Front Burner - How Christian Zionism became a key force in U.S. politics

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Christian Zionism — the belief that the modern state of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy — has existed as a theological concept for well over a century. But in the past couple decades its political power and influence in the United States has surged, with many of Donald Trump's closest political allies among its adherents.Today we're taking a look at the theological roots of Christian Zionism, how it became a political force in America, and its impacts on U.S.-Israel policy.Our guest is Daniel Hummel, the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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We've covered the U.S.-Israel relationship on this show before, but today we're focusing on the theology that motivates millions of American Christians to provide unflagging support for the Jewish state. It's called Christian Zionism. a belief that predates the state of Israel and which sees U.S. Israel relations through the lens of a biblical prophecy about the end times. Its adherents are deeply abetted in the Republican Party and the MAGA movement.

From senators like Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Tom Cotton. Growing up in Sunday school, I was taught those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. A word of warning. If America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us.

to former Vice President Mike Pence, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Trump's current ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. We believe the Bible, and therefore that connection is not geopolitical. It is also spiritual. With nearly 80 million evangelical Christians in the U.S., they are the country's largest religious group and one of its most powerful voting blocks. And while not all evangelicals are Christian Zionists, they are the American religious group most likely to accomplish.

express favorable views of the state of Israel. Daniel Hummel is a scholar of Christian Zionism and author of Covenant Brothers, Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S. Israeli relations. He joins the show today to explain the tenets of Christian Zionism. He'll tell us how this theology became such a key political force in the United States and why it's driving U.S. policy in the Middle East. Daniel, thanks so much for coming on Frontburner. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Okay, so let's start really at the beginning with perhaps the most basic question. What is Christian Zionism? Right. So a really simple definition would be that Christian Zionism is any argument for the state of Israel that relies on Christian theological or biblical arguments. So there's all different types of Christians that could be Christian Zionist. We tend to find them mostly in evangelical Christianity and Pentecostal Christianity today, but over the history of the state of Israel and the history of the question of Zionism,

there have been all different types of Christians that have argued for a state of Israel in the Middle East, and they would all be counted as Christian Zionists. So how far back are we talking about? What is the general historical timeline of this movement? Right. So in terms of the ideas of some type of expectation by Christians, that Jews would return to their biblical land that is talked about in the Old Testament, that history goes back very far.

It goes back at least to the Reformation, so we're talking to the 16th century, where a number of the Protestant reformers had ideas like this in their heads and would write about them. More to the sort of the contemporary moment, you really see Christian Zionists in smaller numbers, but some of them are quite important and working with the political Zionist movement of Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism in the late 19th century. And so you have Christian Zionists all through that period and then up through the middle of the 20th century, the 1948 when Israel is founded. When we think about the modern Christian Zionist movement in, particularly in the United States,

but there's also evidence of it in other countries, that's really a post-1967 movement. And so in 1967 is a crucial year because of a major war, where Israel has a stunning victory over many of its Arab opponents. And this is where Israel begins to occupy places like the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Six-Day War had lasting political consequences as well. Israel found itself militarily dominant for the first time and suddenly three times larger territorially. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, hoping war would lead to independence, instead

found themselves under Israeli occupation. For many Israelis, the war was a miraculous retelling of the David and Goliath story. In the Arab world, the war becomes known as the Naksa or the setback. And so you see a massive grassroots movement emerge after the 1967 war in places like the United States among evangelical Christians. So that movement is much newer than the ideas of the movement that go back many, many centuries. I want to get you to talk a bit more about that kind of Pentecostal version of Christian Zionism, and particularly its view of the end-of-time narrative, and where Jews fit in within that vision? So many Pentecostals, along with many evangelical Christians, have inherited a type of end-times

view. We call that eschatology in sort of theological terminology, a view of the end times, that really features heavily the Jewish people and the state of Israel. The idea is that the next era, after our current era, is really gonna be focused on the nation of Israel. And in particular, the way that God's going to establish his millennial kingdom in Jerusalem, in like the physical, literal city of Jerusalem today,

and that he will be the king, so to speak, of Israel. And the particular dispensationalist system believes that the next thing that's gonna happen in the world, prophetically speaking, is that God will rapture the church or take the church away from the earth. And that will allow God to begin working directly with Israel again. And there will be a series of horrible things happening to Israel and to the rest of the world. There will be a one world dictator that is often talked about as the Antichrist. There will be a massive culminating battle in Israel called Armageddon.

