Huckabee as Trump’s pick for Israel ambassador is a win for Christian Zionism. Here’s why.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heralded the success of a pro-Israel Christian ministry as a struggle akin to Israel’s own.

“I remember when you began. Once you were one of a handful of brave voices in the wilderness,” Netanyahu said in a livestream broadcast from Jerusalem to Washington D.C., where a crowd of about 5,000 gathered for the Christians United for Israel annual summit in July 2019. “But thanks to your leadership, now there are millions of millions devout Christians who stand with Israel.”

That 2019 summit was a victory lap for Christians United for Israel and its founder, Texas televangelist pastor John Hagee. The ministry had built considerable political clout over the course of 13 years to the point of helping shape policy decisions in President-elect Donald Trump’s first term. That included securing David Friedman’s appointment as ambassador to Israel and the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv moving to Jerusalem.

Christians United for Israel and the broader religious movement it helps lead, known as Christian Zionism, reached a new zenith in its influence during Trump's first term. That's all but guaranteed to continue during a second Trump term, an expectation affirmed by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s nomination as ambassador to Israel.

Huckabee’s prospective appointment is also a new milestone for Christian Zionism because it symbolizes the movement’s ability to bring together different pro-Israel evangelicals. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist pastor and host of a show on the faith-based Trinity Broadcasting Network, heavily draws from his faith to guide his support for Israel, although some of those guiding beliefs differ from other Christian Zionist figures.

Christian Zionism, a broad belief in how a modern state of Israel fits into some conservative Protestant theology, enters a second Trump term with after major success with organizing a broad evangelical coalition and establishing credibility with top Republican lawmakers. The next four years will test just how far it can go in shaping U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.

“These are the people that were loyal to Trump in the first administration, were loyal to him when he was out of power and are now going to be close to the center of the second administration,” said Daniel Hummel, a religious historian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a leading expert on evangelical support for Israel.  “I don’t know how they would be any closer — but I don’t see any daylight right now.”

Pro-Israel evangelicals had close ties to Trump’s first administration largely through Friedman, who despite his religious identity as an Orthodox Jew is in many ways a loyalist to Christian Zionist leaders and ideas. Huckabee, who's believed to be the first outwardly evangelical appointment to this role, is a new iteration of the same alliance.

Huckabee’s nomination also points to a solidarity within the Christian Zionist movement between Christians who support Israel because they believe it helps usher End Times prophecy and those who see Israel as a fulfillment of God’s promises in the past. Huckabee falls into the latter and Hagee within the former, a belief known as dispensationalism.

Leaders like Hagee, despite his affinity for a certain theological perspective, have sought to organize across these divides to achieve greater political ends. Hummel, author of the 2023 book, “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation,” calls this the “professionalization” of Christian Zionism.

“Christians United for Israel gives you a unified, single issue lobby group. And the work of that group is to reduce the differences into very strong, shared claims that can then be lobbied in DC,” Hummel said. “It overcame a lot of historic division and fault lines to be able to create this broader movement.”

More: Donald Trump nominates Mike Huckabee to be US ambassador to Israel

Evangelical pro-Israel attitudes adjust

The Southern Baptist world from where Huckabee derives his roots has long been supportive of Israel, though largely absent of dispensationalist motives.

But the story of God’s favorability for Israel is embedded throughout evangelical teaching, which starts at a young age, said Timothy Weber, a retired seminary historian and author the 2004 book, “On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend.”

“These are the kind of people who are just programmed to be pro-Israel because they are biblicists,” Weber said. “That’s what they base their commitments on.”

Dispensationalism didn’t begin to have a noticeable presence in the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, until the 1980s and to this day remains a point of theological disagreement.

“I came to the conclusion that as important as dispensationalism has been in politics and popular theology, you don’t need it for evangelicals to come out pro-Israel,” Weber said.

But the contours of pro-Israel politics has changed over time and the SBC, among other evangelical groups, have adjusted accordingly. The denomination shifted to more deferential support for Israel in 2016, when the convention adopted a resolution at the SBC annual meeting that denounced pro-Palestinian movements in the U.S. and supported Israel’s right to defend itself against “dangerous forces are mounting up.”

