From King Cyrus to Queen Esther: Christian Zionists’ discursive construction of Donald Trump as God’s instrument

Abstract

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential elections with the help of 81 percent of self-identified white evangelicals, liberal commentators, relying on folk-conceptions of religion that privileged concepts like morality and belief, struggled to understand how someone who seemed to lack both could garner such support. Since then scholars have provided various explanations, relating to Christian nationalism evangelical appeals to authoritarianism, and straightforward racism. This article aims to expand this discussion by analyzing the way that evangelical Christian Zionists have supported Trump by rhetorically identifying him as God’s instrument on account of his support for Israel and withdrawal of the United States from the Iran Nuclear Deal. In addition to analyzing the process by which Trump is constituted as God’s instrument, the article also demonstrates more generally how religious discourse functions as a legitimating discourse for those who seek to gain, or maintain, positions of power.

Keywords

2016 Presidential Election Barack Obama Christian Zionism discourse analysis Donald Trump philosophy of history

Introduction

In the 2016 American Presidential election, 81 percent of white evangelicals cast their vote for Donald Trump (Schwadel and Smith 2019). In so doing, they acted as a decisive voting bloc that helped carry Trump to the White House, despite the fact that he lost the popular vote. For many—often liberal—observers, support for Trump by these self-identified Christians is seen as hypocritical. For them, his multiple marriages, documented infidelity, and claims of consequence-less sexual assault, not to mention his lack church going history, are all evidence of a population duped by an immoral and irreligious charlatan. Despite all of this, white evangelicals have remained Trump’s most loyal supporters. As of January 2019, 69 percent of self-identified evangelicals said they approved of the way Trump was handling his job (Schwadel and Smith 2019).

Since Trump’s election, scholars have produced numerous studies to explain why evangelical voters cast their ballot the way they did. For example, sociologists of religion Andrew Whitehead, Samuel Perry, and Joseph Baker demonstrate the role that Christian nationalism and the belief that Trump “represented a defense of America’s supposed Christian heritage” played in voting patterns among evangelicals (Whitehead et al. 2018, 148). From another perspective, Christopher Brittain (2018, 285) applies Theodor Adorno’s analysis of authoritarian movements, and the “racketeering in religion,” that taps “into the evangelical movement’s energy and social discontent” to explain the high rate of evangelical support for Trump. Anthea Butler (2019) argues that underlying evangelical support for Trump is racism and evangelicals’ long history of “participation and support for racist structures in America.”

This article contributes to, and expands upon, some of this explanatory literature, demonstrating the way support for Trump is legitimated through religious discourse. More specifically, it analyzes how American evangelical Christian Zionists have constituted Trump as God’s instrument on behalf of Israel, and the relationship this framing has to conceptions of manifest destiny and American empire. To do this, I provide an overview of the philosophy of history that animates segments of American Christian Zionism influenced by dispensational theology. Following this, I focus on the way the American (Christian) right’s sustained demonization of the Obama administration helped establish the rhetorical conditions that have enabled it to cast Donald Trump as God’s instrument for Israel. Finally, I show how the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal capital,” the relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, its withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear deal, and the administration’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani are invested with divine intention. For many Christian Zionists, these events confirm Trump’s identity as the typological heir to the biblical characters of King Cyrus and Queen Esther, sent by God to advance his will for the world.

Although my focus is on the contemporary United States, I owe my theoretical and methodological inspiration to Bruce Lincoln’s (2007) analysis of religious discourse in Achaemenian Persia. There, Lincoln considers the relationship between religion and empire by analyzing the how Achaemenian Persia constituted itself as “God’s instrument for the project of world salvation” and recoded its imperial activities as acts of divine benevolence (Lincoln 2007, xv). Lincoln emphasizes that rather than attempting to determine whether “beliefs or material interests constitute the real motive force in history,” the two should be recognized as being mutually sustained through a dialectical relationship. “The problem to be addressed” Lincoln states, is not “which comes first” but rather “how a given group reshapes its consciousness (of self, other morality, and purpose) through select acts of discourse such that its members feel licensed … in pursuing their material advantage in increasingly aggressive ways” (xi).

As Lincoln demonstrates, one way the empire was able to justify its conquest and the extreme measures it took to maintain its control over conquered peoples, was by positing itself as the bearer of divine intentions against “The Lie.” “The Lie,” in that context functioned as a form of demonology, in that it was claimed to have infected all those who were perceived to be in opposition to the aims of the empire. In that respect, the extent to which reality fell short of the ideal, was “the result of the corrupting activity of the lie” (13). As the Lie was said to be overcome, then it was claimed that humanity would be united under the empire. Lincoln’s analysis has important bearing on my argument in this article. One reason the concept of the Lie was successful at defining the enemies of the empire was because it had no stable referent. It could, and was claimed to, have infected any person or institution that was perceived to be against the ideals of the empire. As I demonstrate throughout, “the Lie” for Christian Zionists is found in the figure of Satan, whom they assert is always attempting to obstruct American and Israeli interests in the Middle East, which are equated with God’s interests for the entire world. Due to the association of the Obama administration with satanic influences that were anti-Israel and anti-American, then, the Trump administration’s willingness to act in ways that are represented as the reversal of the Obama era actively privileges the desires of Christian Zionists and contributes to these conceptions.

