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The American Evangelical Response To October 7

“Neutrality isn’t an option…[Hamas attacks on Israel were] conceived in the darkest pits of
Hell.”

    -Pastor Jared Wellman

By Neil S. Rubin, Ph.D.

No one was shocked when leading American Evangelical Christians – long known for their stalwart defense of Israeli governments, offered overwhelming support for the Jewish state’s strong military response to the brutal October 7, 2023, Hamas massacres in southern Israel. Yet, a close look at data on American Evangelicals from recent years reveals that the community’s ironclad support of Jerusalem’s government seems poised for a decline in the coming years. This happens as younger generations seem less unquestioning of Israel – an issue also faced in the American Jewish community – and the number of self-identified Evangelicals themselves drops as a percentage of the American population.

For decades, the Evangelical community’s social and political power has been standard in large swathes of the country, particularly the South, the Midwest, and rural America. Even prior to the Evangelical community’s national rise during the Reagan administration of the 1980s, Israel’s government recognized this power – both for tourism dollars and in political strength.

Back in 1971, the Jewish state’s leaders persuaded its country’s modern prophet – legendary first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion – to address 1,500 pastors attending the Jerusalem-hosted first Evangelical conference in the country. As organizer Gaylord Briley noted at the time, speaking of the energy and excitement in the hall, “[It was] a ringside seat at the second coming [of Jesus]” (Chafetz, 1986). In 1979, when the Rev. Jerry Falwell created his Moral Majority group to politically promote his definition of conservative values, he made “support for Israel and the Jewish people everywhere” a key pillar (Falwell, 1999). Since then, every major GOP presidential candidate – with the exception of Pat Buchanan’s brief 1996 primary rise – has embraced overt praise for Israel, particularly its conservative Likud leaders, as a key foreign policy plank.

Immediate Responses

In the immediate wake of Hamas’s invasion of Israel – even as Israeli troops were still
searching for Hamas operatives inside Israel — America’s Evangelical leadership went into
action. Within four days, more than 2,000 Evangelical leaders – including numerous theological
seminary and university presidents — had signed the Southern Baptist Convention’s “Evangelical
Statement in Support of Israel.” They declared in part that while they prayed for “the salvation of
peace for the people of Israel and Palestine,” that “In keeping with Christian Just War tradition,
we also affirm the legitimacy of Israel’s right to respond against those who have initiated these
attacks as Romans 13 grants governments the power to bear the sword against those who commit
such evil acts against innocent life.” They and similar statements from other groups noted the
historic antisemitism against the Jewish people (Staff, 2023).
Antisemitic acts had indeed been rising in the immediate past few years, but the new
violence saw a quick upward spike in verbal and physical attacks. For the perpetrators, any line
between the State of Israel’s actions and each American Jews’ responsibility for those actions
quickly vanished. In fact, by December 12, 2023, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – the lead