There are two major wars that are going to be fought in Israel before the end of time. And that war is the Gog-Meg-War, which you see happening right now. And three and a half years later, the Battle of Armageddon, a massive army led by China, the Bible says, with 200 million people. And then ultimately, the good guys will win, Jesus will win, and establish his kingdom in Jerusalem. And so there's a lot of interest in Israel because many Christians, evangelicals and Pentecostals in particular, believe all these things are going to literally happen, and they're going to happen in what is today part of the state of Israel. God Almighty is the defender of Israel. The Bible says, He that keepeth, keepeth is a military

term. He that defends Israel, neither slumbers nor sleeps. God said, I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you. What is God's... In that eventual kingdom that Jesus will rule over in Israel, or what is now Israel, like, where are Jews in that vision? Have they converted to Christianity? Do they still exist as the Jewish people? How do Christian Zionists see that particular phase of the end times? As with many of these, there's a lot of conversation among Christian Zionists,

and these are not just sort of speculations that have no weight to them. These have very significant consequences for how Jews and Christians relate to each other. As you can imagine, if the idea is that all of these Jews in the millennial kingdom will actually be following Jesus as their savior, well, then for Jews, that feels like that's basically an erasure of their people. And so that is the traditional view. That's the view that many evangelicals and Pentecostals hold, which is that once all this stuff happens, the Jews will have no choice but to recognize that Jesus is the true

Messiah and the true king, and they will become essentially Christians. They will worship Jesus as their Lord. There are other views, and some of them are actually quite popular among Christian Zionist activists, that actually that's not what the end times will exactly be like. There is a special end state for the Jewish people that is different than the rest of humanity. This is sometimes called a dual covenant theology, meaning that there's a one covenant for the Jewish people and a second covenant for the rest of humanity. You can imagine this is a more popular view among activists who want to be able to work with Jews and not make the Jews feel like the ultimate agenda here is to convert them. And I'm wondering also how we should think about Christian Zionism within the

larger evangelical movement in the United States? Are Christian Zionists a certain subset of evangelical Christians? Yeah, they are definitely a subset. So even this theology we've been talking about, this dispensational theology, this is popular, but by no means the only theological tradition in modern American evangelicalism. So even within American evangelicalism, There's a wide variety of views on Israel and the Middle East. There's also a pretty growing generational gap on these views where older evangelicals tend to hold these views while younger evangelicals don't, even within the same traditions. And if you go outside of American evangelicalism, there are many other types of evangelicals from different countries, different traditions, that would see what Christian Zionists talk about as very formal. to how they see the world. So in fact, you know, Christian Zionism would be a minority view

if you took all Christians together. But there's an interesting sort of, you know, for reasons having to do with history and sociology and other things. In the American context, there is a large number of evangelicals who do hold to these views. And in the last few decades, they become very organized. And they have, you know, major organizations like Christians unite for Israel, which was founded about 20 years ago, a major lobby organization advocating for Christian support for Israel. And if you look at the Corinthiansians United for Israel literature, they claim to be speaking for evangelicals, all evangelicals, when they articulate a very pro-Israel position.

I was wondering, Daniel, if you could also just talk a bit more about that the similarities and the differences between Jewish and Christians. Zionism. Like where do they overlap and where do they diverge? Certainly today, there's a lot of overlap between the Christian Zionists who are politically active in the U.S. and the current Israeli government as represented by Netanyahu and the parties in his coalition. There's definitely a sense of what you might call a maximalist view of Israel's right to the land that includes a desire to control all of the West Bank. The idea that Israel has not only sort of a right through conquest of the 1967 war to control the West Bank, but they have a right based on

their ancient lineage and heritage of that land to actually control it and annex it as part of Israel. From both sides, Jewish and Christian Zionists who are of this vein, they don't even refer to the West Bank as the West Bank. They refer to it as Judea and Samaria, which are the biblical designations of that area. I want to use terms that live from time immemorial, and those are the terms like promised land and Judea, Samaria, these are biblical terms. I tell people there is no occupation. It is a land that is occupied, but the people who have had a rightful deed to the place for 3,500 years since the time of Abraham. There's also a shared skepticism of a Palestinian state being viable. And for many of them, whether there is even such a thing as a Palestinian

people or nation, Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel, who's a longstanding Christian Zionist, has been pretty open about his skepticism that there is a Palestinian people that deserve a nation. There really is no such thing as, I have to be careful in saying this, because people really get up, there's really no sense of Palestine. It's not. It's not. There's such complexity within that.

