God's Country

Christian Zionism in America

Samuel Goldman

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780812250039
  9780812250039
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812294941
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The United States is Israel's closest ally in the world. The fact is undeniable, and undeniably controversial, not least because it so often inspires conspiracy theorizing among those who refuse to believe that the special relationship serves America's strategic interests or places the United States on the right side of Israel's enduring conflict with the Palestinians. Some point to the nefarious influence of a powerful "Israel lobby" within the halls of Congress. Others detect the hand of evangelical Protestants who fervently support Israel for their own theological reasons. The underlying assumption of all such accounts is that America's support for Israel must flow from a mixture of collusion, manipulation, and ideologically driven foolishness.Samuel Goldman proposes another explanation. The political culture of the United States, he argues, has been marked from the very beginning by a Christian theology that views the American nation as deeply implicated in the historical fate of biblical Israel. God's Country is the first book to tell the complete story of Christian Zionism in American political and religious thought from the Puritans to 9/11. It identifies three sources of American Christian support for a Jewish state: covenant, or the idea of an ongoing relationship between God and the Jewish people; prophecy, or biblical predictions of return to The Promised Land; and cultural affinity, based on shared values and similar institutions. Combining original research with insights from the work of historians of American religion, Goldman crafts a provocative narrative that chronicles Americans' attachment to the State of Israel.

PART I

The Wilderness and the Eagle

On a Thursday afternoon in the spring of 1666, Increase Mather took his place before the First Church of Boston. The oldest and largest congregation in town, the church was established in 1630, the first official act of John Winthrop and the company that joined him on the Arbella and its sister ships. Since 1640, the congregation had been meeting near what would become Faneuil Hall, in a building distinguished by a majestic ceiling that resembled an inverted ship’s hull. In other respects, the First Church looked much like Calvinist meetinghouses elsewhere in New England: unadorned by ritual objects, furnished with hard benches or pews, and dominated by the raised lectern from which Mather delivered his remarks.¹

Looking down from his perch, Mather faced an audience dressed in the “sadd colors” favored by Puritan laypeople and seated in separate sections for men and women.² Members of that audience beheld a thin, long-nosed young man wearing a clerical ruff and “peculiarly apostolical” expression.³ Only twenty-six years old, Mather had already served for two years as “teacher”—essentially, chief doctrinal officer—of the growing Second Church in the North End.⁴ So his listeners would not have been shocked that his serene visage emitted a voice so powerful, if occasionally shrill, that “Hearers would be struck with an Awe, like what would be Produced by the fall of Thunderbolts.”⁵

Mather’s topic complemented his awe-inspiring manner. Addressing an issue that was something of an obsession among Puritans, he reflected upon the fate of the Jews. Once they had been God’s beloved people and dwelled in the land that He had selected for them. Because of their sins, they were expelled from their divinely appointed home and subjected to centuries of degradation. Yet rumors were swirling around Boston’s port that the Jews were once again on the move. Encouraged by a man who claimed to be the Messiah, they were said to be selling their goods, abandoning their homes, and setting out for Jerusalem.⁶

Not many years before these stories reached Boston, Puritans in England as well as New England hoped to witness the establishment of God’s kingdom in their own lifetimes. The war of Parliament against the king, the execution of the monarch, and the establishment of a Protestant commonwealth were read as signs that the Lord was taking charge of human affairs and leading history toward its conclusion. With memories of these events still lively, rumors of great doings among the Jews must have rekindled visions of millennial glory. Could the Jews’ reported migration mean that the end of days was approaching? Could their instigator be Christ himself?

Throwing a damper over the millennial fever smoldering in New England, Mather insisted that the time was not yet ripe for Christ’s return. Even so, he affirmed that events involving the people and the Land of Israel were powerful signs of the “great and terrible day of the Lord.”⁷ Sooner or later, the Jews would go back to the country that God had promised to Abraham. At that moment, they would “recover the Possession of their Promised Land, and have a Glorious Kingdom of GOD erected among them, and through them Extended unto the Gentiles.”⁸

Mather developed his arguments in monthly lectures delivered in the spring and summer of 1666. The following year, he dispatched his notes to London, where they were published in 1669 as The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation, Explained and Applyed. Over the next four decades, Mather published two book-length sequels—the Diatriba de Signo Filii Hominis et de Secundo Messiae Adventu (Discourse on the sign of the son of man and the Second Coming of the Messiah) and the Dissertation Concerning the Future Conversion of the Jewish Nation—and preached the same doctrine in sermons. Throughout his long career as New England’s leading divine, Increase Mather never wavered in his conviction that God’s promise to restore the Jews to their ancient home would one day be fulfilled.

It is important to begin the story of Christian Zionism in America with Increase Mather for two reasons. The first is that doing so challenges the assumption that Christian Zionism is derived from premillennial dispensationalism, which developed centuries later. In fact, the idea that the Jews were destined to go home was common, if not universal, in Puritan New England. As Mather was careful to point out in his lectures, it also has precedents going back to the origins of Christianity.

