L. Michael Spath, DMin, PhD
ICAHD Webinar, April 14, 2026
The following is my extended presentation, from which I excerpted parts for my remarks for the April 14, 2026 ICAHD webinar with my friend, Stephen Sizer.
Thank you, Linda [Ramsden, head of ICAHD-UK], and thank you especially to Jeff Halper, for his continuing strong voice for justice. Our friend, Stephen Sizer, is one of the world’s leading experts on the history, theology, and politics of Christian Zionism. My assignment is to connect the dots between Christian Zionism and Christian Nationalism’s impact on US domestic and foreign policy.
Stephen has written about Christian Zionism in the Religious Right’s end-time theology, there’s liberal Christian Zionism (Don Wagner has written about this). My thesis is there’s also a secular Christian Zionism in American civil religion, a mixture of religious symbols, stories, rituals, politics, patriotism, to unify the people, their secular “civic creed.”
+ Central to America’s civic creed is belief that American democracy, capitalism, and culture are the peak of a God-ordained Western culture.
+Believing one’s country is blessed by God is not unique to America, but there is an American sense of chosenness, messianism, that it’s called to be “a light to the nations.”
+America’s “civic creed” links America’s universal mission, its “manifest destiny,” that God has plans for the world and America is God’s agent, with the biblical story of God’s plan for the biblical Israelites and Israel’s manifest destiny in the Holy Land. American exceptionalism and Israel’s exceptionalism, America’s manifest destiny and Israel’s manifest destiny – ONE!
Conscious or not, this belief underlies most of the Religious Right’s Christian Zionist theology. This thread is present from before our nation’s founding. The earliest Pilgrims interpreted their journey in biblical terms, to quote Congregational minister and Yale President, Ezra Stiles, they were forging “God’s American Israel.” William Bradford, first governor of the Plymouth Colony, 1621-1651, who read the Old Testament in its original Hebrew, connected the pilgrims with biblical Israelites in their exoduses, exiles, land restorations one and the same, “new England” in reality the “new Jerusalem,” populated by the elect and bound by a covenant of race, piety, and mission. And Puritan minister and Harvard president Increase Mather described Bradford as “Abraham” whom God called out of the Ur of England; his son, Cotton Mather, called him “Moses”; and his writings called a “New England Old Testament, a Genesis, Exodus, and Joshua of the Plymouth Plantation.”
On 1 July 1776, the delegates to the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia learned of the appearance of a hundred British ships – the first of 400 in all – off the coast of New York. Three days later, on 4 July, the assembly appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson to “bring in a device for a seal of the United States of America.” They chose an artist, Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere, to work with them and by mid-August, each brought to the committee his own proposal for the new nation’s seal.
Ironically, Adams, the Calvinist, chose a theme from classical antiquity, whereas the two Deists, Franklin and Jefferson, chose biblical themes, although the latter also incorporated an Anglo-Saxon image. Jefferson suggested that there should be depicted on the front of the seal “the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.” And Franklin’s proposal equally referenced the Israelites being chased by Pharaoh into the parting waters of the Red Sea. These were all combined, and the final proposal as it was submitted (although ultimately rejected) was that on the reverse side of the Great Seal there would be:
“Pharaoh sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his head and a Sword in his hand, passing through the divided Waters of the Red Sea in Pursuit of the Israelites: Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Cloud, expressive of the divine Presence and Command, beaming on Moses who stands on the shore and extending his hand over the Sea causes it to overwhelm Pharaoh.”
The motto that Franklin proposed: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”
Then, in the 19th century, an explosion. In 1845, journalist, defender of slavery in the pre-Civil War North, John O’Sullivan coined the term, “manifest destiny” which blended apocalyptic fervour, Christian missionary zeal, and colonizing foreign policy and empire-building, a beneficent imperialism. For example, Notre Dame’s Scott Appleby described George W. Bush’s presidency as a “theological version of Manifest Destiny.” In 1850, Herman Melville, the year before Moby Dick, he wrote in White Jacket:
“God has predestinated great things from [the American] race…. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard sent on through the wilderness … to break a new path in the New World. … [The political Messiah] has come in us…. Let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy.”
In 1861, this martial colonial zeal at its highest, the same year that The Battle Hymn of the Republic was written, Puritan minister George S. Philips wrote about America’s divine imperial calling:
Our mission should only be accomplished when the last despot should be dethroned, the last chain of oppression broken, the dignity and equality of redeemed humanity everywhere acknowledged, republican government everywhere established, and the American flag should wave over every land and encircle the world with its majestic folds. Then, and not till then, should the nation have accomplished the purpose for which it was established by the God of heaven.
