Editor’s note: Millions of American Christians support Israel for reasons of conscience, theology, or strategic alliance, and many would be appalled by what follows. This report is about something more specific: the network of Christian Zionist and Christian nationalist leaders who need Israel to fulfill a prophetic script that ends with the conversion or annihilation of Jews, and who now hold positions inside the Pentagon, the US Embassy in Jerusalem, and the House Speaker’s office. It documents their funding, their preaching, and their network.
The commander of a US combat unit opened his Monday morning readiness briefing on March 2, 2026, with the Book of Revelation. U.S. and Israeli jets had been hitting Tehran since Saturday. He told the Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) the strikes were “all part of God’s divine plan.” The NCOs let that slide. What got 15 of them to file a complaint was the next part: Trump, the soldiers were told, had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
A Christian himself, the NCO who reported it filed his complaint on behalf of 15 troops, at least one of them Muslim and at least one Jewish, and within 48 hours, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation had logged more than 200 near-identical complaints from every branch of the armed forces, spanning roughly 50 installations. Commanders, the watchdog reported, spoke with what service members called “unrestricted euphoria” about how bloody the campaign would need to become to fulfill fundamentalist Christian prophecy.
That same Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has a Jerusalem Cross tattooed across his chest, the Crusaders’ rallying cry Deus Vult (“God wills it”) inked on one arm, and the Arabic word for “infidel” just below, walked to a Pentagon podium, bowed his head, and opened with Psalm 144: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war.”
Rapture Ready
Christian nationalism is rooted in the premise that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and must be governed as one, to the exclusion of all other religions. Christian Zionism is its foreign policy arm, and the two movements share theology and money, and their personnel overlap.
What distinguishes Christian Zionism from ordinary pro-Israel sentiment is what the theology demands. Tens of millions of American evangelicals — organized through groups like Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which claims more members than the entire American Jewish population — believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews, that Jewish control of that land is a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ, and that anyone who stands in the way of that project is defying God.
The movement venerates Jews with lavish displays of solidarity, while the theology underneath the movement assigns them a role as instruments whose usefulness expires at the Second Coming. Political Research Associates (PRA) calls this “End Times antisemitism.”
Muslims fare worse — cast as satanic enemies to be defeated in the run-up to Armageddon. Palestinians simply vanish from the story. At its center sits a claim that goes back centuries: God’s covenant with Abraham applies to the modern State of Israel, Jews must gather there, and a Third Temple must rise where the Dome of the Rock — the seventh-century Islamic shrine marking the site where Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended to Heaven, and where the ancient Jewish temples once stood — and the Al-Aqsa Mosque now stand.
That claim did not originate with modern evangelicals. Christians were pushing to restore Jews to Palestine long before the Zionist movement existed. Puritans preached it, John Adams endorsed it, and by the 1840s, British officials were drawing maps around it.
What changed was dispensationalism, a theological premise developed in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish preacher who divided all of history into a sequence of divine eras, each ending in judgment, culminating in Armageddon. The broader theology is called premillennialism — the conviction that Christ physically returns for a thousand-year reign, meaning the world will get worse before it gets better. Dispensationalism gave premillennialism a prophetic calendar, and that calendar required Israel. Before Darby, Christians who wanted Jews back in Palestine were expressing a wish. Darby handed them a to-do list — and every item on it required real-world action that put the modern State of Israel at the center of God’s plan.
Darby’s timeline stayed inside seminaries for more than a century until Hal Lindsey turned it into The Late Great Planet Earth, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins sold 80 million copies of the Left Behind novels, which dramatized Lindsey’s rapture-and-Armageddon sequence as apocalyptic fiction. Kirk Cameron, the former Growing Pains teen idol turned evangelist, starred in the film adaptations, and a generation of churchgoers watched the rapture play out as Saturday night entertainment.
