On Jan. 17, the Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches of Jerusalem, an assembly of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox leaders in Jerusalem, released a statement referring to Christian Zionism as a “damaging ideolog[y].” The statement ricocheted around social media and drew special attention from the Catholic corner of the podcast ecosystem. The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, a Catholic commentator with more than two million YouTube subscribers, released a video entitled “Why I’m Not a ‘Christian Zionist,’” in which he offered a faithful paraphrase of the Catholic Church’s traditional (pre–Vatican II) position on Israel: “I don’t think that the Jews are entitled to the Holy Land because of some religious premise. I don’t think that’s true. In fact, being Christian, I believe the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New Testament; Christ is the new covenant.” For Knowles, Catholics are not supposed to believe that Jews have a divine right to the Holy Land because, according to Catholic teaching, Jews do not enjoy God’s favor and are not in fact God’s people—unless they are also confessing Christians.
On the very day of the Jerusalem statement’s release, Tucker Carlson posted a video of his conversation with the young Christian evangelist Bryce Crawford. In the clip, Carlson delivered a much less modulated rebuke to Christian Zionism than either the Patriarchs or Knowles had:
What gets me going is watching Christian preachers, who are paid by the government of Israel, take free vacations to Israel, where they stock up on talking points and propaganda and then inflict all of that propaganda on their congregations and then use the Bible to justify it. You’re justifying violence against innocents, and all of a sudden … [t]hese evangelical pastors come in and are like, if you criticize [Israel’s genocide], you’re not a Christian, and you hate Jesus, and you hate Jews.
Though not a Catholic, Carlson has repeatedly denigrated what he regards as the watering-down of Christianity in his own Episcopal Church. By contrast, he has heaped praise on Catholicism for its liturgical and sacramental traditionalism. On a 2025 episode of his show, he told Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, “I may be too shallow for Catholic theology, but I love what you’re saying.”
Carlson’s fixation on Israel, particularly his conversation with the Jew-baiting Nick Fuentes late last year, has been covered as part of a broader right-wing crack-up over support for Israel and the collapse of the right’s guardrails against antisemitism. Jewish establishment organizations, which have, for years, been putting more of their eggs in the right-wing basket, are now in scramble mode. It is for that reason that Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt excoriated the anti-Israel faction of the right at a Los Angeles synagogue in early January: “Nick Fuentes is disgusting, Tucker Carlson is disgusting, Candace Owens is disgusting, and so on, but there have been good people like Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro … pushing back on these revolting lunatics.”
However revolting Greenblatt may find his triumvirate of anti-Israel podcasters, efforts to marginalize them as extreme or hateful are unlikely to succeed. The real reason is not because the right is fundamentally antisemitic or anti-Zionist. It’s that the American right is becoming more skeptical of the theological commitment to a certain conception of global progress that has long made Anglo-American Protestantism an ally of Zionism. Even if the reports of a religious revival have been oversold, there is little doubt that the future of American Christianity is shifting further and further away from mainline Protestantism, and toward the Catholic and Orthodox churches. (Fuentes and Owens are both Catholics, and Carlson has repeatedly praised the Roman church.) It is this theological drift that harbinges the decline of Christian Zionism.
The simplest way to think about the history of Christian Zionism is to see it as part of a wider nineteenth-century agenda of social reform and global ambition. Put another way, support for Christian Zionism has been inseparable from support for progress more broadly.
In imperial Britain, where Christian Zionism was born, economic industrialization and demographic urbanization created new and ever more harrowing spectacles of destitution. The Victorian London of Karl Marx’s exile and Dickens’s novels was also the London where British elites considered how to resolve the quandaries of another population of unfortunates: the Jews.
In this environment, devout evangelicals were often on the frontlines of social welfare projects. Evangelicalism’s promise of being “born again” also paved the road to more ambitious programs of social transformation. In A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor refers to this orientation as an “evangelical turning to the world.” Thus, in addition to the repatriation of European Jews to the Holy Land, Anglo-Evangelicals fought for temperance, abolition, poor houses, and public education.