There's really no such thing. That's been a political tool to try to force land away from Israel. And that's something that he shares with many Israeli Zionists as well. And then one third similarity is that both Christian Zionists and you can say Jewish Zionists, or particularly the Zionists that are leading Israel now, they have a shared sort of analysis of Israel's enemies. They are quite fixated on the nation of Iran, which we've seen recently in the news. There's a concern about these networks of terrorist groups or non-state actors that include Hezbollah, Hamas, and others. Underland is a deep suspicion of Islam and its

compatibility with sort of allowing a Jewish state, allowing the state of Israel. Israel. I'm interested also, Daniel, in the way that Christian Zionism has manifested itself as a kind of political movement. And, you know, I understand you've been on these tours of Israel that are organized for evangelical Americans, Trump's ambassador, Mike Huckabee, Trump's ambassador at Israel, that is, Mike Huckabee, he's actually led dozens of these tours himself. They're sometimes compared to what birthright is for young North American Jews. What is the purpose of these trips. Like what do they accomplish? What happens on these things? So yeah, Mike Huckabee's been giving these tours for decades and decades and maybe a short story about one of his tours

illustrates what they're trying to accomplish. So on many of his tours, he would, he's the leader. He's a tour guide. So he gets to set the agenda. And often the tours, after you land in Tel Aviv, you drive to Masada, which is a sort of a popular site in Israel. It's up in the desert. It's got a great view. It's sort of up in a mountainous area. And it's the site of a of a Jewish resistance group that held out against the Romans in the 80 in the 70s back when the Jews were rebelling against the Roman Empire. And so this is an entirely non-Christian site. But he will take them there. He'll take his Christian tour groups there, Mike Huckabee will. And he will lead them up to the top and they will do a couple things. One is they'll sing a hymn, a mighty four,

Fortress is our God. It's a classic Christian hymn. The other thing he'll do is he'll give them a history of Masada and the sort of very Jewish history of the place. And then he'll tell the tourists, he says, you know, welcome home. This is your homeland, just as it is the Jewish people's homeland because this is the land of Christ. And his point there is to try to get these Christians who are coming usually from, you know, parts of the United States to really see Israel as a second homeland, as their spiritual homeland, if they have a sort of legal or citizen homeland in the U.S. This is their spiritual homeland. And so they should be deeply invested in the sort of fate of Israel. And they should also internalize the history of Israel and the Jewish people as part of their own history. Most Americans, they simply cannot appreciate how small geographically Israel is, how vulnerable it is, and how much it means to have the American support so that it may maintain its integrity, not only in terms of geographical borders, but for its own security and for the safety of its people and how interrelated we are. The United States and Israel mirror each other

in so many ways. If you're a Christian, you inherently care about the Jewish people, and ideally for him, that would be vice versa as well, that Jewish people should care about the fate of Christian people as well. But this would be an entirely surprising view for most of Christian history, where Christianity and Judaism were contrasted with each other. Christians tended to persecute Jews, tended to see them as outsiders, as cursed, and ultimately as having lost God's favor. And, you know, that view has been credited with many horrible things in European history, culminating in the Holocaust, where plenty of scholarship has shown that these views that Christians have held about Jews played into at least the easy road the Nazis had in perpetrating their anti-Semitism.

But you can see Huckabee here giving a totally different read on the history of Jewish-Christian relations, and really trying through the tour to inculcate that view among his Christian tourists, who will then go back to the U.S. and have a, ideally, have a totally different view of Israel as not just a far country or even one that has sort of an ancient biblical significance where Jesus walked or something like that, but is a live concern of evangelical Christians because they themselves are bound up in the history of that land. We are gathered here today to celebrate life's big milestones. Do you promise to stand together through home purchases, auto upgrades, and surprise dents and dings? We do.