Most of the tens of thousands of churches preaching this timeline by 2026 had never heard of Darby. What they knew came through C.I. Scofield, a Kansas preacher whose annotated reference Bible repackaged dispensationalism for a mass American audience starting in 1909, and the Bible conference circuit that followed, stripping out Darby’s careful ecclesiology and gutting everything except the end-times schedule. Scholars who returned to Darby’s original writings found that what American dispensationalists taught bore only a slight resemblance to Darby’s own theology. But the rapture stuck. And the theology that sold 80 million novels now drives the president’s executive orders.
Here is what dispensationalists believe will happen. Christ raptures believers (Christians) off the earth into Heaven. An Antichrist rises and cuts a peace deal with Israel, then breaks it by walking into the rebuilt Third Temple and declaring himself God. War follows — on a scale that makes the 2026 Iran strikes look restrained — and a seven-year Tribulation ends when armies converge on the plains near Megiddo, the ancient fortified city in northern Israel from which the word “Armageddon” derives. God destroys them, and Christ returns to reign for a thousand years. Ezekiel 38–39 names the nations that march against Israel, and dispensationalists read the ancient names as today’s headlines: Persia is Iran, Magog is Russia, Put and Cush are Libya and Sudan. Two-thirds of the world’s Jews die. The surviving third accepts Christ. Everyone else who refuses is condemned.
Pastor John Hagee, the televangelist who founded CUFI, and his Christian Zionist allies read those chapters as a roadmap to salvation.
On March 1, the day before that commander opened his briefing with Revelation, John Hagee stood behind his own pulpit in San Antonio. He titled the morning’s sermon “God’s Calling, Operation Epic Fury.”
The strikes on Iran, he told his congregation, were part of a divine plan. “Prophetically, we’re right on cue,” he said. Then he thanked God by name for “our president Donald Trump, whose wisdom and courage has crushed the enemies of Zion.”
Hagee then turned to address Russia directly: “I want everyone who lives in Russia to listen up. God is against you. The God of Heaven is against you. Almighty God is going to bury your army at Israel.” He also read from 1 Corinthians, which talks about people who will not inherit the kingdom of God, and called it “God’s hit list”: fornicators, adulterers, “the effeminate — that’s people who are having sex changes and so forth” — homosexuals, drunkards. “Everyone talking about going to Heaven is not going,” he pronounced.
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, a leader in Jewish Renewal, a progressive movement within Judaism that emphasizes social justice and mystical practice, has warned that Israel is “in partnership with people who hold profoundly antisemitic ideas, that Jews serve no other purpose than to be an instrument of the Apocalypse.”
At CUFI’s annual summits, speakers proclaim solidarity for Jews with donations to settlement funds and standing ovations for Israeli generals. Hagee has shown what that solidarity is actually worth. He has blamed “half-breed Jews” such as Hitler for the Holocaust and promoted the Rothschild banking conspiracy — antisemitic tropes packaged in evangelical wrapping. He has also preached that the Antichrist will be gay and half Jewish — casting Jewish ancestry as the shared genetic thread between history’s greatest monster and prophecy’s final one.
Hagee’s antisemitism is not incidental to his Zionism; it is essential. The theology needs Jews to play a role and then exit the stage. Palestinians, meanwhile, never get a role at all.
Hagee rejects Palestinian land claims entirely and endorses Israeli control over what he calls “biblical Israel,” a territory stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. Palestinian Christians whose communities predate the Crusades do not appear in his covenant. In his book Jerusalem Countdown, he placed the Antichrist in the Islamic world.
Former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who has spent years at the intersection of Christian nationalism and Christian Zionism, has called Islam satanic opposition to “Judeo-Christian” civilization. She demanded “a war on Islam.” She urged converting Jews because the End Times were near.
The first step toward Armageddon is to slaughter and burn a holy cow.
