Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism

by Victoria Clark

Millions of Christian Zionists in America believe that God requires them to offer Israel unconditional support — moral, financial, political, and military

Guided by a literal reading of the prophetic sections of the Bible, Christian Zionists are convinced that the world is hurtling toward a final Battle of Armageddon. They believe that war in the Middle East is God’s will for the region. In this timely book, Victoria Clark first explores the 400-year history of this powerful political ideology, laying to rest the idea that Christian Zionism is a passing craze or the province of a lunatic fringe. Then Clark surveys the contemporary Christian Zionist scene in Israel and in the United States, where the influence of the religious fundamentalists has never been greater. Clark engages with Christian Zionism directly, interviewing leaders, attending events, and traveling with Christian Zionists in the Holy Land. She also investigates the Christian Zionist presence in Israel. She finds that the view through the Christian Zionist lens is dangerously President Bush’s War on Terror is a mythic battle between good and evil, and Syria and Iran represent the powers of darkness. Such views are far from rare—an estimated fifteen to twenty million Americans share them. Almost one in three Americans believes Israel was given to the Jews by God as a prelude to the Battle of Armageddon and Jesus’ Second Coming. Clark concludes with an assessment of Christian Zionists’ impact on American foreign policy in the Middle East and on America’s relationships with European allies since the attacks of 9/11.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Politics, Christianity, History

344 pages, Hardcover

First published November 28, 2007

Reviews

[Theodore Zachariades · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book written by a self-described British agnostic is a gem. I am a Christian and some years ago was an ardent defender of dispensational theology. The author is well versed in the history of Zionism both in terms of Christian Zionism which is so rampant in the USA today, and its earlier proto-type in England and other places. I enjoyed reading about the encounters that Clark had traversing various places to get insight into the movement among North American fundamentalist religious evengelicals. She is fair in her presentation for the most part. I was slightly perturbed by her constant reference to the SBC as the Southern Baptist Conference, instead of the well-known largest protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. Also, Clark misapplied a catch all label to amillennial eschatology as being allegorical/idealist, which is not necessarily the case. But these are minor inaccuracies in a well written book. Anyone that has dealings with Zionists may want to read this book to get into the psyche of these unconditional carte blanche defenders of Israel!

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN EXCELLENT HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF ‘CHRISTIAN ZIONISTS’

Author Victoria Clark wrote in the Introduction to this 2007 book, “Land, of course, lies at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict. American Christian Zionists’ attitude to that same land and Israel’s post-1967 settlements on it is what makes their religious ideology so important… Christian Zionists… are Zionists … because they also deny the Palestinians’ right to an independent homeland. Like many religious Jews, they maintain that the Jews’ claim to rule over Israel proper… is divinely ordained… Millions of devout American Christians are convinced that the territories occupied in 1967 must belong to the Jews because God miraculously helped them… In addition, they find no mention of a Palestinian state in their Bible-based schedule of events, or of any peace in the region whatsoever until Jesus stages his ’Second Coing’ and establishes his thousand-year reign of peace on earth… As they see if, two prophesied steps in God’s plan for his world have … very clearly been fulfilled: the miraculous return of the Jews to their ancient homeland… and the equally miraculous survival of the Jewish state since its creation in 1948…

“[T]hey’re … expecting the implementation of… their Bible prophecy agenda… According to this … Jerusalem must become Israel’s undivided capital and the Muslims’ Haram al-Sharif be destroyed and replaced with a new Jewish Temple… [which] will herald the appearance of an Antichrist… For seven years… the Antichrist will sow havoc and suffering on a cosmic scale… [and] will trigger the Battle of Armageddon… All non-born-again Christians---including two-thirds of all Jews… will be slain in the conflagration [Zech 13:8]. Jesus’s … triumph over the Antichrist will … signal… the state of his thousand-year reign of peace and prosperity… People like Chuck Missler believe that true Christians … will suddenly, without warning, be whisked up to Heaven. It is… this divine emergency exit… known as the Rapture, that allows Christian Zionists to contemplate … the End Times with a mixture of pitying resignation and gleeful excitement.” (Pg. 3-4)

She says of Chuck Missler, “In 1990, what Chuck had billed as ‘the deal of the century’ … collapsed in a mire of unpaid debts. After … a boast to his Bible class back home that foreknowledge of the deal had reached him by divine inspiration… The Misslers were liable for everything: their home, cars, and even their health insurance. Chuck had to reinvent himself. Decoding the Bible became his new living.” (Pg. 9-10)

