Israel, the End Times & the Evangelical Imagination | Dan Hummel

What do evangelicals mean when they talk about “supporting Israel” — and how did Jewish–Christian dialogue evolve from centuries of suspicion into the conversations happening today?

In the third installment of our series built around the Last Questions of Faith community lecture, host Jean Geran welcomes historian and author Dan Hummel for a wide-ranging conversation on Christian Zionism, evangelical theology, and the hard, patient work of talking across big religious differences. Dan traces the roots of Christian support for Israel — from post-Holocaust theology and the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate to Billy Graham’s 1969 meeting with the American Jewish Committee — and explains how dispensationalism shapes the way many evangelicals read Israel into biblical prophecy.

Along the way: why Christian Zionists are an organized minority rather than the evangelical majority, how the U.S.–Israel relationship has been deliberately cultivated over decades, and what a more generous, substantive interfaith dialogue — one that includes the more conservative voices in each tradition — might actually look like.

GUEST BIO

Dan Hummel is a historian of U.S. religion and the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans, 2023) and Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations. He is the Director of the Lumen Center at the SL Brown Foundation, and is a co-host of American Evangelicals: A History Podcast. His research and writing focus on Christian Zionism, evangelical theology, and the history of U.S.–Israel relations.

RESOURCES & LINKS

• Book — The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism (Eerdmans, 2023), foreword by Mark Noll
• Book — Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations
• Mentioned: Amy-Jill Levine (A.J. Levine), New Testament & Jewish studies scholar; earlier in this series
• Mentioned: Nostra Aetate (Second Vatican Council, 1965); E.P. Sanders; N.T. Wright; Marvin Wilson, Our Father Abraham

CONNECT WITH US
Subscribe to The UpWords Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and visit slbf.org/studio to learn more about our work at the intersection of faith, the academy, and the marketplace.

This episode was created by the SLBF STUDIO at Upper House.

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour

Transcript

Cold open — “Two groups who each think they have the answer”

Dan Hummel 0:02

My hope is that we can find ways to broaden the conversation, to include, I mean, I guess just to be blunt, the more conservative elements of our traditions. That's one thing that fascinated me about Christian Zionism is it's an example of quite conservative Christians, in some cases, partnering with quite conservative Jews for a shared cause. Now, many of us might find that cause to be distasteful or not of the kind we hope interfaith dialogue produces. But if you actually study them, they are doing the hard work of talking across a lot of difference. You have two groups that really think they are the one group that really has the answer, and yet they're finding ways to work together on a big political project.

Welcome & series intro

Dave Conour 0:45

Welcome to the Upwards Podcast, where we explore the intersection of Christian faith in the academy, the church, and the marketplace. What do evangelicals mean when they talk about supporting Israel? And how did Jewish Christian dialogue evolve from centuries of suspicion and misunderstanding into the conversations happening today? In this episode, host Gene Garin welcomes historian and author Dan Hummel for a discussion on Christian Zionism, evangelical theology, and the ongoing effort to build relationships across deep religious differences. Together, they explore the historical roots of Christian support for Israel and why genuine dialogue requires more than simply finding areas of agreement. This conversation offers thoughtful insight into one of the most important and often controversial topics shaping religious life today. Let's join the conversation with Gene Garin and Dan Hummel.

Role reversal: Dan in the guest chair

Jean Geran 1:43

Well, Dan Hummel, welcome to the Upwards Podcast.

Speaker 1:47

We have a little role rehearsal in this one. Feels like a familiar space, but an unfamiliar chair. So looking forward to it.

Speaker 2 1:54

Yeah, yeah. Well, and you're one of the original podcast hosts, I believe. And I am one of the newcomers. So this is going to be fun.

Speaker 2:03

It will be, yes.

Speaker 2 2:04

Yeah. And then just to give our listeners a little bit of context, this is going to be the third in our series based around our last questions of faith community lecture. And we had sort of a mini Jewish Christian dialogue as it relates to scripture as a part of that community lecture. And then I thought, oh, I have a colleague who knows something about Jewish Christian dialogue. So um, so that's what we're going to be talking about. You have many uh areas of expertise, but we're going to focus on this one today. So thanks for your willingness to switch chairs.

Speaker 2:38

Yeah, very excited. This is a good topic and looking forward to contributing to the series.

Speaker 2 2:44

So maybe we'll start there though. Uh, this Jewish-Christian dialogue topic and work, stream of work, is a bit of a side thing for you, but maybe mid to side thing for you. So why don't you describe sort of how

How Dan got into Jewish–Christian dialogue

Speaker 2 3:00

you got into it?

Speaker 3:01

Sure. So I'm a I'm a Christian, so I have a lot of experience in the Christian world talking about Christianity and other religions, including Judaism. But it wasn't really until grad school that I ever thought about making that a type of formal or intellectual project. I ended up studying Christian Zionism, which we'll talk, I'm sure, about a bit, but the movement of evangelical Christians to support the state of Israel. And that got me interested in broader Jewish Christian relations and particularly Jewish evangelical relations here at UW Madison. I also had a couple professors who were either professionally or really personally invested in interfaith dialogue, the key one being Chuck Cohen, who taught here at UW in the history department for many, many years, for about 40 years, retired about 10 years ago. And he also ran something called the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions for about 10 years in the 2006 to 2016 period. And that institute, which I was sort of affiliated with as a grad student, was all about dialogue between not just Judaism and Christianity, but also Islam and other world religions. I got exposed to some of this world through that as a grad student. I also was Professor Cohen's TA. And so I was able to sort of learn from him in the classroom. He taught a course for many years that was quite popular called Braided Histories, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So I got to work through that material with students. And then I ended up not just writing one, but another book on Christian Zionism and Christian theology, eschatology in particular, where Judaism and Jews and Israel play big roles conceptually in how Christians, uh at least the Christians I was studying, think about the world.

