Among the many tributes to Charlie Kirk, one came from the prime minister of Israel. This is not so surprising since Kirk, an evangelical Christian, strongly supported Israel. In other words, he was a “Christian Zionist.”
Nevertheless, current widespread anti-Israel political ferment has led a number of people to treat Christian Zionism as a fringe ideology of relatively recent origin. For instance, Tucker Carlson and movie actor and director Kirk Cameron have spoken of Christian Zionism as a lamentable aberration.
However, Christian Zionism is not the product of recent invention. It stands on centuries of Christian philosemitic thought, which also often envisioned a future rebirth of the state of Israel. In particular, British and American evangelicals led the way in this movement. They included not only those who held to a dispensationalist view of the second coming of Christ, but also those committed to contending views about the future of the world.
In his book The Origins of Christian Zionism, Donald Lewis considers this beyond question: “Evangelical Protestantism was undoubtedly the single most important factor in growing and sustaining philosemitism and Christian Zionism in the English-speaking world.” For example, the Puritans generally viewed Jews in a positive light, as Iain Murray explains in his book The Puritan Hope. Reflecting that mindset, the Anglican writer Thomas Draxe (d. 1618), who was strongly influenced by the prominent Puritan William Perkins, reprimanded Christians for having enmity toward Jews: “We must not roughly ... contemme the Jeweses, nor expelle them out of our coasts and countries but hope well of them [and] pray for them[.]”
Outside Puritanism, other prominent, religiously minded seventeenth-century intellectuals like the physicist Isaac Newton and the philosopher John Locke envisioned the return of Jews to Israel, in line with biblical prophecy. Influential evangelical churchman Charles Simeon carried a pro-Jewish outlook well into the nineteenth century. However, probably the British individual who most successfully promoted philosemitism and Christian Zionism in the nineteenth century was Lord Shaftesbury (1801–1885).
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh earl of Shaftesbury, is most famous for his successful efforts in reforming the working conditions of British laborers. However, he was equally zealous in his efforts on behalf of Christian Zionism and the welfare of Jews. He bowed to Jews on the street and considered England’s economic prosperity the outcome of opening up the nation to Jews. The concurrent decline of Spain he blamed on its expulsion of Jews. He actively promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine and earnestly hoped for the re-establishment of a country for the Jews there.
Shaftesbury was not at all alone in this. In Lewis’s words, “by the mid-1820s, belief in the restoration of the Jews to Palestine had become the litmus test of Christian orthodoxy” among a number of English writers interested in biblical prophecy. Another example was the Baptist Charles Haddon Spurgeon, probably the most popular and respected English preacher of the nineteenth century. He once declared, “We cannot help looking for the restoration of the scattered Israelites to the land which God has given to them.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, a vocal American advocate for persecuted Jews and Christian Zionism appeared. He was William E. Blackstone (1841–1935). After a trip to Palestine, he initiated and coordinated “The Conference on the Past, Present and Future of Israel,” held November 24–25, 1890. One fruit of the conference was its unanimous “resolutions of sympathy with the oppressed Jews of Russia.”
Blackstone authored a document titled “Palestine for the Jews,” which is now usually referred to as the “Blackstone Memorial.” In part, it states, “What shall be done for the Russian Jews? ... Where shall 2,000,000 of such poor people go? ... Why not give Palestine back to them again? According to God’s distribution of nations it is their home; an inalienable possession from which they were expelled by force.”
Those signing this document included John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan; Melville W. Fuller, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court; T.B. Reed, speaker of the House of Representatives; James Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore; Hugh J. Grant, mayor of New York City, and William McKinley, a congressman who would become president of the United States.
Influenced by the Blackstone Memorial, on Dec. 9, 1991, President Harrison in a message to Congress decried the Russian government’s decision to expell 30,000 Jews from Moscow. Harrison described Jews as peaceful, loyal citizens despite their widespread experience of persecution.
The efforts of British Christian Zionists culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which committed the British government to establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The declaration was subsequently endorsed by the American president Woodrow Wilson, who knew Blackstone. Lewis points out that 7 of the 9 members of the War Cabinet who made the Balfour Declaration were either evangelicals or the products of an evangelical upbringing.
One of them, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, once gave a speech at the Jewish Historical Society of England. In it he mentioned his Sunday school class in a Welsh Baptist church, which made him especially interested in Jews and Zionism. He explained that “you must remember that we had been trained even more in Hebrew history than in the history of our own country.” He could name all the kings of Israel but not those of England.
In light of all this, no one can truthfully claim that Christian Zionism is a recent aberration. Support for Jews and the state of Israel is firmly rooted in history and in widespread Christian conviction.
Bruce W. Davidson is a professor emeritus of Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo, Japan and a board member of the Jonathan Edwards Center in Tokyo. You can contact him at davidson@hokusei.ac.jp.
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