Calling out Christian Zionism for what it is

"We are guilty of treating such structures with too much grace."

I had the pleasure of being part of the National Gathering of Common Grace Aotearoa down at Ngatiawa River Monastery. In a session co-hosted with Aotearoa Christians for Peace in Palestine, I gave the following paper. I hope it can be of use in the unceasing struggle for liberation in Palestine.

Please follow both organisations and check out the #grantthevisas campaign to petition New Zealand Minister of Immigration Erica Stanford to grant emergency humanitarian visas to Palestinians in Gaza who have family ties in Aotearoa, a call which continues to go unanswered by our government.

---

Why isn’t our outcry doing any good? What’s the use of protesting? Have we been screaming too softly? … Why couldn’t we show Christians who go to church every Sunday where it is the crucifixion if happening today?¹

This quote from the great German liberation theologian Dorothee Soelle, first written in the context of the Vietnam war, expresses a mood many involved in the struggle for a free Palestine feel today. This paper, then—if I may ask for your grace—is one attempt to scream a little louder.

Before we begin in earnest, I wanted to quickly run through some of the assumptions I will be making in this discussion. First assumption: Christian Zionism is bad. It is dangerous, irredeemable, and directly connected to the ongoing violence and geocide being perpetrated by the State of Israel. The second assumption is that we need to do something about it. As progressives (another assumption), we reject Christian Zionism and we want to combat it, thwart it, dilute it, provide alternatives, and so on. Working from this basis, there are two questions we will ask ourselves today:

1. What is Christian Zionism and why is it compelling for Christians?

2. What if Christian Zionists are right? Or, what are we do to if it turns out they actually might be reading the biblical text correctly or, at least, providing a viable reading?

1. What is Christian Zionism and why is it compelling?

Christian Zionism can most basically be defined as Christian support for the establishing of the State of Israel on the already-existing lands of Palestine, that is, the development of a settler colony which aims to provide a refuge and ethno-state for Jewish people in Palestine.²

There is some jargon here which we don’t have to get too caught up on, but I think is important to establish the links between our own history here in Aotearoa to that of Palestine. Settler colonialism is a term used to describe the type of colonialism which links our two contexts. Settler colonialism isn’t just about the conquering of a foreign land in order to increase your own influence and possibilities for resources. It’s also about conquering this land for the sake importing a new settler population onto to replace its existing population. Settler colonialism is therefore colonialism where the colonisers ‘come to stay,’ developing forms of national and religious identity premised on the displacement and eventual eradication of Indigenous peoples.³

So, on one level, Christian Zionism can be understood as any support by Christians for Zionism. It is therefore a political claim about the legitimacy of the Zionist State of Israel. But Christian Zionism is also a theological claim. Christian Zionism is a way of reading the Bible that identifies the modern State of Israel with the ancient Israelites, reads the promises of divine election and blessing from the Hebrew Bible onto the modern State of Israel, and so sees its establishment and defence as divinely ordained by the God of Jesus Christ, the God we Christians follow.

It's worth pausing to digest how such a situation came about. Because for the vast majority of its history, Western Christendom has been decidedly against Jewish ideas of statehood, self-determination, really anything Jewish altogether. Participation in pogroms and antisemitic beliefs were commonplace across medieval and post-Reformation Christian history in Europe. The great German Reformer Martin Luther, in his treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, called for the destruction of Jewish synagogues and schools, the banishment of Jewish prayer books and rabbinical preaching, for the stripping of any legal protections, for Jewish homes to be set alight and for Jewish property and money to be confiscated. This Protestant pogrom would lead way for the eventual eradication and murder of all Jews, writing that “we are at fault in not slaying them.”

It’s important for us to understand, then, that Christian support for the establishment of a Jewish ethno-state outside of Europe has often been proposed as a “solution” to the so-called “Jewish question” (certainly, the formal British support for Zionism in the Balfour Declaration was driven in no small part by the very attractive option to stopping the flow of Russian Jews from immigrating to Britian and polluting its Anglo-Saxon purity).⁴ For the Christian West has been looking for a way to expunge the Jews from their reality, to get rid of the internal “other,” the impure race of Europe, in favour of its Aryan ideal. In a post-Holocaust world, we’re used to associating these ideas with the worst and most heinous type of Nazi totalitarianism. But this antisemitic foundation to Christian Zionism is not hidden in our history, and it’s a history that extends well beyond the late nineteenth and twentieth century.