Crucially, the idea of progress in nineteenth-century Britain went hand in hand with paternalism and colonialism. Progress and civilization were understood to stretch as far as the empire could reach. The entwinement of expansionist foreign policy and religious idealism in the British Empire should be familiar to anyone who lived through the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Taken at face value, a remarkable and distinctly Protestant optimism has undergirded both British and American imperial exploits. Through conquest, occupation, and reeducation (democratization), British and American leaders have long supposed that the whole world might become civilized.
However revolting Greenblatt may find his triumvirate of anti-Israel podcasters, efforts to marginalize them as extreme or hateful are unlikely to succeed.
In 1917, Lord Rothschild famously received a letter pledging the British Empire’s support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Arthur Balfour, the declaration’s author, was a devoted Christian Zionist, and was as committed to the idea of the empire’s benevolence as he was to the prospect of the Jews being restored to Palestine. Meanwhile, when President Woodrow Wilson decided to signal his support for the Balfour Declaration, he did so in large part because of the tireless advocacy of William E. Blackstone, a fervent Christian Zionist.
The son of a Presbyterian minister and theology professor, Wilson himself was awash in many of the same Protestant enthusiasms as Balfour. His Fourteen Points were the blueprint for the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. It is a noteworthy irony that it was a UN resolution—however much such resolutions are now derided by Israel—that supplied the Zionist leadership with the basis to declare Israel’s independence in 1948.
Too often, Christian Zionism has been understood as a novel or deviant brand of Christian theology. To be sure, it has long been connected with “premillennial dispensationalism,” the idea that the Jewish return to Israel signals God’s fulfillment of His “earthly promises” and the imminent dawn of Christ’s second coming. But the fact is that Christian Zionism has never been the province of wide-eyed fanatics. To the contrary, in its role in British and American foreign policy, Christian Zionism has appealed to those who have been committed to prominent ideas of human agency, social reform, and global progress. This cluster of ideas, whose spiritual origins date back to the Protestant Reformation, has long been part of the ruling ideology of Anglo-American hegemony.
Of the responses to the Jerusalem Patriarchs’ condemnation of Christian Zionism, the most interesting came from the Catholic theologian Gavin D’Costa. Writing in the traditionalist Christian journal First Things, D’Costa cautiously praised the statement but also raised concerns about how it related to “post-supersessionist teaching within Churches represented by the Patriarchs themselves.”
What is supersessionism? And how does a statement on Christian Zionism relate to it? Divergent opinions on this doctrine go to the heart of why Catholic and Protestant opinions on Zionism have diverged so sharply.
Supersessionism, sometimes known as “replacement theology,” consists most basically in the claim that the Church has replaced the Jewish people as God’s covenanted (chosen) people. According to supersessionism, Jesus inaugurated a new conception of “Israel”—one open to all, Gentile as well as Jew, because it was predicated on faith rather than the rejected markers of biological descent and observance of the law.
Christian Zionism has appealed to those who have been committed to prominent ideas of human agency, social reform, and global progress.
The status of Torah observance among the early Christians is a hotly contested topic among scholars of antiquity. It is incontestable, however, that the Church ultimately adopted the position that Jews who did not recognize Jesus as the messiah had been rejected by God. Among Catholics, this point of view survived intact for nearly two millennia, until the Church’s apparent complicity in the Holocaust catalyzed a period of significant soul-searching and reassessment.
This reassessment famously culminated in the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate, which sought to soften the Church’s historically unsparing judgment of the Jewish rejection of Jesus. Nostra Aetate condemns antisemitism, exonerates today’s Jews of the murder of Jesus, and attempts to express some recognition of the Jews’ special relationship with the God of Israel. Though the statement recounts the fact that most Jews did not “accept the Gospel,” it also declares: “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their fathers.”
When D’Costa writes about “post-supersessionist” teaching, he is referring to the Church’s post-Holocaust attempt to grant some limited sense in which Jews possess their own independent theological legitimacy. For D’Costa, there is reason to worry about an overbroad condemnation of Christian Zionism, because fully opposing Christian Zionism would point to a renewal of the belief that God has, in fact, discarded the Jews.
