President Trump's talk about Jews is really aimed at a very different audience: his white conservative Evangelical Christian electoral base. ed_kilgore writes
Christian Zionist John Hagee addressed an audience in Israel, or as Evangelicals tend to call it, the Holy Land. Photo: Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images Those tuning in to the president’s occasional exhortations to American Jews to love what he loves and to hate what he hates may wonder why he seems obsessed with this relatively small category of Americans, to the extent of accusing the vast majority of them of “disloyalty” to Israel.
One of Trump’s most fervent pockets of support is white evangelical Protestants, a group which consistently sides with Trump on political and policy questions. His approach to Israeli politics often lines up with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it also reflects priorities that have been central to evangelical politics for years.
If you’ve grown up Evangelical, saturated in the Old as well as the New Testaments, the Jews are a mirror image of yourself, and Israel is your deeply familiar spiritual homeland. There is a long-standing strain of Evangelical thinking called Christian Zionism, based on the idea that the reestablishment of a Jewish State in Palestine is an important part of God’s plan for redemption of the world.
Jerusalem was our prophetic bellwether. God’s plan hung on its fate. Whenever Israel gained more political territory, whenever Israel extended its boundaries, it was God’s will, the end-times unfolding on the evening news. Jerusalem, as the spiritual heart of Israel, mattered. Jerusalem was God’s holy city, of the ancient past, in its conflicted present, and for the biblical future.For many conservative evangelicals, Jerusalem is not about politics.
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