Overall, then, my argument is twofold: firstly, religious rhetoric that represents Trump as God’s instrument works because it fits within a preexisting binary apocalyptic worldview that circulates widely in American evangelical culture (Frykholm 2004), and the actions of the Trump administration comport with this worldview. From this perspective, Jews and Israel are represented as central objects of sacred history whose restoration to, and continued occupation of, Israel is essential to the culmination of God’s plans and the establishment of his kingdom on earth. Moreover, the rhetorical construction of the Obama administration as anti-Israel and therefore demonic, contributed to an environment in which the reversal of Obama-era policies are easily constituted as acts of divine will. Consequently, (within its own internal logic) because Donald Trump is deemed to be advancing the cause of Israel, he is constituted as a divine instrument advancing God’s plans, while those critical of him and Israel are constituted as enemies of God under demonic influence. Secondly, I argue that this rhetoric functions to advance and naturalize themes of Christian nationalism, American exceptionalism and empire. This is achieved by claiming that Trump’s support for Israel’s territorial aspirations and his confrontational stance with Iran have not only brought the United States back in line with God, but are also projections of American power and empire that many claim were lost in the eight years that Obama held office.

Christian Zionism’s philosophy of history

Christian Zionism is modern concept used to describe a subset of conservative Protestants for whom the modern state of Israel, and the Jews living in it, are attributed important theological and eschatological significance. As Faydra Shapiro (2012, 617) describes it, in Christian Zionists’ reading of the Bible, “God has decreed a special role and status for the Jews sealed in an eternal covenant, together with a promise to restore them to their land.” Although the widespread use of the term Christian Zionist is relatively recent, the eschatological implications of Jewish restoration to Palestine has occupied the Christian imagination on and off since the sixteenth century (Hummel 2019, 8).¹ In The Origins of Christian Zionism (2010), Donald Lewis connects British support for Jewish restoration to Palestine with British evangelicals’ providential beliefs about the “chosenness” of their own nation, which culminated in the Balfour Declaration. British interest in the prophetic role of Jews, and Jewish restoration to Palestine migrated across the Atlantic to New England, where, as Yaakov Ariel (2013, 21) notes, although the Puritans “worked to build the kingdom of God in America, their messianic hopes included the conversion of the Jews to Christianity and the restoration of that people to Palestine.” In God’s Country (2018) Samuel Goldman shows that throughout American history Christian discourse on Israel has functioned as a source of identity formation for American Christians themselves. According to Goldman (2018, 162), “eschatological narratives built around Jews and Israel helped Americans find their place in sacred history.” One uniting feature of these instantiations of restorationist theology is that in each Jews acted as “reluctant witnesses” (Haynes 1995), becoming central characters in a sacred history that was not their own. According to Haynes (1995, 14–15), the “witness-people myth” places a positive value on Jewish survival within Christian society throughout the ages to the extent that Jews represent the “Israel” that Paul claimed still had a role in salvation history. Therefore, their survival was needed in some part, for the arrival of God’s Kingdom. As witness people, Jews were not only constituted as direct descendants of their biblical ancestors, but were also imagined in a way that functioned to justify and sanctify the British Empire, as well as the construction of American providential identity—a theme to which I will return below.

Beyond these earlier historical variants, the theology of dispensationalism developed by Irish Brethren Preacher John Nelson Darby in the nineteenth century has had a significant influence on American Christian views and understandings of Israel, the Middle East, and the course of history.² Dispensationalism divides human history into different periods, known as “dispensations,” the culmination of which will lead to Jesus’s return and the establishment of the millennial kingdom. As premillennialists, dispensationalists tend to hold a pessimistic view of human history. For them, the establishment of the millennial kingdom on earth would occur after Jesus’ second coming. That second coming, however, would only materialize through the restoration of Jews to Palestine, and a series of devastating wars, culminating in the battle of Armageddon.

Through prophetic interpretations of the Books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, dispensationalists described a future in which Jews would return to Palestine, restarting the prophetic clock they argued God had paused when Jesus was rejected as the messiah, and fulfilling the prophecies required to inaugurate the end of history. For, as dispensationalists argue, it is in Israel where the Antichrist will emerge, the battle of Armageddon will take place, and where Jesus will return to establish the millennial kingdom. In short, Israel is central to the culmination of God’s plans. Before this can occur, however, two other events must take place. The first, based on an interpretation of the Gog-Magog war described in Ezekiel 38–39, is that Iran must attempt to attack Israel. A second is that the Church must be raptured, or miraculously removed from the earth for a period of seven years, at which point the earth will descend into catastrophic violence until Jesus returns to cleanse the earth of unbelievers and establish a global theocracy (see e.g., Hagee 2018a).

Prior to Israel’s establishment in 1948, the above ideas were predominantly speculative, and generally the purview of prophecy circles. However, Israel’s Declaration of Independence, and especially its swift victory and military occupation of East Jerusalem and other territories in the wake of the Six-Day war in 1967, were pivotal in transforming prophetic speculation into seemingly visible fact. Consequently, for Christians influenced by dispensationalism (and those who had been skeptical of it³), these events were evidence that the Bible remained the authoritative source of knowledge about the world. Importantly, these events were interpreted as a clear affirmation that the end times and Jesus’ return were, and are, close at hand.

Beginning especially in the 1970s, American evangelicals influenced by this theology began to fuse prophetic speculation with geopolitics. The 1970 publication of the Hal Lindsey’s best-selling Late Great Planet Earth helped to bring dispensationalism into the American mainstream. By merging political realities of the Cold War, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and growing awareness of terrorism, with theological predictions that seemed to be confirmed through Israel’s military victory, Lindsey and authors like him opened up a discursive space in which these contemporary military and cultural threats could be mapped onto dispensationalists’ prophetic readings of scripture. More recently, the events of September 11, 2001, the War on Terror, the Iranian leaderships’ verbal threats to Israel and the United States especially under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (see Shapiro 2010), and the ever-increasing calls to engage Iran militarily have all managed to invoke the real world violence and conditions for Christian Zionists to affirm the reality of their prophetic speculations and their belief that Jesus’ return is imminent. The antagonistic relationship between Iran and the United States and Israel is especially significant for Christian Zionists because of the role they have assigned Iran in the unfolding of prophetic events.