The National Jewish Evangelical Interfaith Dialogue

Speaker 4:51

So I've uh sort of grown interested in this topic of dialogue. And then in just the last couple of years, I've been part of a group of evangelicals and Jews who meet yearly. It's called the National Jewish Evangelical Interfaith Dialogue. And it's very interesting. There are rabbis and scholars and pastors who are coming out of both of these communities, sort of trying to talk about the obvious topics you might expect, things like support for Israel, anti-Semitism, but also other trends happening in our world that are of interest to both of our communities as well. So that's been a more recent thing where I've really gotten to learn how to be in the room and dialogue as a sort of delegate from my community to another community. And well, we don't really have delegates in the evangelical world. You just represent sort of your little corner of the world. But um that's been really interesting too because it takes it out of sort of the book knowledge and into conversation and more practical areas as well.

Speaker 2 5:50

Yeah. I wanted to ask a little more about that. Are there some stated goals of that organization specifically? I mean, you you ran down some of the things you do, but the stated goals and then what has been maybe the most interesting thing you've learned as being in being a part of that organization and that that dialogue?

Speaker 6:09

Aaron Powell The Stated Goals. So this is a yearly gathering. It's been meeting for decades now. And the idea is one that it's better to be in dialogue regularly or consistently as opposed to just when there's a crisis and you need to talk to someone from another community. So there's sort of a perpetuation of the dialogue is part of the purpose.

Speaker 2 6:29

Relational. Relational.

Speaker 6:30

It's relational. That's right. And it it brings uh scholars and leaders from around the country. So it tends to be in Chicago uh every year, but it's got people coming from both coasts and and in between to it. So beyond relational, there are a lot of issues that evangelical Christians, if we're just going to sort of generalize that group, and American Jews have quite different views on. We might associate their joint tendency to be pro-Israel as one where they agree, but on a lot of social and cultural and domestic political issues, American Jews tend to be one of the most committed Democratic Party voting blocks, and the evangelicals tend to be one of the most committed Republican Party voting blocks. So there's a lot of difference in the room, but there's also not just a shared interest in Israel, but a shared value of the Bible. And so a lot of the sessions in these uh conversations are reading the Bible together and talking about it and bringing the different resources that each tradition has to actually understand how each other, how each community thinks about the Bible. And also to highlight that all American evangelicals and all American Jews do not think alike. So even though there are, you're sort of like grouped into your religious subgroup, there's a wide variety of opinions on all types of topics within the evangelical community and the same on the American Jewish community. So it's to be sort of exposed to that. And then I think one of the things that I've benefited the most from is just learning how to talk across significant difference in a way that is constructive. It's not too shallow. You can always go to shallow, so you're not actually talking about anything too, that's not going to touch too many nerves. You don't want to do that. That's sort of a waste of everyone's time. But if you start weighing in on weighty issues, I remember I was just at this conference a couple months ago and the topic of public schooling came up. And you can imagine evangelicals have all types of views on the role of public schools, the quality of public schools, and American Jews do as well. And you start realizing as you're articulating your views that you're taking a lot of things for granted or you're assuming a lot in the room when you shouldn't be doing that because people are actually coming from very different places. So that's the type of thing that happens

Building long-term relationships across difference

Speaker 8:42

there. And I think there's a strength to it. As long as people are willing to keep meeting that there isn't a sort of high agenda item that must be talked about, that would feel very different. This is really about building long-term relationships. The thing I've enjoyed the most is hearing the diverse ways American Jewish leaders experience evangelicals at a local level. So at this last meeting, there were American Jewish leaders from places like Cleveland and Milwaukee and Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio. And in each of those communities, there's also many evangelical churches and pastors. And rarely, when you're reading the news about evangelicals, or even as someone like me who studies American evangelical history, we're often studying sort of the prominent leaders or the most significant organizations. And it's quite interesting just to hear how, in places that aren't sort of on the main stage, how evangelicals relate to Jewish communities in those cities, what they do together and what they don't do together, what are some of the in the more lighthearted, sort of the ways that they relate awkwardly to each other. And then of course there's also serious things as well. But that's been really fun. I don't know how else I would even learn about those things, except in a gathering like this where people are coming to share those stories.

Speaker 2 10:00

Yeah, and it's

Shared support for Israel, but not shared values

Speaker 2 10:01

interesting. Um, in one of your articles on Christian Zionism, we'll get there next. But a quote you had was referencing that there's shared uh support for Israel, but not always shared values, exactly what you were just talking about. And you said shared values need not be the basis for interfaith cooperation, that interfaith cooperation is working, even though there's not the shared values. And it just kind of struck me like, wow, because a lot of these dialogues and this interfaith cooperation works quite well. I mean, generally, I'm sure there's there's difficult times. But I thought to myself, I wish actually different Christian denominations would have that sort of grace for one another. You know, like we don't, we don't, like you said, we don't all think alike either, but we we tend to almost sometimes be harder on each other within the Christian faith if we have different views. But Christian Zionism, I think that is where evangelicals or a stream of evangelicals are very concerned with Israel and for many

Post-Holocaust theology, Nostra Aetate & the 1969 shift

Speaker 2 11:00

different ways. My understanding, Dan, is that these dialogues started or kind of grew out of, in the first instance, declarations coming out of the Vatican and World Council of Churches in the 20th century, and then you referenced also as a pivotal meeting between Billy Graham and some rabbis in 1969, that was pivotal evangelical Protestants as sort of a the impetus for some of these dialogues. But how do you think the shift, which most of these we're referencing, how do you think the shift from blaming the more kind of historic or traditional anti-Semitic kind of blame of Jews for killing Jesus, our Lord, AJ Levine, our our our other speaker, referenced that as she was growing up, she was, you know, she was accused of that as a young girl. How do you think that shift from that kind of blame game of Jews to this kind of more sympathetic dialogue or desire for dialogue came about?