Second, Mather’s teaching complicates an influential interpretation of the Puritans’ so-called errand into the wilderness. According to this account, the Puritans saw themselves as successors to the people of Israel, called across the oceans in a latter-day exodus from persecution. Because Israel rejected its promised savior, it was no longer David’s capital that would serve as God’s beacon to the world. Instead, the “city upon a hill” in North America was the proving ground for man’s relationship with his Creator.⁹

But to Mather and many other Puritan divines, the matter was not so simple. Although they invoked the “new Israel” trope to inspire or chastise New England, these ministers and theologians insisted in different contexts on the unconditional nature of God’s promises to the original chosen people. At the end of days, they argued, God would reign over a nation of Hebrews from His eternal capital in Jerusalem. As Mather scholar Reinier Smolinski puts it, Puritan thought “pointed toward an entirely different country, and an entirely different people, when identifying who would exercise dominion over the millennial world, a rulership later generations claimed for America.”¹⁰

Belief that the Abrahamic covenant remained incomplete did not mean that Puritans placed themselves on the same footing as Christians elsewhere or that they saw their American settlements as just another British colony. New England was a city on a hill with a providential purpose.¹¹ But part of New England’s vocation was to promote the fulfillment of God’s promises to the Jews. In his tract The Gospel Covenant, the Concord minister Peter Bulkeley encouraged New Englanders to “stirre up everyone to help forward this glorious work.”¹²

The “sacred history” that linked the destinies of American Christians and the Jewish people was initially more theological than political.¹³ For Mather and Bulkeley, the best way Christians could promote the restoration of Israel was earnest prayer. Subsequent generations of Americans were more inclined to believe that God’s will is made effective through acts of state. In 1816, Elias Boudinot, a former president of the Continental Congress and aide to George Washington, wondered whether “God has raised up these United States in these latter days, for the very purpose of accomplishing his will in bringing his beloved people to their own land.”¹⁴ In Boudinot’s hands, Puritan ideas about Jewish restoration became a source of American exceptionalism, justifying not a retreat into the wilderness but rather a mission to assert power out into the world.

1	All Israel Shall Be Saved: The Calling of the Jews and the Errand into the Wilderness

For I would not, brethren, that yee should be ignorant of this secret (lest ye should be arrogant in your selues) that partly obstinacie is come to Israel, vntill the fulnesse of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saued, as it is written, The deliuerer shall come out of Sion, and shall turne away the ungodlinesse from Iacob. And this is my couenant with them, when I shall take away their sinnes.

—Rom. 11:25–27, Geneva version

It is often said that the Puritans of New England regarded themselves as the new Israel. According to the familiar story, the devout Calvinists who accompanied John Winthrop on the Arbella and its sister ships believed themselves to be chosen by God for an arduous journey to a new Promised Land. Just as the Hebrews concluded a covenant under Moses at Sinai, so the Puritans established an agreement among themselves to establish a community devoted to the service of God. Just as the Hebrews struggled and fought for possession of Canaan, so would the Puritans conquer their American Zion.

John Winthrop’s famous sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charitie,” did not exactly launch a thousand ships. The text was written at sea, and we do not know if it was actually delivered.¹ Nevertheless, it has been cited many times to explain the Puritans’ understanding of their mission. According to social theorist Robert Bellah, the “Modell” was “Winthrop’s way of summing up the meaning of the hopes and fears of the colonists in the face of the unknown land that lay ahead. He turned the ocean-crossing into a crossing of the Red Sea and the Jordan River, and he held out hope that Massachusetts Bay would be a Promised Land.”²

Winthrop was not the only Puritan leader to assert a parallel between New England and Israel. In “Gods Promise to His Plantation,” a sermon delivered in 1630 on the departure of Winthrop’s fleet, the leading minister John Cotton presented the analogy between the people and the Land of Israel as an important justification for the expedition. Quoting God’s promise that “I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their owne, and move no more” (2 Sam. 7:10), Cotton argued that the Puritans possessed their own “speciall appointment” in North America.³

Referring to statements like this, historian Conor Cruise O’Brien described the Puritans as believing that New England was a “God Land” in which they would become successors to the biblical Israel.⁴ Cotton was more cautious. Cotton called his brethren to be like Israel. At the same time, he reminded them that God’s relationship with the original chosen people remained in effect. The Puritans had their place in North America, but Israel retained territorial rights in the biblical land of promise. Although it emerged from the Protestant Reformation, this understanding of God’s promises reflects theological and hermeneutic trends that derive from the first centuries of Christianity. Saint Paul’s insistence that “all Israel shall be saved” pointed toward a glorious future in which the Jews would play the pivotal role.

The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation

When Jesus walked the earth, Palestine was inhabited largely by Jews, but their position was not untroubled. Jews never controlled all the territory promised to Abraham, they exercised unified sovereignty only for fleeting periods, and they experienced a series of dispersals both forced and voluntary. Despite these challenges, Jews of the first century AD could think of themselves as enjoying at least part of their inheritance. They were descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, living in the land given to the patriarchs.

Attachment to Jerusalem amplified Jews’ identification with the land. Jerusalem is not mentioned in texts describing the covenant with Abraham or its renewal by Moses. After its conquest by David, however, the city became the center of Israelite worship and a symbol of national identity. The Jewish philosopher Philo testified to the importance of Jerusalem at the dawn of the Common Era. Although born in Egypt and skeptical of traditional conceptions of divinity, Philo reported that Jews everywhere held “the Holy City where stands the sacred Temple of the most high God to be their mother city.”⁵

Jesus’ disciples assumed that the Land of Israel and city of Jerusalem belonged to them. In the Gospels, they express hope that Jesus would reassume David’s throne, asking, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6).⁶ The disciples inquire about the kingdom as a political institution because the occupation of territory was not in dispute. The question was not whether Jews would inhabit their ancestral and holy places; it was whether they would govern them.

The status of the land became more doubtful after the rebellions against Roman rule that began in 66 AD. Over the following decades, the temple was destroyed, Jerusalem devastated, and thousands of Jews killed or driven into exile. Contrary to an enduring myth, Jews were never totally removed from Roman Palestine. But the focal points of Jewish life gradually shifted into the Diaspora.

These shocking developments raised questions about the link between people and land. Had the Lord revoked His promises to the patriarchs and the kings? Or were the upheavals of the first and second centuries just another twist in Israel’s tumultuous relationship with God? Some Jews answered by recall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. The Wilderness and the Eagle
• Part II. American Cyrus
• Part III. God’s Country
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments