jewish state out of the former British mandate became a humanitarian imperative, and when the U.S. became one of the first nations to recognize the modern state of Israel in 1948, Christians broadly supported it.

Evangelicals view Israel through the prism of a celebrated tradition of Christians who opposed the Nazis and rescued Jews from Hitler’s death camps. Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered by the SS before he could be freed by Allied troops, is lionized in American churches, and his letters from prison became standard reading in Bible studies. Corrie ten Boom, who survived the camps after her family hid Jews in her native Holland, became a featured speaker at Billy Graham’s crusades, with her bestselling 1971 autobiography “The Hiding Place” made into a popular film (produced by Graham’s ministry) that was a forerunner of today’s faith-based film industry. From ten Boom and other “righteous Gentiles,” evangelicals learned that being a good Christian meant defending Jews.

But rather than a false and patronizing philosemitism, Christian empathy for the Jewish people is leavened with a clear-eyed assessment of U.S. security interests and the geopolitics of the Middle East. During the Cold War, as Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and other Arab nations allied themselves with the Soviet Union, Israel emerged as a vital strategic partner to America. Like Ronald Reagan, evangelicals viewed communism as a moral evil to be resisted, and Israel became a beachhead for democratic capitalism and America’s most reliable ally in the region.

This alliance grew stronger during the war on terror. Israel’s radical Islamic foes became America’s enemies, and its struggle the West’s struggle. After Sept. 11, 2001, the worst attack on U.S. soil in history, Americans suffered national trauma that caused many to feel sympathy for the plight of Israelis in confronting terrorist threats. Evangelicals largely shared this sentiment.

President Trump has shown a commitment to Israel’s security that rivals that of his evangelical supporters. He relocated the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan heights, provided critical support to end the war in Gaza and bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. More broadly, his fresh approach to the Middle East rejected decades of sclerotic diplomacy focused singularly on Palestinian statehood, embraced an emerging Sunni coalition against Iran and made possible the historic Abraham Accords. This is one of the primary drivers of evangelical support for Mr. Trump.

Christians also cherish Israel as the cradle of their faith. It is why Vice President JD Vance insisted that he visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during a recent trip to Israel. It is the land where Jesus was born and conducted his ministry. Since gaining control of east Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has provided greater access to the holy sites of all faiths.

Evangelical Christians understand that a larger civilizational struggle lies at the heart of the dispute over Israel’s existence. In “The Israel Test” (2009), George Gilder argues that “the incontestable facts of Jewish excellence constitute a universal test not only for antisemitism but also for liberty and the justice of the civil order.” Democratic and capitalist societies that reward achievement and success have historically allowed Jews to rise and prosper. It is no accident of history that those creeds and movements that reject capitalism—Nazism, Soviet communism, radical Islam—also feature noxious antisemitism.

Evangelicals support Israel because they love God, cherish their country, and believe faith and freedom are inseparable. Israel, like the U.S., is a beacon for those timeless and, one hopes, eternal values.