Speaker 11:59

When we think about like the history of theology in the 20th century, there's a huge shift after the Holocaust, and it's often called post-Holocaust theology. So this is Christian, sometimes Jewish, that's probably a separate conversation, post-Holocaust Jewish theology, but post-Holocaust Christian theology is really grappling with this dynamic that most of the people who committed the Holocaust were confessing Christians, whether they were Lutherans or Catholics or some other tradition. And for some Christians after 1945, that was an existential question. How could Christians have done something like this? And there were a number of pioneering works that tried to trace the history of anti-Judaism in Christian thought. People like Franklin Lattell, who was a minister turned academic. He was at Temple University, founded the first Holocaust studies program in the United States. And he developed a theory that was then built upon by other scholars that we put too much blame on just Nazi ideology if we don't recognize that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis was built on previous existing Christian anti-Judaism and even anti-Semitism. And the separation there would be anti-Judaism would be really emphasizing the contrast between Christianity and Judaism and sort of putting Judaism as an inferior religion. Antisemitism is a more racial category that says there's something genetic within the ethnic Jewish line that is abhorrent and should be opposed. And so both of those exist. Antisemitism tends to be a more modern development as ideas, sort of pseudo-scientific ideas of race emerge in the 18th, 19th century. And so someone like Lattell really was concerned about this and was one of the people, among many others, people like Reinhold Nieber were quite important for this as well, who really advocated for a total revolution in Christian theology relating to how Christians thought about Israel and Israel as a sort of theological people and about the Jewish people. And evangelicals are not at the center of that story. That was a theological revision that happened largely among what we call liberal Protestants or mainline Protestants. But there was a version of it that cascaded into the Catholic Church and ultimately culminated in the Second Vatican Council statement called Nostri Tate from 1965, where the Catholic Church rejected the charge of deicides, as what you were mentioning, the idea that the Jews were guilty for the death of God, so should therefore be cursed or something like that, and sort of praised the Jewish people as the source of the Christian religion. So that was in 1965. You mentioned that by 1969, someone like Billy Graham is meeting with the American Jewish Committee in New York to have the evangelical version of this conversation, which is quite different because evangelicals have a different history with that Christian anti-Judaism. American evangelicals in particular don't feel nearly as culpable for the Holocaust as European Christians tended to. And the theology in the evangelical world is just different than the theology in some of the other Protestant

How evangelicals chose to “stand by” Israel

Speaker 15:08

places. So what was really key for the evangelicals was partially a recognition of the tendency for Christians to be anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish. And so there were attempts to rectify that in a sort of evangelical way. The one they ended up choosing was, and being encouraged to choose in some sense by some of their Jewish colleagues, was supporting the state of Israel as a way of correcting for not supporting Jews in the 1940s. That was often the rhetoric was Christians didn't stand by Jews in the 1930s and 40s. It's incumbent upon us to stand by them now. And that aligned well with evangelical theology that saw the state of Israel as sort of a prophetic entity or prophetic creation that was fulfilling biblical prophecy. And that really saw the state of Israel as the good guys in the world, certainly in the Middle East, and aligned with this revision of the way that they talked about Judaism and Jews. So you get a sort of sub-group of evangelicals, including Billy Graham, who's really important because he's such a prominent evangelical, to be starting to think this way by the 1970s and sort of enacting the evangelical version of this broader Christian revaluation of their relationship to Jews after the Holocaust.

Modern Israel vs. biblical Israel: Genesis 12:3

Speaker 2 16:21

Yeah, and I think this is, you know, like you even referenced earlier, evangelicals think differently of different strains. And we're going to talk about a couple different strains. But I I've recently given our previous talks on more biblical and how we read scripture. There's many, I think, and Christian Zionists being some of them who would equate the modern state of Israel with the biblical Israel kingdom. But then, of course, in biblical studies, my understanding is there's actually lots of debate about, you know, the Abrahamic covenant versus Moses versus, you know, and is it conditional or unconditional? And we won't get into all that because we're not the biblical scholars, but is that is that all that's another piece? Would most Christian Zionists equate those two?

Speaker 17:05

Yeah, that's right. So, and this is frankly what Jewish Zionists do as well, right? So when Jewish Zionists talk about the continuity of the Jewish people, they're thinking all the way back to the biblical times and the patriarchs and all that. So Christian Zionists do the same thing, and and this is why, for example, one of the key texts for the average evangelical Christian Zionist is in Genesis. It's Genesis 12, 3, where God is talking to Abraham and he says, I will bless those who bless you, and for whoever curses you, I will curse. And so that's he's speaking to Abraham. For a Christian Zionist, Abraham is a stand-in for Israel, Abraham and his descendants. And then that Israel, that would be, you know, the one being referenced in Genesis, is the same metaphysical, theological group of people that is today the Jewish people, and including the people that are in the state of Israel. So yeah, that there's a couple jumps you have to do there, or a couple decisions you have to make about how you're going to interpret that. But that is seen as uh to get back to the post-Holocaust context, that was seen as a not just a respectful thing to do, but a sort of necessary thing to do to recognize the survival of the Jewish people and to recognize that the state of Israel, which was talked about a lot of the time, that the state of Israel was a humanitarian refuge for the remnants of a European uh Jewry. That was a history that went all the way back to the Babylonian exile and so forth, all the way back into the Bible. So, yes, that is a that's a move that Christian Zionists tend to make, and and they they tend to be so committed to that that they find it hard to understand it otherwise. There was a sort of semi-infamous interview earlier this year between Tucker Carlson, the host, and uh Ted Cruz, who's a very prominent, probably the most pro-Israel senator in the U.S. Senate. And Ted Cruz cited this idea that God will bless those who bless Israel. And Tucker, who's become very critical of U.S. support for Israel, sort of asked him to defend that view from the Bible. And Ted Cruz just, he sort of fumbled around. He's like, Well, I don't even remember where that is in the Bible, but I know it's in there. And it sort of shows like it was just it's so deep in the culture that an evangelical like Ted Cruz grew up in that uh they just it's just a sort of a thing taken for granted uh within that community. And so other views that would sort of question that theology or how we talk about the relationship of the Jewish people to Israel would be seen as sort of out of bounds or unfamiliar to most evangelicals.