Consequently, regardless of whether American evangelicals self-identify as dispensationalists, or explicitly cite eschatology as a reason for their interest in the state of Israel, this theology has seeped into American religion, culture, and politics in a variety of ways. As Ariel (2013, 5) argues “Messianically oriented evangelicals, who expect the imminent return of Jesus, have exercised ideological and political influences far beyond their numbers, often shaping much of the evangelical agenda toward Jews.”

Yet it is not just the end, or the events that premillennialist Christians argue indicate the end, which are important. What happens in between the present and the end is also significant. As Elizabeth Phillips (2014, 31) puts it, for Christian Zionists, “eschatology is not only a chronology of the end times events; it is also a doctrine of God’s intentions for humanity and all creation, and of the status of those intentions in the time between the two advents of Jesus.” At its most bare, this eschatology is predicated on the claims that: (1) modern Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, signaling the imminent return of Jesus; (2) the Arab–Israeli conflict is not a geopolitical conflict but part of a cosmic battle between God and Satan that has been raging since time immemorial; and (3) due to Israel’s special status in God’s economy, failure to support Israel is tantamount to not supporting God. This last point is emphasized with reference to Genesis 12:3 and Romans 15:27⁴ and the claim that “blessing Israel” is a divine decree requiring all Christians to support the modern state of Israel. Moreover, this claim is coupled with the corresponding assertion that supporting Israel reaps individual and national rewards, referred to as “blessings,” while cursing (or criticizing) Israel invites divine judgement.

John Hagee (2018a), the founder and national chairman of the Christian Zionist Lobby group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), encapsulates these tenets in his book Earth’s Last Empire:

God chose the nation of Israel to provide the source of divine truth on this earth for the generations to come. Through Israel, the Almighty gave mankind His sacred Word, the Patriarchs, the prophets, and our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Because Satan hates what God establishes, the spirit of anti-Semitism has prevailed through the ages in an effort to destroy this thread of redemption.⁵

Minnesota’s former congresswoman Michelle Bachmann made an almost verbatim statement in an interview with the Pentecostal Charisma Magazine. Claiming that “there is no greater proof of God’s word than the existence of Israel” Bachmann went on to say:

There’s always been this war between God and Satan. Satan hates Israel because Israel is the blessing to the world. From Israel comes the Messiah. God’s plan begins and ends in Jerusalem. That’s why Satan has this continual desire to kill Jews, to destroy the Jewish state, to destroy the Jewish way of life so that the blessings for the world are destroyed. (Akers 2018)

In a 2017 sermon entitled “What is the Deal with the Jews?” a pastor from the CUFI affiliated Faith Bible Chapel in Colorado also emphasized the reality of this philosophy of history in which Jews function as witness people to Christian truth claims. The pastor opened the sermon by explaining to the congregation that they were not there to worship “a nation or a people group,” because “that would be idolatry” but were instead there to “honor and worship a God who is faithful to his promise, that we can practically actually see his manifestation of his promise, today, right before our eyes when it comes to the Jews and with the nation of Israel”(Faith Bible Chapel 2017). Throughout the sermon, the pastor focused on Genesis 12:1–3, explaining to the congregation that modern Israel’s existence, after thousands of years, was a clear demonstration that “God’s word” (the Bible) remains true. The pastor also told the congregation that because “the Jews” were “stiff necked” and “stubborn,” that God scattered them throughout the earth where they suffered pogroms and death, culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust; but despite all of this, in fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy, they became a nation in a day. Thus, the history of global Jewish persecution, in conjunction with the creation of Israel, are represented as historical affirmations of Christian Zionists’ biblical truth-claims. As is common among Christian Zionists of this theological orientation, he cited the high proportion of Jewish Nobel Laureates, and the high proportion of start-ups in Israel, as evidence of the truth of God’s ongoing fulfilment of his promise made in Genesis 12:2, to make Israel a “great nation.”

Moreover, the pastor also emphasized the reality of God’s curse, telling the congregation that:

Again God has kept this promise [to curse those who curse Israel], and we would not have time to go over the nations that have opposed Israel, and been defeated by Israel. They should’ve overcome them, but they were defeated. They … crazy things happened—dust storms kicked up and blinded the enemy. I mean it was, how—once you really get into this, you think that it is undeniable that God’s hand is on this nation. And you cannot find any ancient group of people who has opposed Israel throughout history. You can’t do it. When’s the last time you spotted a Moabite in the crowd? When’s the last time you sat down and had a cup of coffee with Hittite? With an Edamite? With, uh, one of the Amalakites or any other ites in the world? You know why? They’re gone, they don’t exist anymore. They opposed Israel and they don’t exist anymore, they’ve been wiped off the face of the planet. (Faith Bible Chapel 2017)

This last point is another example of the way the entirety of human history is recast as a history of conflict between God and Satan. In this narrative, God uses Jews (and now Israel) to demonstrate the truth of his promises to the world, to the point that he will wipe out entire nations to remind the world that he does keep his promises. This binary is significant because it efficiently functions to assign either good or evil identities to individuals and nations with great ease, in the same way “the Lie” was used in Achaemenian Persia (Lincoln 2007). As I show below, the ongoing identification of the Obama Administration with evil helped create the rhetorical and material conditions in which his opponents could be identified with good.

Another important aspect of this philosophy of history is the way its proponents emphasize God’s use of humans (often Gentiles) throughout history to advance his plans for Israel. This is, of course, a feature of the narrative of the Hebrew Bible (cf. Alter [1981] 2011). Within this philosophy of history, Hebrew Bible narratives of humans acting as God’s instruments (for example Queen Esther and King Cyrus) serve as types or examples for future divine agents, whom they claim God has chosen to use to advance his plans. For example, extra-biblical historical actors such Lord Shaftesbury, Arthur Balfour, Theodor Herzl, and William Blackstone, and the various contributions they made to what would eventually become the state of Israel, are cited by Christian Zionists as examples of God’s use of humans to advance his plans in the world (Durbin 2018, 74–79). More provocatively, on one occasion, John Hagee described Hitler as God’s instrument whom he sent to get Jews to leave Europe and return to Palestine after they failed to take sufficient notice of Herzl’s plans (Wilson 2008). Other Presidents, such as Harry Truman for being the first head of state to recognize Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948 (see Goldman 2018, 67–69; Merkley 2004, 1–23), and Richard Nixon for supplying Israel with arms during the Yom Kippur war (Durbin 2018, 79), are cited as examples of God using humans to advance his will for Israel in more recent history.

