Onward, Christian Zionists Transcript

NARR: Narrator
IWH: Author Irving Wesley Hall
DW: Reverend Donald Wagner

NARR: In gatherings around America, Christian Evangelicals meet to worship. Many are known as Christian Zionists who interpret the Bible in a unique way.

IWH: Christian Zionism or, as it is also called, Dispensationalism, believes that the Jewish people from throughout the world must all return to the Holy Land. The State of Israel must conquer all of the land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates River in Iraq. The Jews must blow up the two mosques on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. They will rebuild their temple, reestablish the Levitical practices of animal sacrifice and worship the Antichrist for 3½ years. Then Jesus Christ will return and lead an army of hundreds of thousands and kill off all of the Jews with the exception of 144,000 who will promptly convert to Christianity.
A second element is the belief in the imminence of Tribulation, part of an End Time scenario in which the human race itself will be destroyed in a holocaust, inevitably involving nuclear war.
The third element of Christian Zionism is the notion of the Rapture, the idea that just before Tribulation begins, Jesus will return, not for the final time, but for a second time. He appears three times according to the doctrine of the Rapture. He will lift from the earth all of the "born again true Christians", the living and the dead who were "born again" in their lifetimes and whisk them up to heaven where they can watch the destruction of the earth from bleachers in the sky.

DW: There were always elements of this End Time Armageddon idea on the fringes of Christianity. When you look at it, even in New Testament times, there is a take-off from the Apocalyptic text and the theology which was popular in Jesus' time but never central. Jesus, we know, down-played it, as did Paul and others, but it remained an element of people wanting to know how the last days are going to be resolved.
Often it would pop up in a millennial year. So you can go back in Church history, and I have done a little bit of this. In the year 900, in the year 1000 there was a lot of emphasis on the returning of Jesus in the End Times.
The year 1800 was very popular because there was a lot going on in the world. The American and French Revolutions had just taken place. Europeans were upset, so there was a lot of focus on the turn of the century in 1800. Shortly after that, a lot of writing and theology developed around the idea of the "end" and prophecy as prediction.
One fellow who caught it a little bit later was John Nelson Darby, who broke away from the Anglican Church. He was in a Bible study meeting when a woman was caught up with the Spirit, and she began to speak about the books of Daniel and Revelation as prophesying the end, and claiming that "I have had a word from the Lord that we are in the last days and Jesus is about to return." This had a huge impact on a few people who were in that room who saw her as a prophet. They began to form special prophecy conferences.
A former English parliamentarian was there and sponsored them at his estate. John Nelson Darby, this break-away Anglican, got involved in this, and he began to do specialized Bible study, and he systematized that movement in a series of writings. He was very bright, was a Greek scholar, knew the New Testament and studied it in Greek and Hebrew. But what he did was actually to try to create a logical connection between what he saw as Jesus taking people literally into the clouds and 1 Thessalonians 4.
Therefore, he invented the doctrine of the Rapture. Some claim that he got it from others, but we know that he invented it. In the post-American Civil War era, called the Second Great Awakening, many American Evangelicals were converted to this teaching by Darby, who made six missionary journeys to the United States and became very popular in those Bible and prophecy conference movements after the Civil War.

IWH: John Nelson Darby was an Irishman who had an epiphany in the 1830s that he alone could decipher the meaning of the Bible. He was a literalist and he "cherry picked" Bible verses. As a result of his epiphany, he was able to create a hair-raising horror story involving Tribulation and the punishment of mankind starring Jesus as a warrior. And he believed, as did all of the Dispensationalists after him, that he alone understood the Bible, and that every other human being, including all Christians, were not only in error in terms of their understanding of the Bible, but also under the influence of Satanic forces.
So what is meant by the term Dispensationalism?
The essence of Dispensationalism, as one might expect coming from a gentleman who hated the rest of the world and from others who were self-appointed guardians of the truth, the basis of Dispensationalism is the notion of original sin. A dispensation is one of a series of seven events with the same pattern, namely that God dictated to the Jewish people a certain course of action, knowing that they would violate his orders and fail so that he could punish them.
Most of these events occur in Genesis. They should be familiar to everyone—Eve eating the forbidden fruit, the Jewish people and mankind being wiped out through Noah's flood, and the various exiles of the Jewish people because of their sinfulness. Finally, and most important, was the Jews' rejection of the Messiah, Jesus Christ.
In each case, the Jewish people were given an assignment for a dispensation. They violated it and they were punished. The seventh and final dispensation requires the Jews to return to Israel so that they can be exterminated except for the 144,000 who will immediately convert to Christianity.

DW: According to the "two covenant" creed there are two distinct covenants in the Bible. The covenant with the Jewish people comes from Genesis 12 and other places. It is eternal and is never broken. The covenant with the Church comes later after the Resurrection and ends, according to Darby, with the Rapture. The true born-again Christians are literally removed from history.

IWH: Later in the century, Edward Irving popularized the notion of the Rapture and finally Cyrus Ingersoll Scofield codified the Dispensationalist ideology in the Scofield Bible in which he was able to use headlines, cross references and footnotes to inject his own interpretation of the Bible into a seamless web that is now used by Dispensationalists as the inspiration for their ideology.

DW: Then C. I. Scofield created this outline which was laid over the biblical text with commentary and divided the Bible up. This became the greatest efficacy piece, the Scofield Bible, which fundamentalists and Evangelical Christians read.
This is what I grew up with, so I grew up thinking, "well, this is what the Bible teaches".

NARR: From the 19th century up to the latter half of the 20th century, Dispensationalism continued to be a marginal doctrine among Christians. However, the partition of the Holy Land in 1948 and the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel seemed to be a validation of biblical prophecies. Then, in 1967, facing the threat of destruction by Egypt, Syria and other Arab states, Israel launched a preemptive attack which culminated in the Jewish conquest of Jerusalem and the
West Bank. This gave credence to the notion that biblical End Times were imminent.

IWH: The great revival of Dispensationalism began in 1967 with the successful conquest by the State of Israel of a territory that tripled its size-- at the expense of its Arab neighbors. This was a turning point in many ways for the Muslim world, the Christian world and the State of Israel.
It gave the Israeli military the kind of prestige that prompted the United States leadership to realize that Israel was a good place to invest its military dollars as a gendarme for the Middle East.
It also, for the first time, mobilized the right wing section of Israeli society suddenly to regard Jerusalem totally in a new light. Up until the 1967 conquest, Jerusalem was not regarded by any element of Israeli society or any of the streams of Judaism as somehow central to God's plan for the Jews.
But that all changed in 1967. In addition, the 1967 victory had an effect on the Muslim world. The crushing defeat of the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and to a certain extent, Lebanon, was extremely demoralizing, and it gave a new impetus to Muslim fundamentalism because many Muslims believed that the reason why the Jews were successful in taking over Jerusalem, including the third most holy site in Islam, was because Jews were more religious.
So this spurred Muslim fundamentalism. In addition, it was the major motivation for the development of Christian Zionism in America, which up until this time had been a fringe movement even within Evangelical Christianity.
This revival began with the publication in the late sixties of a best-selling book by Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey essentially cribbed the lecture notes from his mentor at the Dallas Theological Seminary and laid out this long-dormant End Times scenario asserting that the conquest of Israel by the Jews and their ingathering was the central feature of the beginning of the end of the world.
The success of his book was accompanied by the rapid growth of new media, especially television. Along with traditional radio it became dominated in many regions by Christian broadcasters. The enormous amount of money generated and eventually the alliance with the Zionist lobby in the United States drove the enormous expansion of this formally fringe ideology.

Pastor John Hagee: "On February 7th of this year, over 400 of America's foremost Christian leaders met at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio Texas and unanimously agreed to come to Washington, D.C. for one reason, and one reason alone, and that was to stand up and speak up for the State of Israel.
Various Congressmen: "What an incredible gathering of individuals here! This is fantastic."
"I can't resist to say it. I will be silent no more. Our times demand it. Our history compels it. Our future requires it, and most of all, God is watching."
"5,000 years from now we won't remember much, but we will remember this night and will still be talking about it. We will be talking about the night that the wild branches that were grafted into the mercies of God stood up."
"We stand for Israel because we stand for democracy."
"We will defend ourselves. We will defend our values. We will defend our democracies, and we will defend the spirit of God which unites us."

IWH: Hagee is the self-appointed leader of Christians United for Israel, or "CUFI", which is the most prominent Christian Zionist organization in the United States. John Hagee and the Christians United for Israel has an enormous amount of political clout as we shall see.
U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman likened John Hagee to Moses at a recent CUFI Conference in Washington, D.C. A panoply of Republican and Democratic politicians praised the work of Hagee and CUFI, and even President George W. Bush affirmed his support through a live telecast. This organization has an enormous amount of power.

DW: Christians United for Israel was created--I believe--in July 2005. It was launched with their first conference in Washington, D.C. But there is a history to it. It goes back to the American Moral Majority in the late 1970s and several pro-Israel organizations that grew out of that like Stand for Israel, and many others. Hagee had for many years in his San Antonio mega-church, Cornerstone Baptist, held "Nights to Honor Israel."
He is a Dispensationalist. He believes this "centrality of Israel" theology. He has raised millions of dollars, some of which was diverted to illegal Israeli settlements, so he has, I think, been courted by some right-wing pro-Israel Christians and the pro-Israel Jewish lobby The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, to be the spokesperson and the founder of this new movement, Christians United for Israel.

IWH: First, Christian Zionists believe that Christians have a primary obligation--above all else--to support the policies of the State of Israel, to support its occupation of Palestinian land, to support it as an ethnically pure racist state which discriminates against the large minority of Arab-Israeli citizens, much as the state of Mississippi discriminated against African-Americans under Jim Crow until the 1960s.
Christian Zionism also supports the expansionist policies of Israel as a military state. There is virtually nothing that Israel can do that the Christian Zionists are not willing to support. In fact they are more Zionist than the Zionists. Pat Robertson, probably one of the most prominent televangelists and Christian Zionists, actually suggested that then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was stricken with a terminal coma because he defied God by evacuating a number of Jewish settlements from the Palestinian Gaza Strip. So the first element in Christian Zionism, and what gives it the name Christian Zionism, is its unqualified support for Israel…

DW: …which they get from the pro-Israel Jewish lobby AIPAC. So if they want a war in Iran, then they are going to mobilize Christians.

JOHN HAGEE: "It is time for America to consider a military preemptive strike against Iran to prevent a nuclear holocaust in Israel and a nuclear attack in America."

DW: They are also organizing regionally and then they have their national convention. So it is a growing and a powerful movement.

IWH: Virtually every televangelist on Trinity Broadcasting Network or other religious American media is a Christian Zionist and preaches this ideology. It is a billion dollar industry. The total viewer and reading audience of media controlled by Christian Zionists is estimated to be larger than the total readership of Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the New York Times combined.

DW: The greatest potential of pro-Israel voters will be among fundamentalist Christians and it is an element in America that is growing. The Israeli lobby sees this base represents a larger number than American Jews. It is also a natural base of automatic support on the issues they want.

IWH: A large number of people believe in the Rapture. Some 39% of Americans, for instance, believe that when the Bible refers to the end of the earth occurring through fire, this means nuclear war. Some 70 million Americans believe in the Rapture. Incidentally, this is almost exclusively an American ideology--100% "Made in America". Ironically, despite the large number of believers, you will find that very few of the rank-and-file Christians who believe in elements of Dispensationalism have even heard of the term, much less understand the underlying philosophy and the methodology behind it.

DW: I do not believe that the idea of the Rapture is a Biblical doctrine. Hagee preaches it, but Darby took 1 Thessalonians 4 and made it into a literal historical event. So where the Bible talks about Jesus coming into the clouds for "the believers", I think that that is symbolic language, not an actual historical event. But, when you look at where it takes you, it forces Jesus into a double "second coming". Jesus has to come in the clouds to remove the Church and then Jesus has to come back again. That's not Biblical!

IWH: Christian fundamentalists believe that the Bible and its prophecies are in fact a play book for the present. In other words, the prophets of the Bible—Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Isaiah--were not simply social critics at the time warning the Israelites of their evil ways in order to attempt to correct them, as all traditional Bible scholars see it. Somehow those prophecies were predictions that fell into a 2000-year old time warp and were simply waiting for Reverends Pat Robertson, John Hagee and Jerry Falwell to come onto the scene and apply those prophecies to current day events and the eventual and imminent end of the world.

DW: So they are a force and for me, as an Evangelical Christian, and for many of us, they do not represent the Gospel. It is a distortion and it really undermines, I think, a just peace in the Holy Land. They have no concern, not an ounce of compassion, for Palestinian Christians, who are really suffering, losing their land and being driven out of their homeland.

IWH: Now…Wouldn't one expect that the Zionist movement in the United States would oppose Christian Zionism both because of the fate that it dictates for the Jewish people, but also because of its ideology, which traditionally, going back to Darby, has believed and put forward unequivocally that God created Christians and Jews to take different paths through their history? The Jews were to take an earthly path and the Christians were to take a heavenly path. Jews were never to be allowed to go to heaven unless they converted to Christianity.
Obviously, the Zionist establishment in the United States and Israel are perfectly aware of the anti-Semitic content of Christian Zionist ideology. But going back as far as the late 1970s, when the State of Israel reportedly gave Jerry Falwell a gift of his personal Lear jet airplane, the Zionist establishment has realized the value of Christian Zionism despite the essential anti-Semitism of its ideology.
To Jewish Zionists the Christian Zionists are useful idiots. For the End Time Christian Zionists, the Jews are sacrificial lambs.

[Cover of The Einstein Sisters Bag the Flying Monkeys]
Irving Hall's political satire illuminates Christian Zionism and pleads for one secular democratic state for Israelis and Palestinians. It is available from amazon.com.