Speaker 2 19:39

Aaron

Who counts as a Christian Zionist?

Speaker 2 19:40

Powell So how situate Christian Zionism within the broader evangelical space. So who are we talking about here and then what distinguishes them as Christian Zionists?

Speaker 19:50

Aaron Powell So they tend to have this idea. I mentioned Genesis 12.3, this idea that if the US or if Christians bless Israel and support Israel is how this is usually interpreted, then God will bless them. So this is a key part. This is one of the things that distinguish evangel uh Christian Zionists from other evangelicals, is they tend to think about the world as centering on Israel in some sense, that this is how God mediates blessings and curses throughout the world. There are some theological particulars. I mentioned the prophecy component of this. So many Christian Zionists come out of a certain theology that's popular in the evangelical world called dispensationalism that has a bunch of uh end times prophecies that need to be fulfilled by the state of Israel. And so there's a lot of fascination and fixation on Israel there. And then there's also within the Christian Zionist world, there are evangelicals who tend to be politically conservative, who tend to see the U.S. and Israel as very close allies in sort of a strategic

Christians United for Israel & the organized minority

Speaker 20:50

sense. They both have the same enemies in other parts of the world. They both share Judeo-Christian values. This is often a sort of way that it's talked about Israel's a Jewish country. For many of these evangelicals, the U.S. is a Christian country. So these are the two pillars of the Judeo-Christian civilization. Where you see all those things together, you're probably going to find Christian Zionists. They do not represent the majority of evangelicals, but they're very well organized. And so they are heard from a lot. The umbrella organization right now is called Christians United for Israel. It was founded by a Texas pastor named John Hagee, who's been a prominent conservative political pastor for many, many decades. Christians United for Israel claims to have 10 million members, overwhelmingly evangelical Christians, who are basically like a lobby organization that sometimes, you know, uh they have summits in Washington, D.C., and they go and lobby Congress people and things like that. They also do a lot of work at the local level in the different states. They have chapters on college campuses and they push for legislation in states to sort of invest in Israel or to oppose the boycotting of Israeli products, which is often popular among. Critics of Israel. So that's an organization that has 10 million people. I'm like many scholars, I'm skeptical that there's actually 10 million active members of something like that. But even if it's a fraction of that, even if it's you know a tenth of that, that's still a very well-organized, large group of evangelical voters, some of them in really key swing states, so they can make their weight felt during election time more than otherwise. But if we in a traditional survey, we tend to think there are between 70 or 80 million evangelicals in the United States. So we're talking about a minority here. Certainly the ideas that we've been talking about are held by more than just the people that are a member of one of these organizations. So there are there is a broader sort of sentiment, pro-Israel sentiment, pro-Israel theology in the evangelical world. But really until the last 20 or 30 years, it was very disorganized. And so you had it sort of on a cultural level. You might have had it in churches and the and the way that pastors talked, but you didn't feel it as much on the political level or the diplomatic level. And that's really what's changed in the last few decades and create a lot of this conversation around where does this come from? Is this sort of a legitimate way of being political? Who's actually behind this? And those types of questions that are really have been really prominent, particularly in the last few years since the October 7th, 2023 attacks and the ongoing wars in the Middle East and wars that the U.S. is really involved in as well. So those questions have emerged much more acutely, I would say, in recent years. When I was doing my dissertation about 15 or so years ago, this was an interesting issue, but it wasn't sort of a burning issue. It was, it was one of these issues that some people have written on, some hadn't. There's a lot now of focus and attention and curiosity around Christian Zionism, around the pro-Israel culture that is in different parts of the American church. And that's a product of not just what's happening in the world, but also the organization that those Christians have brought to their beliefs and their sort of desire and successful in a lot of cases to have their voices heard by politicians.

Speaker 2 23:58

Yeah, that was really helpful. Sometimes you almost think it might be the majority of evangelicals, but it's a mixture, it's a subgroup.

Speaker 24:04

So it's an organized minority, is how I'd say it.

Break — about SLBF Studio at Upper House

Speaker 3 24:09

We'll get back to our conversation with Dan Hummel in just a moment. The Upwards podcast is produced by SLBF Studio out of Upper House, a Christian study center serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison community. Through conversations with scholars, authors, and thought leaders, we explore the intersection of faith, learning, and public life. To learn more about us, go to slbf.org slash studio.

Dispensationalism and the end-times script

Speaker 2 24:36

Since you're you didn't do it, I'm gonna brag on your book. So The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism. So we're gonna go into a little bit of eschatology here. And this is a wonderful book for our listeners if you haven't read it and you're interested in end times things and the American Evangelical Church. And I know you can't summarize. I I did read the book, and I know it's impossible to summarize. However, maybe you could give us a little indication of the eschatological piece of dispensationalism and how Israel factors in and then how that is linked to Christian Zionism. Just that piece for me.

Speaker 25:14

Yeah, so dispensationalism, I mentioned it a few minutes before, is this particular theology that has a really interesting history. And you can read the book that Gene just mentioned that I won't say the title of. If you would like to learn about where it comes from in the early 19th century, the short of it is it becomes very popular in American evangelicalism by the turn of the 20th century and has sort of been with us since then in various forms. And part of what dispensationalism does on a theological level, also hermeneutical level, how it reads the Bible, is um it makes a strong category of Israel being separate from the church. And that might sound very minor for some Christians, but what it does when you read the Bible is it means that whenever you see the word Israel, you are associating it with the Jewish people. And for most of Christian history, for most Christian traditions, that goes for the Old Testament. And God is working with Abraham and the patriarchs, and then with King David and so forth. But once we get to the New Testament, there's often an idea that the church becomes the new Israel, that God worked through Israel, now he's working through the church, and there's a different covenant and there's a different mission for the church. And dispensationalists have always rejected that and have said when the church came about, it was not a replacement of Israel, or it was not even an advancement on this larger plan God had. It was actually a separate plan. And so you could think of dispensationalists tend to think there are two chosen peoples of God. There's the church, which is for all people who trust in Christ, and then there is Israel, which are the seed of Abraham, the sort of biological seed of Abraham.

