Confab eyes assault on pro-Israel evangelicals

Ninety-million evangelical Protestants are part of the backbone of American civil society. These Bible-believing Christians have eclipsed mainline Protestants who comprised the Protestant establishment that led the United States in the decades before, during and after World War II. Many elites in the Washington-New York beltway regard evangelical Protestants with contempt, but this does not diminish their influence. Evangelicals have had a huge impact on presidential and Congressional elections since helping Ronald Reagan win the presidency in 1980. 

Because evangelicals regard the Bible as a reliable expression of G-d’s word, they have been some of Israel’s most ardent supporters in the modern era. Polling data indicates that evangelicals are more likely than American Jews to believe that G-d gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people. Moreover, ardent evangelical faith corresponds with higher levels of patriotism; evangelicals are more unashamedly pro-American than many other segments of American society. This helps explain why military enlistment rates are higher in the American Bible Belt than in other parts of the country, particularly the northeast.

In light of the role evangelical Protestants play in the American body politic, it’s no sur-prise they have been targeted by anti-Israel activists in both the U.S. and the Middle East. 

During the early 2000s, Palestinian Christians and their allies, many of them affiliated with Sabeel, a Christian anti-Zionist organization headquartered in Jerusalem, worked to delegitimize pro-Israel evangelicals in the U.S. by portraying them as zealots intent on engineering a showdown between Christianity and Islam. This message resonated strongly in some quarters, particularly with mainline Protestant churches that have been losing market share to evangelical churches since the mid-1960s.