The retrospective identification of ordinary historical actors as divine instruments works because of the central role that Israel has in this theology. Consequently, any decision or action by a person or government that has made Jewish presence in Israel possible, historically or contemporaneously, can be constituted as advancing God’s will. Conversely, anything thought to upset those plans is constituted as advancing the will of Satan. I suggested above that earlier expressions of philo-Semitism and restorationist theology constituted Jews as reluctant witnesses to advance Christian socio-political interests. The same can be said of dispensational influenced theology. Ariel (2013, 45) puts it concisely:

Analysis of the dispensationalist eschatological faith reveals unmistakably that the Jewish people are essential for many of the events of the end times to get going, especially during and after the Great Tribulation. Evangelical Christians have therefore taken special interest in the fate of the Jews and in the developments in the life of that nation and have often interpreted these events in light of their eschatological convictions.

Beliefs, however, are not static or unidirectional, and as Bruce Lincoln (2007, xi) notes, they are mutually sustained through the material forces of history. The philosophy of history outlined above acts like an interpretive grid rather than a map, shaped and augmented by social and political contexts. In the next section, I demonstrate how many of these themes were emphasized during the eight years of the Obama administration, when politically active Christian Zionists argued that he was inviting divine punishment on America for what was characterized as his administration’s poor treatment of Israel, in conjunction with his purported support for Israel’s and America’s enemies.

Creating the rhetorical conditions for God’s instrument to emerge

The conditions for constituting Trump or any other President as God’s instrument were put in place by the Christian Right long before they knew who they would support. This is because during the Obama administration’s two terms the Christian Right, and the conservative establishment more broadly, consistently defined him and his intentions as anti-Israel, anti-American, and, often, demonic.

Even prior to Obama’s first term, his opponents drew on conspiracy theories regarding his religious affiliation to smear him as an anti-Semite (McAlister 2010). One example of this was the Tennessee Republican Party’s dissemination of a February 2008 press release entitled “Anti-Semites for Obama.” As Melani McAlister argues, the press release, purportedly about Obama’s Middle East policies, “clearly insinuated that Obama had dangerous ties to Islam and was therefore opposed to Israel” (McAlister 2010, 222).

Obama’s connection to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons were critical of American foreign policy and race relations (e.g., Wright 2001), was also used to claim that he was both anti-American and anti-Semitic. For example, early in Obama’s first term, long-time Christian Right stalwart Gary Bauer⁶ made these links explicit to emphasize the danger he claimed America and Israel were in. Speaking at CUFI’s 2010 Washington Summit, Bauer took the first opportunity to associate the Obama administration with anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias. He noted that although a year prior “the jury was still out,” and that some people were willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, he “didn’t have much doubt.” For him, it was becoming increasingly evident that the administration was tilting the “United States away from Israel and quite frankly toward the Muslim world.” According to Bauer this was because:

I felt that the evidence was pretty strong given the President’s association with Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright, and I looked at the Sermons of Reverend Wright, they were anti-Semitic. I mean, my goodness, he honored Louis Farrakhan at his church, so it was hard for me to imagine that a good foreign policy would come out of the new administration for Israel, and I’m afraid a year later I think most reasonable people would conclude that um, this is a very anti-Israel administration. (Bauer 2010)

As I have argued elsewhere (Durbin 2013) from the outset of his presidency, some of Obama’s opponents and critics drew on the rhetoric of the jeremiad, claiming that Obama was mistreating Israel and thus inviting divine judgement upon the nation as a result. The eight years that spanned the Obama administration’s two terms provided a virtually limitless supply of occasions for American Christian Zionists to define themselves as true Christians, protecting Israel from a president whom many claimed was working on behalf of Satan to obstruct God’s will for Israel. Some of the ways this was achieved was by focusing on the administration’s criticism of ongoing building in East Jerusalem; Obama’s 2011 statement that “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” (cited in Friedman 2011); and the administration’s reticence to use language that his critics claimed sufficiently demonized Islam. The administration’s willingness to engage diplomatically with Iran, via the Iran Nuclear Deal, was also a primary source of demonization. As I discuss below, the deal was used as evidence that the administration was not only anti-Israel at its core, but also that it was intent on handing Israel’s enemy a nuclear weapon.

These themes were synthesized in a 2015 episode of Fox News’s show Hannity, entitled “Is President Obama Betraying Israel?” hosted by Sean Hannity. The segment aired on March 2, 2015, the day before Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech to a joint session of congress in which he vehemently opposed the Iran Nuclear Deal. Although the timing of the segment makes its political intent clear, in Hannity’s words, it was meant to explain to viewers “why there’s such an icy relationship between Israel and the White House.” The answer was pre-empted shortly thereafter when Hannity stated “ever since President Obama stepped foot in the Oval Office, he’s constantly proven that he is not a friend to Israel” (Hannity 2015).The evidence for this was then laid out through a series of clips from Obama’s speeches, starting with his 2009 speech in Cairo and what Hannity described as Obama’s “apology tour,” as well as the administration’s criticism of ongoing Israeli settlements which it said were illegitimate and undermined peace efforts.

