The Bible Connection: Decoding the Politics of the New Right

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1. Dispensationalism, Fundamentalist Christians and US Foreign Policy

Why Middle East peace would be a BAD thing...

15 million or so, that is about one-third of America's 40 or 50 million evangelical Christians of Americans, believe that the Bible predicts the future and that we are living in the last days. Their beliefs are rooted in dispensationalism, a particular way of understanding the Bible's prophetic passages, especially those in Daniel and Ezekiel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. They believe that the nation of Israel has a special role in God’s plan for the end of time. And at the 20th century, these US evangelicals become Israel's best friends-an alliance which has had considerable geopolitical consequences. ¹

‘Dispensationalism’ is the view that just before the end of time, the Jews will return to the Land of Israel and ‘unite it’ once again as in the grand old days of the Bible.

Throughout their history, dispensationalists have predicted that before the final events of the End Times can take place, the Temple must be rebuilt in Jerusalem. According to their myth, half way through the Great Tribulation, Antichrist will enter the restored Temple and declare himself to be God.

The view is ancient, and seemed just ‘far-fetched’. But after the founding of Israel in 1948 followed by the land-grab of the Six-Day War, it seemed to many Dispensationalists that the Bible prophecy was being fulfilled. The significance of the Six-Day War for them was that in it, Israel gained control of the entire city of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount.

And so, following the war, Dispensationalists became very active in support of the contemporary Israeli state and politics. In the 1970s, dispensationalists broke into US popular culture with runaway best-sellers, and launched successful political campaigns to promote Israel.

During the early 1980s the Israeli Ministry of Tourism recruited evangelical religious leaders for free tours. In time, hundreds of evangelical pastors went on these sponsored trips to the Holy Land.

Since the mid-1990s, tens of millions of people have read one or more novels in the Left Behind series, one of the most effective ways that the creed of dispensationalism has been spread.

Not long after the Six-Day War, the Israeli government sent Yona Malachy of its Department of Religious Affairs to the United States to study American fundamentalism and its potential as an ally of Israel. Malachy was enthusiastically received by Christian fundamentalists and he was able to persaude some of them to launch strong pro-Israeli manifestos. And so, by the mid-1980s, there was a discernible shift in the Israeli political strategy. AIPAC, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to give it its full name, a powerful lobbying group in Washington, D.C., re-aligned itself with the American political, including Christian conservatives.

One of the new US groups created with the aim not only of supporting Israel if not actually of ushering in the ‘end of time’, is the National Leadership Conference for Israel, founded by Pentecostal preacher David Lewis. It supports Israel by scheduling conferences, organizing letter-writing campaigns, placing advertisements in newspapers and putting on large public rallies. Other groups, such as the ‘International Fellowship of Christians and Jews’ and ‘Christians for Israel’, have as their main activity the ‘reuniting of Jews’ mainly by moving people from the former Soviet Union to Israel.

Another influential pro-Israel organization is the National Unity Coalition for Israel which actively opposes "the establishment of a Palestinian state within the borders of Israel" .

Bridges for Peace, however, is an educational and charitable organization that is explictly wedded to the Bible prophecy. It sponsors the largest food bank, tours and educational initiatives in Israel. Another group, the Christian Friends of Israeli Communities pairs individual evangelical congregations in America with Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

The dispensationalist/Israeli friendship has consequences for Israeli politics too - strenghtening the fundementalists there and further undermining Israel's already very diminished secular character.

The fundementalists worry about obscure elements of the prediciton, such as that the Bible revelation requires a new Temple to be built on the site of one of Islam’s most holy mosques. How could the Temple be built, when the Temple Mount was already "occupied" by Muslim sacred sites?

In 1982 Louis Goldberg of Moody Bible Institute suggested a solution - in some future Arab-Israeli war, a surface to surface missile fired from Jordan or Syria might go off course and destroy the Muslim site. Dispensationalist fiction writers also gave it a try: in Salem Kirban's novel "666," the Antichrist vaporized the mosque with his ruby laser ring; and in Charles Colson's "Kingdoms in Conflict," American prophecy believers financed a plot by Israeli radicals to blow up the Dome.

Over the years there have been a number of attempts to destroy the Dome and the mosque. Such activities were connected in one way or another to a small but growing movement on the far right of Israeli politics and religion-the Temple Movement. Though most Israelis do not believe in the necessity of a new Temple to secure Israel's future, a minority is convinced that Israel's current problems are due to its failure to occupy the Temple Mount and rebuild the Temple there.

A group that is particularly admired by many US Dispensdationalists is the ‘Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful’, which was founded in the late1980s by ‘war hero’ Gershon Salomon, one of the Israeli soldiers who liberated the Temple Mount during the Six Day War, has dedicated himself to “consecrating the Temple Mount to the Name of G_d, to removing the Muslim shrines placed there as a symbol of Muslim conquest, to the soon rebuilding of the Third Temple there, and the G_dly redemption of the people of the Land of Israel."

Dispensationalists saw Salomon as a pious Jew who taught with great conviction that God's plan for the Chosen People in the Last Days included three things: restoration of a new Jewish state, the re-gathering of Jews from around the world, and the reconstruction of the Temple on Temple Mount-all in anticipation of Messiah's coming.

As Paul Boyer has pointed out, dispensationalism has conditioned millions of Americans to be somewhat passive about the future and provided them with lenses through which to understand world events. Dispensationalists are certain that trouble in the Middle East is inevitable, that nations will war against nations, and that the time is coming when millions of people will die as a result of nuclear war, the persecution of Antichrist, or as a result of divine judgment. Striving for peace in the Middle East is a hopeless pursuit with no chance of success.

Indeed, Road Maps to peace in the Middle East are seen by Dispensationalists as the Devil’s work.

For them, peace is nowhere prophesied for the Middle East, until Jesus comes and brings it himself. The worse thing that the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations can do is force Israel to partition the ‘Holy Land’ and thus delay the second coming.