(RNS) — On Jan. 6, about 100 North Carolina pastors and their wives will travel to Israel on an all-expenses-paid trip. They will tour Galilee, where Jesus ministered, and go to Jerusalem, where Jesus was crucified. On Jan. 11, they’ll have a private dinner with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
The trip is organized by the American Renewal Project, a group dedicated to mobilizing evangelical pastors to run for office. An anonymous donor gave David Lane, a Texas political operative and evangelical Christian, $2 million for the effort.
“We believe in the Abrahamic covenant,” Lane said. “God said to Abraham, I give you my word that I’m going to give you the land. So the land is the Jews’, and because we’re evangelicals, we have been grafted in. And you know, the evangelicals are the best friends of Israel.”
But those beliefs are changing. Pro-Israel evangelicals, sometimes known as Christian Zionists, have found themselves under fire in recent months from their fellow conservatives — including podcasters and provocateurs Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens — and from Palestinian Christians and other U.S. activists who reject the idea that the modern state of Israel is the same construct as the ancient Israel of the Hebrew Bible.
In the wake of the devastating war in Gaza — in which more than 70,000 Palestinians (the majority of whom are reported to be women and children) have been killed — many younger Americans, including evangelicals, have become skeptical of Israel and of the billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded weapons the U.S. provides to it.
The latest University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll found a growing gap between younger and older evangelical Republicans. While 59% of older evangelical Republicans (age 35 and older) said Israeli actions in Gaza were justified, only 36% of younger evangelical Republicans (ages 18 to 34) said the same.
That pushback blew up online earlier this month after a video of U.S. evangelical Mike Evans, speaking to a group of 1,000 evangelical pastors, went viral. The video showed the pastors on a mass trip to Israel, organized by the Christian Zionist group Evans founded, Friends of Zion.
Evans professed his love for Israel in the video, and critics on social media began to claim he had sold out America by promoting a foreign country. The trip was funded partially by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs “to secure religious and political support for Israel.”
“We’re going to train 100,000 Christian ambassadors to be ambassadors in their own country, for the state of Israel, to defend Israel’s brand and to combat antisemitism,” Evans said in a video clip.
Evans has also feuded with Carlson, especially after the latter criticized Christian Zionists during an interview with Nick Fuentes, who has espoused antisemitic views. Evans told The Jerusalem Post that Carlson made comments Evans thought were reminiscent of the Nazis.
In a recent interview with podcaster Theo Von, Carlson accused Israel of genocide and called it an insignificant country that the U.S. should abandon. He also denounced pastors such as Evans who refused to criticize the war in Gaza, saying they’d made “deals” with the Israeli government.
That uproar came on the heels of another controversy about a plan to target megachurches with pro-Israel messages. Earlier this year, a Christian marketing group called Show Faith by Works began work on a $3.2 million marketing project paid for by the Israeli government.
The Show Faith by Works project includes creating a traveling pro-Israel museum for display at churches, Christian colleges and Christian events, and a “geofencing” campaign targeting churchgoers with pro-Israel ads, according to the filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Geofencing is a form of digital marketing that promotes messages to consumers within specified physical locations.
The goal of the project is “encouraging Christians to have a more favorable view of the Nation of Israel, and to encourage Christians to visit Israel for tourism purposes,” according to the filing.
The geofencing campaign, which came under criticism from several Christian denominations that had churches targeted, including the United Methodist Church, has since stalled.
“We feel like the comments about geofencing were intentionally misleading by those who wanted to slander the project,” Chad Schnitger, a marketing professional for Show Faith by Works, said in an email. “Geofencing is a common marketing tool that has been used for over a decade and cannot be used to track people.”
Both controversies revealed that Christian Zionists are now facing political realities for which they were not prepared.
“It’s really become a multifront struggle for the traditional pro-Israel evangelical position — not just a one-front, left-right struggle,” said Daniel G. Hummel, author of the book “Covenant Brothers,” which looks at how Christian Zionism has shaped the relationship between the U.S. and Israel. “I’m not sure if there are really robust strategies yet on how to address it.”
In podcasts, webcasts and vertical video platforms such as TikTok, conservative influencers including Carlson, Owens and Fuentes traffic in conspiracy theories and inflammatory comments that often veer into antisemitism. Owens has also been among those who have tied the assassination of Charlie Kirk to Israel, without evidence.
Criticism of Israel has also grown from centrist evangelicals.
“If you truly care about the people of Israel, you have to also care about their Palestinian neighbors, even for the sake of the security of Israel,” said Mae Elise Cannon, executive director of Churches for Middle East Peace, a coalition of 36 Christian denominations, mostly Protestant but also Orthodox and Catholic, that advocate for equality, human rights, security and justice in the Holy Land.
These U.S. churches are particularly concerned with the plight of Palestinian Christians, who have faced military occupation, forced displacement, discrimination and persecution at the hands of Israel. Yet concern for Palestinian Christians has been minimized by U.S. evangelicals or wholly ignored because of their unflagging support for Israel.
Recently, another collective, the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East, has formed, advocating for peace, justice and engagement among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the region. One of its members, Randy Tomlinson, a Southern Baptist layman who lives in the Nashville, Tennessee, area, said he’s been hearing concerns from a lot from older pastors in the denomination.
