How The Rapture Explains The Rupture Over Israel On The Right

It’s no secret that Israel is losing ground in American public opinion on both the left and the right, even as many American Jews feel newly besieged by rising antisemitism. On much of the left, activists and intellectuals increasingly interpret Israel and Zionism through anti-colonial and anti-racist frameworks, casting the conflict in the moral language of oppressor and oppressed.

On the right, a different but equally consequential shift is underway. Influential conservatives like Tucker Carlson have come to view Israel as a drain on American resources, setting up debates with Israel supporters like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee, a Baptist preacher and ambassador to Israel. But the criticisms go beyond the MAGA movement’s “America First” isolationism. The turn on the right isn’t just about geopolitics — it’s about theology.

“Christian Zionism,” as Carlson described it in his podcast interview with white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, is a “brain virus” and “dangerous heresy.”

For decades, one of the most reliable pillars of pro-Israel sentiment in the United States was not just Jews but conservative Christians. That support had a theological motor: Israel mattered not just as an ally on a Cold War map, but as a central actor on the map of the End Times. Put simply, Christians needed Jews to return to the homeland of Israel to usher in the second coming of Christ.

But now, that theological motor is sputtering.

Carlson’s point of view appears to resonate especially with younger evangelicals. A survey commissioned by the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and administered by the Barna Group found that support for Israel among young evangelicals fell from 75 percent in 2018 to just 34 percent in 2021. This trend is of a piece with a decline in Biblical literalism. In 2022, a Gallup poll found that just 20 percent of Americans describe the Bible as the literal word of God — an all-time low.

With hardline readings of scripture on the decline, many young evangelicals are less tethered to elaborate prophetic systems and more likely to see evangelicalism as a kind of political identity. As the political scientist, Baptist pastor and Washington University professor Ryan Burge has argued, “more and more Americans are conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power.”

Researchers and journalists have been charting an evangelicalism that is fragmenting, thinning and reorganizing around politics and identity as much as doctrine. As a 2021 Pew study found, increasing numbers of self-identified conservative evangelicals, particularly younger white Christians, are more steadfast in their support for President Donald Trump and conservative causes and candidates than they are doctrinaire about regular church attendance or adherence to traditional ideas about biblical inerrancy.

The consequence is subtle but profound: Support for Israel increasingly has to be justified in political and civilizational terms, not prophetic ones. And when the theology thins out, older guardrails around how Christians talk about Jews — why they matter, what role they play in history — can thin out too.

None of this means younger conservative Christians are uniformly “anti-Israel.” But it does mean that a once-powerful permission structure — the belief that modern Israel is a prophetic signpost that faithful Christians are obligated to protect — has weakened. In that vacuum, a different permission structure has taken shape: a populist right-wing suspicion of foreign-policy commitments, with Israel often cast as a symbol of an outdated Republican establishment.

To understand what’s changing, it helps to remember what once held the coalition together: a Cold War fusion of realpolitik and Revelation.

From the 1940s to the 1980s, for millions of conservative Protestants, foreign policy was never just strategy. It was an arena where sacred history seemed to announce itself in headlines.

In that world, different religious subcultures developed distinct ways of reading geopolitics as spiritual drama. Devout Catholics often interpreted the battle against communism through popular Marian devotion — especially the story of Fátima, which cast the struggle as a contest between Christ and atheistic tyranny. In that widely circulated narrative, the Virgin Mary’s reported 1917 apparitions in Fátima, Portugal warned that Russia would spread its “errors” across the globe unless it repented — an apocalyptic frame that fused Marian piety with Cold War anticommunism.

Protestant fundamentalists had their own overlapping eschatology: dispensational premillennialism.

Dispensational premillennialism, a complicated eschatological framework that was once deeply familiar to tens of millions of American Protestants, was essentially a detailed scenario for how the world would end.

God, believers were taught, worked through distinct historical eras, or “dispensations.” The current era — the “church age” — would close suddenly. True Christians would be taken up from the earth in the rapture, lifted directly to heaven.

What followed would be a seven-year period of tribulation marked by war, chaos and persecution under a global ruler known as the Antichrist. During this period, prophetic passages from Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation would unfold on the world stage: Nations would align, a climactic battle would center on the Middle East and forces often identified with “Gog,” the apocalyptic enemy described in the Book of Ezekiel, would move against Israel from the north.

At the end of this catastrophe, Christ would return in glory, defeat the Antichrist at Armageddon and inaugurate a 1,000-year reign of peace before a final judgment.

This idea emerged as an alternative biblical interpretation to the widely held 19th-century belief that history would steadily improve through Christian influence before Christ returned. Whereas evangelicals in the 19th and early 20th centuries largely agreed that Christians could hasten the Messiah’s return by using their influence and active engagement in social movements to build a 1,000-year peace that would precede Christ’s second resurrection, many evangelicals in the 20th century instead insisted that divine intervention — not human reform — would inaugurate the millennium of Christ.

This drama had preconditions, and one of the most important was the regathering of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. For many evangelicals, then, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was not simply a news event, but a signal that prophecy was moving from page to world stage. On the very weekend Israel declared independence, influential Pennsylvania preacher W.O.H. Garman told his radio audience that Jews were “going back home in preparation for the closing events of this dispensation, and the return of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

For many Jews, this was not an especially comforting form of support. In the premillennial script, the return of Jews to the Holy Land was a necessary prelude to the Tribulation and to Christ’s eventual return — an apocalyptic story that did not exactly end with Judaism flourishing on its own terms. Different prophecy teachers handled the details differently, but the broad arc was clear: Jews played a central role in the End Times, yet that role ultimately culminated in mass suffering, conversion or judgment within a Christian narrative framework. Jewish existence was affirmed, but as part of someone else’s faith.