In an effort to further demonstrate just how anti-Israel Obama was Hannity ended the segment by juxtaposing the previous clips with segments from speeches Obama had made that cast Islam in a positive light, in which he claimed that the “United States is not and will never be at war with Islam”; distinguished Islam from violent extremism; called Al-Qaeda a “gross distortion of Islam,” and stated that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” (Hannity 2015).

Unsurprisingly given the timing of the segment, underlying all of this was a focus on the Iran Nuclear Deal. As it was presented by Hannity and his guests, the passage of the Deal was a step toward the destruction of Israel. In this instance Obama was compared to Neville Chamberlain, blind to reality (and the existence of evil) in an attempt to appease the Nazis, while Netanyahu was compared to Winston Churchill.

One reason these themes are repeated is because they economically carry and advance a heavy ideological load. The fact that Obama referred to terrorists as terrorists rather than Islamic fanatics or simply Muslims was used as proof that he was a closet Muslim, or at least sympathetic to the aims of Islamists. As I elaborate below, in theological terms, the Iran nuclear deal is cited as evidence that Obama was in league with Satan, while his reference to 1967 borders was equated with dividing God’s land, impeding Jesus’ return, and thus inviting God’s judgment on the nation.

Spending eight years framing the Obama administration as anti-Israel, and thus anti-American and anti-God, ensured that any future presidential candidate’s discourse on Israel would inevitably play a role in their campaign. One example of the way discourse on Israel is used in political contests occurred when the two leading Republican candidates at the time—Donald Trump and Ted Cruz—were invited to address the 2016 meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Speaking before Cruz, Trump boasted of his long history of support for Israel, telling the audience that his “number one priority” as president would be to dismantle the Iranian nuclear deal. He also took time to criticize the United Nations, and said that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had “treated Israel very badly” (Begley 2016).

Ted Cruz, long thought to have been the Christian Right’s preferred candidate, tried to outdo Trump in his pro-Israel posturing. Cruz opened his speech by quipping that “perhaps to the surprise of the previous speaker [Trump], Palestine has not existed since 1948” (Cruz 2016). Moments later Cruz stated that

my leading Republican opponent [Trump] has promised that he, as President, would be neutral between Israel and the Palestinians. Well, let me be very, very clear: as President, I will not be neutral. America will stand unapologetically with the nation of Israel. (Cruz 2016)

This rhetorical sparring is one example of the way discourse on Israel and Palestine has become a significant item of political discourse and a measure of whether a particular candidate is fit for office.⁷ In this instance, Cruz was arguably more Hawkish on Israel, literally erasing Palestine in his speech and renouncing the (however dubious) claim of the United States to act as an honest broker in the conflict in favor of unreservedly supporting Israel. However, because Trump ended up receiving the nomination, his position on Israel became the frame of reference by which to compare him to Obama.

God’s man for Israel and America: The discursive construction of Donald Trump as God’s instrument

In the period between Trump’s nomination and eventual election, the Christian Right drew on a wide repertoire of Christian nationalist tropes in support of his candidacy—one of which was his stated support for Israel. Prior to Trump’s electoral victory, pro-Israel Christian news sources published a series of articles urging Christians to vote for Trump on the basis of his support for Israel and other issues framed around divine judgement. Much of this was achieved by the way they had previously framed Obama’s activities as actively inviting a curse on America—a curse which they asserted the Republican candidate was positioned to lift.

For example, Charisma News published a series of articles that framed the election as a referendum on whether the United States would continue to receive God’s favor. The first in the series, entitled “Will Obama’s Betrayal of Israel Bring America Down?” (Garlow 2016a) warned of (further) divine punishment on America due to Obama’s “betrayal of Israel,” his “love affair with Iran,” and his advocacy of “land for peace”—all of which the article claimed would continue if Hillary Clinton were elected. The second article (Garlow 2016b) in the series provided a solution under the title: “Could Donald Trump Reverse the Curse over America?” The article therefore implied that Trump’s purportedly pro-Israel stance would, to use his own campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” not through specific policies per se, but rather through the divine blessings that would follow those policies.

Casting Obama as an enemy of God, who was by proxy advancing Satan’s aims, therefore helped create the rhetorical conditions by which his political opponents could be constituted as God’s instruments. Thus, when Donald Trump was elected president, American Christian Zionists represented it as God’s will on account of his positions on Israel and Iran. In an interview with John Hagee on the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s pro-Israel television show The Watchman, the show’s host Erick Stackelback asked him whether he “was encouraged” by the new administration and its relationship with Israel. Hagee responded by saying that he was “very, very, very encouraged,” and that he believed “we’ve gotten our country back,” before expanding upon why he believed Trump won in the first place:

I believe that Mr. Trump broke out of the pack of all those Republican candidates when he started supporting Israel. He started making very bold statements that he would be the defender of Israel, that he would move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem …. And that’s when he started going up in the polls. I believe that’s when God almighty got involved in this electoral process and appointed him, ah, by the very supernatural power of heaven. Because the Bible says the Lord raises up a leader and God puts down a leader. And everyone is saying there’s a supernatural element. I assure you that when Donald Trump started saying good things about Israel, the winds of heaven got behind his political sails and pushed him right to the White House. (The Watchman 2017)

This example, repeated on numerous occasions,⁸ is also demonstrative of the way Christian Zionists like Hagee use historical, contingent, and often downright surprising events to bolster truth claims regarding the infallibility of the Bible. In this respect, Trump’s victory is represented in a manner similar to the way prophetically minded Christian Zionists represent Israel’s military victories. For them, Israel’s victory in 1967 was and is represented as a clear sign that God is acting on behalf of Israel, not only because Israel recaptured Jerusalem, the city to which they believe Jesus will return, but also because the seeming improbability of the victory (see McKay 2005; Mitchell 2018). Likewise, Trump’s victory is represented as further proof of the reality of the promises of Genesis 12:3, whereby his unlikely victory was aided by God who blessed him because of his discourse on Israel.