In the 19th century, then, during the period of US Westward expansion and the decimation of the indigenous peoples, is when, as Stephen pointed out, Darby’s Christian Zionist end-times theology arose in Britain and the Scofield Bible in the United States. No wonder this Western “civil religion” culminated with Lord Balfour, UK Prime Minster at the turn of the 20th century (1902-1905), author of the so-called Balfour Declaration, the universalization of Western culture, its manifest destiny, for “the general welfare of mankind.” For the West, across the globe, especially in the Holy Land, imperialism became altruistic.
Bethlehem theologian-pastor, Mitri Raheb, summarizes it like this: “The bond between the State of Israel and the United States is of a strategic political and military nature, grounded in the common belief of being a chosen people as a settler community called to rule.”
This racist, messianic, imperialist American civil religion underlies the catastrophe today that has created devastation in the US and brought the world to the edge of World War Three. A few of the more egregious contemporary examples:
+ The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 being implemented by Trump, is based in a dominionist theological heresy, The Seven Mountains Mandate, where believers are to rule over the seven aspects of society: family, religion, education, arts and entertainment, media, business, government. White House Faith Office leader, Trump spiritual advisor, Paula White, as well as the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA are advocates for the Seven Mountain Mandate. During Holy Week, White compared the accusations, trials, assassination attempt, re-election of Trump to the false accusations, betrayal, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. She also said, “Saying No to President Trump is saying No to God.”
+ J. D. Vance mentor, tech guru, Palantir co-founder, Peter Thiel, warns about the arrival of the Antichrist who preaches peace cloaked in the cover of one world government, a sign of the coming apocalypse, all while providing surveillance technology to Israel to target Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and to Trump’s government to target immigrants.
+ US Ambassador to Israel and Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee, said in an interview that Israel has a biblical right to the land between the Nile and the Euphrates;
+ During her tenure, now former US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted an ICE recruitment video with soldiers repelling from a helicopter onto a ship wielding AK-47’s, breaking down doors of US citizens, dark-skinned supposed “illegals” in handcuffs, the secretary fist-bumping soldiers, with “Everybody wants to rule the world,” blasting in the background, and in bold Gothic script, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God.”
+ US Secretary of War, self-identified Christian Nationalist Pete Hegseth, who has, “Deus vult,” “God wills it” tattooed on his biceps and a Crusader Cross on his chest, invokes Holy War language against Gaza and Iran, asserting “God’s almighty providence” is on the side of the US military. He prays and calls on the American people to pray for God to rain down “overwhelming violence against those who deserve no mercy” in Venezuela, Gaza, in Iran “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
+ Then there’s Donald Trump. In his first term, he was compared to 6th c. BCE Persian king, Cyrus the Great, though not a believer in Israel’s God, liberated the Hebrew people from Babylonian Captivity, reestablished them in the land, rebuilt the Temple. No mention of Cyrus this time; now he taps into an American obsession, the myth of the solitary hero fighting evil (he has his own superhero cards), comparing himself to Israel’s righteous, biblical warrior-kings, David and Solomon, the avenging angel of the apocalypse, a militant Jesus who urges, “Onward Christian Soldiers.” You saw he just posted an image of himself as Jesus, bathed in light, healing a sick man, surrounded by a soldier, a nurse, a woman praying, an older man, the Statue of Liberty, Lincoln Memorial, a giant American flag, and in the sky eagles, fighter jets, a heavenly host, and the beast.
What Trump has done is taken one of the threads of America’s original civil religion – faith, capitalism, flag, exceptionalism, messianism – and fused it with the apocalyptic fervour of Christian Zionism, cynically, narcissistically placing himself at the center of world history, all the while, for good measure, enriching himself and his cronies. Journalist Alexandra Cohen says Trumphas created a new kind of civil faith “that holds conservatism, whiteness and Christianity as a holy trinity of the “real” American identity, with himself as the object of worship,”saying he was “chosen by God,” America’s savior.
So we have the origin story, the belief that the taming and settlement of largely uninhabited land was a God-ordained. A brave pioneering people escape from religious and political oppression in Europe or Egypt, meet great obstacles in realizing their dreams of a free land for free people in an untamed wilderness. They overcome the savage natives, native Americans- Canaanites-present-day Palestinians, who use terror to try to thwart their divine mission. But with God’s help the brave settlers defeat the savages, force them off the land, and forging a way to make the wilderness blossom and flourish.