“Twenty-six months into this war, more and more people are saying, ‘I look at what I’m seeing in the land and I’m not sure I can square that with my faith, and I don’t know what to do about it,’” Tomlinson said.
He doesn’t advocate abandoning Israel, but he does think evangelicals need to think more critically about Israel’s actions.
“I can ask God to bless the Jewish people but that doesn’t preclude me from loving the Palestinian people, from my heart breaking for the Palestinian church that’s dying,” he said. “We’re a generation or two away from not being the church in this place where the church started, and so, I think we need to get out of that zero-sum mindset, and get back to a point where it could be both.”
Evangelicals have long seen Israel’s rebirth in 1948 and the capture of the West Bank and Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War as signs that biblical prophecy has been fulfilled. Beliefs about the end times and the second coming of Jesus are often tied to Israel — in large part because of the strain of theology known as dispensationalism, which has flourished over the last 200 years. That theology inspired the idea of the rapture, the popular “Left Behind” book series, and other apocalyptic tales.
But that theology has started to fade, especially with the evangelical resurgence of Reformed theology based on the works of John Calvin. And if Christian Zionist groups can no longer count on a theological consensus among evangelicals about Israel, that’s a problem. “That’s where you’re basically turning it into a PR political conversation and Israel doesn’t look great in that conversation in recent years,” Hummel said.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry, aware its public profile has crashed, has allocated $150 million in its annual budget to rehabilitate its image, especially among evangelicals. Responsible Statecraft reported that that includes a $6 million contract with a firm called Clock Tower X, owned by former Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale, to deliver “at least 100 core pieces of content per month” — including videos, audio, podcasts, graphics and text — and “5,000 derivative versions” monthly. The project will help game algorithms and manage artificial-intelligence frameworks with a positive message about Israel. The campaign messages will be distributed via Salem Media Network, a conservative Christian media group.
Israel’s foreign ministry also has a campaign with Bridges Partners, a Washington-based consulting firm, to create an influencer network called the Esther Project (of no relation to the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther). Influencers can earn as much as $7,000 per post.
The publicity produced for these campaigns not only portrays Israel in a good light, it also characterizes Palestinians chiefly through the prism of Hamas. It asserts that Palestinians are complicit in Hamas’ leadership, financing and military operations and accuses them of sheltering terrorists.
Many evangelical groups are still invested in helping Israel. Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project, is developing a new program called Generation Zion, aimed at training young evangelicals and young Jews as advocates for Israel. Moon, who said the Philos Project gets no funding from Israel, attended AmericaFest, an annual conservative event organized by Turning Point USA, this past week, hoping to recruit students and other younger Americans to support Israel.
Moon recently left the task force dedicated to fighting antisemitism within the conservative Heritage Foundation after its president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson’s podcast with Fuentes.
He believes a straightforward reading of the Bible shows that Israel should matter to Christians.
Along with the decline of dispensationalism and the rise of conservative critics, pro-Israel groups face more pragmatic challenges, Moon said.
“We don’t have a good grasp on social media, on the pro-Israel side,” he said.
Hummel said some Christian Zionists have begun citing what he called “blessing theology” to promote the idea that Christians should support Israel. Some of those Christian Zionists are Pentecostal or charismatic Christians who see supporting Israel as part of the prosperity gospels. Others are Southern Baptists or evangelicals who say that the Bible commands them to support Israel.
Earlier this year, when Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist minister, visited the City of David — an archaeological site in Jerusalem — he quoted from a familiar passage of Genesis to justify U.S. support for Israel. “Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed,” he said, quoting Genesis 12, according to his official remarks. “And I come here tonight because I’d rather have a blessing than a curse.”
Evans, of Friends of Zion, worries younger evangelicals and younger Americans generally will no longer support Israel. He blamed America’s universities for that, as well as online influencers such as Carlson, who have large audiences. Evans has seen the polling, and things don’t look good.
“The Israel haters have achieved an astonishing amount of damage to the young generation,” he said.
Evans said that while he loves Israel, he does not believe the nation always does the right thing, in the same way that the U.S. has flaws. For him, there’s a more fundamental connection to Israel that’s inspired pastors to support Israel.
“Their faith came out of this land,” he said. “Their Bible came out of this land. So that’s their connection. It’s not about politics or prophecy.”
And there are plenty of evangelical pastors who will still gladly travel to Israel, especially on a free trip.
Mike Burner, pastor of Calvary Chapel in Statesville, North Carolina, is one of them. He and his wife, Lobby, will be part of the group heading to Israel next month with the American Renewal Project.
“I’m in love with the Lord, and the Lord loves Israel,” Mike Burner said. “So, I’m going to love Israel. Do I think Israel is still the apple of his eye? I do. God said he is going to save Israel. I believe that. I believe that’s one of the promises he makes, and he keeps every one of his promises.”
Now other evangelicals are saying that uncritical support for Israel is un-Christian.
“That’s not Jesus’ way, that’s not peacemaking,” Tomlinson said. “That’s not caring for the other, that’s not praying for those who persecute you. I cannot hear Jesus saying that.”