national Jewish group confronting antisemitism, reported that antisemitic sentiments were now
standard at anti-Israel rallies. Only two months after October 7, 2023, the ADL reported 2,031
such incidents in the United States alone. (Similar linkages at European and Moslem anti-Israel
have long been common.) In America, the incidents had increased by about 300 percent from the
same time frame in the previous year (Anti-Defamation League, 2024). As the months went on,
acts of hate continued. As but one example, in early January 2024, a New York high school
basketball game between a Jewish private and a public school was abruptly canceled. During the
game, a student on the latter’s team yelled at an opponent, “F*** you. I support Hamas!”
(Watrobski, 2024).
Not surprisingly, political, Jewish, and many faith community leaders quickly condemned
such events. Evangelicals were eager participants in the effort. And Jewish leadership noticed.
When American Jews held their massive November 14 th pro-Israel rally on the national mall in
Washington, D.C., the only non-Jewish and non-political leader to address the estimated crowd
of 250,000 was the Rev. Pat Hagee. For decades a leading Christian pro-Israel voice, he is the
founder of the Christians United For Israel (CUFI). That Evangelical group claims 10 million
American supporters and brings more than 5,000 supporters to Washington, D.C., each year for a
major political conference. The effort has brought CUFI the moniker “The Christian AIPAC.” As
the Rev. Hagee told the Nov. 14 crowd – his voice booming with his stereotypical southern
preacher cadence, “There is no middle ground in this conflict. You’re either for the Jewish
people or you’re not… Israel is the apple of God’s eye. Israel is the shining city on the hill…” He
even led chants of “Israel lives! Israel lives! Israel lives!” and “Jerusalem, Israel, you are not
alone!” (Hagee, 2023).
The strong Evangelical response is not political alone. Israel’s lucrative tourism industry
largely halted after the events of October 7. Yet, both Jewish and Evangelical groups – albeit
separately – launched solidarity missions to Israel. These featured traveling to the site of Hamas
massacres, meeting with the survivors and families of those abducted, and even helping harvest
crops in place as foreign workers returned home after the outbreak of violence. The message the
Evangelicals brought back to the United States was clear. As Mike Huckabee, an Evangelical and
former GOP presidential candidate said in Dec. 2023, “I leave [Israel] first grieving for the pain,
the hurt, the unimaginable horror. But I also leave here with an extraordinary resolve to more
than ever stand with Israel” (Zedek, 2023).
Challenges for Evangelical Leadership
While the immediate path of Israel's support by the Evangelical community and its
leadership is not in doubt, the long-term is more questionable. There is evidence that the national
community’s impact has begun a slow decline. While the definition of who constitutes an
Evangelical Christian can shift from study to study, there has been a drop in recent years of
comparable surveys. The Pew Research Center – one of the nation’s more respected analyzers of
religion in American life – showed that from 2009 to 2019, the percentage of American
Protestants identifying as Evangelical dropped from 28 percent to 25 percent. While that’s not so
dramatic, Pew also noted that in that time, the percentage of Americans identifying as Protestants
dropped from 51 to 43 percent (“In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace,”
2020). This means that the aggregate number of Evangelicals has dropped. Likewise, in 2023,
Christianity Today reported that from 2006 to 2020, Evangelicals as a percentage of the U.S.
population fell from 23 to 14 percent (Smith, 2023).

Adding to the potential for more shifts in the Evangelical community, and mirroring the
same issue for American Jews, younger Evangelicals are showing less support for Israel than do
previous generations. When asked from 2015-2018 who they felt the United States should favor
in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the aged 18-34 bracket for backing Israel plunged from 40 to
21 percent. Over that same time period, “lean toward the Palestinians” jumped from 3 to 18
percent (Belin, 2024). Further, in 2021 polls by the Barna Group, which examines trends in faith
groups, and the University of North Carolina Pembroke were even starker. In their survey in
2021, about 34 percent of respondents 18-29 years old said they supported Israel, while 24
percent said they supported the Palestinians. Three years earlier, those numbers were
dramatically different – sitting at 69 percent and 3 percent, respectively. The researchers admit
that their first study was from a subset of a larger group and thus not necessarily as statistically
valid as the latter one, which specifically probed the Israel-Palestinian question (Jenkins, 2021).
Still, the trend is clear.
It is worth noting that a 2024 joint poll by two operations that focus on the Christian
community jointly did a survey that showed little shift between younger and older Evangelicals
regarding support for Israel. However, the central question focused not on “political support” but
on “charitable behavior.” It found that 59 percent of respondents 70 years and older see helping
support “Israel/the Jewish People” as a “number one priority.” Still, the subset of respondents 40
and under drops to 46 percent – also a weaker answer for Younger Evangelicals (Concepts,
2021).