Still, in the context of Cold War politics, this theological structure made Jews and the Jewish state politically valuable. Israel was not just another country; it was a prophetic sign. That made it easier for conservative evangelicals to see Israel as an indispensable ally — even if the spiritual logic behind that alliance was not one most Jews would have chosen for themselves. (Of course, the eschatological foundation of that alliance has not stopped some Jews, particularly on the Israeli right, from enthusiastically embracing Christian support, even inviting evangelical leaders to the Knesset.) In this worldview, to oppose Israel, or even to treat it as just another nation-state, risked placing oneself on the wrong side of a script written in scripture.

Cold War anti-communism fit neatly into this same story. Many evangelical conservatives cast the Soviet Union — a secular regime openly hostile to Christian churches — not only as a geopolitical rival but as a spiritual actor, part of the gathering forces of evil. Clarence Edward Macartney, a prominent Presbyterian leader, warned that Russia represented “one of the worst outbreaks of Antichrist in government.” And in prophecy teaching, the Soviet Union was often linked to “Gog,” the northern power in the Book of Ezekiel destined to move against Israel in the final crisis. The Cold War map overlapped uncannily with the biblical one.

In sermons and tracts, evangelical leaders also tended to treat international institutions — from the League of Nations to the United Nations — as potential scaffolding for a future world government under the Antichrist. Garman told radio listeners in 1949 that efforts at a League of Nations, world courts or a United Nations were doomed because they left out “the Prince of Peace,” and because scripture foretold a coming federation of nations under the “worst despot of all history.” Institutions many Americans saw as tools of stability looked, in this theological frame, like blueprints for the Antichrist’s regime.

Within this worldview, Israel sat at the center of both sacred and secular history. Defending it was consistent with American strategic interests, but it was also a form of religious fidelity. That fusion — of biblical prophecy and Cold War geopolitics — helped lay the emotional and theological groundwork for the later alliance between conservative evangelicals and the pro-Israel right.

If prophecy once supplied the “why” of evangelical Zionism, then the obvious question is why it supplies less of it now.

Part of the answer is doctrinal drift. Dispensationalism, which emphasizes a literal interpretation of the Bible, has not disappeared, but evangelical scholars and pastors have noted its declining dominance in Christian intellectual life.

Another part is demographic and sociological: Younger evangelicals are less likely to inherit dense, institutionally reinforced systems of belief, and more likely to inherit a package of cultural — and increasingly partisan — cues. Christianity Today’s reporting on evangelical fracture describes a movement splintering into subfamilies, with some younger cohorts less committed to older doctrines or rituals, like weekly church attendance.

Dispensationalism is a theology of charts, timelines and interlocking prooftexts. It flourishes when people are motivated to practice theology — and when religious institutions train them to do it. When those institutions weaken and the cultural incentives shift, doctrine is often the first casualty.

For American Jews, the implications are sobering. The erosion of premillennial theology weakens a longstanding — if often theologically uncomfortable — foundation of pro-Israel sentiment. The old evangelical alliance was never rooted in liberal pluralism; it was rooted in prophecy. As that prophetic framework recedes, so could also the strange protective logic that once made Israel theologically indispensable to millions of Christians.

In its place, antisemitic conspiracy theories have more room to flourish on the right, with popular influencers like Fuentes casting conservative support for Israel as part of a globalist, interventionist scheme engineered by Jewish “neocons.” In this environment, it takes less theological work for a young conservative Christian to imagine that rejecting establishment “neocon foreign policy” means rejecting Israel — and less social cost to flirt with stereotypes that once sat closer to the fringe. Indeed, the 2025 Yale Youth Poll found that, amid a rise in antisemitism among young people across the political spectrum, “self-described ‘extremely conservative’ young voters were the most likely to agree” with antisemitic statements.

“The American right has been having a heated, high-stakes debate about the appeal of antisemitic ideas among younger conservatives,” Ross Douthat recently argued in The New York Times. “And to my mind, a crucial question is whether this was inevitable: Across the Trump era, the ‘America First’ right has turned against immigration and globalization and become skeptical of foreign military commitments, including the U.S. alliance with Israel. So was it only a matter of time before nationalism opened the door to antisemitism?”

But the story here is larger than Israel. The Christian right that coalesced in the Cold War was not simply a political movement with religious voters. It was an interpretive system — a way of turning geopolitics into spiritual meaning. As that system thins out, what replaces it may be something colder: a politics of grievance in which religious identity persists, but the theology that once disciplined it does not.

That older moral vocabulary was never confined to conservative foreign policy; it also informed strands of civil rights activism and antiwar protest, grounding politics in ideas of covenant, justice and human dignity. As its theological foundations erode, something is lost on both the left and the right — a shared language that once bound political argument to transcendent moral claims rather than to partisan identity alone.

For conservatives who care about Israel, and for Christians who care about the moral integrity of their public witness, the implication is uncomfortable: The old alliance was sustained by doctrine, not just by party. Once doctrine recedes, the guardrails it provided — however imperfect — recede with it.