| A
brief history of Christian support for Zionism
Home > Resources > A brief history of Christian support for Zionism
By David Blewett, National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel (NCLCI), January 2003
http://www.nclci.org/Articles/art-blewett-cjrelations.htm
Much has been said this past year about Christian
support for Israel, so much that one might think it is something
new, a product of the Christian Coalition. In reality, Christian
support for a Jewish return to Eretz Israel, then known
as Palestine, extends back to the 16th century Reformation.
It is not a recent phenomenon and it is not limited to any one
corner of the church, support is found in fundamentalist as
well as liberal churches. Support is expressed differently in
various denominations, but that is not a statement about the
support as much as it is a statement about differences in church
theologies and styles.
In the earliest years, Christian discussion
regarding Jews and Palestine was rooted in theological language
and messianic expectations. This type of support produced no
practical results until the nineteenth century when world events,
especially Napoleon's unsuccessful attempt to conquer Palestine
and "restore the country to the Jews" (1799), changed
significantly the makeup and motives of the movement.
Several new Christian movements developed in
the nineteenth century that based their theologies on biblical
prophecies, especially the Second Coming of Jesus. For instance,
in 1830 John Darby (1800-1882) founded the Plymouth Brethren,
whose doctrine of "dispensationalist premillennialism"
teaches that all unfulfilled biblical prophecies are dependent
on the return of the Jewish people to Palestine. This theology
continues to be taught in many fundamentalist Christian churches
today.
The Christadelphians were founded in 1844 and
were quickly recognized for their active support of Jewish return
to Palestine. Later the group offered very specific help to
Hibbat Zion, a Jewish movement that developed in the
1860s to help Jews get to Palestine, a predecessor to Herzl's
political Zionism. Even later, the Christadelphians played a
role in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust.
In 1866, Rev. George J. Adams led a group of
167 members of the Church of the Messiah in Jonesport, Maine,
in the USA, to Jaffa where they established what became known
as The American Colony. Most of these Christian pioneers felt
no hesitance about leaving family, friends and home to move
to a place most of them knew only from the pages of Scripture.
They were convinced that God's Spirit was leading them on this
adventure to help prepare the land for the countless people
who would undoubtedly follow them to the Holy Land, whether
to live or simply tour the holy sites. Ultimately, they went
to prepare the land for the expected imminent return of the
Messiah.
Other Christian organisations and individuals
earned respected places on the earliest pages of Zionist history.
There was Rev. William Blackstone (1841-1935) in Chicago, Lord
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-85), the
Mormon missionary Orson Hyde who, in 1841, was sent to Jerusalem
"to dedicate the land to the Jews" and Rev. William
Henry Hechler (1845-1931) of whom it would be said, he was "not
only the first, but the most constant and the most indefatigable
of Herzl's followers."1
In one way or another, all of the very early
Christian activity to help Jews return to Palestine was motivated
by the theological conviction that when Jews were once again
living in their promised land, the "second coming"
would occur. However, in the second half of the 19th century
a different kind of Christian support began to emerge, a support
based on humanitarian and political motivations rather than
theological expectations. This new type of support became most
noticeable after Great Britain declared its support for a Jewish
homeland in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration (1917).
Christians who represented this kind of support
include Colonel George Gawler (1796-1869) who founded the Association
for Promoting Jewish Settlement in Palestine to teach Jews the
techniques of modern farming. Jean Henri Dunant (1820-1920),
founder of the International Red Cross, also founded the Palestine
Colonisation Society in London in 1875.
Similar Christian organisations were developed
in other countries, but the most energetic expression of political
support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine came from Christians
in the United States. Rev. Edward Russell founded the Pro-Palestine
Federation (PPF) in 1930, composed primarily of pastors and
a few priests. In 1932 the American Palestine Committee was
founded with a membership that included a number of prominent
public figures, statesmen and elected officials.2
Feeling the need for an overtly Christian organisation, the
Christian Council of Palestine (CCP) was founded in 1942 and
soon grew to a membership of 3,000 clergymen, primarily from
liberal churches. In order to maximise effectiveness, the two
organisations merged in 1946 and became the American Christian
Palestine Committee (ACPC), with a membership of over 15,000
Christians.