The film The Trump Prophecy (Schultze 2018) and book upon which it was based (Taylor and Colbert 2017) also advance this narrative. The film purports to show how Mark Taylor, a retired firefighter turned author and Pentecostal “prophet,” received divine revelation of Trump’s victory years before it occurred. At the end of the film, numerous figures from the Christian Right, including David Barton, Lance Wallnau, and Michelle Bachmann speak about various things they claim Trump has done to bring America back in line with God and his intentions for the nation. A prominent theme in their explanations relates to Trump’s relationship with Israel.

Janet Porter, the founder of Faith 2 Action,⁹ made this explicit:

If you want to be on the right side of history, you want to be on God’s side. And if God is for Israel—and he is—then I want to be for Israel …. When I saw that President Trump changed the embassy, and basically said “no, we are going to acknowledge the capital of Israel is Jerusalem and move our embassy where it should have been all along, I was cheering … what we need to do is stand with Israel, because God stands with Israel. (Schultze 2018)

Chris Mitchell, the Israel correspondent for Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) News, cited Genesis 12:3 and claimed that “Because of the blessing that President Trump has bestowed on the Jewish people, that will reap diplomatic, economic, and even spiritual blessings for the United States” (Schultze 2018).

By implicitly and explicitly invoking Genesis 12:3 in these instances, Christian Zionist supporters of Trump draw on anxieties about the decline of American empire, and the decline of America as a “Christian Nation,” they felt during the Obama Administration. In the same way, Christian Zionists claimed that Obama’s treatment of Israel was a source of American decline in the wake of the global financial crisis, many have represented Trump’s pro-Zionism as an avenue to redeem the nation. These examples also demonstrate the way that Christian Zionism and expressions of philo-Semitism can act as a screen for local socio-political interests. Just as British Evangelicals’ philo-Semitism was, among other things, a projection of their own belief that the British Empire was chosen by God to advance his will in the world by protecting his ancient people (Lewis 2010, 6), American Christian Zionist supporters of Trump emphasize his (and American) support for Israel in terms that advance their own claims of America as a Christian nation with a providential mission that extends beyond its own borders.

God’s gift to the Jews? Trump as King Cyrus and Queen Esther

Beyond generic claims, prominent American Christian Zionists have specifically identified Trump as God’s instrument in two ways that relate specifically to Israel: as the typological heir of King Cyrus and Queen Esther. Christian media made these connections in various ways. Isaiah 45 describes how the God of Israel takes hold of the pagan Persian King Cyrus’s right hand, in order to, among other things, “subdue the nations before him, and to strip kings of their armor” (Isa. 45:1) while also bestowing a “title of honor” on Cyrus despite the fact that he did not acknowledge the God of Israel (Isa. 45:4). The happy coincidence that Trump is the 45th president makes this connection that much more compelling for the evangelicals who supported and continue to support Trump because it establishes a biblical parallel, thus legitimating their truth claims.

In The Faith of Donald Trump, David Brody describes how he met Pentecostal figure Lance Wallnau who told him that “God spoke right to my ear, and said, ‘The next President of the United States will be the forty-fifth president, and he will be an Isaiah 45 president’” (Brody 2018, 330). Wallnau also claims that in a meeting with Trump, he told him “that the reason God’s hand was on him was because of the grace of God—to restrain evil. And that he would be the forty-fifth president of the United States” (Brody 2018, 335–336).

The Trump Prophecy (Schultze 2018) also made this connection. In one scene the film’s protagonist, Mark Taylor, wakes in a sweat on the floor, and immediately writes in his journal that he “saw God” in form of a bright orb. He then opens his Bible to the page where he had placed his father’s funeral program, which happens to be Isaiah 45, and reads the scripture aloud. In the following scene, Taylor wakes up to hear Trump speaking on television, and is compelled to write in his journal that “spirit of God told me, I have chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this. For as Benjamin Netanyahu is to Israel, so shall this man be to the United States of America.” The cosmic nature of this purported revelation, and its relationship to truth and the restraint of evil is also established visually by the presence of a demon who visits Taylor in his dreams and tries to prevent him from speaking, and thus from writing the prophecy down. In an interview with the real Mark Taylor on Dove TV (2017), the interviewer stated “Others have likened him [Trump] out of the book of Isaiah … 44 and 45—that he’s kind of like the King Cyrus of our day, where God literally took a non-believer and used him to save Israel. Is there any similarities there in your thinking?” to which Taylor replied, “absolutely.”

The pentecostal preacher Perry Stone also identified Trump with Cyrus from an overtly eschatological perspective. Speaking on his television show Manna-Fest, Stone (2017) told the audience that “because we are in the last days and because we’re in major prophetic cycles, we’re going to see some things emerge and develop that probably we’ve never seen emerge and develop before.” One of those prophetic cycles is what he called a “Cyrus pattern.” As with much of the discourse surrounding Trump’s relationship with Israel, Stone contextualized it in comparison with the Obama Administration, and opened his discussion of Cyrus by stating that:

The previous Administration did not deal well with Israel, they did not treat the Jewish people well. When you release billions of dollars to an enemy [Iran] in the Middle East that wants death to America and death to Israel, you got a problem somewhere, and that’s exactly what happened. Shipping in planeloads of cash to these individuals that were enemies of God’s people. (Stone 2017)

Stone identified other acts of King Cyrus, which he asserted were re-enacted by Trump, including Cyrus’s decree to build a wall around Jerusalem. In Stone’s words:

Cyrus was given a decree—this is funny—to, he gave the decree to the Jews, to build a protective wall around the city. The city had been destroyed. Enemies were coming into the city; strangers could come and go. That wasn’t God’s purpose for the city. So Cyrus says rebuild the wall. (Stone 2017)