The Sacred Cow
Under Jewish law, nobody can enter the Third Temple without first being purified with the ashes of an unblemished red heifer. The Temple Institute, a Jerusalem-based organization dedicated to rebuilding the Third Temple that has already constructed the ritual vessels and priestly garments for use in a future sanctuary, has been trying to find one since 1987. In September 2022, five red Angus yearlings from evangelical ranches in Texas landed in Israel. They were classified as “pets” on the customs forms to get around livestock import rules and trucked to the West Bank settlement of Shiloh. On the Mount of Olives, organizers built a white sacrificial altar positioned so the priest faces Al-Aqsa directly across the valley. One heifer was slaughtered and burned in what participants called a practice run; inspectors disqualified the animal for two black hairs on an otherwise red coat. A breeding program has followed.
Byron Stinson, the Texas rancher who sourced the heifers, would later stand before members of Congress and declare that the cow “is red for the blood of Jesus Christ.” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who co-founded the National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance where Stinson spoke, backs the project. Ambassador Mike Huckabee visited the Shiloh settlement in May 2025. No sitting U.S. ambassador had ever held an official meeting in the West Bank.
Huckabee began the tour by viewing the heifers, then told settlers their presence was a miracle, that he owed them a “spiritual debt,” and that he had “never used any term other than Judea and Samaria.” The conservative religious journal First Things described Huckabee’s mission as bringing “the biblical arc of history to a close with the repatriation of Judea and Samaria to the Jewish people.” “I want to be on the blessing side, not the cursed side,” Huckabee has said.
The Network
On February 4, a month before Hegseth opened his Pentagon briefing with a psalm, Johnson keynoted the Family Research Council’s (FRC) 2026 National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance (NGPR) at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. The deep, wailing sound of shofars opened the proceedings — ram’s horns blown on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur for millennia, co-opted by the New Apostolic Reformation as a Christian call to spiritual warfare. Shofars were also blown outside the Capitol on the morning of January 6, 2021.
From the 2026 NGPR podium, Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) prayed to “bind the demonic forces” in America. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) told the room that every person in the country would serve and praise Jesus Christ. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) sat in the front row with his head bowed. In all, more than two dozen federal lawmakers have attended NGPR gatherings, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), as well as state attorneys general and, according to the FRC, unnamed members of the Trump administration.
Tony Perkins co-founded the NGPR alongside Johnson and runs the FRC, which is classified as a church by the IRS — meaning it faces none of the financial reporting requirements that govern other nonprofits. Perkins also sits on the board of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and serves on the board of the Israel Allies Foundation, an international network operating in 53 countries that presses elected officials to pass pro-Israel legislation on biblical grounds. He frames his support as fellowship, not prophecy. Perkins has told CBN News that “America’s future is intertwined with Israel’s.”
Sarah Posner, an expert on Christian Zionism and author of Unholy, told Moment Magazine that “the friendly overtones of many Evangelical Christian Zionists is something of a ruse and that the messianic elements — the return of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon, and, yes, the mass conversions — are the very point of the Christian Zionist message.”
CUFI is also classified as a church. It claims 10 million members, files no public financial reports, and took credit for Trump’s 2017 Jerusalem embassy decision. With 41 state chairs and 51 model bills on the shelf, Jason Rapert’s National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL), which drafted the Texas bounty-hunter abortion bill, is now writing Christian Zionist foreign policy: “Judea and Samaria” renaming resolutions that would replace “the West Bank” with biblical language in official state and federal documents.
Hagee Ministries has sent more than $100 million to Israeli causes since 1981, much of it to settlement organizations and groups that oppose a two-state solution. CUFI raised $2.65 million in the weeks following October 7 and has accepted direct funding from the Israeli government. HaYovel, a Tennessee-based Christian Zionist nonprofit that started by sending American volunteers to harvest grapes on West Bank settlements, pivoted after October 7 to funneling $3.7 million in tactical equipment — helmets, body armor, thermal drones, night vision — to settler security teams, some of it to settlers like Issachar Manne, whom the State Department sanctioned in July 2024 for violence against Palestinian civilians and seizure of their land.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is Jewish-led — not a Christian ministry, as the evangelical watchdog MinistryWatch put it — but its own website describes its aliyah (immigration to Israel) work as “fulfilling biblical prophecy,” and 92 percent of its donors are evangelical Christians. The organization has channeled $3.6 billion into Israel since 1983. Most of this money moves through donor-advised funds and 501(c)(3)s classified as churches, beyond the reach of public financial disclosure.
