What's up guys,

Dan Hummel grew up as a missionary kid. His parents were planting churches in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, and he spent his teens at a Colorado Springs megachurch whose congregation included Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the Left Behind novels.

He now runs the Lumen Center in Madison and is a research fellow in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has spent more than a decade studying Christian Zionism, including a year in Jerusalem and a lot of time in Israel's state archives, back when you could still walk in and open the boxes.

We discussed why most Christian Zionists aren't American, where the phrase "Judeo-Christian" actually comes from, how Mossad nearly passed on Adolf Eichmann, and the end-times theology that still drives a big part of the Republican Party.

What the tour buses don't show you.

Dan was 10 when he first read the Left Behind books. In those novels, Israel was one of the good guys, and it was the first time the country felt like a real place to him. Then he lived in Jerusalem from July 2012 to July 2013, five minutes' walk from the Old City. He heard his first missile sirens that autumn, and he found a country with plumbing, dust and grumpy people like anywhere else. The West Bank checkpoints were a few miles from his flat.

That year also changed his picture of who Christian Zionists actually are. He had assumed the movement was mostly American, but at one rally of around 5,000 people that he attended as an observer, he guesses no more than a few hundred were. Most had travelled from Nigeria, Brazil and South Korea, and the room was full of people speaking in tongues and claiming healings. Paula White, Trump's spiritual adviser, worships the same way, so we pulled up a clip of her on the show. I called her Paula Deen. Twice.

The American side of the movement leans heavily on one verse. Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee often cite Genesis 12:3, in which God tells Abraham he will bless those who bless him. Dan explained the leap it takes to read that as a promise about a state founded in 1948, since most Christian traditions, Catholic and Orthodox included, hold that God's chosen people after Jesus are the church. Three chapters later, Genesis 15 promises Abraham's descendants land from the Nile to the Euphrates. That is the passage Tucker Carlson pressed Huckabee on in February.

What else we discussed.

The Dead Sea Scrolls turned up in 1947, the year before Israel was founded. The story goes that Bedouin shepherds followed a stray animal into a cave above the Dead Sea. When scholars compared the Isaiah scroll to the text we read today, Dan says the overwhelming majority of it matched. Dan also explained that "Judeo-Christian", in the sense politicians use it, only took hold in the 1930s as a way to set America against communism and fascism. George Washington never heard the phrase.

I finished Netanyahu's autobiography two or three weeks before October 7. What stuck with me was how openly he talks about building the alliance with American evangelicals while plainly not sharing their faith. Dan says he's part of a tradition that goes back to Ben-Gurion. His father, Benzion, was a historian of the Spanish Inquisition who believed there was an antisemite underneath most Christians, so Benjamin went looking for the one kind of Christian he thought he could work with.

That turned out to be people like Jerry Falwell. Menachem Begin gave him an award named after his own ideological hero in 1980. When Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, the story goes that Falwell was the first person Begin called. Falwell went on to film TV specials from West Bank settlements as proof that prophecy was being fulfilled in front of his eyes.

Dan's own views shifted when he met Christian Palestinians in Bethlehem. Their first point to Western Christians was that we don't know they exist. In 2013 he took a wrong turn with his parents on the Mount of Olives and drove into a protest, with rubber bullets and smoke in the street. He also says young Israelis are now further right than their parents, partly because so many grow up with no Arab friends at all.

The last hour turned to the end times. In the version Dan grew up with, the rapture takes every true Christian, Israel signs a false peace with the Antichrist, and it all ends at Armageddon, which is a real place in northern Israel. That's why a lot of evangelicals distrust any peace process on principle. Napoleon III, the Kaiser, Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Gorbachev have all been cast as the Antichrist. I made my case for Peter Thiel. Dan's reading is less cinematic: the Antichrist is whoever has all the trappings of Christianity while undermining it.

John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel in 2006. It now claims 10 million members, more than the number of American Jews, and by the 2010s its summit in Washington was a stop nearly every Republican presidential hopeful had to make.

I told Dan I can't square what people like Huckabee defend with anything Jesus taught. He didn't argue. He said his job as a historian is to understand how they arrived at their views, and he's chosen to stay a scholar rather than an activist so evangelical audiences will still listen to him.

📖 Dan's book | His history of how American evangelicals came to read the Bible through the state of Israel.

📜 The scrolls, online | The Israel Antiquities Authority's free digital library of the Dead Sea Scrolls, with fragments found from 1947 onwards.

🗺️ From the Nile to the Euphrates | Genesis 15 in full, the covenant passage behind the Greater Israel debate.

🎙️ What Huckabee told Tucker | Axios on the February interview where the US ambassador said Israel taking all of that land would be fine.

⚖️ The banality of evil | The Jewish Women's Archive on Arendt's first New Yorker piece from the Eichmann trial, and the book it became.

We'll reveal the results next week.

Last week's results

"Elon posted an AI video of robots, a city on Mars and a bionic baby, and wrote 'This is the future we shall bring into being.' Would you sign up?"

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Hard pass

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ I don't think we get a say

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Mars, yes. The robot baby, no

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Sign me up

Peace,

Julian