Covenant Brothers

Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations

Daniel G. Hummel

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780812296242
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Weaving together the stories of activists, American Jewish leaders, and Israeli officials in the wake of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Covenant Brothers portrays the dramatic rise of evangelical Christian Zionism as it gained prominence in American politics, Israeli diplomacy, and international relations after World War II. According to Daniel G. Hummel, conventional depictions of the Christian Zionist movement—the organized political and religious effort by conservative Protestants to support the state of Israel—focus too much on American evangelical apocalyptic fascination with the Jewish people. Hummel emphasizes instead the institutional, international, interreligious, and intergenerational efforts on the part of Christians and Jews to mobilize evangelical support for Israel.From missionary churches in Israel to Holy Land tourism, from the Israeli government to the American Jewish Committee, and from Billy Graham's influence on Richard Nixon to John Hagee's courting of Donald Trump, Hummel reveals modern Christian Zionism to be an evolving and deepening collaboration between Christians and the state of Israel. He shows how influential officials in the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs and Foreign Ministry, tasked with pursuing a religious diplomacy that would enhance Israel's standing in the Christian world, combined forces with evangelical Christians to create and organize the vast global network of Christian Zionism that exists today. He also explores evangelicalism's embrace of Jewish concepts, motifs, and practices and its profound consequences on worshippers' political priorities and their relationship to Israel.Drawing on religious and government archives in the United States and Israel, Covenant Brothers reveals how an unlikely mix of Christian and Jewish leaders, state support, and transnational networks of institutions combined religion, politics, and international relations to influence U.S. foreign policy and, eventually, global geopolitics.

PART I
ROOTS, 1948–1967

CHAPTER 1

From Mission to Witness

DURING HIS VISIT TO Israel in 1960, Billy Graham employed a translator—a fellow Southern Baptist who had lived in Jerusalem since 1945. His name was Robert Lisle Lindsey.¹ The two had met the year before at Graham’s home in Montreat, North Carolina, where Lindsey first broached the topic of a visit to Israel. Fluent in Hebrew and familiar to Israeli officials, Lindsey explained the basic theological concepts that Graham later referenced in his interviews and sermons in Israel. An Oklahoma-born Baptist, Lindsey had far more experience responding to charges of proselytizing the Jewish people. He was no less than a commissioned missionary of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board who had moved to Palestine to share the message of the “Yeshua Hamashiach” (Jesus the Messiah) to Jews and Arabs alike.

Lindsey’s history in Palestine dated to 1939, when he visited as a twenty-one-year-old graduate of the University of Oklahoma. Led by famed dispensationalist David L. Cooper, the Bible study tour Lindsey joined was one of only a few granted permission by British authorities amid the Arab revolt (1936–1939). Cooper’s tours were ninety-day excursions with more nights spent on rocky desert ground than on the beaches of the Mediterranean. The expeditions could have been mistaken for a seminary boot camp, mixing historical and archaeological knowledge as Cooper retraced the steps of the Israelites and Jesus. He overlaid the sightseeing with an analysis of the fulfillment of biblical prophecy taking place across the land.² After the tour ended, Lindsey decided to stay in Palestine for another year, take classes at the Hebrew University, and room with one of the only Hebrew Christian families in Jerusalem. By the time he finally left for the United States in June 1940, he had become proficient in Hebrew and Arabic. He later joked that he looked and sounded indistinguishable from a sabra, a Jew born in Palestine.³

When Lindsey returned to Palestine in 1945, he was one of the first American evangelicals to confront the problem of Jewish missions in a Jewish society.⁴ Lindsey and his Southern Baptist colleagues arriving between 1948 and 1955 initially expected to spearhead a spiritual revival. In a century of mass religious movements, they anticipated a work of the Holy Spirit among God’s chosen people. But the missionaries immediately confronted local opposition and increasing self-doubt. In an act that revealed his changing priorities, Lindsey replaced the sign above his West Jerusalem chapel that read “Baptist Mission” with one that read “Baptist House.” “Mission [misimah]” had a military connotation, while “missionary [matif]” conjured images of Christian coercion and Jewish resistance.