She recounts the historical developments leading to modern Christian Zionism; e.g., “Cyrus I. Scofield … [was] the greatest popularizer of [John Nelson] Darby’s ideas via what became known as the Scofield Reference Bible, who ensured that pre-millennial dispensationalism spread so deep and wide that it could never be uprooted… Scofield did not pretend to know the time of [the Jews’] restoration to Palestine…” (Pg. 90-91) “[Arthur J.] Balfour was … so ardent a Chistian Zionist he failed to understand how the majority of British Jews could resist Zionism’s appeal.” (Pg. 115) In 1917, “Looking hopefully ahead towards … a post-war peace by solemnly undertaking to restore the Jews to their ancient homeland, Balfour believed, would boost the spirits of the nation. For Britain to stand for the restoration of the Jews to the Holy and … would strike just the right high moral note.” (Pg. 121)

She observes that after WWII ended, “the Holocaust had to be fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of bible prophecy… Some found themselves reasoning that Hitler’s monstrous crime must be merely another instance of God punishing many of his Chosen People… The extermination of six million of the… must be God’s warning to the remainder to leave their secular existence in Europe and become… ‘true Zionists’ in Palestine… It’s hard to imagine a neater illustration of the ease with which fundamentalism of any kind---Jewish, Christian, or Muslim---dispenses with both divine and human responsibility for ethical conduct and, in so doing, betrays all that is good in religion.” (Pg. 139-140)

Of the ‘Left Behind’ novel series, she observes, “The world that [Tim] LaHaye and [Jerry] Jenkins, and [Pat] Robertson have conjured up … is one in which true Christians are required to fight, kill, suffer and even die for their faith. As such, it springs from a … mind-set better suited to dissidents in a totalitarian society than to citizens of one of the most open and tolerant societies in the world.” (Pg. 171)

She reports that in 2006, “leaders of the Roman Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, and Lutheran churches in the city clubbed together to issue the first formal declaration of Christan Zionism… Chuck Missler and Hel Lindsey … blamed the old Christian churches for what Christian Zionists call their ‘replacement theology’ for teaching that the Old Testament’s promises to the Jews were cancelled out, replaced, by the Christian New Testament’s promises to the whole world… This … is a sign that the cold war between the two Christian camps in the Holy Land---one pro-Israel, the other pro-Palestinian… is heating up…” (Pg. 227)

She notes, “Nobody has done more than Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein to accustom American Jew to the novel notion of teaming up with Christian fundamentalists for the greater glory and safety of America and Israel… Rabbi Eckstein has been doing a first-class job of persuading his fellow American Jews to ignore Christian Zionists’ End Times schedule and any missionary agenda, and look instead at their no-strings-attached financial ‘blessing’ of Israel… Yet far from all Eckstein’s fellow Jews see it that way… Some have likened his mediation of this exchange of pecuniary blessings on Israel for divine blessings on American to the medieval Catholic Church’s cynical trade in indulgences…” (Pg. 231-232)

Of so-called ‘Jewish Christians,’ she states, “In the opinion of most Jews… Jewish Messianics are the wrong kind of Jew, a despised and distrusted fifth column…. The state of Israel endorses this hostility, flouting its own law on the freedom of religion by refusing to grant Jewish Messianics the automatic ‘right of return’ to Israel, a freedom it extends to anyone else who can prove their Jewish descent… What American Messianics and Christian Zionists … all have in common is a fixation with End Times bible prophecy, in which Israel and the Jews, whether converted or not, are indisputably center-stage.” (Pg. 243-245)

She states, “my impression that pleasurable relief … into a disaster-movie scenario with a happy Rapture ending for good born-again guys, accounted for the spread of Christian Zionism in the United States… I also [had] … my deeper hunch that fear—grounded in a sense that America’s days as a superpower with God’s Most Divinely Favored Nation status are numbered, unless America ‘blesses’ rather than ‘curses’ the Jews---was the biggest engine driving this ideology. Fear, of course, is at least as powerful a motivator as pleasure.” (Pg. 258)

She concludes, “The story of Christian Zionism reveals the roots of a politico-religious alliance, the thriving state of millenarianism in America, and one good reason for the gulf of sympathy separating the United States from her European allies today. But it also illustrates the unbridgeable psychological chasm dividing those with a fear-filled fundamentalist mind-set from those without it, especially in times of tumult and strain… Christian Zionists [will not] be wooed away from their bible literalism by theological argument, or shaken out of their beliefs by events turning out differently from how they expect… If the influence of Christian Zionism on western policy continues to exert the hold it does today, there is a chance we may all become allies for Armageddon.” (Pg. 289)

This book will be of great interest to those studying these topics.

