I am a Christian. I stand with the Jewish state and her people. Christ is my King. And — spoiler alert — He is also a Jew.
I have sat with devoutly religious Muslim leaders and dignitaries and listened with conviction as they disclaimed antisemitism under the guise of their faith. Now I myself must condemn those who advance bigotry while claiming Christianity’s banner.
Tucker Carlson’s recent comments concerning Christians and Israel are appalling. “If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and killing Christians, I think you’ve lost the thread,” he said in an interview with Munther Isaac, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem.
Carlson passed over numerous inconvenient facts about his chosen guest. As Haley Strack wrote for National Review, Isaac has accused Israel of conducting an “occupation,” and claiming that Palestinians in Jerusalem have “experienced ethnic cleansing at Israel’s hands and are subject to Israeli apartheid.” He celebrated the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and described Israel’s response to it as a “genocide.”
As has been widely reported, interviewing Isaac, Carlson also ignored crucial context. The church in question is not in Israel, but in the West Bank, which is administered by the Palestinian Authority. Bethlehem, specifically, was 80 percent Christian in 1995; it is now 80 percent Muslim. By contrast, the Christian population of Israel is growing.
These facts make clear that Carlson’s complaints were merely pretextual. His main goal was to use the clerical collar of his guest to try to legitimize, nay spiritualize, his most recent anti-Israel, anti-Christian dialogue. But it was dialogue with a Palestinian-terrorist sympathizer nonetheless. Isaac, Carlson, and others like them like to hide their bigotry behind a purported separation between the Jewish people and the state of Israel. But the global peril Jews have faced following October 7 dispels the notion that Jews can be treated apart from Israel itself.
Just as there cannot be a kosher hog, one cannot claim to be a Christian and hate Israel. What many fail to realize, or choose to ignore, is that the fight against antisemitism is one for the Christian as well as for the Jew. The cornerstone of Christian antisemitism is replacement theology — the myth that the mission of the Jewish people was finished with the coming of Jesus Christ and that the Israelites were replaced by Christians in the eyes of God.
And it is indeed a myth. Just ask the Apostle Paul, who flatly rejected replacement theology in Romans 11: “I say then, ‘God has not rejected his people . . . may it never be. For I too am an Israelite, a descendent of Abraham of the tribe of Benjamin.’” The Apostle’s point? It’s simply that Paul was Jewish and God did not reject Paul. Rather, God used Paul, and will never turn away from the Jewish people.
Like Jew-hatred, silver-tongued attempts to deny Jesus’s Judaism are nothing new. And like misery, Jew-hatred loves company. In fact, the world’s oldest hatred has made common cause with other forms of malevolence for millennia: the Spanish Inquisitors, Martin Luther, the Third Reich, and more. During World War II, the Mufti of Jerusalem thanked Adolph Hitler for “the sympathy which [Hitler] had always shown for the Arab and especially Palestinian cause.”
In our history, some Christians have, sadly, cloaked their antisemitism in religious garb. Today, the Tucker Carlsons of the world barely try. They are driven by a love for clickbait, chaos, and cash. When you sell your soul, Jew-hatred, it seems, is often part of the deal.
Under ordinary circumstances, Carlson’s comments would be saddening, but no more noteworthy than any other tragically recurrent flareup of the world’s oldest hatred. But it cannot be ignored that he sought to target Israel at a time when, in this very country, mobs passionately chant both “death to America” and “death to Israel”; when our most elite universities cannot guarantee the safety of their Jewish students; and when even those who mourn the victims of Hamas’s attack cannot do so safely.
Nor can his comments be ignored at a time when the Biden administration has betrayed Israel at the U.N. and seems increasingly keen to do so elsewhere, and when House Republicans are yet to provide support to the embattled nation. The House’s continued failure to advance aid, coupled with the Biden administration’s ever-increasing, victim-blaming pressure on Israel, puts the Jewish state in an increasingly precarious position. It’s a position Carlson appears to support.
This is not just a foolish stance but also a dangerous one. Tehran’s tyrants and their henchmen in Hamas, Hezbollah, and elsewhere see Washington’s failure to stand with Jerusalem, and it energizes their bloodlust. Yesterday’s attack by Iran on Israel is yet another example. Each day Congress fails to act dramatically increases the likelihood of a regional war. Americans — Zionists or not — do not want that to happen.
The overwhelming majority of American Christians stand with Israel. We do not apologize for our Zionism any more than we would apologize for believing Jesus is the Messiah. Our faith, modern history, and patriotism all demand we stand with the Jewish state and with our Jewish neighbors.
It is in America’s interest to support Israel, and to help it show that targeting Jews for elimination is unacceptable. And it is Christians’ spiritual obligation to stand with the Jewish people. There’s only one thing to say to those who believe otherwise, those who, for their own personal advancement, would try to drive a wedge between Jews and Christians.