So what makes Christian Zionism compelling? In the first instance, Christian Zionism is compelling because it fulfils a longstanding desire to expunge Jews from the Christian West. In fact, before the formal political movement of Jewish Zionism which developed in the late nineteenth century, Christians were among the main proponents of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As the radical Israeli historian and dissident Ilan Pappé demonstrates, “Associating the return of the Jews with statehood, before the emergence of Zionism, was a Christian project until the sixteenth century, and thereafter a specifically Protestant one (in particular an Anglican one).”⁵

We can see the contemporary manifestation of this logic in Joe Biden’s frequent comment that the security of Israel is of vital importance because without Israel, no Jews anywhere else will be safe.⁶ Of course, this is quite a concerning thing for the leader of a country with more Jews than the State of Israel to say. This slippage reveals something important: the Christian West has pinned its hopes on the establishment of a Jewish state to solve the problem they’ve long been interested in solving—how to remove Jews from their midst, if not through outright extermination (which no longer flies in a post-1945 world) then through sending them elsewhere, just as Britian sent its social derelicts to the colonies of Australia and New Zealand without any care of the Indigenous peoples who already lived in these now-colonised lands.

But this does not go all the way in explaining Christian support for Zionism, especially if one accepts that 1945 did not represent the death of white supremacy within Western Christianity.⁷ The second historical reason for the rise of Christian Zionism relates to the development of a theological system known as dispensationalism, a way of interpreting the Bible alongside current events that asserts the imminent return of Christ and the judgment of the world through a time of violence, tribulation, and death. Alongside themes with which may be more familiar—such as the extrabiblical idea of the rapture or the identification of the so-called “mark of the beast”—particularly important to the establishment of dispensationalism is the assertion of a Jewish “homeland” and the “restoration” of the Jews to Palestine. 

Understanding Christian Zionism as both a political and a theological claim helps us understand why it is compelling for so many Christian communities. Politically, the development of the Zionist state fits with Europe’s longstanding desire to get rid of Jews. Theologically, however, there are further reasons that give rise to Christian support of Zionism, ones which come to structure wider Christian ideas about the return of Christ, the witness of the church, and the very legitimacy of one’s faith. This is why challenging Christian Zionism becomes so fraught, why it has such a grip on our churches.

In essence, we’ve built large theological systems based on the election of white Europeans destined to bring civilisation and salvation to the world’s lesser peoples. This is what underpins the bona fide Christian faith of the many British settlers who descended upon these stolen lands and established a settler colony called New Zealand. This belief, the theological belief of settler colonialism, asserts the right of an elected or specially chosen people group to claim and conquer the lands of another, to eradicate a native people from their own land, to claim this land as their own. It is a belief that we might call colonial exceptionalism.

Colonial exceptionalism is what undergirds beliefs about the rapture: the idea that I as a chosen Christian will be saved by God from the sufferings and tribulations of others on this evil earth. Colonial exceptionalism is what undergirds beliefs about the rights of white settlers to continue to possess a land that was stolen and alienated from tangata whenua. And colonial exceptionalism is what undergirds Christian support for Zionism, specifically by transferring the deep exceptionalism felt by many white Christians onto the State of Israel and its settler colonial aims. Its fetishises Israeli Jews as a specially blessed and chosen people by God who are therefore justified to establish a setter colonial state in Palestine no matter the cost or violence. This, we must say, isn’t even about protecting or supporting Jews themselves as much as it is about protecting and supporting white Christian claims to exceptionalism, for, as we have seen, Christians in the West have never truly loved the Jewish people. All these factors undergird Christian support for Zionism. As the great James Baldwin writes, “the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests … The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.”⁸

2. What if Christian Zionists are right?

So where does our colonial exceptionalism come from? Let us read from the book of Joshua,

“Then the Lord said to Joshua, ‘See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have the whole army give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the army will go up, everyone straight in’ …

When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys …

Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the Lord’s house …

So the Lord was with Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land.” (Josh 6:2-5; 20-21; 24; 27).

