American evangelical leaders are pushing back against a wartime drop in Christian support for Israel, and have pledged to redouble their efforts among the young generation in the postwar period by mixing the Bible with Israeli innovation, as well as bringing more Christians to visit.
The move comes amid polling which shows a drop in support for Israel even among large supportive conservative evangelical groups following the war in Gaza, and a very public fissure on the right between the predominant supporters of the Jewish state and its vocal opponents.
“The big battle is not on the left, which is far gone, but on the right to be sure that the right doesn’t become far-right, but it is not as big as it is made out to be,” Troy A. Miller, president and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters, said during a visit to Jerusalem last month.
The prominent group of American Christian media broadcasters, which encompasses 1,500 media organizations across America and reaches tens of millions of people on five continents, will be hosting its first-ever conference in Jerusalem this fall, seeking to unite Christians and Jews in combating media misinformation following the two-year war against Hamas in Gaza.
Miller cited recent internal data showing that more than 60% of American adults follow Christian media outlets, including 64% of Gen Z and 58% of Millennials, while two-thirds of the general population view Christian media favorably.
“We are seeing a major trend with Gen Z coming back to church,” said Miller.
“Antisemitism is part of the anti-globalist movement, and anti-Israel just happens to be part of that,” said Pastor Larry Huch, founder and senior pastor of the Dallas-based New Beginnings Church. “These are people who feel disenfranchised from the American dream.”
“Israel is terrible at PR,” Huch told JNS, lamenting that the message being shown around the world is that “everything is war.”
“We need to combine biblical history with the benefits that Israel is bringing to the world through its innovations,” he said.
Still, relations between Israel and the evangelical community are necessarily centered on the Bible.
“The less young people know the Bible, the further they drift away from Israel,” Israeli Ambassador Naor Gilon told a delegation of hundreds of pastors attending a conference organized by the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem last month. “You lose connection to the Bible, you lose connection to our common roots.”
“I’ve been warning this has been coming for 20 years; you can’t take evangelical support for granted,” said Robert Stearns of the New York-based Eagles’ Wings Ministries, which led a delegation of pastors to Israel last month in coordination with the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
“Young people are being pelted with new media and social media Monday-Saturday, and then there is this level of fear and pushback of being vocally supportive,” said Pastor Stephen Luna of Kansas.
“A lot of pastors lack confidence about how to speak about Israel,” said Pastor Micah Wood of Alabama. “The answer to global antisemitism is global philosemitism. You don’t defeat antisemitism by fighting it but by providing the opposite.”
Meanwhile, Israel’s newly appointed Special Envoy to the Christian world this week slammed the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church for voting to identify Israel’s war in Gaza as ”genocide.”
“PCUSA has lost 67% of its members since the 1980s. Meanwhile, the Christian population of Israel has grown by 110%,” said George Deek, Israel’s special envoy to the Christian world, wrote on X. “Maybe if they spent less time condemning the one country in the Middle East where Christians are thriving, they’d have more Christians left to do the condemning.”