Responses of Other Christian Groups
While the Evangelical response is clear, what about other Christian groups, particularly
ones with long records of interfaith dialogue with the Jewish community? The Catholic
community, whose Church has quasi-country status and diplomatic relations with the State of
Israel, has seen a variety of responses. While Pope Francis said he was praying for “all who are
living hours of terror and anguish,” his Jerusalem representative – Cardinal Pierbattista
Pizzaballa — had sharper words for Israel. In seemingly equivocating the Hamas attacks and
Israel’s immediate response, he said, “The operation launched from Gaza, and the reaction of the
Israeli Army are bringing us back to the worst periods of our recent history.” Israel’s embassy to
the Vatican not surprisingly disputed the verbiage, noting, “Israel’s response under [these]
circumstances cannot be described as anything but its right to self-defense. It certainly cannot be
described as aggression.” A few days later, in his weekly general audience, Pope Francis
commented, “It is the right of those who are attacked to defend themselves.” Yet, he shared
concern about the “total siege facing the Palestinians in Gaza, where there have also been many
innocent victims” (McFeely, 2023).
Some leading American Catholic officials –as a collective, often more liberal than
Vatican counterparts on numerous social and political issues – were more sympathetic to
Jerusalem. This particularly seemed to be true in areas where there were larger Jewish
communities, and subsequently a more robust Catholic-Jewish dialogue. Reflective of this,
Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston said, “There is no room for moral ambiguity on this issue.
Resisting such terrorism and aggression is the moral duty of states to be carried out within moral
limits.” Still, he extended his sympathy to the “Palestinian civilian communities and families in
this conflict” (McFeely, 2023).
Throughout the United States, many interfaith dialogue groups focused on channeling the
deep emotions of Jews and others into non-incendiary conversations. An example came from the

Baltimore-based Institute for Islamic Christian and Jewish Studies. The group continues to hold
workshops for educators, students, religious leaders, and community officials on how to make
such conversations not delve into antisemitism and Islamophobia – the latter a concern
continually raised by American Moslem groups (Rivera, 2024).
Non-Evangelical Protestant denominations – often known as “mainline Protestants” –
have had a rockier relationship with American Jews regarding Israel’s response to the Hamas
attack. On Oct. 23, 2023, the Presbyterian Church (USA) sought to maintain official neutrality
while criticizing violence on both sides. Noting Hamas is not among the peace-seeking groups it
seeks to support, it called both for “Israel’s right to exist as a free and sovereign nation” and
shared that it is “firm in its support of Palestinians and their right to live free in their land,
without occupation, aggression, and bloodshed.” Further, the group called on “all leaders to
immediately put an end to the bloodshed, release those who are captured and held hostage, end
the fighting, and open humanitarian corridors to get medical attention to everyone who is in
need.” Details on how to accomplish this were absent (Acting, 2023).

Conclusion
American Evangelicals and other religious groups' reactions to the Hamas assault on
Israel have followed long-established patterns. Yet, in the coming decades, when today’s younger
Evangelicals move into communal and national leadership positions, unquestioning support for
Israel is unlikely to be so automatic. In fact, similar to the response of American Jews, it is likely
to be more diverse and nuanced. At present, no Evangelical group has called for an independent
Palestinian state living aside Israel. Still, one should not be surprised if that is on the proverbial
horizon; it just happened in the American Jewish community with groups such as American
Friends of Peace Now and The Union for Reform Judaism. (Since October 7, the Jewish
community has seen more media attention given to far-left groups such as Jewish Voice for
Peace and IfNotNow, both of whom are heavily criticized by mainstream Jewish groups). The
potential for such operations in the Evangelical community should not be dismissed. After all,
thanks in large part to the Rev. Falwell’s pushing Evangelical beliefs into the mainstream more
than four decades ago, political activism is now a hallmark of the national Evangelical
community.

For today, however, overall numbers in the Evangelical community remain strongly more
supportive of Israel than the Palestinians. That’s good news for Jerusalem and the overall
American Jewish community’s main priority of strengthening American-Israeli relations
politically, militarily, and culturally. Yet, the pro-Israel advocates would do well to keep an eye
on trends in the Evangelical. Thus, they would be wise to help CUFI and others cultivate a future
leadership cadre that shares their joint goals.

Neil S. Rubin, Ph.D., is author of American Jewry and the Oslo Years (Palgrave MacMillan,
2012).

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