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Why Do Evangelicals Support Israel?

Authors:
Dr. Mordechai Inbari
Dr. Kirill Bumin
M. Gordon Byrd

The fact that American evangelicals support Israel is undeniable, however, scholars disagree about their motivations. Our research seeks to fill this gap by carefully exploring theological, cultural, political, security, and demographic sources of evangelical support for Jews and Israel. To that end, we composed a nation-wide survey on 1,000 evangelical and born-again respondents, conducted in April 2018 and administered for us by Lifeway Research, a national polling company that specializes in surveying attitudes of various Christian communities. The full findings were published recently in a scholarly article (here). 

In our survey, the majority of evangelicals and born-again Christians are white (65% of the sample), concentrated mostly in the Southeast (38.3%) and the Midwest (22.5%), and are most likely to hold a high school diploma (37%) or have “some college” experience (29.8%), without obtaining either an associate or baccalaureate degree. They live predominantly in rural (37%) and suburban locations (42%), and their mean household income is roughly $40,700.  Sixty-one percent of the respondents are female. An average age of our respondent is 49.3 years of age and 57.3% of the respondents are married. As expected, our respondents exhibit a relatively high level of religiosity (demonstrated by frequency of church attendance and frequency of reading the Bible), with over a half reporting attending church at least once a week and reading the Bible at least twice a week.

The Survey

We asked our respondents “Where do you put your support?”, giving them a choice between Israel and the Palestinians. The results show an overwhelming support for Israel.

To explore the factors influencing evangelicals’ support for Israel, we utilized a multivariate ordered logistic regression. As expected, the results show that evangelical support for Israel is driven by respondents’ beliefs rooted in evangelical Christian theology and by their feeling of cultural and religious affinity with Jews. Respondents who stated that they support Israel to fulfill the prophesy regarding the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and because Jews are God’s chosen people are more likely to manifest high levels of support for Israel than respondents who either disagreed or responded with weak support. 

We find strong support for the following statement: “I support Israel because of my shared cultural and/or religious values.” Perceptions of a kinship, on the basis of common cultural and religious values, play a major role in generating high support for Israel. We failed, however, to find support for the argument that evangelicals are pro-Israel due to latent feelings of guilt or responsibility for the Christian persecution of Jews in the past. Statistical analysis also revealed that evangelicals’ support for Israel cannot be attributed to the respondents’ belief in shared American-Israeli political/democratic values or to a belief that Israel is the sole protector of Christian access to holy sites. 

The analysis reveals that the frequency of church attendance (religiosity), ideology (specifically, preference for a conservative point of view), and opinion of Jews and Muslims are very significant predictors of support for Israel among evangelical and born-again Christians.

More frequent attendance of church and religious assemblies increases the odds of strong support for Israel by 1.215 times. Similarly, respondents who identify themselves as political conservatives are 1.312 times more likely to express high levels of support for Israel than the more liberal or centrist evangelicals. 

Socialization is a particularly important variable in explaining evangelical support. Our research shows that being around other evangelicals who talk about Israel and about its importance to the evangelical community is one of the most significant predictors of support for Israel, second only to the influence of positive opinion of Jews. Put simply, more frequent exposure to positive messages about Israel generates high levels of support, even taking into account the influence of other variables. Together, frequent church attendance and socializing with other pro-Israel evangelicals increase the odds of high levels of support by almost three-fold (2.775 times). 

The statistical analysis also confirms that respondents’ opinion of Muslims and Jews impact their support for Israel. As we hypothesized, negative opinion of Muslims increases support for Israel, while favorable view of Muslims reduces support for Israel by 0.723 times. Also, a favorable view of Jews has a highly statistically significant and positive impact on support for Israel. In fact, opinion of Jews is the most significant predictor of support for Israel in our analysis, increasing the odds of registering high support by 3.03 times.  While church activities, interaction with other pro-Israel evangelicals, belief in a common Judeo-Christian culture, and theology all play their expected role in explaining evangelical support, our analysis thus shows that a positive opinion of Jews among evangelical respondents is the most consequential explanation for consistently high levels of evangelical support for the State of Israel.

