The great Christian Zionist falling away

What happens when Christian Zionists find out they're wrong?

Christians United for Israel, or CUFI, held its 2024 A Night to Honour Israel last week.

It’s an annual pro-Israel event spearheaded by the largest pro-Israel Christian group in America. The leader of CUFI, Pastor John Hagee, has close relations with the highest echelons of the Republican Party at all levels.

The organisation is a well-oiled machine of political leverage for Israel. Like its Jewish counterpart AIPAC, CUFI trains activists in how to pressure US politicians to do what the Zionists want them to do.

They don’t protest. That’s for losers.

They lobby.

When John Hagee calls, congressmen, senators and presidents pick up the phone.

Miriam Adelson, widow of Las Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, attended the event. She has pledged $100 million to Trump’s election campaign. Trump and her clearly return favours. He awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.

Rabbi to the stars Shmuley Boteach was seen trying to get her attention at the event.

Perhaps Miriam was ignoring Shmuley because of his recent scandals, such as calling the enormously popular Candace Owens an “arch-antisemite” who wants to kill all Jews.

Regardless, Shmuley is still bafflingly powerful. How many scandal-ridden, dildo-promoting rabbis can demand meetings at the Vatican?

Or can still be celebrated by Christians after publishing a book in 2012 that argued Jesus was a kosher rabbi, a Jewish nationalist and not the Messiah?

The political power that entities like CUFI and men like Shmuley can deploy on behalf of Israel is staggering, yet it is not broadly understood by the general public. While Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists exert enormous influence over Western elites, everyday citizens don’t really think about the issues dear to the Zionist lobby megastructure that much at all.

Isn’t American democracy based on the will of the people, i.e. the American people?

So, how can it be that the most powerful political force in US politics is focused on issues that are irrelevant to US citizens?

It is due to the power of ideology, particularly ideology that derives its legitimacy from interpretations of end-times prophecy.

Jewish Zionism is its own beast and largely emerged in the 19th century among Eastern European Ashkenazim. Christian Zionism got going around the same time. It derives from scriptural interpretations developed by John Nelson Darby in the mid-1800s and popularised via the Scofield Reference Bible a century later.

John Nelson Darby was an aristocratic Irish genius who received a prestigious education in London and Dublin and converted to the faith during his studies. Like many geniuses, he liked to systematise his ideas and was impatient with established interpretations of topics he held dear. For Darby, that topic was the interpretation of scripture with a focus on eschatology—the study of the end times.

For aeons, Christians had believed that the kingdom of God was either already established on earth via the church or else was to be established in eternity after the Second Coming of Christ. Darby threw out 18 centuries of church doctrine by asserting that not only was the kingdom of God yet to come on the earth, but that it would be preceded by a sequence of events largely to do with the Jewish people re-established in their First Temple Period homeland.

A century before the founding of the modern nation-state of Israel, Darby argued that God would one day return his attention to his chosen people, the Jews. Just before He did so, He would ‘rapture’ his church into heaven and be done dealing with Christians. Jesus would then return for a second time to take his place as king of the Jews.

The rapture is the basis for the Left Behind books and movies

The framework upon which John Nelson Darby based all of these assertions is known as dispensationalism, and it is a very sophisticated and complex framework to wrap your head around. Christian Zionists are known for keeping vast wall charts covered in details outlining the theory.

If all of this sounds wildly bonkers to you, that’s understandable. You really have to be involved in evangelical, Baptist or more fundamentalist Protestant churches to come across this stuff. But in America, these beliefs are widespread among Christians and form the basis for the Christian Zionist support of Israel.

The spread of dispensationalism interpretations of scripture in America was largely due to the widespread use of the Scofield Study Bible by pastors throughout the 20th century. The Scofield Study Bible contained commentaries in the margins, all based upon Darby’s dispensationalist framework, and as pastors used the Bible for their sermons, dispensationalism became the dominant eschatological perspective in US Protestant churches.

The Scofield Bible, compiled from a study course put together by Cyrus Scofield, was mysteriously published by Oxford University Press in 1909 and became ever-more influential as the prophesied return of the Jews to their homeland came true in 1948. It seemed that Darby’s framework must be true.

Dispensationalism is easily disproved by the Bible once you check it against the text. The idea that God would one day give the land of Palestine back to the Jews because they are the seed of Abraham—one of Darby’s central contentions—is debunked by Galatians 3:16:

Brethren, I speak in the manner of men: Though it is only a man’s covenant, yet if it is confirmed, no one annuls or adds to it. Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, “And to seeds,” as of many, but as of one, “And to your Seed,” who is Christ. And this I say, that the law, which was four hundred and thirty years later, cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect.

The promise to Abraham was a spiritual promise to a spiritual people defined as those who are in Christ.

The theory, however elaborate and sophisticated, has many more holes. Darby’s theory reminds me of Karl Marx's; it is too profound and powerful to have come from just a man and is, therefore, likely the product of a superhuman intelligence outside the physical realm.

As that intellect, in this case, cannot be the Holy Spirit, it must be from an unholy source—a demon or a fallen angel.

Maybe that view is too far out for you. That’s fine. But bear with me for just a moment, because there may also be a very clear motive that the Kingdom of Darkness would have to carry out such a multi-century deception among the body of Christ.

There are millions of sincere, Bible-believing Christians who have fallen into the Christian Zionist net. They are offended by woke culture, which is an ideological derivative of the ideas of Marx applied to identity instead of class. They believe in their Bible, they love Jesus, they live for church, and they fear God.

Many of them, however, have allowed their hearts and minds to be possessed by a love for Israel and hope in the rapture. They follow Jewish content creators like Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, who assure them that Israel will soon triumph over her neighbours as prophesied in the Old Testament and that the rapture will occur shortly after.

What if that doesn’t happen? What if all of this was an elaborate spiritual deception, and the state of Israel is about to get turned into glass by a coalition of Arab and Persian neighbours supported by the military powerhouses of Russia and China?

Millions of Christians would experience a crisis of faith. As disillusionment set in, they might even fall away from Christianity.

If you were Satan, and you knew the eschaton—the End of Days—was coming at some point, isn’t that exactly what you’d want? A great falling away from the faith just prior to the end, to drag as many of those loathsome Christians down into the pit with you as possible.

Wouldn’t that make it worth your while to invest in a multi-century deception of Western civilisation? A great Marxist-Zionist mind trap to ensnare the Last Days church.

Uploading a few theories into the heads of a few twisted geniuses eager for fame in the 1800s might just be worth the effort.