The Heritage Foundation staffers who wrote Project 2025 also launched Project Esther, a 33-page blueprint to dismantle pro-Palestinian advocacy by classifying it as a “Hamas Support Network.” Yet 11 of the 12 organizations on Heritage’s antisemitism task force were evangelical Christian groups; no major Jewish organization endorsed the plan. The Forward reported that Heritage “struggled to attract Jewish supporters” for a project that “appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups.” Multiple organizations Heritage named as participants — including CUFI, the Hudson Institute, the Atlantic Council, and the Republican Jewish Coalition — denied any involvement.
By November 2025, Project Esther was disintegrating. Heritage president Kevin Roberts defended Tucker Carlson after Carlson platformed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, and called Carlson’s critics a “venomous coalition.” The Zionist Organization of America, Young Jewish Conservatives, and the Israel Forever Foundation quit. The task force’s own co-chairs — Mario Bramnick, Victoria Coates, Ellie Cohanim, and Luke Moon — formally cut ties with Heritage, vowing to confront antisemitism “on the right as well as the left.”
The War Cabinet
Hegseth runs monthly prayer services inside the Pentagon and attends a weekly White House Bible study led by far-right preacher Ralph Drollinger, who teaches that God commands America to support Israel and who, in a June 2025 lesson, wrote that “Israel…executed the Messiah.” Blaming Jews for the death of Christ is the oldest antisemitic accusation in the Western world. The Catholic Church repudiated it in 1965. Hegseth and Huckabee are both listed sponsors of the Bible study.
In December 2025, two months before the first strikes on Iran, Franklin Graham preached at one of Hegseth’s Pentagon prayer services. “We think about God as a god of love,” Graham told the room. “But did you know that God also hates? Do you know that God also is a god of war?”
Hegseth has publicly called the events of 1917 (the Balfour Declaration promising a Jewish homeland), 1948 (Israel’s founding), 1967 (Israel’s capture of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War), and the 2017 Jerusalem embassy decision “miracles,” ticking off the dispensationalist prophetic timeline one date at a time. Asked by CBS whether he views the Iran war in a religious context, Hegseth answered: “The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.” Dr. Matthew D. Taylor, a Georgetown scholar who documented the New Apostolic Reformation’s role in the January 6 Capitol attack in his book The Violent Take It by Force, told the Associated Press that Hegseth’s rhetoric “can only inflame and reinforce the fears and deep animosity that the regime in Iran has towards the U.S.”
In August 2025, Speaker Johnson stood in the West Bank settlement of Ariel — which the International Court of Justice had declared illegal the year before, under the Fourth Geneva Convention — and told residents the land “belongs to you by right.” He did not mention the ruling. David Barton, the Christian nationalist pseudo-historian who has built a career insisting the United States was founded as a Christian nation, has advised Johnson for a quarter-century and helped him staff the Speaker’s office.
On The Tucker Carlson Show, hosted by Tucker Carlson, who has platformed Holocaust revisionists, Huckabee told Carlson it would be “fine” if Israel swallowed the whole Middle East.
Writing in the Times of Israel, analyst William Keenan laid out what happens when prophecy enters the chain of command. An intelligence officer who presents evidence for a negotiated off-ramp isn’t just questioning a superior anymore — he’s questioning God’s plan. Nobody has to give an order for the analysis to narrow. “The problem,” Keenan wrote, “is not theological. It is operational.”
The Export
CUFI and the International Christian Embassy operate in 95 countries. In Uganda, born-again members of parliament who attended CUFI-affiliated conferences now cite Genesis 12:3 — “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you” — to justify one-party rule and the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which carries the death penalty.