Finally, it is important to note that with the exception of the effects of age, no other demographic variable rose to the level of statistical significance. The statistical analysis shows that age is one of three strongest predictors of support for Israel. In particular, we find that 18-29 year-old evangelicals are less likely to express strong support than their parents and grandparents – one unit increase in age (i.e., moving from 18-29 year old category to the 30-49 cohort, or from the latter to the 50-64 age group, and so on) also increases support for Israel by 1.481 times. It is important to note that these differences between 18-29 year-old respondents and older evangelicals are not driven by the fact that the younger evangelicals are less religious (in fact, we find the contrary). Our data suggest that younger evangelicals may be less supportive of Israel due to their ideology. We find that in general young evangelicals are more likely to express centrist political positions than the older cohorts, who tend to be more conservative. Additionally, we speculate that these findings are a byproduct of different conceptions of justice, with younger evangelicals expressing more positive attitude toward the Palestinians and more likely to perceive the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians as unjust.

Our analysis shows that neither education, race and ethnicity, income, marital status, nor region or area of residence have an impact on evangelicals’ levels of support. 

Notes of Eschatology and Biblical Literalism

As the responses indicate, there is an overwhelming support for the notion that the State of Israel is connected to the idea of the Second Coming of Jesus (83.94%). These data support the literature that emphasizes eschatology as a major motivation of evangelicals when it comes to Israel. Since pre-millennial dispensation theology expects that Jews would build a Temple for God prior to the events of the Second Coming and eventually convert to Christianity, we also asked respondents to respond to these statements. The results show that evangelicals are almost evenly divided over these statements. Only about a half of the respondents express support for the statement that “building of the Temple is an event that needs to take place in the near future.” The uncertainty of the respondents regarding the question of the conversion of Jews at the Second Coming, with only about half expressing positive support, is also important to note. 

Biblical narrative relates to a covenant made between God and Abraham, thus offering him and his offspring eternal blessings and turning them into chosen people. Since certain Christian readings argue that Jews lost their election by rejecting Jesus as their Messiah, we asked in the survey: “Do you believe God’s covenant with the Jewish people is eternal?” The results show strong support – 72.8% indicated that “yes, the covenant remains,” 5.6% said that “no, the covenant has ended,” 2.7% said that “God never had a covenant with the Jews,” and 18.9% responded with “don’t know.” Similarly, the statement: “I support Israel because Jews are God’s chosen people” generated high levels of agreement – 84% responding in favor (taking into account “somewhat agree,” “agree,” and “strongly agree” responses). We can thus conclude that the majority of evangelicals do, indeed, reject supersession theology. 

Since the majority of evangelicals sees the Bible as the literal word of God, they express high levels of support to several statements that, although Biblical, have contemporary ramifications. Among them are that Jews are God’s chosen people (84%), and that God made promises to Jews, such as giving the Land of Israel to the Jewish people (90.6%) and making Jerusalem Israel’s capital (62%). According to literal reading, God also promises to bless Gentiles if they would stand by Abraham and his offspring (87.7%). 

The combination of “cold” eschatology and Biblical literalism, in addition to the ones mentioned earlier, have thus significantly contributed to shaping a favorable view of Jews and high support for the State of Israel by evangelical and born-again Christians.

Conclusion

The results of our statistical analysis show that the three strongest predictors of evangelical and born-again Christian support for Israel are: 

1) age (older respondents are more supportive); 

2) opinion of Jews (rather than belief that Jews are God’s chosen people; although both are significant predictors); and 

3) socialization (frequently hearing other evangelicals talking about Israel). 

About the Authors

Motti Inbari is a Professor of Religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Dr. Inbari focuses his research on Jewish fundamentalism, mostly in Israel, but also in the US and Europe. He is the author of four books, his latest is The Making of Modern Jewish Identify: Ideological Change and Religious Conversion (Routledge, 2019). 

Kirill M. Bumin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration and an Assistant Dean of the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Dr. Bumin specializes in post-communist and Middle East politics, with particular focus on political transitions, ethnic conflict, and comparative judicial politics.

 Gordon Byrd is a PhD student at East Carolina University.