Abstract
US Christian Zionism represents the most obscure and least explored amid the various constituencies that animated the project of a ‘New American Empire’ during the era of President George W. Bush. It may be characterized as a modern millenarian movement stemming from American conservative Evangelicalism, which advocates that the restoration of Diaspora Jews to Palestine is a necessary step in an End Time scenario in which Christ returns to rule the world for 1000 years before the Final Judgement, and that he will do so from a theocratic kingdom centred on Jerusalem.1
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Notes
See John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Penguin-Allen Lane, 2007, pp. 5–17.
See Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism: A Roadmap to Armageddon, Inter-Varsity Press, 2004.
In the author’s opinion, the most reliable and updated demographic statistics are those provided by Stephen Spector in his study, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 41–3.
See John Hubers’ editorial in, Challenging Christian Zionism, available at: http://www.christianzionism.org (accessed 2 February 2010).
See Gary Dorrien, ‘Evangelical Ironies: Theology, Politics and Israel’, and Gerald McDermott, ‘Evangelicals and Israel’, both in Alan Mittleman, Byron Johnson and Nancy Isserman (eds), Uneasy Allies? Evangelical and Jewish Relations, Lexington Books, 2007, pp. 103–26, and pp. 127–54, respectively.
Timothy Weber’s quote is taken from the transcript of the PBS programme Bill Moyer Journal, ‘Perspectives on Christian Zionism’, 5 October 2007.
See Aaron David Miller, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace, Bantam Books, 2009, pp. 109–19.
See Stanley Grenz, The Millennial Maze: Sorting out the Evangelical Options, Inter-Varsity Press, 1992, pp. 100–8.
See Barbara R. Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation, Westview Press, 2004, p. 23.
See Elizabeth Phillips, ‘“We’ve Read the End of the Book”: An Engagement with Contemporary Christian Zionism through the Eschatology of John Howard Yoder’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 21, 2008, p. 344.
For an exhaustive analysis of Christian Zionism’s theological framework, see especially Sizer, Christian Zionism, pp. 106–205; and Timothy Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, Baker, 2004, pp. 20–3.
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James Barr, Fundamentalism, SCM Press, 1991, p. 41.
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Craig Hill, In God’s Time: The Bible and the Future, Eerdmans, 2002, p. 207.
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Quoted in Ehud Sprinzak, ‘Gush Emunim: The Tip of the Iceberg’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 21, 1981, pp. 28–47.
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The controversial plan of Ateret Hacohanim is addressed by Louis Theroux in his reportage, ‘My Time among the Ultra-Zionists’, BBC 2, 3 February 2011.
See Ehud Sprinzak, ‘Kach and Meir Kahane: The Emergence of Jewish Quasi-Fascism’, Patterns of Predjudice, 19 (3/4), 1985, pp. 3–13. Meir Kahane (1932–90) was an American-Israeli rabbi whose messianic doctrine and political activism laid the ideological groundwork for the most extreme form of Jewish nationalism. For an exhaustive treatment of Rabbi Kahane’s legacy in the context of past and present Israeli religious radicalism, see especially
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See Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, University of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 229.
See Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. by Patricia M. Ranum, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, pp. 85–107.
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Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, California University Press, 2003, pp. 170–1.
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See Jason Dittmer, ‘The Geographical Pivot of (the End of) History: Evangelical Geopolitical Imagination and Audience Interpretation of Left Behind’, Political Geography, 27, 2008, pp. 280–300.
See John Hagee, Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, Lake Mary, Front Line, 2006.
See Shalom Goldman, Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land, University of North Carolina Press, 2009, p. 289.
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See Stephen O’Leary and Michael McFarland, ‘The Political Use of Mythic Discourse: Prophetic Interpretation in Pat Robertson’s Presidential Campaign’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 75, 1989, pp. 433–52.
Quoted in Peter A. Pettit, ‘Christian Zionism from a Perspective of Jewish-Christian Relations’, Journal of Lutheran Ethics, 7 (5), 2007, pp. 14–24.
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See Richard K. Fenn, The End of Time: Religion, Ritual, and the Forging of the Soul, SPCK, 1997, p. 6.
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Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People, University of North Carolina Press, 2000, p. 287.
See Yaakov Ariel, ‘How are Jews and Israel Portrayed in the Left Behind Series? A Historical Discussion of Jewish-Christian Relations’, in Bruce David Forbes (ed.), Rapture, Revelation, and The End Times, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 146–7.
See Stephen R. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination, John Know Press, 1995, pp. 141–70.
See Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Serif, 2005.
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See David Brog, In Defense of Faith: The Judeo-Christian Idea and the Struggle for Humanity, Encounter Books, 2009.
John Hagee’s foreword to David Brog, Standing with Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State, Charisma House, 2006, p. xi.
Jean-Pierre Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam, University of California Press, 2012, p. xiii.
See David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, Syracuse University Press, 2005, pp. 231–2; and Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam, pp. 83–90.
See Eric Hobsbawn, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, Abacus, 1995.
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© 2014 Carlo Aldrovandi
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Aldrovandi, C. (2014). US Christian Zionism. In: Apocalyptic Movements in Contemporary Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316844_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316844_5
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