The most common way progressives tend to fight any violent or colonial ideology (like Zionism) is to claim that it represents a perversion of the faith, that is, to claim that these people—whether they Christian nationalists, Zionists, whoever—do not represent true Christianity. We respond to the colonial logic and dehumanising violence of Christian support for Zionism by saying that this is not really what Christians stand for, that Jesus was in fact a liberator of the oppressed, and therefore that true followers of Jesus would never believe such things.  

The problem with this response is that by writing off these forms of Christianity as somehow inauthentic, we both deny their very real effects—in someways, it doesn’t matter if they are real forms of Christianity or not, they still have very real consequences—but we also separate ourselves from them. In a pernicious way, we commit another type of exceptionalism, this time through a move to innocence.⁹ We protect Christianity from its real-life devastations and section off a pristinised version for ourselves.

As the British political theologian Marika Rose plainly puts it, “Christianity has a very long history, and a lot of it is terrible. It is tempting to deal with this history by disavowing it, by suggesting that real Christians wouldn't do the kinds of things that actually-existing-Christians have done.”¹⁰ But the problem with this is that is denies the very real histories to which we belong as Christians, histories which have been manifestly terrible. We may blame these distortions on a wide range of things. But these moves to innocence cannot be sustained when we consider the depths of these distortions, the true horrors of the evil we as Christians have perpetrated.

Instead, Rose contends, there are instances where our faith itself has been culpable in such violence. “Sometimes,” she writes, “Christianity is the name of our sin.”

For example, let’s return to our passage from above. The story we read of in Joshua is the story of genocide and ethnic cleansing—there is no two ways about it. We can pretend like it’s not there, or we can develop sophisticated readings of the text that avoid the issue, we can point to archaeological evidence that no such event took place, we can relegate this to the proto-history of a people suffering under exile. But if we were more honest, we would acknowledge that the plainest reading of this passage and others like it is that God’s covenantal people commit genocide and that, in fact, God commands genocide, blesses the actions of Joshua and the Israelites, makes a way for them to take hold of a promised land while purging its native inhabitants.

This means, I believe, we must ask the horrifying question: What are we to do if Christian Zionists are right? That is to ask: what are we to do with the features of our own tradition, of our own scriptures, that seem to support the actions of one people destroying another and stealing their land as long as such people are chosen by God? As the postcolonial feminist theologian Kwok Pui-lan questions, “Can I believe in a God who killed the Canaanites and who seems not to have listened to the cry of the Palestinians for some forty years?”¹¹

The point is that we cannot fight colonial exceptionalism until we’ve purged it from ourselves. There is no ‘pure’ Christianity divorced from the colonial history in which Christianity has been passed down to us. We have to instead face the complexities and the guilt of this past.

Ending Colonial Exceptionalism: Calling Christian Zionism what it is

The Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb writes,

Historically, the notion of the promised land was used by Western Christian empires to colonize and exploit countries and continents. Today, no one would dare to evoke such a theology as a pretext for colonization, apart from the State of Israel. Over the past one hundred years, Israel has often used the Bible to justify the colonization of Palestinian land … For Zionists and Christian Zionists, there is nothing wrong with settler colonialism. On the contrary, it is celebrated as the fulfillment of a divine land promised? … It is high time to develop a theology that views the colonization of Palestine as part and parcel of European settler colonial history.¹²

As a Palestinian Christian living in occupied and colonised lands, Raheb knows all too well of the false promises made even by progressive or liberal Christians in the West to truly stand in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation, to call out the State of Israel for what it truly is—a violent settler colonial state. What is the point of calling such a Christianity false when its real-life effects are so overwhelmingly real? What if, instead, we understood Christianity as the name of our sin? What then? Raheb continues,

We cannot separate Israeli colonial policies in Palestine from modern European colonial history … No one should be allowed, whether Jewish settlers, Israeli politicians, or naïve Christian theologians, to use “biblical rights” to violate “human rights.” We should not allow accusations of anti-Semitism and Western guilt about the Holocaust to avert our eyes from Israel’s colonial policies … We ought to confess that Christian theologians have played a key role, consciously or subconsciously, in aiding the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land and people.¹³

It remains each of our responsibility as Christians to end colonial exceptionalism. First, we must call out Christian Zionism for what it is: a continuation of the project of European colonialism and empire upon the Palestinian people. We cannot make excuses for colonisers anymore, whether they be Israeli politicians, Christian nationalists in America, or even Christian Zionists in our own congregations. We must radically and repeatedly call our Christian support for Zionism for what it is—the continuation of the same violent structures which have wreaked so much devastation in these lands as well as in Palestine.