[Daniel Hadley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good chaser for Left Behind. It helped me understand the mentality, which sort of alarmed me.

[Si Squires-Kasten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victoria Clark takes American Protestantism seriously enough to reveal its absurdities and pathologies before tracing its most devout believers to the very top of our politics. Even though this book is more than 10 years old, her understanding of the internet's potential to radicalize atomized subjects is prescient. Allies for Armageddon is also a valuable anti-capitalist text, as the shadowy American money which bankrolls the Israeli right wing despite international sanctions and the protests of its own citizens exists because of policies which facilitate the extreme concentration of wealth.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was slow to get through (Part 1 in particular was not organized in a way I found easy to follow), but it has fundamentally changed my understanding of US foreign policy in the Middle East.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some important American political and religious figures, the solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is remarkably simple; God gave the land of Israel to the Jews, from the Nile to the Euphrates. Thus, ethnically cleansing the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Palestinians should be seen as a reasonable compromise, since Israel would be giving up divine claims to the Sinai, Jordan, and parts of other countries that have sprung up in violation of God's will. As this new book by the British journalist Victoria Clark makes clear, the founding and ongoing good fortune of the modern state of Israel has relied on millions of people for whom Israel is a divine miracle. Even those who follow Christian Right politics very carefully will learn much from this book about the origins of the modern American evangelical belief system that ties the fate of Israel directly to the coming Armageddon.
It is an astonishing story and a well-told one, in which charlatans, fanatics, and the fundamentalist revolt against liberal theology in the early years of the twentieth century play key roles. Christian Zionism (the belief among gentiles that God gave the land of the Jews to Israel) was active for many years prior to the founding of Israel, in the United States, Great Britain, and even among some European royal families. Conversely, the recent vintage of many of the textual interpretations that buttress the reverence for the modern Jewish state would probably astound many American evangelicals. Many Europeans will discover for the first time how the phenomenally popular Left Behind series of novels and movies buttressed American support for Israel. They will also find a solid portrait of how deeply entangled the modern Republican party is with religious fundamentalists.
But for most readers on this side of the pond, the closer Clark's story gets to the present and to American politics, the less revelatory and reliable her findings become. While millions of Americans do have strong biblical beliefs about Israel, it is surely wrong to say it is "the prevailing belief system of the American South" (p. 256). We can forgive a British author for mixing up football and baseball when identifying a coach-turned-evangelical leader, but mistakenly attributing the founding of neoconservatism to Irving Kristol during the Ronald Reagan years is beyond the pale. British journalists oft:en see things more clearly in American politics than do our own scribes, as John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge showed in their admirable The Right Nation (2004). But such is largely not the case here, as the errors are accompanied by misinterpretations of the roles of various players and interest groups. And her concluding section makes deeply derisive comments about the very existence of the state of Israel, calling it a "poisoned chalice" handed to the persecuted Jews of Europe after 1945 (p. 287). This book, therefore, has much to offer in its popular history of the birth of the idea of Christian Zionism, but the European readers who will have most need of the rest of the book would be wise to consult other sources about the puissance and potential of America's Christian conservatives.
(Review from the Journal of American History)

[Elaine Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book is divided into two parts: the history of Christian Zionism from the Reformation in England to 1948, and a survey of modern American Christian Zionism.

For me, the first part was full of new information, weird twists of history, strange characters (a Venn diagram of this book & Eating the Sun shows Joseph Priestly as the one person in the union!) over the history of both Britain & the US. The second half has some new, but much that's familiar to anyone who's been following this part of foreign policy over the last 10 years.

It feels like what it is, too: a foreigner's attempt to understand something deeply weird and totally American. (alas) She tries to have a gentle touch, but the underlying tone is OMGWTFBBQ crazy people! Not that I don't sympathize, of course, and maybe I'm projecting a bit. Because yes, OMG teh crazy. I really really really hope that we get to an actually rational foreign policy in re: the Middle East sometime soon!

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

See my review at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf....