Last July, then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote a social media post accusing Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza. Matt Brooks, the chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, dismissed her statement as “outlandish” and “ridiculous,” but Steve Bannon, the former aide to Donald Trump and influential podcaster, defended her. “Marjorie Taylor Greene just reflects her constituency,” Bannon told The New York Times. He described her constituency as “hard-core evangelical Christians.”
Over the last six months, the media has abounded with reports about a conservative division over Israel — pitting critics of Israel like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Bannon and Greene against hard-line Zionists such as Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro. But what was mostly left unsaid was what Bannon asserted: that in denouncing Israel, Greene was “channeling” conservative evangelicals. Weren’t they supposed to be the bedrock of Republican support for Israel?
Unbeknownst to much of Washington — and long before conservative pundits and politicians began this recent round of sniping — subterranean changes have been taking place in the Republican base. Young Republicans, including young evangelicals, have become increasingly disenchanted with their party’s uncritical support for Israel. Greene was speaking for them.
That disillusionment with Israel could well divide Republicans in 2026 and 2028 the way Israel and the war in Gaza have already divided Democrats. But the likely consequences go beyond internal party politics. In combination with the attitudes of young Democrats, it may signal the beginning of the end for America’s special relationship with Israel — a scenario that could transform the geopolitics of the Middle East, alter the lives of American Jews and, for the first time in many generations, leave Israel to fend for itself.
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In the first decades of Israel’s existence, Democrats were its most dedicated American supporters. From the founding of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, in 1954 through 1993, the organization’s three executive directors were liberal Democrats. But Republican enthusiasm for Israel began to grow during the 1970s when Israel became a valued American partner in the Cold War. In 1977, Israeli voters ousted the social-democratic Labor party in favor of the conservative Likud party, and as Likud and other right-wing parties eventually came to dominate Israeli politics, it became easier for the American right to see Israel as an ally.
9/11 was another key moment in the relationship between American conservatives and Israel. Around the time of the attacks on the United States, according to Gallup, both parties supported Israel over the Palestinians, with Republicans about 10 percentage points more supportive than Democrats. By 2003, the margin was about 35 points.
One demographic group was playing a major role in this burgeoning trend. “Why did the Republican Party become so Zionist?” asked David Frum, the former George W. Bush speechwriter, in his 2003 book, “The Right Man.” “Certainly the influence of evangelical Christians has a lot to do with it.” In 2002, Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, had joined with Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein to form an organization called Stand for Israel. “Christians have the potential to be the most effective constituency influencing a foreign policy since the end of the Cold War,” Reed told The New York Times. In 2006, John Hagee, a Texas pastor and fundamentalist, revived an inactive group called Christians United for Israel. Six years later, its membership reached a million, making it the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States.
Meanwhile, the gap between Democrats and Republicans on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued to grow, reaching 64 percentage points in 2018. While some of this divergence was due to a decline in Democratic sympathy — as progressives became critical of Israel’s right-wing governments and the occupation of the Palestinian West Bank — the rise of evangelical support was a major factor.
As for why evangelicals were shifting: Frum writes that Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, attributed evangelicals’ support to their propensity to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of “the war on terror.” And many evangelicals did indeed see Israel as a friend because it was the enemy of their enemy: radical Islamists in the Middle East.
But the fervor of their support was not simply about geopolitics. It was also connected to their faith — specifically, their embrace of premillennial dispensationalism, or end-times theology.
This strain of Protestant theology, based on selective readings of the Bible, went back to the mid-19th-century teachings of a clergyman named John Nelson Darby. It enjoyed little support in the early- and mid-20th century except among some Baptists and Pentecostals, but it took off in the 1970s, inspired by Israel’s improbable victory in the Six-Day War. Dispensationalism was the subject of the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s — Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” — and was promoted by Pat Robertson through his TV show “The 700 Club” and his organization, the Christian Coalition.
According to dispensationalism, history after Jesus’ first coming was divided into steps, or dispensations, that would climax in Jesus’ second coming. One essential step was the Jews, God’s chosen people, returning to and reclaiming their home in Israel. After the Jews had fully established their homeland — Lindsey estimated it would take 40 years after Israel’s birth — Christ would enter Heaven and spirit away the true believers in what was called “the rapture.” The world would then endure seven years of tribulation before Christ would come to Earth and preside over a just and joyous millennium. Evangelicals had to be supportive of Israel as a precondition of their being raptured away by Christ.
