By any measure, Yael Eckstein is an incredibly effective advocate for Israel. As the president and global CEO of a massive Israel-focused philanthropy, she oversees humanitarian relief, security programs, social services for elderly Holocaust survivors, and Jewish resettlement. On her weekly podcasts, she ties biblical teachings to modern Israel and personal stories from her own life in Jerusalem. At 41, Eckstein, a native of the Chicago suburbs and an Orthodox Jew who now lives in Israel, has enjoyed recognition for her leadership and philanthropic impact, earning a spot on the Jerusalem Post’s “50 Most Influential Jews” four times from 2020 to 2024 and receiving its Humanitarian Award in 2023. That year, her nonprofit brought in $271 million, significantly more than better-known nonprofits like Amnesty International USA, the ACLU Foundation, and Human Rights Watch.
By this point, you may have noticed that I haven’t yet told you the name of Eckstein’s organization. It’s not the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC, or the Anti-Defamation League. Eckstein’s group raised more money in 2023 than both combined. Those groups primarily target Jewish donors for their fundraising, but according to a spokesperson for Eckstein’s organization, 92 percent of its donors are Christians. Since 1983, when Eckstein’s father, a rabbi, founded the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, the group says it has raised a staggering $3.6 billion for Israel and to support the Jewish people more generally. Since the death of Eckstein’s father in 2019, the group has more than doubled its revenue.
The fellowship’s fundraising prowess reflects the fact that Christians who root their political support for Israel in their faith no longer comprise a fringe movement—Christian Zionists have created a juggernaut that has mobilized individuals and congregations all over the world. I have reported extensively on Christian nationalist movements in the United States, but it wasn’t until I started researching this story that I began to understand how organized and powerful the Christian Zionist movement really is, and how it is shaping the politics of the Middle East.
I’m not alone. Jeremy Ben-Ami, who runs J Street, the liberal lobbying group focused on a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, suspects that there is “very little awareness” even among American Jews of this dynamic. “Most Jewish Americans view the US-Israel relationship through the lens of the American Jewish community’s influence and through its politics,” he said. “They don’t give as much weight and consideration to what’s happening in the evangelical community.”
And yet, what’s happening in the evangelical community is massive, a growing conviction that the primacy of Israel is key to the geopolitical order and to Christian salvation. A 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 82 percent of white American evangelicals believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, compared with 81 percent of ultra-Orthodox Jews and 44 percent of respondents overall. A 2024 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 64 percent of white evangelicals believed Israel’s actions in Gaza were justified, compared with 32 percent of the American public overall. Christians United for Israel, the evangelical Zionist group founded in 2006 by Texas pastor John Hagee, claims 10 million members, more than the entire population of 7.5 million Jews in the United States. The movement has enormous financial heft: A 2018 investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz found that Christian groups had invested an estimated $50 to $65 million in Israeli settlements in the West Bank over the previous decade.
Many donations to Israeli causes move through small nonprofits, of which there seems to be an almost limitless supply. After months of reporting on this topic, I still discover new Christian Zionist groups every day. These fundraising figures actually understate the size and scope of the movement because much of the money comes from churches, which are not required to disclose their finances.
Some Christian Zionists aspire to be more than just an ATM for Israel and proIsrael causes, even adopting Jewish rituals and culture. At the church services and prayer rallies I have attended, appropriation is omnipresent. Attendees wear Jewish prayer shawls and Stars of David. They blow shofars, the rams’ horns that ancient Israelites used to alert the community to threats and are now used ceremonially during the High Holy Days. Some bow back and forth, as though they are engaged in the Jewish prayer practice of davening. At one event, I watched a group of Christian teenagers dance the hora. Many evangelical churches now host Passover Seders; some celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. A book by the late Charlie Kirk about why he celebrates the Jewish Sabbath will be published posthumously at the end of this year; two months ago, he hosted Eckstein on his show.
For the Israeli government, the admiration appears to be mutual. Increasingly, it has partnered with Christian Zionist groups in hopes of gaining influence in Washington. In 2020, an investigation by the Forward and the Seventh Eye found that Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs approved a $40,000 grant to the Tennessee-based Christian Zionist organization Proclaiming Justice to The Nations. The group denied receiving any Israeli government funds but has nonetheless lobbied against the movement to boycott Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. Last year, the Guardianreported that Israel had channeled funds to US Christian Zionist groups—such as Christians United for Israel and the Israel Allies Foundation—to finance the anti-boycott movement and the effort to quash pro-Palestine activism on college campuses.