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of the Christian Zionist movement. You mentioned that in the United States, it's kind of grown in popularity, certainly after the 1967 war. What about more recently? Like, when does this movement become politically significant to right-wing politics in the U.S.? During the 70s and 80s and 90s, there were obviously a lot of evangelical Christians that cared about Israel and voted for candidates who supported Israel and so forth. But during those decades, this is the decades of the moral majority and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, a lot of politically active evangelicalism. There was never a single issue organization that had as its issue supporting the state of Israel as evangelicals. There were smaller organizations that did, but in terms of a national organization.

That all changed in 2006 with the founding of Christians United for Israel by the pastor John Hagee. John Hegey had been active in this space for decades, going all the way back to the early 1980s. And in 2006, in part because 2006 was one of the times that the Iranian government announced that they were starting up their nuclear weapons program again, Hegey decided to found Christians United for Israel as the first national single-issue organization on this issue. In a second verse, Isaiah 621, for Zion's sake, Zion is Israel, for Zion's sake, I will not remain silent. God is saying through the pen of Isaiah that there will come a day that it's important for Christians to speak up and stand up in defense of Israel and the Jewish people. And today they say they have over 11 million members.

And if that's true, that means that that single organization has basically, you know, more members in it than there are American Jews in the entire United States. And just gives you a sense of how, you know, how many evangelicals there are in the United States, because that is not even a majority of evangelicals are part of that organization. But how significant of a block Hege can claim to speak for. And so since 2006, Christian Night for Israel has continued to grow in its influence. become a major area of thought and activism, not just on sort of national diplomacy with Israel, but also on state-level legislation around opposing the boycott, divestment, and sanction movement that pro-Palestinian groups are attempting to try to force Israel into peace negotiations. Christian Design for Israel found chapters of student groups at various

colleges around the country to sort of have a pro-Israel voice on these college campuses. And it's become a place for national Republican politicians to basically, I don't want to overstate it, but in some sense, if you want to be a serious Republican candidate for president, you're probably making a stop at a Christians United for Israel summit. So most of the major Republican candidates for president in the last few cycles have had some relationship to Christians United for Israel. Some of them have been very close. People like Mike Pence and Mike Huckabee have been, you know, very, very close. But other people like Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley, and I could go on and on, have had repeated sort of dealings with

Christians United for Israel. But there is another resurrection that we are celebrating today. And by that I mean the resurrection and the restoration of the unshakable, of the unalterable, of the iron-clad friendship between the United States and the state of Israel. And then during Trump's first term and now during his second term,

Christianity's eye for Israel has been one of the closest advisors or sources of input for the Trump administration on what his base is thinking about Israel. In the first Trump administration, this manifested in one particular way, which was the moving

of the embassy, the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv. This has been a long, a long-running goal of Christian Zionists, among others, to move that embassy to Jerusalem as a sort of statement that the capital of Israel is Jerusalem in the eyes of the U.S. Trump did that within the first year in office and credited Christian Zionists as the main reason why he did it. And because of that courage of our president, we gather here today to consecrate the great upon which the United States Embassy will stand reminding the dictators of the world that America and Israel are forever united. We thank you for... You mentioned John Hagey there and his influence and the influence of Christians United for Israel,

but Hagee himself, you know, has called Hitler a half-breed Jew. That's a quote. He's claimed that God sent Hitler to create Israel. These are comments that were really. widely considered to be anti-Semitic. How widespread is that kind of rhetoric within the Christian Zionist movement? Yeah, and Hagee has made those comments. He probably hasn't made them in recent years as often, but he made them in such a number that back in 2008, when John McCain was running for president, he sought Hagee's endorsement and Hagee gave it. And then these comments came out, among other comments, that Hagee had made. And McCain had to sort of awkwardly reject the endorsement that he had accepted

because it was not something McCain wanted to be associated with. McCain now, today, makes a dramatic turnaround, and it's because of our inquiries about remarks that Pastor Hagee made many years ago in sermons, in which one in particular, in which he talked about Jews and the Holocaust, and what he believed was God's plan to bring the Jews back to Israel. Behold, I will send for many fishers. actor will I send for many hunters. And they, the hunters, shall hunt them. That will be the Jews. Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun, and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.

