NEWS FEATURE: Christian Zionists embrace their faith’s Jewish roots

c. 1998 Religion News Service ORLANDO, Fla. _ Tears flowed from Jeanette Scott’s eyes as she draped a blue and white silk”tallit”_ a Jewish prayer shawl _ around her shoulders. Woven into the tallit was a depiction of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site.”The Lord was really putting an anointing on me,”said the 29-year-old woman.”I […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

ORLANDO, Fla. _ Tears flowed from Jeanette Scott’s eyes as she draped a blue and white silk”tallit”_ a Jewish prayer shawl _ around her shoulders. Woven into the tallit was a depiction of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site.”The Lord was really putting an anointing on me,”said the 29-year-old woman.”I felt like this was really mine. I’ll wear it when I pray.” Despite her affinity for Jewish prayer objects, Scott, of Pensacola, Fla., is not Jewish. Instead, she is among a growing number of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians who have become enthralled with their faith’s Jewish roots.”God came to the Jews before he came to the gentiles,”said Scott, who attends an Assembly of God church.”Everything in the world centers around the Jews and Israel.” Literal believers in both the Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament, these Christians insist Jews remain God’s chosen people and say they are duty-bound to love and support them.

They note Jesus was a Jew, as were the Apostles and the first Christians. And they take seriously Bible references to the ingathering of Jews in the land of Israel in preparation for Jesus’ return. This concern for the return of Jews to Israel has led to the movement being called Christian Zionism.


Some Christian Zionists, like Scott, have incorporated Jewish ritual objects and snippets of Hebrew prayers into their worship. A few, like E. Daniel Wright of Houston, have adapted, to varying degrees, the dress of ultra-Orthodox Jews. In this, Wright has gone all the way.

He wears a dark, velvet skull cap and a fringed Jewish ritual undergarment known in Hebrew as”tzitzit,”and sports a long grey beard. Completing the picture are black trousers and a white shirt, the daily garb of an ultra-Orthodox male.

Wright, 48 and a Church of the Nazarene member, calls himself an”Israelite,”whose”heart has been circumcised by the Lord.”His appearance, he said, elicits questions from Christians, allowing him to share with them their faith’s Jewish sources.

Many more of these Christians have merely added Jewish elements to their religious language. At the First Christian Self Defense Academy in Chesapeake, Va., for example, head coach Joseph Garcia teaches karate students the Hebrew names for God”so they will know to respect the roots of their religion.” This attraction to all-things Jewish extends to the modern nation of Israel, viewed by Christian Zionists as hard evidence of the truth of biblical prophesies. Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson _ one of many leading evangelicals with connections to Christian Zionism _ calls Israel”God’s prophetic time clock.” The Rev. Jerry Falwell and Focus on the Family’s James C. Dobson are among the other well-known Christian leaders identified with the movement.

Christian Zionists take an uncompromisingly pro-Israel stand on the Middle East peace process, believing none of the land the Bible says God promised to Abraham’s descendants should be turned over to Arab control. Consequently, they back the hardline policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Should war erupt again in the Middle East, Christian Zionists say they have no doubt God again will vanquish Israel’s enemies, which they believe has been the case since Israel’s independence in 1948.”Israel is indestructible,”said popular religious broadcaster and evangelist Benny Hinn.

Contemporary Christian Zionism has its roots in the 19th century, but did not become widespread until modern Israel’s birth.”Evangelicals have always been interested in Jesus’ return of course,”said Robert Walker, the retired editor of Christian Life magazine, a once-leading evangelical publication now merged with Charisma.”But if there was no place for him to go, no land, where would he go? Then came 1948. Now there was a place!” However, it was the 1967 Middle East war _ in which Israel gained Jerusalem’s Old City, the West Bank and other land forming the core of biblical Israel _ that truly unleashed Christian Zionists’ messianic hopes, just as it unleashed similar feelings among some Orthodox Jews.”People got really excited then,”said Walker.”What a military victory it was. This had to be God’s hand at work.” This year’s 50th anniversary of modern Israel’s founding also has produced an outpouring of Christian Zionist fervor because of its symbolic link to the ancient Israelite celebration of the jubilee.


Every 50 years in biblical Israel, the jubilee was celebrated with the release of all slaves and the return to its prior owner property obtained since the previous jubilee. The idea was to maintain a fair distribution of wealth and insure that no Jew remained mired in perpetual servitude or poverty.

Christian Zionists believe Israel’ 50th anniversary represents a spiritual restoration of the biblical jubilee celebration, and they point to the current return by Switzerland and other nations of tens of millions of dollars to the families of Holocaust survivors as a sign of the truth of their assertion.

Ironically, even the most Orthodox of Jews have not marked the jubilee since the Babylonian exile some 2,400 year ago, since its celebration was contingent on all 12 original tribes living on their land.