Speaker 1 26:55

The rest of us are the rest of the world, are the nations, right? Those are the nations.

Speaker 26:59

That's right. That's right. And they're not chosen, right? So you so you they're they're sort of where the chosen come out of. So that's the way that dispensationalists see the world. And so because of that, when they read the prophecy sections of the Old Testament in particular, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Daniel, or the book of Revelation in the New Testament, they are really expecting a lot of those prophecies to be fulfilled by a what you say, a literal or a sort of in time and space nation of Israel in the historic promised land, in what we'd call Palestine today. And the way they try to read all those prophecies to line up with each other are sort of seeing that the world culminates in a battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil in Israel, in a place called Armageddon or Harmagido, and ultimately the good guys win and the bad guys are vanquished, but all of it's happening and involving the nation of Israel. And so this is where the fixation or the interest in Israel and the Middle East in general comes from for a lot of evangelicals, is they think that the sort of end of the redemption of the world is unfolding in the Middle East, and that we have sort of the script of it if we know how to interpret the biblical prophecies well. Well, in that script, Israel is, I mean, it's a little qualified, but Israel are Israel's the good guys. Israel is the people that God is protecting, that ultimately God wants to come and rule over, and the other nations, and over history, the sort of key players in that, based on how different generations read these prophecies, include Russia and Iran, or the broader Muslim world, Egypt. These are all seen as enemies of Israel. And so if you take that view of prophecy and then you just sort of put it on your geopolitics or how you see the world or international diplomacy, you're going to have very strong views about who should be attacking whom and who you should be doing a peace deal with and who you should be very skeptical of. And so a lot of Christian Zionists are just taking that theology and applying it to the current Middle East, the modern Middle East. And it's not that simple. I think there are other things going on. They're also Americans, and so they're thinking through the way Americans have typically dealt with the Middle East. But this theological component is quite significant. And so to bring that to Christian Zionism, historically, a lot of Christian Zionists have come out of this theological, this subculture of dispensationalism, and have really been, they've articulated that why they're being activists on this issue is because they believe that they can assist or they are called by God to be on the good side or the right side of this issue. And so they see it as natural to advocate for the U.S. being closer to Israel, to actually give aid to the Israeli government, to advocate for a more favorable view of Israel in media or in the broader culture, to take tours to Israel, to support Israel financially, economically. All these things are seen as outworkings of this basic theological commitment. And that's not the only thing that animates Christian Zionists. That's one of the things I've tried to write consistently about is this eschatology is an important but not sufficient piece to explain what's going on. But it is important. And without it, it's hard to imagine that there would be nearly as much interest by American evangelicals in this country versus some other country where there might be a reason to be interested in. And this theology has really animated Christian Zionists for over a hundred years now. And people like, I mentioned John Hagee, who founded Christian Zion for Israel, he comes out of this world. Earlier generation of people, people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, came out of the dispensationalist world. Billy Graham also came out of it. He was sort of moving in a slightly different direction by the 70s, but he was very familiar with this way of thinking. And this goes all the way back. Often we start the story in the 19th century with people like William Blackstone, who presented the Blackstone Memorial to President Benjamin Harrison in 1891 to advocate for a Jewish homeland in the Ottoman Empire at that time. And he was also animated by this dispensational theology. So you sort of have a continuity of this going all the way

Heaven, earth, and the Israel–church dualism

Speaker 31:14

back.

Speaker 2 31:14

I was really interested in one in the introduction of your book. As part of dispensationalism, isn't there this kind of dualism between Israel, like the church now is for all, it's for heaven, along with the angels and the principalities, but Israel is the earth. Like that's that's the covenant is for this this life now, the earth. And I I sort of saw a parallel in you said in your article on Christian Zionism, that you use the word they some of them see Israel as God's timepiece, right? And these times, the prophecies that are coming, but that they seed handling of modern Israel to what you call Jewish self-understanding. I thought that was interesting because that seemed to be kind of a parallel or that that same dualism kind of showing up.

Speaker 32:04

That's a good observation. Yeah, I think that's right. This this goes back to the origins of the dispensationalist theology. But yeah, there's a f there's a strong dualism between heaven and earth. And the church are God's heavenly people and are destined to reign in heaven after all the end times happens. And Israel are God's earthly people and are destined to rule the earth and are sort of supposed to fulfill those prophecies in Isaiah and Jeremiah about how the earth will be all at peace and will be centered in Jerusalem. So, so yeah, so there's that there's that distinction, and it does, like you say, align with a sense of the way that evangelicals tend to see the state of Israel today as I mentioned a force for good, but also as a state that can sort of articulate its own interests and that Christian Zionists are often called to just sort of affirm the interests that the Israeli government or the Israeli people articulate as their interests. And this is an interesting, it's it's not very common, I guess I'm saying interesting in an academic way. It's not a common way that American domestic groups advocate for foreign countries. Usually there's a strong vision by the Americans of like what that country should be doing. This is one of the cases where, in the main, evangelicals are really deferring that to the Israeli government. So when the Israeli government continues to build settlements in the West Bank, that's something that Christian Zionists tend to just endorse. They might personally endorse it anyway for their views on the borders, the rightful borders of Israel or something like that. But they tend to leave the sort of articulation of these things to the Israeli government. And that's happened with the settlements, that's happened with the wars that are going on right now. So the often the Christian Zionist perspective is Israel knows what's best for itself. And so it is the job of Christians to support them in what they understand are their best interests. That's given them a lot of cachet among the Israelis, particularly the Israeli government, because that is quite a valuable ally to have, advocating the U.S. government. But it's also given them critique because it can appear as if Christian Zionists aren't really thinking a lot about the moral, ethical, or or even just sort of base uh US interests in the region and are much more willing to outsource that to the Israeli government. So it's an interesting dynamic, and it's been one of the things I've really tried to sort of understand is it's been highly cultivated and honed over the years as there's become a much more professional class of evangelicals whose entire professional career is bound up in relating the evangelical community to the Israeli government. This has been the line that they've sort of developed in a very professional way that makes it a pretty strong relationship

