BIG READ: The power and influence of Evangelism in the US

The US, the UK and Germany are among the most powerful backers of Tel Aviv in the latest phase of the decades-long resistance to the Israeli state’s expansion into Palestinian lands. Each of the three powers ostensibly support Israel politically and unconditionally, yet each has a specific historical driver, an earlier crisis, or sets of beliefs and values that help undergird their support.

The British may be trying to atone for the catastrophe they initiated with the creation of an Israeli state, one of the two calamities of the late 1940s, the other being partitioning of South Asia, and the Germans seem to remain at war with their conscience for the horrors that they inflicted on Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

As for the US, one relatively unexplored driver is American evangelical support for Israel, which is shaped by eschatological beliefs within a society that looks fundamentally Christian. This apparent fundamentalism is itself underpinned by and gaining momentum with a growing movement to “bring the Bible back” into homes, schools and government, so America can be great again. All of these, notably the power and influence of literalism and evangelism, prompted the Associated Press to ask earlier in February, whether the US was a Christian country. It’s relatively easy to say that it is not, but when you listen to Donald Trump’s more vocal supporters, and the more virulent strain of literalist evangelicals like, say the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and their twin in Michigan, you get a sense that there is a deep belief, ranging from presidents and the media, to military officials and civil rights leaders, that Americans are God-sent, and that theirs is primarily a Judeo-Christian society.

In a newsletter distributed by the Synod Assembly of the North/West Lower Michigan Synod on February 15, the message was clear; Americans are a light onto the world. Witness the startling parallels between that statement and the rhetoric of Israeli pop star Narkis who entertained soldiers in early November with songs about “finishing off Gaza” and the Israelis being “a light onto non-Jews” to almost deliric applause.

We may say that Michigan and Wisconsin (where I have witnessed the crucifix and the US flag paired up in the church sanctuary) are not the entire US. Consider, however, Fox News host Sean Hannity’s proclamation that the US was the gift that God gave the world. That, you may say, is the media. Consider, then, George W Bush’s statement in October 2015: “God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq.”

Again, you may say, that that is one president. Yet, the 32nd president of the US, Franklin Roosevelt, spoke of a “united crusade” led by Americans against “unholy” enemies. We will get to Trump below.

Soldiers and citizens listen and follow their leaders. Consider the statement by Lt-Gen William Boykin, an outspoken evangelical Christian who cast the Global War on Terror (GWOT) as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and “Satan”, LA Times (and several other news outlets) reported on October 16 2003.

Boykin appeared in dress uniform before a religious group in Oregon earlier in 2003 where he declared that radical Islamists hated the US “because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan”.

In a discussion on the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol…. We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this,” Boykin said in 2002, when Bush was “in the White House because God put him there”.

An insightful footnote about the US in Somalia may be useful. One not so small story that went ignored when, in January 2002, a “rag-tag” bunch of “pyjama-wearing” fighters brought down a US helicopter (a set of events dramatised by Ridley Scott in the film Blackhawk Down), was that a task force from a Muslim majority country played a vital role in rescuing the Americans. According to Adrian Teh, director of a film depicting a Malaysian battalion’s efforts to save the Americans, the mission was conveniently ignored by the US at the time that Blackhawk Down was made. Given that the war on terror was associated with Islam and Muslims, it may have been bad public relations to praise a Muslim-led battalion that saved American soldiers.

In Trump, the evangelicals have found (another) leader whom they believe can make America great again, conservative journalist Tim Alberta wrote in his book, The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. In December 2023, Trump promoted himself as God-sent, and as “an instrument of God”. This divinity that shapes the people of the US (God’s best country that Hannity referred to), its churches (Wisconsin and Michigan Lutheran Synod’s light onto the world), God’s mission in the GWOT (which Boykin spoke of) and the sanctified presidencies of Bush and Trump has no apparent gaps, and the beat goes on.

David Lull of the US’s National Council of Churches of Christ reminded us that the work and all the civil rights activism of Martin Luther King Jr was “rooted in the Judeo-Christian heritage”. Keith Miller, professor of rhetoric and English at Arizona State University, explained how the Bible was the main text of segregationists, but that Martin Luther King Jr also used the Bible to contest them. The late Colin Powell, the most decorated black soldier in the US, said in September 2003, that the US was a Judeo-Christian country. He rapidly backtracked when he realised he had spoken the truth in public. It is difficult to avoid thinking that in the US Christianity is the question and the answer to everything.