The first European settlers to this land, as well as our nation’s founders, interpreted their mission in light of the early Hebrew people as recorded in the Hebrew Bible. But then, Zionists found a model in the European’s settler colonial project here in this land. This whole process has come full circle – from the 17th century Pilgrim Puritans settling in their “New American Israel,” to Zionist Organization of America-planted articles in American newspapers describing the Zionist ‘pioneers’ as modern-day versions of American settlers. For example, in the June 11, 1922, New York Times: “These immigrants to Palestine are ‘Jewish Puritans”’; their settlements are “the Jamestown and Plymouth of the new House of Israel”; they are “building the new Judea even as the Puritans built New England”; the settlers are like the “followers of Daniel Boone who opened the West for American settlers” while “facing the dangers of Indian warfare”; and in the process “the Jews are bringing prosperity and happiness in Palestine.” Zionism, Christian and Jewish, and Christian Nationalism, inextricably connected, mutually reinforcing.
And what is the US Christian response? According to a 2026 Public Religion Research Institute poll, 35% of Americans identify themselves as Christian nationalists, while another 23% “sympathize” – 58% of the US population a fertile ground supporting Zionist candidates locally for school boards, library boards, as well as statewide and national office, as Heritage Foundation president, Keven Roberts put it, “a fundamentally Christian” – that’s Christian Nationalist, Christian Zionist – “view of culture.”
Resistance can be found in the Baptist Joint Committee’s Christians Against Christian Nationalism, begun in 2019; with Friends of Sabeel North America, Churches for Middle East Peace, Christians for a Free Palestine, Apartheid Free Communities, mainline denominational committees and local Palestine solidarity organizations, each offering webinars, Palestine solidarity tours, church and community resources, Gaza flotillas, support for BDS, demonstrations, advocacy days in Washington DC and statehouses, more. And Pope Leo has spoken out forcefully for Palestine and criticized Mr. Trump’s warmongering.
While the conversation is certainly changing, activism on the rise, and rays of hope among Millennials and Gen Z’ers, especially young evangelicals, two things remain concerning: (1) things are getting worse for Palestinians in Palestine, not better, even after 30, 40, 50 and more years of resistance. What can we do differently than what we’ve been doing before? (2) And Christian resistance remains siloed with many groups doing what they can, but without a sustained, unified, interfaith voice (like in the civil rights movement in the US and the global ant-apartheid movement against South Africa).
Is it possible, given how deeply ingrained American and Israeli exceptionalism is in the American psyche, to re-frame the story? Are there other sources within our tradition that critique such a narrow, messianic, nationalist, imperialistic view? Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, talk about “two tributaries that run from the pages of the Bible down through American history.” The first, they call, “zealous nationalism,” that emphasizes America as God’s chosen nation,” capitalism supported by biblical teaching, “seeks to redeem the world by destroying enemies,” “stereotyping enemies,” the “mystique of violence,” “obsession with victory,” and “the worship of national symbols such as flags.” The second they call “prophetic realism” – see Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address invoking the inscrutability of God’s will or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Nobel Lecture about a “world house” – more humble, that emphasizes coexistence, institutions of justice, human rights, and international law, that America has a “responsibility to help alleviate the world’s problems, many of which it has caused,” that is, a “globally focused civil religion.”
In 1998, when I first became active in this issue, our friend, Zoughbi Zoughbi, at Bethlehem’s Wi’am Conflict Resolution Center said, “You can’t make our problem your problem; you’re not here, it will consume you. But you have a problem in the US, and your problem seriously impacts our problem, so please, work on your problem.” I’ve thought of Zoughbi’s advice often. Sam Bahour always reminds my groups about the Gaza genocide, “This is a US war.” “Gaza is a bi-partisan, Republican and Democrat, war.”
The stories we tell, the symbols we revere, the rituals we observe, that is, the civil religion that Christians and all people of goodwill practice, make all the difference. Underlying most people’s religious beliefs is their true religion – their worldview, value system. The same is true for nations. We must not only confront a heretical Christian Zionist theology but the ideology underlying it; the racist, exceptionalist, settler, national story in the public square based on a false, hybrid Christianity, the civic creed baked into the American consciousness from our founding that we must address.