Meanwhile, while the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel caused a tumultuous period of reevaluation for the Catholic Church, for many Protestants these events supercharged the Jews’ place in the narrative of American hegemony and global progress. After Jews had been singled out by the Nazis for destruction, it seemed all the more inarguable that they were entitled both to religious and political self-determination. While Catholicism slowly and ambivalently adjusted to this reality, the deeply Protestant American empire embraced it.
Across much of the political spectrum, Israel became an American darling. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., only days before his assassination in Memphis, “I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world.” King, of course, was a staunch critic of Vietnam and of crude American exceptionalism more generally. But as a Baptist minister, one named for the hero of the Reformation no less, he saw himself as a passionate participant in the ongoing Protestant drama of civilizational progress. Indeed, his idea that there are “outposts” of enlightenment in otherwise dark parts of the world is the basic link that connects the social idealism of the British Empire and the neoconservative adventurism of American foreign policy in the twenty-first century.
From the Balfour Declaration to the Iraq War, Christian Zionism has been an indelible plank in the broader platform that has tied together Anglo-American exceptionalism and global progress. Many Protestant Americans, across race and party, have seen themselves and their national destiny in the biblical narratives of God’s chosen people. For this reason, support for Israel has often seemed an easy corollary of American exceptionalism.
This exceptionalism reached a fever pitch after 9/11. The Bush administration made an evangelical push for freedom and democracy abroad. Regime-change wars were supposed to allow wayward nations—most notably, Iraq—to be “born again.” Ultimately, the colossal failure of the Iraq War played a huge role in catalyzing the Trumpian revolt in the Republican Party. As the diadem in the crown of American overreach, the Iraq disaster furnished Trump with a genuinely resonant example of how America’s globetrotting evangelism was more vice than virtue.
Now, more than a year into Trump’s second term, the reaction to the Iraq War has become more than a political score for the Trump campaign. For important figures in Trump’s orbit, like Tucker Carlson, the Iraq War is the signature sin of the neocon right, which must never, ever, be forgiven.
Support for Israel has often seemed an easy corollary of American exceptionalism.
The ongoing revolt against the neocons does not simply require a new crop of State Department employees. It demands a comprehensive overhaul of the ideology—simultaneously political and theological—which has ruled the country throughout the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. For Carlson, the polite (culturally) Protestant center, America’s erstwhile civil religion, has been too weak, too circumspect, too willing to believe that America is an exceptional country of ideas rather than a real place of blood and soil like every other. For him, late modern America has been the victim of an elite conspiracy to dispossess the nation of its industry, its dignity, its cultural coherence, and ultimately, its soul.
But the very worst part of neocon rule has been the submission to Israeli interests. As Carlson said on his podcast back in October 2025, “The true villain here, I would argue, is not the state of Israel, the Jews. It’s the United States…. [T]he actual villain in this story is the leadership of the United States that is putting up with serial humiliation for decades.” As the established religion of the regime, Christian Zionism—as Carlson sees it—has produced American leaders who have been willing, at every turn, to launch regime-change wars at the behest of men in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (and their allies in America). The commitment to global progress, and particularly to the welfare of Israel, has produced a crop of American leaders fundamentally disloyal to the basic interests of their own constituents.
Once the country limps past the midterms, and our sights turn to the epochal transition to come in 2028, America First’s revolt against nearly two centuries of Anglo-American Christian Zionism will take the debate stage. JD Vance, a Catholic convert and a man who owes his vice-presidency to Carlson, is likely to stake a claim to America First that has no qualms about the idea that the church has replaced the Jews. He will certainly not concern himself with whether the Holocaust entitles Jews to theological independence, let alone national self-determination. As recently as Jan. 27, Vance released a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day that omitted all reference, explicit or implicit, to the Holocaust’s Jewish victims. If Vance expects his wife (a Hindu) to ultimately convert, she should rest assured that it’s nothing personal—he also wants Jews to embrace Jesus.
In the battles to come, over Israel but also over the place of America’s Jews in the national fabric, American Christianity is likely to press on with its own, much-delayed, Counter-Reformation.