Time in Jerusalem prompted Lindsey to ask how, and if, Jewish missions could survive in a society where the continuity of the Jewish people was an overriding priority. By the early 1950s, he and his colleagues decided to rebrand their mission as one of Christian “witness,” developing a new theology that accommodated Israeli society and confronted some of the problems of Jewish-Christian relations in the light of the Holocaust. Lindsey’s post-1945 writings in particular showed how deeply the Holocaust, as understood from within Israeli society, influenced his thinking—and how the initial impulse for Jewish-Christian reconciliation emerged from a most unexpected source of Christian missionary writings.⁵

Lindsey’s thinking had profound implications for evangelical Christian Zionism, introducing into evangelical theological currents a novel approach to Jewish-Christian relations. Unwilling to question the evangelistic mission of Christianity or to categorize the New Testament and Christian faith as anti-Jewish—both criticisms advanced by liberal and ecumenical Protestants in the same years—Lindsey focused on the lamentable past of Jewish-Christian relations and offered new theological categories. Adapting to Israeli society and personal exposure to the plight of European Jews prompted missionaries to develop language that took seriously Jewish identity, racial antisemitism and the Holocaust, and the long history of Christian anti-Judaism. This project, which missionaries called “witness,” made evangelicals familiar with the concepts of interreligious reconciliation that later fueled a sense of political obligation to Israel.

Tracing Christian Zionism to the writings of missionaries from 1948 through 1966 may at first appear counterintuitive. Not only have Jewish missions remained one of the most controversial issues in modern Christian Zionism, but those missionaries lived far from the centers of American evangelicalism. Moreover, those who moved to Israel were outliers, rejecting key elements of dispensational theology and enjoying advanced language skills, education, and familiarity with modern Jewish thought.⁶ Yet it is precisely because of their geographical distance and experiences that missionaries created a new way of thinking about Jewish-Christian relations for a generation of postwar American evangelicals. As the first evangelicals to grapple with the religious and theological meaning of the Holocaust and Israeli statehood—and to do it in Israel—the small missionary community, anchored in Jerusalem and Nazareth, working among Jews and Arabs, created a new language of reconciliation that would travel far beyond its original purpose.

The Problem of Missions

When Robert Lindsey returned to Palestine as a missionary with the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board in 1945, he found Jewish-Arab tensions had worsened during his absence. The ability of British authorities to maintain social order was tenuous as Arabs, Jews, and British overlords vied for political control. The calamity of the Holocaust and rising nationalist aspirations of peoples under colonial rule were a daunting backdrop to missions work. But missionaries continued to pour into Palestine from dozens of denominations and countries, crowding into the neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, the cities of Nazareth and Bethlehem, and the port towns of Jaffa and Haifa.

Lindsey’s generation of Southern Baptist missionaries, arriving in Israel between 1948 and 1955, created a new ethos that merged spiritual, material, and political goals in the service of Jesus’ commission to “go and make disciples of all nations.”⁷ Postwar American missionaries were one of the largest generations in history with almost 30,000 stationed around the globe by 1960, two-thirds claiming sponsorship by conservative Protestant churches or organizations.⁸ While evangelicals had long prioritized spiritual conversion over social reform, they became more interested in the social and political life of the societies in which they worked in these postwar decades. Decolonization, rising nationalism, and a new scientific approach to missions informed by anthropology and sociology contributed to the growing evangelical emphasis on social and political, as well as spiritual, knowledge.⁹ This was one area where postwar evangelicals consciously claimed separation from fundamentalists, who remained unreformed in their practice of missions.¹⁰

In Israel the missionaries needed all the help they could get. Christians traditionally enjoyed demographic and institutional advantages wherever they encountered Jewish communities. In medieval Europe, segregated Jewish communities had been marked by suspicion and faced pressure to convert to Christianity. The rise of racial antisemitism only compounded Jewish suffering. But in the new state of Israel the situation was reversed, with Christians representing only a small minority of citizens. The Christians that did live in the state—mostly Arab Orthodox Christians—numbered around thirty-thousand after the 1949 armistice and comprised less than 5 percent of the population.¹¹ Protestants from North America and Europe numbered in the low hundreds; Jews and Arabs mostly ignored the few Southern Baptists in their midst.