We are guilty of treating such structures with too much grace. As Christians, we tend to err on the side of caution, of inclusion, of niceties. But in doing so, we make another move to innocence. By either making excuses for Christian Zionism or by claiming it is some defect of our faith we ignore the very real effects it continues to have.

Ending colonial exceptionalism, then, means ending the move to Christian innocence. We must purge ourselves of all innocence and exceptionalism even within progressive Christianity and refuse to bypass the painful process of facing our own history as a task which undoes us rather than repeats its mistakes. And then, for Pākehā such as myself, we must learn from tangata whenua across the global solidarities which link us, to turn to Palestinian voices, Māori voices, Indigenous voices worldwide to determine what comes next.

What lies beyond or after Christian Zionism and settler colonialism is, I must confess, beyond my own limitations as an ongoing beneficiary of the colonial system. But I know this: Decolonisation is not (only) a process in which ideas, identities, or ideals are overturned. It is rather a process in which structures, governments, sovereignties are dismantled and remade. It is here in which white settlers like me must relinquish control over the process of decolonisation, a process which we must be clear eyed about. There can be no peace in Palestine without the end of these violent systems. There can be no peace in Palestine without the end of Israeli settler colonialism. There can be no peace in Palestine without the end of Christian Zionism.

Peace and grace,

Andrew

---

More thoughts/books/reading

Mitri Raheb continues to provide a deeply critical liberationist Palestinian Christian perspective that does not get enough airtime within the circles I run. His Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible has been foundational for my thinking here. His panel with Kwok Pui-lan linked above is a great listen (thanks Lillian!).

James Baldwin’s “Open Letter to the Born Again,” continues to bowl me over every time I read it. I wrote a little reflection on it here.

Marika Rose’s Theology for the End of the World remains on my constantly-recommending-people-please-read list.

If I can be so vain for a self-reference, though it does not use the term “colonial exceptionalism,” my paper published with Andrew Picard and couple years ago “The Christian Settler Imaginary” remains my most formal attempt to address it within the context of Aotearoa. Can send PDFs to anyone who is interested.

1. Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1975), 3.

2. A more fulsome definition is offered by the Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb: “Christian Zionism has to be understood as a religious lobby in support of the last active settler colonial enterprise and the longest occupation in modern history. It weaponizes the Bible for an imperial Western project intended to eliminate the native people while confiscating their land and exploiting their resources.” Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible (Orbis Books, 2023), 72.

3. Jane Carey and Ben Silverstein, “Thinking With and Beyond Settler Colonial Studies: New Histories After the Postcolonial,” Postcolonial Studies 23, no. 1 (2020): 1. The Australian historian and theorist Patrick Wolfe famously establishes settler colonialism as a particular form of colonialism that can be defined by the following characteristics: colonialism as a “structure” rather than an event; invasion premised on a “logic of elimination” of Indigenous communities; invasion followed by settlement in which colonisers “destroy to replace.” See: Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

4. While he was prime minister of Great Britian, Lord Arthur Balfour’s government authored the 1905 Aliens Act, “meant to primarily keep destitute Jews fleeing Tsarist pogroms out of Britain.” Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’s War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance (Profile Books, 2020), 37. 

5. Ilan Pappé writes, Ten Myths About Israel (Verso Books, 2017), 31.

6. “Prominent Zionists laud Biden’s remark that no Jew anywhere is safe without Israel,” Times of Israel (21 September 2023), https://www.timesofisrael.com/prominent-zionists-laud-bidens-remark-that-no-jew-anywhere-is-safe-without-israel/.

7. Aimé Césaire, the great mid-century Black poet, author, and leader, put it this way: “When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on my radio, when I learn that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when, finally I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead.” Quoted in James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Orbis Books, 1997), 25. See also Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review, 1972), 36-37.

8. James Baldwin, “Open Letter to the Born Again,” The Nation (29 September 1979), https://www.thenation.com/article/society/open-letter-born-again/.

9. For an analysis of the “setter move to innocence” see Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s evergreen “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40.

10. Marika Rose, Theology for the End of the World (London: SCM Press, 2023), 13.

11. Kwok Pui-lan, Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World (Wipf & Stock, 2003), 99.

12. Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine, 113-114.

13. Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine, 115-116.