After the UN partition vote in 1947, the ACPC
found itself just one among many similar organisations, Jewish
and non-Jewish, that urged a quick implementation of the UN
Special Committee on Palestine plan. The American Christian
Palestine Committee continued for several more years to organise
local programs and conferences, lobby national leaders and to
publish a monthly magazine, Land Reborn, always focused
on communicating the justice of the Zionist cause and strengthening
sympathy in Christian communities for the Jewish State. Then,
thinking that its work was done, the ACPC disbanded. Nearly
a decade later, Carl Voss, who had been the ACPC General Secretary,
wrote, "Christians did play a part but not as significantly
or as definitively as they should have. They had been conditioned
against such actions by centuries of deeply ingrained anti-Semitism,
conditioning which could not be undone in a few short months,
or even years."3
In 1948 several things fostered supportive Christian
attitudes towards a Jewish State. These included the horrors
of the Holocaust, awareness of the deplorable living conditions
for Jewish survivors in Europe and the realisation that if Jews
were not allowed into Palestine they would have to be absorbed
by Western countries. Favourable attitudes, however, did not
last. It did not take long for the National Council of Churches
(NCC) and other organisations to turn a deaf ear to Israeli
concerns.
In the weeks leading up to the 1967 War, while
Egyptian President Nasser was rallying the Arab world to join
him in annihilating Israel, the NCC and its constituent members
remained overwhelmingly silent.4 But immediately
after Israel's victory, the NCC announced that it "cannot
condone by silence territorial expansion by armed force."
Since 1967 the NCC, the World Council of Churches and most mainline
Protestant denominations have expressed a generally pro-Arab
attitude critical of Israel.
Also in the 1960s, Dr. Franklin H. Littell,
a distinguished pioneer in Christian-Jewish relations and chairman
of the Department of Religion at Temple University, began to
challenge the church to confront its enormous guilt of silence
while Nazis systematically murdered millions of Jews, a silence
that implied compliance. In the days leading up to the Six Day
War, Dr. Littell was once again shaken by the silence of Christians,
another silence that implied compliance with the Arab plan to
"drive Israel into the sea."
While Israel was winning the war, Dr. Littell
was working to reactivate the pro-Israel spirit in the mainline
Protestant churches that the ACPC had generated. Soon after
the Six Day War, Dr. Littell launched his new organisation,
Christians Concerned for Israel (CCI), an organisation that
"was, in a real sense, the residual heir to the legacy
of PPF, CCP, and ACPC."5
As pro-Arab sentiments increased in the mainline
Protestant and Catholic churches, particularly among the leadership,
Dr. Littell recognised the need to expand the CCI membership.
That opportunity came in 1978 when a large number of Christians
and Christian organisations came together in Washington to protest
the proposed sale of AWACs to Saudi Arabia. The unexpectedly
large turnout of concerned Christians and Christian groups,
several of whom had never heard of one another, led to the organisation
of the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel (NCLCI),
with the CCI membership as its nucleus.
For centuries there has been Christian support for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. Some support comes from Christians who express themselves with great energy and emotion as they rally for Israel and study biblical prophecy in light of current events. Christians in those churches are the heart and soul of the Christian Coalition and religious right.
At the same time, there are other Christians
who actively support Israel as a result of studying history,
current events and politics, as a reaction to the Holocaust
and the long history of antisemitism, especially Christian antisemitism,
and as a result of Christian-Jewish dialogue. These Christians
know the prophecies but they prefer to express their support
in more objective ways as they work behind the scenes to mold
opinions for Israel in their churches and communities.
There is no one reason why Christians support
Israel. Both elements of Christian support are genuine and neither
should be ignored in favor of the other, both address significant
but distinctly different groups in today's Christian churches.
References
1 - Paul C. Merkley. The Politics
of Christian Zionism, 1891-1948 (London: Frank Cass Publishers;
1988) p.25.
2 - Initial membership of the APC included 10 senators, 18 representatives and several Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officials. Headed by a Mormon, Senator William King of Utah, the committee's honorary chairmen were Vice President Charles Curtis and Senators William Borah and Claude Swanson, Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. [Reuben Fink. America and Palestine (New York: American Zionist Emergency Council; 1944) pp. 59-60] By 1941 the membership had grown to include 68 senators, 200 representatives, 22 governors, 1,200 clergymen and nearly 700 prominent non-Jewish Americans.
3 - Carl Voss. "The American Christian Palestine Committee," Essays in American Zionism, 1917-1848 (New York: Herzl Press; 1978) p. 497.
4 - A few Christians did bravely challenge
the Christian silence; see the article by A. Roy and Alice
Eckardt, "Again the Silence" at www.nclci.org/articles.
5 - Paul C. Merkley. Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel (Montreal: McGill-Queen's
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