Mother Jones illustration; Getty; Zuma (3)
Earlier this week, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson hosted far-right influencer Nick Fuentes on his livestream show. Carlson had undoubtedly anticipated a blockbuster interview, and Fuentes, the leader of the extremist “groyper” movement, delivered handsomely, offering a buffet of provocative sound bites designed to spread far and wide on social media. He made the case for the importance of Americans “to be pro-white,” sang the praises of brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and bemoaned the problem of “organized Jewry in America.”
But perhaps the most widely shared moments of the discussion had to do with Carlson and Fuentes’ shared distaste for Christian Zionism, the popular evangelical movement that calls Christians to support Israel. The conversation began with Carlson and Fuentes musing about the origins of the neoconservative movement—populated by such notables as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz—that they blame for interventionist US foreign policy.
“It arises from Jewish leftists who were mugged by reality when they saw the surprise attack in the [1973] Yom Kippur war,” suggested Fuentes. This explanation didn’t satsify Carlson who countered, “But then how do you explain [US Israel ambassador] Mike Huckabee, [Texas senator] Ted Cruz, and [former national security adviser] John Bolton?” Carlson then went on to include, “George W. Bush, Karl Rove— all people I know personally who I’ve seen be seized by this brain virus. And they’re not Jewish. Most of them are self-described Christians.” He continued, “And then the Christian Zionists who are, well, Christian Zionists. What is that? I can just say for myself, I dislike them more than anybody, because it’s Christian heresy. And I’m offended by that as a Christian.”
The backlash by the right wing on X was swift. In a tweet to his 411,000 followers, Will Chamberlain, an organizer of the influential National Conservatism conference, accused Carlson of betraying the memory of avid Israel supporter the late Charlie Kirk. An anonymous account with the name Insurrection Barbie tweeted to a million followers. “Christian Zionist here and I’ll gamble my eternal salvation on my theology over that of Tucker Carlson all day.” US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told his two million followers, “Wasn’t aware that Tucker despises me. I do get that a lot from people not familiar with the Bible or history. Somehow, I will survive the animosity.” Jumping to Huckabee’s defense, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has 7.1 million followers on X, tweeted, “Mike Huckabee is a pastor and a patriot who loves America, loves Israel, and loves Jesus. I’m proud to be in his company!”
There are, in fact, a lot of people in his company. In a recent piece, I wrote about the astounding size of this movement.
A 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 82 percent of white American evangelicals believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, compared with 81 percent of ultra-Orthodox Jews and 44 percent of respondents overall. A 2024 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 64 percent of white evangelicals believed Israel’s actions in Gaza were justified, compared with 32 percent of the American public overall. Christians United for Israel, the evangelical Zionist group founded in 2006 by Texas pastor John Hagee, claims 10 million members, more than the entire population of 7.5 million Jews in the United States. The movement has enormous financial heft: A 2018 investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz found that Christian groups had invested an estimated $50 to $65 million in Israeli settlements in the West Bank over the previous decade.
The online skirmish over Carlson’s remarks about Christian Zionists is only the latest evidence to emerge of a growing fissure on the right over the extent to which the United States should be involved in foreign conflicts, especially those in the Middle East. As I wrote in a piece around the time that the United States bombed Iran, Christian Zionism has everything to do with this schism:
Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions—many of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.”
Christian Zionists often profess to love both Israel and the Jewish people, but for many of them, this devotion is intrinsically tied to their beliefs about the fate of the Jews in the end times—and it’s not pretty:
During his first term, Taylor noted, Trump made strong connections with influential figures in the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a charismatic Christian movement that teaches followers to take “dominion” over all aspects of society, including government. Over the last decade or so, Christian Zionism has become an important part of NAR theology—so much so that during worship, some adherents now wear Jewish prayer shawls and blow shofars, the ram’s horn instruments that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle and still features in some Jewish holidays. This is an example of what Taylor refers to as philosemitism—the idea of loving Jewish customs and cultures. But within end-times theology lurks a dark side to Christian Zionists’ fixation on Judaism. Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that Jews will convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t convert will perish.
It can be tricky to disentangle anti-interventionism from straight-up antisemitism—especially after the October 7 Hamas attacks that kicked off the catastrophic war in Gaza. But it’s worth noting that the Christian Zionist faction of the pro-interventionist side isn’t necessarily in it for the love of the Jewish people, either. “If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism,” Taylor told me, “they really are two sides of the same coin.”
Correction, October 31: An earlier version of this story misstated the first names of early neoconservatives.
Image credit: Jason Koerner/Getty; Al Drago/CNP/Zuma, Bob Daemmrich/Zuma (2), Mattie Neretin/CNP/Zuma