Jubilee fever reached a peak in Orlando last weekend (April 29-May 3) with a five-day gathering of some 10,000 Christian Zionists at the city’s mammoth convention center. Participants came from as far as Japan and Africa.

The Rev. Kayode Pitan, pastor of a Pentecostal church in Lagos, Nigeria, said he traveled to Orlando”because this is a once-in-a-lifetime meeting. For me it is a privilege to be around for this.” The event featured hundreds of dancers and musicians who combined ballet and rock music in spectacular stage presentations combining Jewish imagery and Hebrew songs with a charismatic and Pentecostal worship style.

One night’s performance theme was a re-enactment of the biblical King David leading the Ark of the Covenant, the wooden box in which the original Ten Commandments were said to have been kept.


Another night focused on the Holocaust and birth of modern Israel. More than 200 banners and flags _ including Israel’s national flag and others representing Israel’s original 12 tribes and the Holy Spirit _ added to the sense of extravaganza.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS.)

The event reached an emotional peak during a Saturday-night sermon by Hinn _ born, of all things, an Israeli Arab.

As the band loudly hammered out one pulsating, traditional Jewish song after another, dozens of audience members blowing shofars _ the ritual Jewish trumpet fashioned from the horn of a ram or antelope _ joined Hinn on stage as hundreds of others danced ecstatically through the aisles banging tambourines shaped like Stars of David and praising Jesus.”The very fact that Jews are still alive proves God is still alive,”Hinn shouted to cries of”Hallelujah.””If you forsake Israel, you forsake God. … If you touch Israel, you touch the apple of God’s eye,”he continued.

Then, Hinn slapped his hands loudly into a microphone. At the crack of his hands, dozens of people, overcome, collapsed to the floor on top of one another. Some cried, some laughed, some spoke in tongues _ all typical of a Hinn spiritual healing service.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

It is this sort of indiscriminate mixing of Christianity and Judaism that makes many Jews suspicious of Christian Zionists. Leaders of the mainstream Orlando Jewish community, for example, urged the area’s 25,000 Jews to stay away from the event, saying Christian Zionists care at least as much about converting Jews as they do helping Israel.

Jewish leaders also dislike Christian Zionists’ exalting of Messianic Jews _ Jews who say they remain Jews despite believing Jesus is the Messiah. Mainstream Jewish belief precludes such a position and regards Messianic Jews as apostates.


Messianic Jews were well-represented at the Orlando conference, including in its planning. Many were also among the featured speakers and performers. In the convention center exhibit hall, Messianic organizations and businesses dominated.

Jewish community concerns also kept Netanyahu _ who early on was advertised as the event’s main attraction _ and other top Israeli officials away. Netanyahu’s absence came despite previous appearances by him at Christian Zionist gatherings.

The only Israeli government officials on hand were tourism representatives, mindful that Christians account for between 50 percent to 60 percent of the 500,000 or so Americans who travel to Israel each year. More than 80 percent of the American Christians who do visit Israel are evangelicals, said Geoffrey Weill, a tourism ministry spokesman in New York.

But not just Jews are wary of Christian Zionists. Liberal Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians say Christian Zionists are blind to the condition of Palestinians _ some of them fellow Christians _ living under Israeli rule. Some evangelical Christians agree.”It’s mixing biblical theology with modern politics,”said the Rev. Donald E. Wagner, executive director of Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding and a religion professor at Chicago’s North Park University.”I do not equate the modern state with fulfillment of the biblical text.” Another Chicago-based group critical of Christian Zionists is Christian Peacemaker Teams, which manned a booth at the Orlando conference. CPT, supported in the main by Mennonite and Brethren church groups, sends observers to Hebron in the West Bank to serve as witnesses to the ongoing hostilities there between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.”You can’t just focus on the law of the Bible,”said Cliff Kindy, a CPT member from North Manchester, Ind., and self-described”radical evangelical.””What about the prophets’ call for justice?”It seems to me that is being forgotten”by Christian Zionists.”The modern state of Israel does not represent Judaism in the way that (Christian Zionists) conceive it.” Such criticisms are dismissed by Christian Zionists as the politically correct notions of a watered-down Christianity unwilling to accept the Bible’s territorial imperative.”It’s going to get more and more unpopular to be a friend of Israel,”said Rick Joyner, executive director of MorningStar Ministries in Charlotte, N.C.”It’s going to cost you something to walk with God and support Israel,”he told the Orlando gathering.”Everybody wants to be a Christian when it’s popular. Everybody wants to support Israel when it’s popular,”he added.”Let’s see who is real when it’s unpopular, when it may even cost us our lives. Whole nations will be tested around the nation of Israel, about what is right and not just political expedience.”

DEA END RIFKIN

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