You know, one thing to think about with Hagee is he has changed his views over the years. I wouldn't want to excuse any of the things he said, but he is also sort of publicly recanted from some of them. They come from this deeper ambivalence about people like Hitler who persecute. Jews, but in certain interpretations, those persecutions lead to things like a, you know, a further clarified need for like a state of Israel, that someone like Hagee who sees God at work in all things, including things that might on the surface seem very evil, but Hagee would say they all work together for God's good. He sees God's agency behind the persecution of Jews as well because he ultimately thinks that the prophecies are going to be fulfilled in the way they've

been interpreted. But there are many, many Christian Zionists who have a similar view that they don't think Hitler was a good guy or anything like that. But they do see the persecution of the Jewish people as some part of God's will. As you've laid things out there, Daniel, like it would seem to be. be that Christian Zionists in the U.S. and the Israeli right, people like Benjamin Netanyahu and the good party and his coalition partners, they would seem, there's strange bedfellows here. And yet Netanyahu himself has spent a long time cultivating this relationship with Christian Zionists. How does Israeli politicians reconcile their alliance with Christian Zionists who may hold

beliefs that otherwise they would find problematic. I think a lot of it is a pragmatism that Israel is always on the lookout for allies, particularly in the U.S., because the U.S. is such an important part of Israel's foreign policy. And Christians have been there for close to 50 years now in an organized fashion, and they've become a very important part of American politics. And so there's a lot of pragmatism to the role. relationship. There's a lot of willingness to let some of these controversial issues become side issues to the core issue of coordinating the sort of diplomatic PR and even military defense

of Israel. There's a sort of class of very polished and competent activists and organizers in the Christian Zionist space that occupy organizations like Christians and I for Israel, also organizations like Bridges for Peace, which is another one of these big American founded organizations. Another one is the international Christian embassy in Jerusalem. These all become sort of part of the ecosystem of Christian Zionist support. And they're all staffed by very competent and very measured people who, by measured, I mean, they know how to interact with both Christian and Israeli communities in a very, you could say, politically productive way.

And so when the Israeli government is dealing with those people, they're dealing with professionals and they're dealing with people who understand Israeli society, understand how to say things in ways that don't cause controversy. You talk about the importance of prophecy to Christian Zionists and kind of their overall view of the end time. So when something as momentous as the October 7th attacks happen, how do Christian Zionists interpret it? How do they understand what happened that day and how do they understand Israel's response? Their immediate response, which we saw in a number of sermons that were delivered the week,

the Sunday right after October 7th, was to try to fit in the event into a pretty distinct or specific timeline, prophetic timeline, and to start to begin to speculate on what would happen next based on the apparent fulfillment of prophecy that October 7th had done as sort of a function. God is going to laugh and ridicule these armies that come against Israel. And then he says he will break them with a rod of iron and shall crush them to pieces like a potter's vessel. Hello, China, Russia, Iran, Turkey. The day you lift your hand to attack Israel, God all. Almighty is going to crush you.

For many of us as we see supporters of the Palestinians and, you know, opposition to Israel's war in Gaza as a justice issue, Christian Zionists see it also as a justice issue, but they see it from the other perspective. And so the way they interpreted October 7th was as both revealing the evil of Hamas and of all of Israel's enemies in the Middle East and giving Israel the warrant to really pursue its national interest in Gaza to the full extent that the state deemed its national interest was at stake. And this is one of the dynamics that Christian Zionists have tended to go to over the recent decades is more than any specific policy proposal or any specific peace plan, Christian Zionists have really deferred to the Israeli government to decide what is the goal of a given war or a given peace process or a given policy. And some would look at that and say sort of derogatively that it's like a blank check

diplomacy. Basically, whatever Israel does, Christian Zionists are going to support. That's more or less, I would say that's more or less accurate. But the more sympathetic way to portray that is that Christian Zionists are acknowledging that the Israeli government knows its interests better than Christian Zionists do. And so the role of the faithful Christian is to support the state of Israel rather than dictate to the state of Israel its policies. You know, the relationship between the United States and Israel has long been described as one being special, right from the kind of the birth of the state of Israel. How do you think that relationship, though, has changed because of Christian Zionism? Like, what has Christian Zionism's contribution been to the way that the United

