Christian Zionism isn’t just for dispensationalists

Long dormant, the specter of anti-Semitism has reemerged on the political right. Over the last decade, vicious and vile Jew-haters like Nick Fuentes and the Groypers have entered in and out of the national spotlight. In 2022, Fuentes and a seriously unstable Kanye West (who had just been banned from Twitter/X for threatening to go “death con 3 On Jewish people”) shared an infamous dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

In 2025, Fuentes and the Groypers are once again in the news, thanks to a recent softball interview that the young provocateur received from Tucker Carlson. Rather than press back as Fuentes admitted his adoration of Joseph Stalin and lamented “organized Jewry in America,” Carlson mostly nodded along, often acknowledging agreement.

While an extreme case, Fuentes’ rise tracks with a growing class of Gen Z men on the right who do not share the previous generation of conservatives’ rock-ribbed support for America’s most important ally in the Middle East. According to the New York Times’ ever-insightful Ross Douthat, one reason that support for Israel is losing sway with this younger generation is due to “the weakening hold of certain theological ideas about Israel” like premillennial dispensationalism.

Known to the broader world through the Left Behind series’ sensational depiction of the Rapture, premillennial dispensationalism teaches that Jesus’ second coming will follow the return of the Jewish people to Israel and the restoration of temple worship in Jerusalem. Because all orthodox, Bible-believing Christians await with longing for Christ’s return, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come, dispensationalist theology provides an open-and-shut case for supporting the modern nation-state of Israel: If temple worship is not restored, Christ cannot return.

Dispensationalist arguments for foreign policy worked very well for evangelical baby boomers, many of whom grew up with books and films like Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), A Thief in the Night (1973), and Left Behind. But many millennial and Gen Z Christians never received that same cultural catechism, and it shows.

Whatever one’s perception of the biblical merits of dispensationalism, the case for the U.S.-Israel alliance need not rise or fall with any one Christian tradition of scriptural interpretation, or any one political party for that matter. As Samuel Goldman points out in his history of Christian Zionism, Christian support for Israel long predates Left Behind and the Reagan administration, and even the rise of premillennial dispensationalism in the 19th century.

Hundreds of years before Israel was reconstituted as a nation and premillennial dispensationalism was spreading through the work of John Nelson Darby, Christians of other stripes—from the eccentric John Locke, to theologian Jonathan Edwards, and Founding Father Elias Boudinot–were all alike looking forward to God’s restoration of the Jewish people to the Promised Land. In the modern era, “the most visible American Christian supporters of the Zionist movement,” according to Goldman, were theological liberals like Reinhold Niebuhr who rejected dispensationalism.

Perhaps even more than a reminder of the respectable history and theological pedigree of American Zionism, what the rising generation of Christians need is a straightforward, secular case for the merits of the U.S.-Israel relationship. If Douthat is right that paraphrased memory verses like “those who bless Israel will be blessed” are no longer enough to “interrupt the movement from skepticism about the Netanyahu government to hostility to Zionism to full-blown antisemitic conspiracizing,” making alternative arguments is essential.

In his interview with Fuentes, Carlson tried to claim that “our relationship with Israel … is insane, and it hurts us.” The truth of the matter is that Israel has repeatedly kept theocratic Iran from obtaining nuclear status. When Iran’s leaders chant “Death to America” or call us the “Great Satan,” they mean it. They would like nothing more than to wipe us off the map, which would be much easier for them to accomplish if not for decades of Israeli efforts in taking down Iran’s nuclear program: from the Stuxnet virus in 2010 to Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025. It’s no wonder Iran calls Israel the “Little Satan.”

There’s nothing anti-Semitic or un-American in wondering what we get out of the nearly $200 billion dollars we have provided to modern Israel over the course of its existence. But when you consider the trillions of dollars it costs to fight wars in the 21st century, or the $100 billion we pay every year to maintain our own nuclear program, that $200 billion (averaging out to less than $3 billion a year) seems like one incredible deal to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of a regime that hates us and wants us dead.

Ironically, Iran sees what far too many young Americans are missing: The Great Satan and the Little Satan make for natural allies.