A professionalized lobbying relationship

Speaker 34:41

as well. I think sometimes as we read about it, we can assume this is sort of fringe or very charismatic pastors sort of rallying people to this cause and you know, taking their big churches on tours to Israel or something like that, and sort of like a populist movement. There is an element to that, but at this point, we're well into the 30, 40 years into a very organized way of doing this. It functions very much like a traditional lobbying relationship where there's a lot of very professional people at the top of these organizations who have many of them have lived in Israel for most of their lives, after at least their adult lives. And so they are familiar with how Israeli culture is, how the Israeli government works, as well as they're deeply connected into the evangelical world. And that creates this interesting and quite significant relationship between the two communities.

Speaker 2 35:28

Well, and I can tell you. So I worked in the State Department in the early 2000s, right? And it was alive and well then, too, although you we didn't really know exactly. And I think there are multiple factors that have the US trying to, in many ways, we had to be the neutral arbiter because they were so beat up on by other so many other countries, right? Like at the UN and what have you. But I will say it was always a little surprising to me how different we treated Israel than any other country on the planet, really. So it's interesting to connect those two dynamics.

Current affairs: Huckabee, Hegseth & shifting dynamics

Speaker 2 36:04

Back to uh Christian Zionism, you said in your article that what is new is not the convictions of Christian Zionism, but their elevation to highest levels of government. Now let's move into a little bit of the current affairs piece. We have Mike Huckabee as our ambassador in Israel. He's a at least uh maybe would you call it like a more traditional stream of Christian Zionism?

Speaker 36:29

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And his his history goes all the way back to the 70s on this issue. So yeah, he he's a very long-standing, prominent Christian Zionist who's now in an official capacity.

Speaker 2 36:40

And you mentioned Ted Cruz as another, but there's more. And then, but we also have our Secretary of Defense. And in the midst of this war, it feels to me like the relationship with Israel might be changing. I mean, they were just left out of some negotiation. So we'll get to that next. But tell us a little bit about Secretary Heggseth and his version of Christian Zionism, which sounds a little different than the others.

Speaker 37:08

He comes from a different theological stream. So he's not a dispensationalist, as we've been using that term. He doesn't believe that well, I don't know exactly what he believes, but his church does not teach that there will be this big role for the state of Israel to play in the end times. But he is quite pro-Israel, and he comes at that more from this, you could say, culture wars or civilizational approach to seeing Israel. So I mentioned the idea of a Judeo-Christian civilization that is has certain bat values based on the Bible. That's quite a popular talking point for a lot of conservatives. The idea that these are more traditional values, these are the religious values of both the United States and Israel. And Hagseth really sees a lot of the world as divided between people who support the sort of Judeo-Christian civilization and then people who oppose it. And so he supports Israel for that reason. Another is that, and this has been a long-standing theme in the U.S.-Israel relationship, is that there's a certain strand of Americans who are particularly involved in the military who just love the Israeli military. They find it highly effective. They are always impressed by how quickly it mobilizes and seems to have these amazing victories in all types of ways. We've seen that in the last few years in just a diverse amount of ways that the Israeli military attacks different parts of its enemies. It also has a really good intelligence network. And there's a definite strain of American conservatives who want to emulate that. And so they they see partnering with Israel as a key way of doing that, having an intelligence sharing relationship and learning from the Israeli military. This goes all the way back to like the Vietnam era when Israel had a war in 1967 that was quite significant. That it conquered a lot of the territory that we now call the occupied territories. And it did it in what was famously called the Six-Day War. So it only lasted six days. This was in 1967. This was right as the U.S. was getting deeply involved in the Vietnam War. And so there was a lot of contrast even put back then between the really effective Israeli military and it seemed like the U.S. military couldn't get its act together. Now, of course, those are very different contexts. There's a lot of reasons why one of those went quick and one of them became a quagmire. But for people like Pete Hegseth, they want to learn from the best examples. And part of the partnership with Israel is around that, that sort of militaristic ideal. So if you combine that with the culture war sort of civilizational approach, you get a sense of why Hegseth is quite pro-Israel in his views. And that sits alongside people like Mike Huckabee, people like Marco Rubio, who is also quite pro-Israel, but comes at it from a slightly different perspective being a Catholic. And then you can think of other people who have been in office in the first Trump administration, people like Mike Pence, the vice president, who was a long-standing Christian Zionist, Mike Pompeo, who was the Secretary of State during the first Trump administration. A number of these people have been long-standing evangelical Christian Zionists. Others of them have just been very pro-Israel for a long time. But that's one of the things that I'm not exactly sure when I wrote that line you quoted, but it was remarkable during the first Trump administration to see an idea that had been at one time on the fringes of the Republican Party, then sort of a view that was one of many to one that by 2017 was promoted to one of the dominant views and helped justify things like moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem after it had been in Tel Aviv for the whole history of the U.S. Israel relationship. That was quite a remarkable thing to see as a historian. And it's sort of only gotten more there's only been more closeness and prominence of some of these evangelical Christian Zionists since 2017 up until today.

Is Israel being left out? The deep well of support

Speaker 2 40:47

None of us knows exactly what's going on in all of this mix, but it seems to me that Israel's, for one of the first time in my memory, been not a participant in some of this. And so I'm just wondering what um what that does to maybe these organizations that are lobbying for Israel. Or I don't know. It it's it's confusing, but it's also it's fascinating to think about. What do you think?