A recent survey of evangelicals by Motti Inbari of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and Kirill Bumin of Boston University showed how central premillennial dispensationalism was to evangelicals’ support for Israel. They found that a belief in “premillennialism increases the likelihood of strong support for Israel by 82.7%” and “relative to premillennialism, amillennial beliefs” — that is, a rejection of the idea that a literal reign by Jesus lies ahead — “reduce the likelihood of strong support for Israel by 56.2%.”
Not all evangelicals subscribed to the precise terms of premillennial dispensationalism. But many held, at minimum, general theological beliefs — including the notion that Jews were God’s chosen people and that God had promised Abraham that Israel would be their home — that played a crucial role in their support for Zionism. A 2017 survey by Lifeway Research, a Christian organization, showed that the “primary reason” for most evangelicals’ support of Israel was what they found in the Bible. Inbari, Bumin and M. Gordon Byrd reanalyzed the Lifeway data in a 2021 article. They found that evangelicals “who stated that they support Israel to fulfill the prophesy regarding the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and because Jews are God’s chosen people are more likely to manifest high levels of support for Israel than respondents who either disagreed or responded with weak support to these statements.”
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In the Republican Party generally, and with American evangelicals in particular, Israel seemed to have found a powerful, consistent, valuable ally. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, it all began to unravel.
In 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, Republicans under 50 were more likely to have a positive than a negative view of Israel by 63% to 35%. By last year, they were more likely to have a negative than a positive view by 50% to 48%. That’s a 30-point swing.
The drop among young evangelicals has been just as dramatic. Support for Israel among evangelicals ages 18 to 29 fell from 69% in 2018 to 33.6% in 2021, according to a poll supervised by Inbari, Bumin and the Barna Group, a Christian research and polling firm. Last summer, the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll found that only 32% of Republican evangelicals ages 18 to 34 sympathized with the Israelis rather than the Palestinians.
What happened? Part of the story, undoubtedly, is about history and memory. As the Holocaust has receded further into the past, young voters are less likely to see Israel as a haven for a perennially oppressed people and more likely to see Israelis as oppressors themselves. Young Americans are also less likely to feel any residual link to Israel from the Cold War or, for the youngest voters, from the post-9/11 war on terror.
All of this made young Republicans (as well as young Democrats) less likely to ignore or justify Israel’s aggressive expansion of settlements and mistreatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and, more recently, its deadly response to Hamas’ murder of more than 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. They might not join Greene and Carlson in calling Israel’s reaction “genocide,” but they would be more inclined to see the killing of tens of thousands of women and children, and the rendering uninhabitable of Gaza’s cities, as an immoral response. In the Maryland poll, only 22% of Republicans 18 to 34 years old said that Israel’s actions in Gaza were justified “under the right to self-defense,” compared to 52% of Republicans 35 and older; and only 36% of young Republican evangelicals thought the Israeli response was justified, compared to 59% of older Republican evangelicals.
But it is important to note that the disenchantment of young evangelicals predated the war in Gaza by several years. As the Barna Group poll found, it began sometime between 2018 and 2021. That may be because, by 2018, young evangelicals — decades removed from the Six-Day War, which had convinced many Christians that the rapture was imminent — were abandoning dispensationalist theology.
A host of experts have attested to this phenomenon. “Younger Evangelicals are less inclined to systematic Dispensationalism, and seminaries that once stressed it no longer do,” wrote Mark Tooley, the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a few months ago. “Personally, I rarely if ever meet Dispensationalists under age 50.” Writing in the Middle East Quarterly in December, Aaron David Fruh explained that young evangelicals “are embracing alternatives like amillennialism … or postmillennialism, which holds that the Second Coming of Christ will occur after the Church has Christianized the world.” Some evangelicals, Andrew Voigt noted in Christianity Today in 2024, are joining the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches, both of which take an amillennial view.
An extensive survey of over a thousand evangelicals last year — conducted by Infinity Concepts and Grey Matter Research & Consulting, two firms that often work with Christian groups — found that just 29% of evangelicals under 35 believe Jews are the chosen people. For all other age brackets, the number was 50% or higher. According to the survey, young evangelicals are more likely than older evangelicals “to gravitate toward replacement theology,” “say there are no chosen people,” “or have no idea what to believe.” “Replacement theology” or “supersessionism” is the belief that with Jesus’s initial coming, Christians have replaced, or superseded, Jews as God’s chosen people — a belief that accords no special importance to the state of Israel.