Israel’s embrace of Christian Zionists is especially remarkable for another reason. Some evangelicals interpret passages from the Bible to mean the Messiah will reappear only when Jews who have scattered to the corners of the Earth return to Israel. Once Jesus comes back, those who accept him will be saved, and everyone else—including recalcitrant Jews—will perish and be damned to hell. “I don’t want to say [evangelicals with these beliefs] don’t care what happens to the Jews, but they understand that there are some things in their theology that are necessary for the salvation of the world,” Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, told me. “You have to break the eggs to get the omelet.”
When I asked Eckstein about her thoughts on Christian Zionists’ end-times scenario, she shrugged. “Everyone’s entitled to have their own beliefs, their own philosophy, their own theology,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
In the meantime, the bond between American Christian Zionists and Israeli leaders is growing ever tighter. In 2021, Ron Dermer, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States and a close adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called evangelicals “the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States.” That same year, Donald Trump told an Israeli journalist, “Evangelical Christians love Israel more than Jews in this country.” Earlier this year, before Netanyahu met with the president at the White House, he held a meet-and-greet for US evangelical leaders, including televangelist and Trump spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain and the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins.
For Trump and some key members of his administration, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Israel Ambassador Mike Huckabee, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, backing Israeli expansion is a divine mandate, even as the international community documents brutality and starvation. The Trump administration now refuses to cooperate with United Nations aid efforts in Gaza, instead creating an alternative group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The project of an evangelical leader, the foundation eschews UN food distribution sites in favor of its own stations in Israeli-controlled areas. As a result, hundreds of aid-seeking Gazans have been killed.
Daniel Hummel, director of the research institute the Lumen Center and a historian of US religion and diplomacy, told me he considers Christian Zionists currently “one of the most significant contributors to Republican thinking on Israel.” Then he clarified: They’re “not just advisers, but enactors of policy. It’s hard to think of another well of people like that.”
Over the last 50 years, Christian Zionism has morphed from a relatively small movement into a major political player. In his 2019 book, Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and US-Israeli Relations, Hummel traces its roots back to Israel’s founding in 1948 and the 1967 Six-Day War, which some Christians and Jews saw as biblical prophecy come true. But in 1991, President George H.W. Bush angered Christian Zionists by blocking loan guarantees to Israel because of its settlement expansion. The second Bush administration was friendlier to the evangelicals, while the Left Behind novels brought apocalyptic, end-times prophecy into popular culture. After the 9/11 attacks, Islamophobia went mainstream, and Christian Zionism took off politically and culturally, becoming a major factor in America’s foreign policy.
“We Christians are calling on our beloved President Trump and his team to aggressively remove all barriers to Israel’s sovereignty over all the land.”
Even during the Obama administration, when Christian Zionists waned in political influence, their movement flourished within churches. And with Trump’s victory in 2016, their unlikely support of him paid off. Over international objections and undoing decades of US policy, Trump officially recognized Jerusalem—a city also holy to Christians and Muslims, and partly in the occupied territory of the West Bank—as the capital of Israel and relocated the US Embassy there. The Netanyahu government was thrilled, and so were Christian Zionists. One prominent evangelical leader, a South Carolina–based pastor named Dutch Sheets, said in a broadcast that the embassy move “did something in the spirit realm. It aligned us in a significant way with Israel.” White-Cain, the Trump spiritual adviser, later recalled telling him, “Sir, you’ve done the right thing.” Here was further validation that Trump had been chosen by God to lead the United States in the world.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, those same pastors became leaders in the “Stop the Steal” campaign. In a 2024 broadcast, Sheets said Trump had told a pastor friend in a dream, “God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.”
But it is in Trump’s second term that Christian Zionists have truly ascended to power. Consider the Republican leadership. House Speaker Johnson has supported Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and defended Israeli settlement expansion as events foretold in Scripture. In 2023, he backed a plan to provide $14.5 billion in military aid to Israel by taking funds from the IRS. A little over a week after the October 7 attacks, Johnson tweeted that the US House of Representatives must “take all necessary action to end Hamas forever.” During a visit to Israel in August, Israeli news outlets reported that he declared the West Bank “the rightful property of the Jewish people” and said the area “must remain an integral part of” Israel.
As a further assertion of the power of Christian Zionists within his administration, Trump made history in November 2024 when he named Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, Republican presidential candidate, and Baptist minister, as the first evangelical Christian to serve as ambassador to Israel; Trump’s first-term pick was bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman. Huckabee first traveled to Israel on a pilgrimage in 1973 and says he has since visited roughly 100 times. He said in 2008 that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian,” adding that the term was nothing more than “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.” Ten years later, on a visit to the West Bank settlement of Efrat, he laid a brick as a symbol of support. He was part of a group of influential pastors who lobbied Trump in 2017 to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He now heads that embassy.