Speaker 41:14

Yeah, I'm hesitant. Anything we say will probably be outdated in before this thing even uh is published. But uh one thing that what I will expect to be a constant is that the Israeli government will see the deep well of support it has in the American evangelical community as a huge asset. This will allow them a freedom of movement in bucking whatever the U.S. insists they do that they wouldn't have otherwise. And that is not a new development. Back in 1981, the Israeli government, the Israeli military, surprise-attacked an Iraqi nuclear reactor. It was seen as an act of war. It was condemned immediately by the U.S., among many other entities like the UN. And the first call that the prime minister at that time, his name was uh Menachem Begin, made was to Jerry Falwell, who was a prominent coalition leader in the Reagan Revolution. He ran something called the Moral Majority, which was a big sort of lobby organization. And he made that call because in Menachem Begin's words, Jerry Falwell could speak for 20 million Christians in the U.S. And so he knew that if he could get that group to start telling a different story rather than condemning the attack, saying this was actually a heroic act, this was Israel defending its interests, he knew that that would sort of neutralize the Reagan administration. And he was exactly right. The Reagan administration critiqued it, denounced it, and moved on because they were not in the mood at that point, this is early in Reagan's first term, to anger one of the core bases of support. It's a different world we're in now, many years later, but that same dynamic is still there. And in fact, it's more organized than it was in 1981. And so I think one of the things that'll be going through the heads of Netanyahu or whoever's running Israel in the near future will be knowing that there is a very well organized, staunch, unmovable support for them in the American organized American Christian Zionist uh world that will be, will have their back no matter what they do. So if they deem that they need to continue to wage some type of war in Lebanon, they will know that it will be a big, a real messy conversation on the U.S. side. It won't be a decisive condemnation of what they're doing. So that doesn't necessarily mean they'll do it. They have other things going on besides just thinking about U.S. domestic politics. But it's a huge asset when you're a small country, knowing that you have a very dependable lobby group in a democratic large country that will give you freedom to think about ways you might disappoint the leadership of that larger country. And that will factor into everything that Israel is considering going forward. And it's it's something that they've really Spent a lot of energy and resources working on as well. It's not just a natural alignment between evangelicals in Israel. There's been a very long cultivation of that relationship. There's been a lot of effort from the Israeli side to cultivate that relationship too. I mentioned touring is a sort of a popular thing that the Israeli government often offers holy land tours to evangelical pastors to try to get on their good side. But they also do something they call it Hasbara or public diplomacy, where they are very intent on getting pro-Israel literature in evangelical media spaces and things like that. So they really see the value in this. And these are the times right now we're in where they think this will pay off for them in the long term.

Linear vs. cyclical: football, baseball & the end times

Speaker 2 44:41

Getting back a little bit to uh the Jewish Christian dialogue piece, Amy Jell Levine in our conversation, she had a really interesting, this might link a little bit to dispensationalism again, briefly, but she had a really interesting analogy and how we Americans especially think very linear about the end times and she equated it, or the the analogy was uh we play football, whereas Jews tend to focus on remembrance and multiple interpretations of the same scripture. We don't like multiple interpretations, right? You even said, you know, the lit more literal ones from these different streams of evangelicalism. But yeah, they're playing baseball and they're running around the bases in each generation reinterpreting what it means. And so I asked her a question sort of about what you know salvation looks like in those two scenarios. And she said that Jews are are not really so concerned about salvation. Of course, God saves, but they're more concerned about sanctifying life on earth. So they're also orthopraxy, that was another distinction I learned, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Orthopraxy, right practice, whereas Christians are more orthodoxy, right relief, right belief. So I'm wondering, you know, given that those are differences that we've had, I'm wondering what you think of the shift that there has been in Christian, evangelical, maybe both, in sort of the scholarship kind of moving away from this, you know, we need to say a prayer and get into heaven, and it's all about individual salvation, getting to heaven, and the move to more of a kind of meta-narrative, God's big story, and he's making all things new in his kingdom, new heaven and new earth. Do you think that shift in Christian circles and scholarship is helpful to possibly bring us closer together, given that it seems a little more in line with Jewish interpretations or ways of thinking?

Recovering the Jewish context of Jesus & Paul

Speaker 46:47

Definitely. And I think you're putting your finger on something that's actually closely aligned, just not on not on just what you were saying, but actually, you know, a lot of that rethinking in the Christian theological world is actually by recovering some of the Jewish context of the New Testament and the old and the Hebrew Bible, but particularly understanding Jesus' context more thoroughly as a fully Jewish context. So, you know, you can date this, and I know you've had Seth on, who is a scholar in this space, but thinking of like the scholarship of someone like E.P. Sanders in the 1970s who really reinterpreted Paul in his Jewish context. That was a somewhat of a revolution at the time, where Paul had been understood more in Christian categories and how he was speaking to those, rethinking Paul's thought as one of coming out of the Jewish world in the first century. And the same with Jesus as someone who was thoroughly Jewish in his practice, understood himself to be following the Torah, and was a rabbi for his earthly ministry. And when you start reinterpreting the gospels and reinterpreting the epistles in that way, you start moving toward this blurring of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Maybe not blurring, sorry, word, but seeing those as aligned very closely, and they're both quite important. And actually, you could add a third, there's a there's a third ortho, and it's orthopathy, which is about the affections, that there is a certain way of you could you could see in the Christian context the fruit of the spirit. That's a third sort of to be a mature Christian or a Christian, you know, following Jesus, you don't just do the right practices, you don't just believe the right things, you also relate to others in the right way. You also are kind and generous and humble and things like that. So the the alignment of all of those, I think, has been increasingly emphasized in even evangelical theology. I'm not just talking about Christian theology, even in the evangelical world, because there's a recovery and a new sense of understanding, what was Jesus trying to do in the first century? Who is he responding to? Who is he trying to get to listen to him? And that all requires a mastery of first century Judaism, of the languages that Jews spoke at the time, and even often some later understanding of where Judaism goes after that. So not just confining yourself to the first century. I think of the work of more famous people like N. T. Wright, who's really made this turn in his own scholarship, really emphasizing the Jewish context for interpreting Paul. But other people, I just wrote a sort of academic article on Marvin Wilson, who was a very longtime Old Testament scholar at uh Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, who wrote a book in the 80s called Our Father Abraham. And it was about rethinking the Jewish Christian relationship. This is back 30, 40 years ago now. But he came out of that, or he was sort of exposed to that because he went to grad school, a PhD program at Brandeis University as an evangelical Christian. Brandeis is one of the premier Jewish universities in the U.S. His advisor was Jewish and his colleagues were Jewish. He entered into the world of biblical studies from a much different perspective than the average evangelical Christian who goes to a set an evangelical seminary or something like that. So he was attuned to some of this stuff a little earlier than others, but through his scholarship and others, that big divide between orthopraxy and orthodoxy has really closed. At least for those who are reading in this, I think on the popular level, there's still a lot of the traditional ways of thinking about this. And there's certainly a lot of concern in the evangelical world over right belief and biblical inerrancy and things like that. But there's there's definitely been chinks in that armor or different pockets that have emerged in the last few decades that are a result of this change in how we're thinking about the New Testament.

