A New Museum Tracks the History of Christian Zionists

Michael (Mike) Evans, an American author and journalist, and a Christian who has made supporting Israel his life’s work, has now built a cutting-edge museum inside a cluster of old stone buildings in downtown Jerusalem. The building, the Friends of Zion Museum, offers both an education about and a tribute to the Christians who helped make a Jewish state possible.

Who were, and are, these Christians? Although the term had not yet been coined, Christian Zionism, defined as the idea that God’s promise to Israel should be advanced by helping human hands, goes back hundreds of years, a child of the Protestant Reformation. By the mid-1600s, it had won proponents among Dutch, English, Scottish, and early-American Calvinists, few of whom had ever seen an actual Jew. In the early 1800s it grew in popularity in England, and later in that century found strong echoes in the United States. Church-going evangelicals today, intimately familiar with the story of the ancient Israelites, have tended to retain the same perspective.

Added to all of this in the 20th century was an even more powerful rationale for Christian Zionism: namely, the miracle of modern Israel itself. Although, in 1948, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, most decent people were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews in Palestine, the more sophisticated “knew” that the fledgling Jewish state did not stand a chance against the combined force of invading Arab armies. Then the miracle of 1948 happened, followed by another miracle in June 1967, and another, more closely-run one, in October 1973.