Secretary of Defense Hegseth, too, is a devoted Christian Zionist. During his confirmation hearing, he stated, “I am a Christian and I robustly support the state of Israel and its existential defense.” While on one of his many Israel trips, he learned about the Jerusalem cross, a symbol from the coat of arms of the ancient kingdom of Jerusalem that is commonly associated with Christian nationalism and the Crusades. He had it tattooed on his chest. At an Israeli news conference in 2018, he said, “The declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a miracle, and there’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.”
He did not mention that rebuilding the temple described in the Bible would be an act of aggression toward Muslims, who also consider the Temple Mount a sacred site.
The robust Christian Zionist presence in the Trump administration is the culmination of a decades-long effort by evangelical pastors. Today, many preach support of Israel to the MAGA base in their congregations. Jentezen Franklin, an evangelical Georgia pastor and spiritual adviser to Trump, gave a sermon in the summer of 2024 about godly voting. “Whether we like it or not, [the Jews] are still his chosen people,” he told his congregation, holding a Bible and waving it around emphatically. “God has blessed America because we have blessed and stood with the nation of Israel. And when you vote for anyone who is anti-Israel, you literally are voting against every part of this book, from Genesis to Revelation.”
And in March, Mario Bramnick, a Florida megachurch pastor, cheered Trump’s victory at an event in Jerusalem: “I am so grateful to God that there is a new sheriff in town and that God gave us President Donald Trump—not only to make America great again, but to make the world and Israel great again.”
Before the Messiah returns, some Christian Zionists believe that certain events described in the Bible must take place—and they’re attempting to speed up the process. Christian Friends of Israeli Communities funds projects in the West Bank to fulfill prophecies related to settling and prospering this land. Other groups focus specifically on development and agricultural projects in the Negev Desert to realize the prophecy of Isaiah 35:1, “The desert will rejoice and flowers will bloom in the wastelands.” The prophecy-related work by Christian Zionists in Israel also has geopolitical significance and attracts millions of dollars in annual donations.
Improbably, one of these efforts centers on an American entrepreneur obsessed with red cows. Let me explain. As Hegseth alluded to during his appearance in Israel, some evangelicals believe that the ancient temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt before the Messiah can return—but that can only happen if the faithful perform a purification ritual that includes the sacrifice of a perfectly unblemished red heifer. In 2021, Byron Stinson, a Texas businessman, set out to bring red heifers to Israel. Stinson, who in his self-published memoir refers to the moment when he heard God’s voice at age 13 as his “bar mitzvah,” placed ads in agricultural publications and offered $15,000 rewards to locate the perfect red cows. Of the 21 candidates he found, rabbis approved five of them, for which he obtained US and Israeli travel permits by classifying them and as pets instead of livestock. Instead of traditional ear tags, he outfitted the animals with microchips in order to keep their appearance unblemished. In September 2022, he chartered a flight to Israel for them. The total cost of the venture exceeded $500,000. In July this year, Stinson helped coordinate a rehearsal of the purification ritual in which one of the cows was sacrificed.
There was one big problem: the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the Jewish and Christian term for the site where the mosque is located and where Stinson and his supporters hope to rebuild the temple, is in disputed territory. While Israel controls its access and security, the area is sacred to Muslims, who have day-to-day management responsibilities for it. The arrival of Stinson’s red heifers was interpreted by some as a hostile act; a Hamas spokesperson cited it as one of the motivating factors behind the group’s massive October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.
Stinson’s heifer project may have contributed to escalating tensions with Hamas, but it pales in comparison to the size and scope of another endeavor that has been much more central in the Jewish community and has been adopted by some Christians: Aliyah, or the return of Jews to Israel. As described in the Torah, Aliyah is a sacred act for Jews—and is variously interpreted to mean a spiritual ascent or permanently resettling in Israel. But for Christians, it’s a prophetic sign. “The ingathering of the Jewish people in modern times holds great promise for Israel and for the world, as it heralds the soon coming of the Messianic kingdom,” explains the website of the decades-old Christian Zionist group International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. “That the Gentiles are called to assist in this process is an amazing and holy thing.”
“The ingathering of the Jewish people in modern times holds great promise for Israel and for the world, as it heralds the soon coming of the Messianic kingdom. That the Gentiles are called to assist in this process is an amazing and holy thing.”
Eckstein’s International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is a power player in Aliyah efforts, raising millions annually to help fund flights, resettlement, and emergency transport, with much of the recent focus on bringing in Jews fleeing war zones such as Ukraine, Russia, and Ethiopia. In 2023, the last year for which a financial report is available, the group paid for 4,264 Jewish people to move to Israel, and it spent more than $7 million on Aliyah.