How widespread is this evangelical movement in the US? How do they explain support for Israel? Let us look briefly at evangelic support for Israel before we look at just how embedded Christianity and “belief” is in the US.

State of Israel as fulfilment of Biblical prophecy

Roosevelt’s call for Americans to be united in the crusade against “unholy forces” remains a rallying cry among Christians. The rapidly growing movement, Christians United for Israel is committed to “unify Christians across all denominational and cultural boundaries in support of Israel”. There can be no gaps in loyalty.

A study by Motti Inbari, Gordon Byrd and Kirill Bumin of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke investigated evangelical support for Israel in the US. Results of the surveys used show that the three strongest predictors of evangelical (and born-again Christian) support for Israel are among older people, “opinions of Jews” and socialisation or the frequency of hearing other evangelicals talking about Israel.

Theirs and other (cognate) research results show that evangelical support for Israel is driven by respondents’ beliefs rooted in (evangelical) Christian theology, in eschatology and Biblical literalism. The most significant ideological statements found in the research, were that the state of Israel was “proof of the fulfilment of prophesy regarding the nearing of Jesus’ second coming,” and that “Jews are God’s chosen people.”

Christianity runs deep in the US. Christianity is the most widely practised religion in the world, with about 2.4-billion followers, 33.3% of the global population, and the US has the largest Christian population in the world. A University of Maryland study recently found that at least 60% of Republicans believe that that country should pass a law to declare the US “a Christian nation”.

A Gallup poll conducted in 2022 found that 81% of adults in the US believed in God, down from 90% between 1944 and 2011. Gallup first asked the question in 1944, repeating it again in 1947 and twice in each decade of the 1950s and 1960s. In those latter four surveys, a consistent 98% said they believed in God. When Gallup asked the question nearly five decades later, in 2011, 92% of Americans said they believed in God.

Christianity has always played an important part in US politics. While the First Amendment of that country’s constitution specifically states that “Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise”, the founders of the republic drew on religious values and rhetoric as the basis for the new country. The church was active and fairly central to most social and political processes in the US. Churches were active on both sides in controversies over slavery and the Civil War. Religious groups were also significant participants in campaigns such as prohibition of the sale of alcohol, defence of the gold standard in the 1890s, the enactment of women’s suffrage, the reform of the national economy under the New Deal and the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Singularly important, religion was the source of the so-called Protestant ethic, which helped shape the goals and the behavioural standards of US political life.

This place and role the church, and belief in God of Christianity can be linked to some of the founding myths (origins myths) that are so integral to state formation when it is spoken of in divine tones. Stemming from this, Erin McDaniel of the University of Texas explained: The idea of Christian nationhood fills Americans’ need for an origin story, a belief that “we’ve come here for something special, and that we’re here for God’s work.”

One outcome of this is that it creates a sense of “national innocence”, which makes people in the that country “resist confronting uglier parts of US history”, McDaniel, a professor of government said.

You have, then, a country in which its manifest destiny is considered sacred, its wars of conquest against indigenous people are justified (by Theodore Roosevelt) as the most “righteous of all wars” because they were against people whom the European settlers considered to be “savages” standing in the way of settler colonial expansion. This brings us back to the present, where the world’s largest Christian community within a single country, wishes itself as a “Christian nation” and in which its evangelicals provide moral and material support for Israel because it is necessary to complete the eschatological imaginaries of literalists in the US.

Sidebar

Many Americans believe the US was founded as a Christian nation, and the idea is energising some conservative and Republican activists. But the concept means different things to different people, and historians say that while the issue is complex, the founding documents prioritise religious freedom and do not create a Christian nation.

Why this matters:

• Six in 10 US adults said the founders originally intended the US to be a Christian nation, and 45% said the US should be a Christian nation, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey.
• These views are especially strong among the Republicans’ white evangelical base and are being voiced by some supporters of Donald Trump in his bid for the presidency.
• But historians say that while the issue is complex, the founding documents prioritise religious freedom and do not create a Christian nation.

One-third of US adults surveyed in 2023 said God intended the US to be a promised land for European Christians to set an example to the world, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings survey. Those who embraced this view were also more likely to dismiss the impact of anti-Black discrimination and more likely to say true patriots may need to act violently to save the country, the survey said.