The 2016 resolution and an extensive floor debate about it embodied an already diminishing enthusiasm among evangelicals for Palestinian self-determination and a two-state solution. The convention overwhelmingly approved the 2016 resolution and then did the same at this year's SBC annual meeting in a resolution about support for Israel in the wake of Oct. 7.

California pastor Stephen Feinstein, who authored an early draft of that 2024 resolution, said there’s a growing recognition in the SBC and throughout American evangelicalism in which “a lot of people are like, ‘Whatever I may think of Israel theologically, this is what I know historically and politically about them. And I know what Israel’s opponents are saying and it just isn’t true.’”

Feinstein’s personal views on Israel are more rightwing than many Southern Baptists, but he feels the convention’s current stated positions are satisfactory and solidly conservative.

Hummel and Weber said this shift is also reflective of heightened partisanship over Israel between U.S. conservatives and liberals, a divide that’s only widened after Oct. 7 and with the ongoing war in Gaza.

The struggle to set the terms

A little over a decade ago, evangelical discourse about Israel and Palestine was more nuanced and a contingent of prominent evangelical leaders were more outspoken in supporting a two-state solution.

More than 30 evangelical leaders signed a 2007 letter saying Israelis and Palestinians have “legitimate rights stretching back for millennia to the lands.”

But such an idea, and and an evangelical endorsement of it, was preposterous to rising Christian Zionist voices like Hagee and Huckabee. The two, among others, fiercely advocated for evangelicals to embrace a more hardline stance on Israel. Ultimately, they were far more successful.

Huckabee broadcast many of these views on the campaign trail when he ran for president in 2008 and in 2016. For instance, Huckabee has previously said “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian” and has been a major proponent of Israeli settlement in the West Bank and eventual annexation of it.

Huckabee said in various media appearances his views on Israel are first inspired by his faith and through his 100-plus trips to Israel in the past 50 years, mostly to lead group tours. He’s also visited and celebrated new West Bank settlements.

“The land is not just real estate,” Huckabee said in a February podcast interview. “It must be a place that is undisturbed by its enemies and those who wish…not to prosper from it, but just to keep someone else from living there.”

Collective wins across the dispensationalist divide

Huckabee may boldly defend some of his views on Israel, while others he’s far less assertive.

Huckabee has mostly avoided specifics about whether he believes Israel has a role in End Times prophecy. It indicates he may not be dispensationalist, but Hummel and Weber also noted it’s not a politically savvy position. Dispensationalism has an offensive reputation among many Jews because the End Times prophecy outlines an event in which Jews suffer mass slaughter while Christian believers are spared because God raptured them.

Far more evangelicals draw from other scriptural teachings about God promising to bless the descendants of Abraham and that God decreed the land of Israel to the Jewish people. Those ideas are more accessible to a wider audience, Weber said.

“They don’t get involved in all the details of dispensationalism and trying to guess about this and that and how it fits into the big picture,” Weber said. “But they’re just Bible believers.”

Hummel said Christians United for Israel saw the power of those unifying ideas and sought to emphasize them to create an impression the group is inclusive to different religious conservatives.

Today, Christians United for Israel membership is at 10 million-plus, a base of supporters that include Southern Baptists, Pentecostals and many others. Meanwhile, the ministry made extensive inroads with influential conservative lawmakers.

“Christians United for Israel has become a major player in the Republican party,” Hummel said. “If you’re a serious candidate for president in the Republican Party, you need to make a speech at Christians United for Israel at some point laying out your bona fides for why you’re going to support Israel.”

In Christians United for Israel’s early days, members of Congress like former House Majority Leader Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and former Sen. Joe Liberman, D-Connecticut, were among the group's more prominent proponents and routine headliners.  Today, it can call on a rotating cast of powerful Republican leaders, from officials in Trump’s first administration like former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to rising stars in Trump’s second term, like Sen. Marco Rubio, tapped to be the next secretary of state.

Huckabee’s prospective appointment, which requires Senate conformation, is an extension of that and, even though he may hold different theological beliefs about Israel from some other evangelicals, those distinctions matter little compared to the sheer power Christian Zionists are about to reclaim in the new Trump administration.

“I don’t see the fundamentals of that changing anytime soon,” Hummel said. “And that’s going to mean the most ardently pro-Israel voices, people like Huckabee and Hagee, are going to be listened to even more.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Huckabee nomination foreshadows Christian Zionism in second Trump term