Reading Scripture “with more generosity”

Speaker 2 50:32

Well, and I think uh I asked AJ about Jewish Christian dialogue, and I think she was uh we we were talking a lot about our shared stories and how how important those are and and focusing on those. And she's wants to try anything that could work to bring us closer together. But she wasn't very she wasn't super sanguine or super hopeful on on some of the larger, you know, more policy issues we were discussing earlier. But she stated that one of her motivations for getting involved and working so much with Christians and talking so much to Christians was to find the switch for Christians to be able to read scripture and she used the term with more generosity. So as opposed to jumping to the more sort of anti-Judaism interpretations of what happened, but actually with a more generous understanding of where Jews are coming from and Jewish history and what have you.

Dan’s hope: getting the right people in the room

Speaker 2 51:28

So, what is your hope for Christian Jewish dialogue?

Speaker 51:32

Uh well, one of the things that I've experienced as Amy Joe Levine has also experienced, is you can have a really good conversation with select leaders from another community, but that may not project out into the broader community. The people who tend to opt into an interfaith dialogue session are already primed to be more interested in themes like pluralism and diversity than those who are just going to say, uh, that's not a place where I really want to be engaged in. And so my hope is that we find ways where the right people are in the room when we have these conversations. And by that I mean I find it awkward when we're in a dialogue and we're talking about groups of people that are not in the room and just saying, well, if only they could change their minds. You know, it feels a bit like, well, we're probably the minority that, yeah, there's a few dynamics there that make it feel like this is not actually doing what we all hope it will do. And I learned that from, I mentioned Chuck Cohen, the professor here at UW, who I was a student under, and he's been doing Jewish-Christian dialogue for decades and decades. And he concluded this many decades ago, that if interfaith dialogue is confined to largely the elite, progressive representatives of all the religious traditions, then you're actually going to not have a lot to disagree on because those segments of each of those traditions have sort of done the same move and are actually a lot like each other more than they are like some of their co-religionists in their different traditions. So it's not going to be that interesting. And then it's also not going to really move the needle in the way that the people in the room hope it does. That, oh, we wish, you know, more of our co-religionists were interested in dialogue or could learn, as Amy Jill said, of a more generous way of engaging with others. And so my hope is that we can find ways to broaden the conversation, to include, I mean, I guess just to be blunt, the more conservative elements of our traditions. That's one thing that fascinated me about Christian Zionism is it's an example of quite conservative Christians, in some cases, partnering with quite conservative Jews for a shared cause. Now, many of us might find that cause to be distasteful or not of the kind we hope interfaith dialogue produces. But if you actually study them, they are doing the hard work of talking across a lot of difference, a lot of it being exclusivist difference as well. That's where sort of the progressive sides of some of the religions, you know, they sort of downplay the exclusivism of their tradition. Well, in Christian Zionism, you have two groups that really think they're the one group that really has the answer, and yet they're finding ways to work together on a big political project. And that's all to say, I hope we can find ways that a dialogue that emphasizes diversity, pluralism, learning from each other while also talking about the differences in a way that's substantive can start including the more conservative elements of those traditions. We've done a few things here in Madison at Upper House that have tried to do that when we've hosted, we've hosted a few reading groups that are explicitly about religious pluralism or religious diversity in Madison. We've really tried to recruit from our local communities representatives across the spectrum from the Christian and the Jewish community and other communities as well. It's a lot more work. There's a lot of explaining you have to do for a lot of all the people really why would they want to join something like this when they know the parameters? But the times we have done it and it's been successful, it's been a very rewarding conversation and one that I hope it sticks with people and actually sort of changes minds, even if it's just a group of leaders and there's much work to be done to translate that out to a broader community. It can be done. It's often harder and takes more time, but uh it's something that I hope more people get invested in and again make easier as we go

Closing reflections & where to find more

Speaker 55:15

forward.

Speaker 2 55:15

Well, thank you, Dan. This has been fun chatting with you. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and uh wonderful experience with this topic.

Speaker 3 55:23

It's good to be with you. This conversation reminds us that meaningful dialogue doesn't require agreement on everything, it requires curiosity, humility, and a willingness to understand how others see the world. Dan Hummel's insights into Christian Zionism, Jewish Christian relations, and the challenges of interfaith engagement help illuminate not only the history that has shaped these conversations, but also the opportunities that lie ahead. As our communities become increasingly diverse, the ability to engage deeply across differences may be one of the most important skills we can cultivate. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who would enjoy the conversation. Also, consider visiting slbf.org slash studio to find other podcast offerings. That's slbf.org slash studio. Until next time, keep looking upward and living with purpose. Go in peace.