When Southern Baptist missionaries disembarked on the Mediterranean’s eastern edge, they entered a society hostile to the individualistic, entrepreneurial Southern Baptist religion of the Bible Belt. The dislocation of indigenous Arab Christians after 1948 revealed not only the effects of war, expulsion, and influx of Jewish refugees; it also laid bare the sectarian identities that had governed Palestine’s social relations before Israeli statehood.¹² Conversion from one religion to another was rare and legally impermissible under the legal system inherited from the Ottoman and British Empires. As the bedrock of Ottoman religious policy, millets (religious courts) were given authority to oversee religious and social laws, offering minority religious communities within the empire a semblance of local autonomy and a stake in the regime’s stability. Millets shaped Istanbul’s response to a vastly diverse religious population by assuming a static conception of religious identity—a person was born a Muslim, Christian, or Jew and remained so for life. This system remained in place through British and Israeli transfers and presented missionaries with one of the most intractable barriers to conversion.¹³

The first Baptist missionary, Shukri Musa, was baptized in Dallas by the famed Southern Baptist preacher George W. Truett in 1909. A native of Safed, a village overlooking the Sea of Galilee, Musa returned home in 1911 and established the first Southern Baptist church in Palestine.¹⁴ Counting fewer than a thousand members, with missionary personnel hovering around a dozen, Southern Baptists worked at the margins of Palestinian society and the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community. Wartime recalls of all Southern Baptist missionaries in the Middle East decimated the Palestine mission from 1939 through 1945.

The struggle between Jews and Arabs in Palestine turned Christian attention to the Middle East after World War II. More than fifteen thousand Christian missionaries and foreign workers were counted in Israel in 1949.¹⁵ Missionary interest stemmed from prophetic energy around the “regathering” of the Jewish people, expectations of a mass Jewish conversion, expanding financial support from American donors, and a humanitarian desire to help the survivors of the Holocaust. This desire was piqued by personal encounters with European Jewish refugees, many of whom were disembarking in Haifa or Tel Aviv in the early 1950s.¹⁶ Though far smaller than Japan or Western Europe—two popular fields of missions work—Israel’s per capita missionary presence outstripped that of any other country in the world.¹⁷ Southern Baptists sent a dozen families to Israel in the two decades after 1945 and counted twenty-five missionaries in 1966, the denomination’s largest national presence in the Middle East.¹⁸ Missionary influence multiplied through interdenominational cooperation, especially with Mennonites, Brethren, Nazarenes, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance headquartered in Jerusalem.¹⁹ Hebrew Christian missions agencies in Jerusalem, which operated separately, included the International Hebrew Christian Alliance and the American Board of Missions to the Jews.

Though representing the largest foreign Protestant presence in the country, Southern Baptists were unable to gain a local following. In the state’s first twenty years, the total number of Jewish converts to Christianity in Israel was probably fewer than three hundred, and even such a low count is likely too generous.²⁰ The number of Jewish converts to the Baptist faith was a fraction of this number, perhaps only a handful in the first dozen years. Southern Baptists found more success among Arabs in the Galilee region, but even this growth fell below expectations. “Up to this time there has been no great progress toward winning the Jew to Christ,” wrote Dwight Baker, who arrived in Israel in 1950, to the Foreign Mission Board two years later, “although one attempt after another has been made. . . . The harvest reaped by zealous young missionaries who came to serve among these people was frustration and disappointment.”²¹ The rare Jewish convert often chose to keep his or her new religion a secret for fear of reprisal from family and friends. With no tangible gains, missionaries administered small churches made up of expatriate Christian workers. Those years, recalled another missionary, were full of “desperate needs, frustrated hopes, and pathetic groping for the will of God.”²²

The arrangement between the Israeli government and the Chief Rabbinate—between “state and synagogue”—presented more legal and political challenges, especially as antimissionary organizations lobbied the Israeli government to evict foreign Christians.²³ In the eyes of Israelis, missionaries were opportunistic and concerned only with generating conversions from the most vulnerable classes—outcasts, unassimilated immigrants, and children. In many cases, Israeli opinion was well founded. “They were hungry people pleading for bread,” remarked one visiting American missionary upon touring a poor refugee settlement outside Haifa. “But these people wanted the Living Bread [of Jesus].”²⁴ The indifference that these examples of Christian missions displayed toward the physical needs of Jewish immigrants won few converts.

Cultural isolation forced the Southern Baptists to adapt. Their need to explain low conversion numbers to perturbed American sponsors led them to theorize new social, psychological, and theological explanations for Israel’s exceptional resistance to the gospel. The state was still reeling from independence and ongoing conflict, experiencing a massive influx of immigrants, and confronting the Holocaust and continuing Arab hostility.²⁵ Israelis were in no condition to be proselytized. This diagnosis recast not just the missionary but the Christian’s role in Jewish society.

Witness Zionism

In mid-twentieth-century evangelicalism, to provide a Christian “witness” meant to proclaim the gospel in the hopes that listeners would be moved toward a decision for Christ. For many missionaries, witnessing also included service to the poor and reforming cultural practices to reflect Wes...