Thus, while Stone sanctified Trump’s xenophobic pledge to build a wall along the southern border of the United States to keep immigrants out of the country, his focus returned to what he considered was the prophetic and eschatological nature of Trump’s victory and its relationship to Israel. “I might be standing here saying something that’s more prophetic than I even realize” Stone suggested, before continuing: “Cyrus assisted in the rebuilding of the Jewish temple, against much opposition, by the way, much opposition.” The focus on the opposition to Cyrus is undoubtedly a reference the opposition Trump consistently claims to receive from the media, the “establishment,” and other figures whom might be considered to be infected by a modern version of “the Lie.” More significant, however, is that Stone’s reference to the Temple relates to the belief among dispensationalists that Israel will build a third temple as part of their eschatological vision of the End Times.¹⁰ In this respect Stone is not simply suggesting that God is using Trump to protect Israel; he is also suggesting that God might be using him to help usher in Jesus’s return.¹¹

Following this, Stone (2017) discussed Israel within the parameters of the philosophy of history outlined above, noting that:

People ask me why are the evangelicals so tied in to the nation of Israel? It is not that big of a deal. Israel does a lot of things people politically disagree with. I don’t agree with everything they do politically. But let me say something to you: What about America’s relationship with Israel, and should Christians who know the Bible be concerned about that relationship?”

Stone’s final question is rhetorical, functioning as a useful segue into further discussion of the historical nations and peoples that have ceased to exist as a result of their treatment of Jews. Stone brought this up to the present day, claiming that social and economic problems in the United States were divine punishment for Obama’s treatment of Israel. Thus, Stone (2017) concluded on the following triumphant note:

I’ve come by to tell you something, that in the past several years, America lost its influence, America lost its respect as a nation; our debts rose to an insurmountable, unbelievable level. Natural disasters struck our country in a level that we’ve never seen before. And during the past three previous presidents of the United States I believe some of the decisions—it can’t be everything—but some of the decisions they made toward that nation [Israel] reduced us down in the favor of God. But I’ve come by to tell you that hour has now changed, in the name of the Lord!

Here, Stone’s declaration represents the logical conclusion of the preceding years’ relentless accusations that the Obama administration was anti-Israel, coupled with the theological claims of Genesis 12:3 and the belief that social and economic ills in America were divine punishment for that treatment. Thus, Trump becomes a divine instrument whom God is using not only to protect Israel, but also to redeem the United States. Beyond these instances of typology, Trump’s identity as the typological heir to Cyrus was most spectacularly achieved after he officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal capital.” Just as Cyrus let Jews return to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple, Trump’s decision earned him his own comparison to the Persian king.

For many Christian Zionists there were two specific reasons that moving the embassy was a good idea. One, they claimed, was because it was a “blessing” to Israel. Acknowledging Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal capital” and relocating the United States’ embassy there were represented as acts of piety, reorienting the United States into its appropriate relationship with God and rendering “blessings” upon the nation in return. A second reason the move was celebrated related to its eschatological implications, and the possibility that it could help kick start the events required for Jesus’s return.

The notion that the United States would be “blessed” as a result of the embassy move was expressed in the various ways. An e-mail from the Living Word Christian Centre (2018) in Minnesota framed the move in a way that left the content of the “blessings” vague:

When President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel last December, he reminded the world that America is Israel’s ally. In doing so, he set America up to be blessed. Going forward, may we as individuals and collectively as a nation, continue to stand for Israel.

At Cornerstone Church in Texas, however, John Hagee offered more explicit detail of how America was receiving divine favor after Trump announced that Jerusalem was Israel’s capital. According to Hagee, a few days after he met with Trump at the Whitehouse, “President Trump Declared to the world that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. And forever, it should be” (Hagee 2018b). He went on to explain

Word has reached us that on May the 14th [2018], President Trump is going to put the first phase of the embassy on the day of Israel’s statehood. This is supernatural stuff. The Bible says I will bless those who bless you. Look at the blessings that are pouring out on America right now. Our economy is exploding. The enemies of democracy are being exposed. Corruption is being exposed—it’s been there for years, now we’re seeing it. Our military is being rebuilt. Our military is crushing ISIS. Our borders are becoming secure. Our infrastructure is being rebuilt. We have a president who treats Israel like an ally and not like an enemy. Give god praise for that!

These claims were also echoed on Fox News by Jeannine Pirro. Not only did Pirro claim that Trump was like Cyrus fulfilling biblical prophecy, she also naturalized Christian Zionists’ philosophy of history, and celebrated the expressions of American military strength and empire that she found asserted in the declaration:

[Trump] not only sends a message to Iran but to Russia as well, that the US is back as a dominant regional player after the Obama years. He recognizes the reality that everyone else in the west willingly blinds themselves to—and that is that Jerusalem is the one and only capital of Israel. … The empires that tried to destroy Israel and its capital Jerusalem are long gone, yet the Jews still speak the same language and practice the same religion, which is the foundation of our own Judeo-Christian nation. Donald Trump sent Iranians who are the descendants of Persia a message to reflect on their own history, and that it was the king of Persia who, 1000 years before Mohammad was even born, said that Jerusalem was the capital of the Jewish people’s country.

There will be no Ottoman empires or Shia nations that will destroy Jerusalem any longer. Donald Trump recognized history. He, like King Cyrus before him, fulfilled the biblical prophecy of the gods worshipped by Jews, Christians and, yes, Muslims, that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish state and that the Jewish people deserve a righteous, free and sovereign Israel. (Pirro 2018)

These examples demonstrate how the content of Christian Zionists’ demonization and criticism of Obama have now become the frame of reference for their assertions that Trump is bringing “blessings” on the United States by supporting Israel. In this context, the economic and military stagnation they claim the United States experienced under Obama is now being reversed, through the United States’ more brazen reassertion of military power.

