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“Israel has blessed this world by pointing us to you, the one true God, through the message of her prophets, the Scriptures, and the Messiah.”
So Robert Jeffress, the same pastor who once made “Make America Great Again” into a hymn, prayed during his blessing of the new US Embassy in Jerusalem on Monday.
In his prayer, Jeffress also praised President Donald Trump as one who “stands on the right side of you, O God, when it comes to Israel.”
Jeffress, a pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas and one of the most prominent members of Trump’s unofficial evangelical advisory council, has long been known for his vocal support of Trump. He has repeatedly said that divine providence had a hand in Trump’s election and that God has authorized Trump to do, basically, whatever he wants.
Given the controversial nature of the embassy move, which prompted a wave of violence at the Gaza border on Monday in which Israeli soldiers killed at least 50 protesters, one might be forgiven for finding Jeffress’s full-throated evocation of Christian supremacy surprisingly tactless.
Certainly, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney found Jeffress an offensive choice to pray at the embassy’s opening. Citing critical comments Jeffress had previously made about Mormonism and Islam, Romney said “a religious bigot should not be giving the prayer that opens the United States Embassy in Jerusalem.”
Rabbi Jack Moline of the Interfaith Alliance was also critical of the Trump administration’s invitation to Jeffress. He said in an interview that “the American embassy is American soil. And therefore, the constitutional principles that we live by ought to be in place when a ceremony is being held on American soil.” In Moline’s view, Jeffress’s remarks “violated the establishment clause … by mixing their own particular right-wing theology in what was supposed to be a civil event.”
But Jeffress’s prayer wasn’t just a disquieting celebration of Christian Trumpism. It was also a coded message, one that placed the embassy move within a wider theological context.
For many evangelical Christians — including those who have Trump’s ear — moving the embassy to Jerusalem isn’t just about temporal political goals. Rather, the embassy move is one that will yield cosmic, and catastrophic, results. Evangelicals who subscribe to the quintessentially American tradition of premillennial dispensationalist theology, Trump’s decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem is a necessary step in bringing about the apocalypse.
At best, influential figures in the Trump administration — from Vice President Mike Pence to ex-adviser Steve Bannon — have been making political decisions based, in part, on courting evangelicals who believe an embassy in Jerusalem is a key step to the end of days. At worst, they’re actively trying to bring it about.
The evangelical theology of apocalypse is a distinctively American one
To understand how Israel fits into premillennial dispensationalist theology, it’s important to clarify what premillennial dispensationalist theology is. It is a tradition within Christian thought that became popular among English Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries but is today most closely associated with the evangelical American tradition. Dispensationalists believe that God has divided human history into “dispensations” — periods that illuminate different aspects of God’s plan for humanity. For example, the period between Moses’s reception of the Ten Commandments and Jesus’s crucifixion is understood as the period of “the law”; the period since is the period of “grace.”
Ultimately, the final, hoped-for period of human history will be the “millennial kingdom”: a 1,000-year period in which Christ will rule on earth in Jerusalem, after which God’s last judgment will occur. (“Premillennial” refers to the fact that adherents believe that true believers will be raptured into heaven before this period happens.)
While individual evangelicals might differ as to the precise order or nature of these events, books like Hal Lindsey’s 1970 work The Late, Great Planet Earth (as well as the wildly popular Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic action novels) popularized a general vision of the end times many evangelicals today share. By and large, these visions — based on differing interpretations of passages in the biblical books of Revelation and Daniel — share a common shape. Jesus’s return will immediately follow the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and the restoration of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.
Within such a paradigm, global politics becomes a kind of bellwether for the divine plan. What happens in the Middle East is significant insofar as it points to the immanence of the millennial kingdom and the second coming. Apocalypse is to be hoped for because it presages Christ’s return.
This is particularly true of the fate of Jerusalem. For many evangelicals, only a fully Jewish Jerusalem will satisfy the prophetic preconditions necessary for the desired end times. Some evangelicals, therefore, adopt what is known as Christian Zionism: a belief that war in the Middle East is, fundamentally, part of God’s plan (because it brings about the apocalypse) and that God wants Israel returned to the Jews during the period of the millennial kingdom.
The belief is based on a few different theological ideas: the idea that God blesses those who care for Israel (rooted in an interpretation of Genesis), that God’s divine covenant with Israel is ongoing, and that various biblical prophecies made about the ultimate fated restoration of Israel must come to pass before the end times can occur.
The US Embassy move is highlighting the work of Christian Zionists
It’s unclear exactly how many evangelicals are premillennials — a National Association of Evangelicals poll of evangelical leaders found that 65 percent of them subscribed to the worldview, while a Lifeway poll of Protestant pastors (including mainline Protestants, who do not traditionally hold premillennial views) found that 48 percent believed in premillennialism.
But how much influence do these attitudes have on foreign policy?
Johnnie Moore, a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory council whose PR firm, Kairos, represents a number of other council members, denied reports that theological attitudes played a significant role in Trump’s decision to move the embassy. “This was geopolitical opinion, more than theology,” Moore told reporters shortly after Trump’s decision to move the embassy was announced.
But Vice President Pence has well-documented close ties with Christian Zionist organizations. He’s given talks infused with Christian Zionist rhetoric to sympathetic organizations like Christians United for Israel and frequently invoked Christian Zionist imagery in his public statements. Pence undeniably either subscribes to these views himself or actively courts the favor of those who do. Bannon,the ex-Trump adviser who was still working in the White House at the time Trump initially announced his decision to move the embassy, has likewise openly spoken about being a Christian Zionist.
And, of course, there’s Robert Jeffress. His appearance in Jerusalem today is only the latest in his long history of wielding dispensationalist and Christian Zionist rhetoric to advocate for GOP candidates.
In 2014, Jeffress wrote a book arguing that Obama was paving the way for the coming of the Antichrist, if not the Antichrist himself. He’s cast Trump as a kind of modern-day King Cyrus: chosen by God as an unlikely leader. He’s frequently made statements that cast the future of Israel as the function of biblical prophecy. As longtime “court evangelical” watcher John Fea points out, on a recent Fox & Friends segment, Jeffress made a point of quoting the popular dispensationalist Bible verses Genesis 12:1-3, in which God promises to bless those who bless Israel, and curse those who curse Israel.
It would be difficult to come up with a more symbolically potent figure to open the new embassy in Jerusalem than Jeffress. And while, as Moore insists, there may have been other factors than the eschatological at play in Trump’s decision to move the embassy, the foregrounding of Jeffress today is a powerful nod to the efforts of Christian Zionists worldwide.