In Brazil, under former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, Pentecostal pastors carried the dispensationalist timeline into the favelas, the sprawling low-income neighborhoods that ring Brazilian cities, preaching it to congregations that had never heard of the Balfour Declaration, then turning those congregations out to vote. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a far-right authoritarian who has gutted judicial independence and press freedom, moved Hungary’s embassy to Jerusalem and became Israel’s staunchest defender in the European Union.
Pentecostal congregations are growing faster than any other Christian movement in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. The converts inherit the dispensationalist timeline in its entirety. The Nakba — 750,000 Palestinians expelled or fled from their homes in historic Palestine in 1948 — does not appear in it.
Cracks
In January 2026, the church patriarchs in Jerusalem — Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Franciscan, the leaders of Christianity’s oldest congregations in the city where the faith was born — published a statement calling Christian Zionism a “damaging ideology” that “misleads the public, sows confusion, and harms the unity of our flock.” The patriarchs warned that Christian Zionists had been “welcomed at official levels both locally and internationally” and that their activities “constitute interference in the internal life of the churches.” Huckabee told Religion News Service that he did “not feel any sect of the Christian faith should claim exclusivity in speaking for Christians worldwide.” In 2018, 69 percent of American evangelicals under 30 sided with Israel. By 2025, it was 32 percent.
In late 2025, an anonymous donor gave a Texas operative $2 million to charter planes and fly a hundred North Carolina pastors to Israel for a private dinner with Huckabee. That kind of money buys loyalty, not enthusiasm, and the price keeps climbing because volunteers have stopped showing up on their own.
Mortar Jesus
On March 20, three NCOs rotating into a U.S. Army battalion headquarters at an undisclosed installation outside the United States found a poster left behind by the outgoing unit, tacked up in a common working area. It showed a stereotypical Western image of Jesus Christ firing a mortar round. Beneath the image: “MORTAR JESUS.” The NCO who reported it to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation wrote that the poster made him fear for what his unit was walking into — “considering the reports of commanders in the Middle East telling their soldiers that the war with Iran is a holy war.”
On March 25, Hegseth hosted his first monthly Pentagon worship service since the Iran war began, livestreamed it, and read a prayer he attributed to the chaplain who ministered to the troops before the January raid in Caracas, Venezuela, where the US captured that country’s former president. He asked God to let “every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness” and to grant American forces “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Then he opened Psalm 18: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and did not turn back till they were consumed.”
One day earlier, Trump had told reporters in the Oval Office that Hegseth and the Joint Chiefs chairman were “the only two people that were quite disappointed” by the prospect of a ceasefire. “Pete didn’t want it to be settled,” the president said, laughing. The day before that, at a roundtable in Memphis, Trump named Hegseth as the first Cabinet member to push for the strikes. Hegseth did not dispute it. He stepped to the microphone and offered his own summary of how the Pentagon negotiates: “We negotiate with bombs.”
Reverend Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, called the Christian Zionism of Hegseth and his allies “a theology of war, of violence.” Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff, rebuked Hegseth’s scriptural war in a talk from the Vatican on March 22, warning that some “even intend to involve the name of God in these choices of death” and that “God cannot be enlisted in darkness.” Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the pope’s Middle East envoy, called it the gravest sin: war is “first and foremost political” with “very material interests,” and invoking God’s name to sanctify it is “the gravest sin we can commit.”
A week later, on Palm Sunday, Pope Leo doubled down. Standing before tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square, he declared that Jesus “rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
Hagee’s prayers sounded nothing like the pope’s. There’s no room for pacifism in Christian Zionism. The day after the first bombs fell on Iran, Hagee thanked God “for the fabulous military victory over the enemies of Israel this week,” and prayed from his pulpit in San Antonio: “Let God Almighty be brought onto the battlefield, and the enemies of Zion and the enemies of the United States be destroyed before our eyes.”