One of the main evangelical pastors who has embraced supersessionism is Andy Stanley of North Point Ministries in Georgia, which is composed of eight churches and boasts 50,000 parishioners. Stanley, who has authored more than 20 books, has a national following. He has urged his parishioners to “unhitch” from the Old Testament and from a Jewish worldview. Stanley’s main church is in Alpharetta, which is near Marjorie Taylor Greene’s former congressional district. Greene’s family construction business was headquartered there, and she was baptized at Stanley’s church in 2011.
Evangelicals who reject dispensationalism may regard Christian Zionism as a heresy; they may be hostile toward Israel and even toward Jewry. “Some American Christians, in the post Dispensationalist age, are now tempted by or falling actively into a dark well of obsession with Israel and by extension Jews,” Tooley writes. Other evangelicals who embrace a more straightforward amillennial view — one, for instance, held by many American Catholics — simply judge Israel as they might any other foreign country and find it wanting.
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The Israeli government and its allies in America are clearly worried about the defection of young evangelicals. The Israeli Foreign Ministry has allocated millions to improving its standing among evangelicals. Two Christian Zionist groups, Friends of Zion and the American Renewal Project, have joined the effort.
Israel has reason to be concerned. It has already lost a generation of young Democrats, and now the same thing is happening among young Republicans. Without popular support, Israel and those Americans who favor its policies will have to rely on the clout of groups like AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League, as well as super-wealthy pro-Israel Jews such as Bill Ackman, Miriam Adelson and Larry Ellison. Trump’s own support for Israeli aims seems to have been heavily influenced by pro-Israel donors and by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose family foundation has donated to West Bank settlements.
That situation is probably not sustainable. And it could have very bad side effects. The specter of wealthy Jews and their organizations fighting to retain intact America’s special relationship with Israel, against a tide of countervailing sentiment, could reinforce not just hostility to Israel but also antisemitism, which is rooted in part in age-old beliefs about illicit Jewish power — and which is already rising on the right and left. An extensive Yale Youth Poll conducted last fall found that 43% of 18 to 22 year olds and 39% of 23 to 29 year olds hold at least one of three typically antisemitic beliefs — for instance, “Jews in the United States have too much power.” A whopping 45% of white conservatives ages 18 to 34 hold one of these beliefs.
The fissures around Israel are already starting to show up in Republican electoral politics. In Florida, Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback is pledging to refuse donations from AIPAC and to divest $385 million in Florida state funds from Israel bonds. In an eastern Kentucky Republican primary, pro-Israel donors are backing a challenger against incumbent congressman Thomas Massie, who has opposed military funding for Israel. In endorsing Massie’s opponent, Trump labelled the congressman a “hater of Israel.”
And looking ahead to 2028, some Republican Israel hawks are skeptical of Vice President JD Vance’s commitment to the Jewish state, while two of his potential rivals, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, have left no doubt about their pro-Israel stances. One mark against Vance is that when he visited Israel last October, he omitted the customary visit to the Western Wall. Instead, he visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a holy site frequented by Christians. A month earlier, Rubio had visited the Western Wall. Vance is also known to be far more opposed than either Rubio or Cruz to intervention in foreign wars that don’t directly impinge on America’s national interest.
The clash over Trump’s successor has become intertwined with the social-media war among conservative pundits. Supporters of Israel have tied Vance to Tucker Carlson and to Carlson’s hostility toward Israel. Last September, Fox’s Mark Levin lashed out at Vance’s staff members and at Carlson for criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Tucker central is the VP’s office,” Levin wrote on X. Carlson, meanwhile, attacked Cruz on his show for receiving support from AIPAC and for his adamant backing of Israel.
Of course, a lot can change in two years, especially with Trump in the Oval Office. If Trump, abetted by Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, does have an overall strategy in the Middle East, it goes something like this: Assist Israel in crippling Iran, its chief adversary in the region; don’t object as the Israelis marginalize or dispossess the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; expand the Abraham Accords to include the Gulf states; and label American opponents of this strategy Israel haters or antisemites.
If this effort succeeds by 2028, maybe Israel won’t need much U.S. assistance going forward. In that case, it might not matter what young evangelical Christians think.
But conflicts in the Middle East that go back well over a century are unlikely to remain quelled forever. And someday, when clashes between Israelis and Palestinians — or Israel and any of its other neighbors — invariably erupt again, an American administration that wants to throw its weight and arms behind the Jewish state will have difficulty convincing its core voters to go along. We’ve known for a while that this would be true for any future Democrat in the White House. Now, thanks to a new generation of conservatives, it’s probably true for a future Republican president too.
John B. Judis is the author of “Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict” and most recently of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” with Ruy Teixeira.
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