Why Are So Many Christian Evangelicals Supporting Israeli Expansion

When I read the recent story in the New York Times on American evangelical leaders pressing for Israel to annex the West Bank, I immediately recalled an anecdote from forty-five years ago. The rising religious-political celebrity, Reverend Jerry Falwell, was on the cusp of creating the Moral Majority, the political organization probably best known for its lobbying in the 1980s around issues like abortion and prayer in schools. Falwell’s foreign policy passions were a bit simpler in these early years of his political activism: oppose communism and support Israel.

To that end, he traveled in 1979 to the new Israeli settlement of Elon Moreh, a few miles northeast of the city of Nablus in the West Bank, and produced a television special profiling the band of rogue settlers who were claiming that land for the State of Israel. The settlers were members of Gush Emunim, the Orthodox Jewish group formed after the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War to settle various conquered lands by Israel. Falwell’s TV special exalted the pioneering spirit of the settlers and explained the significance of the name as the traditional site where God promised Abraham, “To your descendants will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7).