States sees Israel and its role supporting Israel? Right. So, yeah, going well back into the early 20th century, there's been a sense that there's a special interest by America. Americans in general to Zionism and then to the state of Israel, for a lot of the middle part of the 20th century, from 1948 when Israel was founded through the 50s, through the 60s, that shared affinity was based on things like a sense that Israel was a beleaguered humanitarian cause after the Holocaust, that Americans should support, that Israel was a settler pioneering type country, just like the U.S. was. that Israel was based on Judeo or Jewish values and that the U.S. was based on Christian values. And so there was some compatibility there, that Israel was a democracy in a largely non-democratic region. And then there has just been a much more overt sense of evangelical understandings of Israel and prophecy, certainly in the last 10 to 15 years. I mean, I remember when when Mike Pence became the vice president, he's been a long time Christian Zionist,

and he started making speeches about Israel. There's a certain general pro-Israel attitude that American presidents and vice presidents had for a very long time, but they tend to be couched in the more general terms that I was just describing about democracy and humanitarianism and so forth. And Pence would talk much more openly about the way his reading of the Bible animated his belief in the legitimacy of the state of Israel. My friends, to look at Israel is to see that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob keeps his promises. Ezekiel prophesied, and I quote, behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. And the state of Israel and her people bear witness to God's faithfulness

as well as their own. And that type of language just has not been part of the public discourse from, certainly from the presidency until the last 10 or so years. Even a supposedly or so-called evangelical president like George W. Bush, who had a very strong faith commitments as he was in the White House, did not talk about Israel in that way. Now, there are a variety of reasons why someone like Mike Pence would talk that way, but one of them is that the Christian Zionist culture has become part of the Republican Party culture over the last couple decades or so. So I think you see just a much different, a much more pointed articulation of the role of religion and politics, ideological

framings of U.S. Israel affinity, and what makes that relationship special. It's not just shared civic values or shared ethical values. It's also a shared theological and you could even say sacred history that the two nations share. You know, another irony here for me is the other party to this conversation, the Palestinians. The Palestinians, right, that they represent one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. And by all accounts, Palestinian Christians have been killed in the occupied territories over the last two years. many have also been forced to flee. How is it that the Bible compels U.S. evangelicals to express all of this support and solidarity for the nation of Israel, but not their fellow Christians in Gaza or the West Bank?

Yeah, this is one of the puzzles that continues to occupy a lot of observers. You know, one of the pieces to the puzzle is that while they're, as you mentioned, the Palestinian Christian community is very old and very, you can say distinguished. I mean, Bethlehem is part of the West Bank. It's birthplace of Jesus. But most of those Palestinian Christians tend to be Orthodox Christians. So they tend to come from a different tradition than evangelicalism. And in a real sort of base way, they are very different Christians. They dress differently. They talk differently. They practice their faith very differently. So there is a strained, there is a strained relationship just. within the Christian world between evangelical Christians and Orthodox Christians on a number of theological and cultural points. There is also something specific about Palestinian Christianity or the condition of Palestinian Christians that evangelicals tend not to gravitate towards. Part of that is the theology of Palestinian Christians because quite understandably of their situation, they tend to be highly skeptical of any theological argument for the state of Israel.

And evangelicals tend to find those arguments really compelling. And evangelicals also tend to really interpret the state of Israel as a victim, as an underdog, and as still a post-Holocast solution to the problem of anti-Semitism. This is something that was really at the forefront during the 60s and 70s when the Christian Science Movement was forming, much closer to the time of the Holocaust, but really a sense that Christians had failed to protect the Jewish people during the 1930s and 1940s, and that it was really incumbent upon Christians of that era and up till today to be ever vigilant in protecting the Jewish people. And I would say that concern for most evangelical Christians who are Christian Zionists, it overrides the concerns of other minorities in the region.

I will say this is one of the trends we see with the younger evangelicals is that they tend to identify much more with the Palestinian perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict. They tend to see Palestinians as the victims and Israelis as the occupiers and aggressors. And that leads to much more sympathy with the Palestinian people, a Christian or not. Daniel, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing those insights with us. It's been a pleasure talking to you. That's all for today. I'm Jonathan Mopensy, in for Jimmy Poussa. We'll talk to you again tomorrow.

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