The spiritual origins of Zionism

Satan doesn't have new tricks

I went to an investing workshop a few weekends ago in Queensland. Like everyone, we’re feeling the pressure of inflation. My main question is when to sell our gold. 2028 is looking good, it seems. Not advice. Time will tell.

At the dinner afterwards, one of the blokes I was chatting to asked me point-blank: “What’s with all you Christians supporting Israel?”

Good question, mate. Good question.

Normies are beginning to ask the question that political elites, church networks, and media institutions have treated as a thoughtcrime for decades. Why are so many Christians willing to risk economic chaos, regional war, and perhaps something even worse for the sake of Israel? Why does every act of Israeli aggression in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, or against Iran arrive wrapped in a moral halo, as though ordinary prudence and ordinary judgment no longer apply?

The answer is not only strategic, though strategy matters. It is not only financial, though money and lobbying matter. The deeper answer is spiritual.

If you want to understand why so many Christians are prepared to blow the world up for Israel, you have to understand Zionism as more than a political programme. You have to understand it as a theology of history.

At the level of present events, Israeli aggression across the Middle East is not simply a series of disconnected military actions carried out under the neutral banner of security. It is increasingly animated by an expansionist ideology that regards land, power, and historical destiny as belonging together. This is why the rhetoric surrounding Israel so often exceeds the language of ordinary statecraft.

A normal state speaks of deterrence, borders, and interests. Zionism, especially in its stronger forms, speaks of inheritance, return, promise, and redemption. What is at stake is not merely the survival of a nation among nations, but the conviction that this particular nation possesses a sacred historical claim which ordinary moral constraints are not permitted to obstruct.

To understand that conviction, we need to distinguish between secular Zionism and religious Zionism. They are not identical, and the former has increasingly yielded to the latter.

The early Zionist movement emerged in nineteenth-century Europe under the pressure of the failure of assimilation. In that context, figures like Theodor Herzl presented Zionism primarily as a political solution to the Jewish question. It was a nationalist project, modern in form and European in method, which sought to make the Jewish people into a normal political nation with territory, sovereignty, and military force. Its grammar was secular, even when it borrowed symbols from Scripture.

But secular Zionism always lived on borrowed capital. It drew emotional and historical power from biblical memory while often detaching that memory from the theological framework that had once governed it. It wanted the language of Jerusalem, exile, and return, yet it translated those realities into the categories of modern nationalism. That tension could not hold indefinitely.

Over time, the older secular model has lost ground to a more explicitly religious one. In Israel itself, the rightward shift has been unmistakable. Biblical promise is no longer treated merely as a civilisational ornament. It is treated as a political warrant. Land is not only strategic. It is sacred. Settlement is a redemptive act; therefore, atrocity is not merely incidental. It is necessary.

This matters because once political claims are made religious claims, compromise begins to look like betrayal. A border dispute can be negotiated. A divine inheritance cannot. That is why right-wing religious Zionism has become such a powerful force not only in Israel, but also among the American political right. Organisations like AIPAC extend this Jewish expansionism into the heart of the American political establishment, particularly on the Republican right.

That is where Christian Zionism enters the picture. The extraordinary power of Zionism in American politics depends upon millions of Christians who have been taught to regard the modern state of Israel as the centre of God’s purposes in history. For these believers, Israel is not simply another state to be judged, criticised, or restrained like any other. It is a prophetic sign. It is the clock by which the end times are measured. It is the stage on which sacred history is expected to reach its conclusion. Once that imagination has taken hold, ordinary political reasoning becomes impossible. War begins to look providential. Escalation begins to look necessary. Catastrophe itself can be interpreted as fulfilment.

The principal theological engine behind this is Dispensationalism. This is a theory of the Biblical end times that gained traction in the 1800s and took over Protestant Christianity in the 1900s. God is said to have one plan for the Church and another for ethnic Israel, with the promises to Abraham remaining nationally and territorially operative in a distinct sense for the Jewish people.

When Israel was established via the Balfour Declaration and the postwar order in 1948, Dispensationalism became the default end-times view for Protestants. From the evangelical or Baptist churchgoer today, criticism of Jesus will be met with a gracious smile. Criticism of Israel will get you burned at the stake.

Trust me, I’ve got the scars.

Religious Zionism is built upon a monumental amount of rabbinic kvetching about the loss of the land. That stream of thought draws upon the Maccabean revolt against the Greeks and the brief period of independence before Roman subjugation ended Jewish self-rule. Europeans are usually referred to by the rabbis as Amalek or Rome. Both are detestable to the religious Zionist, although they are careful not to make that too apparent to us. For now.

The destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, foretold by Jesus and carried out by the Romans, was a devastating blow to Jewish self-image. The final nail in that coffin was in the 130s when the Romans finally genocided the Jews left in Palestine.

John the Baptist and Jesus referred to the Pharisees as serpents and hypocrites, and what we would call ancient Zionism was at the heart of that critique. It was the driving force behind movements like the Zealots and many revolts against Rome. What became rabbinic Judaism saw the land as belonging to the Jews because of their innate ethnic identity. It prevented many of the Jewish people in ancient times from accepting Christ when He came.

This Satanic deception was at the heart of the Jewish rejection of Jesus. When Jesus told them His Kingdom is not of this world, most fell away. When He repeated it in the Temple in his final days, it was enough to make them choose the political terrorist Barabbas and scream, “Crucify Him… His blood be upon us and upon our descendants!”¹

Indeed.

That Jewish racial entitlement to the land and belief in innate superiority has never dimmed. It manifests in different religious and ideological ways, but it is at the heart of what it means to be Jewish. Pointing it out gets us into trouble, and I’m not interested in promoting hatred or retribution. But it’s true.

For Christians to go along with Zionism is irreconcilable to our faith. Christian theology is incompatible with Zionism. The New Testament does not permit the old covenantal categories to remain ultimate after Christ. John the Baptist strikes at the root of genealogical presumption when he warns his hearers not to say that Abraham is their father, because God can raise up children to Abraham from stones².

Jesus carries the same judgment forward. He does not deny Israel’s history. He fulfils it. He is the true centre of God’s purposes, the one in whom Temple, kingdom, and covenant reach their appointed meaning. The kingdom of God is not arriving through ethnonational restoration or territorial maximalism, but through the Messiah who gathers the people of God into himself.

Paul then states the matter with unmistakable clarity. The Seed of Abraham is Christ. That is his argument in Galatians 3:16, and from it the rest follows. If Christ is the Seed, then those who belong to Christ are Abraham’s offspring and heirs according to promise, whether Jew or Gentile. The chosen people of God are not defined by bloodline and land, but by repentance, faith, and union with the Messiah. This is not a marginal apostolic aside. It is the heart of Christianity.

That is why Christian Zionism is not simply a political error. It is a theological inversion. It asks Christians to centre what the New Testament has revealed as peripheral, and to apostatise what the apostles have fulfilled in Christ.

Israel was never a land in the ultimate sense. The land mattered, but it pointed beyond itself. Israel is a people, and that people is gathered in Christ.

That is not ‘replacement theology’. It’s the Bible.

1. Matthew 27:16-26.

2. Luke 3.