Similarly, while introducing Trump at a December 2017 rally in Pensacola, Florida, Republican Senator Doug Broxson excitedly linked Trump’s Jerusalem declaration to the end times, telling the crowd that: “when I heard about Jerusalem—where the King of Kings—where our soon coming King is coming back to Jerusalem, it is because President Trump declared Jerusalem to be capital of Israel”. (Palma 2017).

In addition to identifying Trump with Cyrus, he has also been identified as the typological heir of Queen Esther due his withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Deal and assassination of General Qasem Soleimani. Evangelicals in general, and Christian Zionists in particular have made long use of the book of Esther and its themes of divine instrumentality. As some Christian Zionists’ read it, the Book of Esther is another affirmation of aspects of their philosophy of history: the plot Haman hatched against the Jews of Persia was brought back upon him, after God used Esther to foil his plot; Haman tried to curse Persia’s Jews, and as a result, he was cursed by God (see Durbin 2012). The setting of Esther, in ancient Persia, also makes it particularly amenable for ideological appropriation for contemporary application due to the antagonistic relationship that the United States and Israel have with Iran, and the role that Iran has played in end times prophecy since the 1970s.

The prophetic speculation set off by Trump’s victory also involved new speculation about how God’s enemies might try to hinder his plans. In a 2018 sermon on Israel as “God’s prophetic clock” John Hagee (2018b) asked whether Iran would attack Israel “with new super weapons that have been made possible by the 150 billion donation made by Barack Obama?”

Again, the comparison of Trump to Esther is established in large part due to his undoing of Obama era policies (or, in the terms used in Isaiah 45, “restraining evil”), notably the Iran Nuclear Deal. Later in the sermon, Hagee (2018b) described what he claimed was the certainty of Iran’s future destruction based on the same premise that led to Haman’s demise in the Book of Esther:

Because what you do to the Jewish people, God will make sure is done to you. God is going to crush Iran in the soon coming Magog War. He is going to crush Russia—and I’m going to tell you how—it’s going to be the most awesome thing the world has ever seen. … Hang on—why should Americans care about this? Because Americans through Barack Obama have given a hundred and fifty billion dollars to Iran, whose mantra is death to Israel, death to America, and wipe Israel off the face of the earth. When Iran got that hundred and fifty billion dollars, they were on the verge of bankruptcy. But that 150 billion dollars from Barack Obama breathed new life into the greatest terrorist organization on the face of the earth. Money were (sic) given to Hezbollah and Hamas who have sworn to kill the Jewish people. That money can build bombs, and that money can build super rockets with which to attack Israel. War is coming in the Middle East, and it’s coming soon, and its going to be the biggest thing you’ve ever seen.

Hagee went on to claim that:

Terrorists who have pledged to destroy America, are already here. And when that war starts over there [In Israel], they want to start one here. But follow the money. Barack Obama gave 150 billion dollars. He loads up jets with cash to give Iran the money to fund Hezbollah, who are in America right now seeking a base of operation to kill Americans.

In this narrative, Hagee has inserted Obama into the end time scenario of the Gog Magog war that is centered around an Iranian attack on Israel that will lead to the rapture and start the process of Armageddon.¹² Theologians and others influenced by dispensationalism have inserted the modern nations of Russia and Iran into the war’s depiction in the Book of Ezekiel since the Cold War (see Boyer 1992, 152–180). In this instance, however, Obama has also been inserted into that text, whereby through the Iran Nuclear Deal he becomes a primary character in starting the Gog Magog war, thus advancing a demonic plot to kill Americans, destroy Israel, and prevent Jesus’s return.

Consequently, when Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran deal, assassinated Soleimani, and is preparing the way for war with Iran, his actions are represented in ways that make him a purported savior of the Jewish people. Just as Esther was unwittingly used by God to save Jews in ancient Persia, enabling them to destroy their enemies who plotted their destruction, Trump is represented as saving Israel from Iran, and reversing a curse on America that would have logically followed. Moreover, just as recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was interpreted as a source of national blessing and as a step closer to Jesus’s return, so too was Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran deal. As Hagee (2018b) interpreted it:

I believe we are watching the birth pangs of the Gog Magog War of Ezekiel 38. Why should you care? Because the rapture of the church of Jesus Christ happens just before the Gog Magog Wars.… Now let this congregation, and the world, and America recognize that we are living in the final moments of the dispensation of grace, and that the king of glory is coming with all of his power and glory, and let us be prepared for a meeting in the air.

Rather than simply being the voice of external lobbyists, this now appears to be a view within the administration. As an interviewer from CBN asked secretary of state Mike Pompeo: “Could it be that President Trump, right now, has been raised, for such a time as this, Just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from an Iranian Menace?” To which Pompeo responded “As a Christian I certainly believe that’s possible” (Brody 2019). In this context, then, Trump is not only constituted as God’s instrument, but by actually engaging in acts of violence against Iran, the United States is thus constituted as meting out divine retribution to God’s enemies.

With this in mind, then, it is worth making one final point about the implications of constituting Trump as God’s instrument on behalf of Jews. The election of Trump has seen an increase in hate crimes, and the emboldening of neo-Nazis and white nationalists. In Charlottesville, Virginia, white nationalists at the “Unite the Right” rally, whom Trump described as “very fine people” chanted that “Jews will not replace us.” The shooter who murdered eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018 explicitly cited the belief that Jews were working as part of a larger conspiracy to bring immigrants (described as “Invaders”) into the United States (Andone et al. 2018). These events are part of a broader trend of the rise in anti-Semitic attacks around the world—with the greatest increase occurring in the United States (Reuters 2019; O'Donnell 2020).

It is not difficult to see the connection between Trump’s rise and the corresponding emboldening of the far right and anti-Semitism in the United States. Yet many American Christian Zionists clearly do not make this connection. Organizations, such as Hagee’s CUFI, have been quick to denounce overt anti-Semitic violence in the United States, often e-mailing their members after such events to condemn them. Yet they still maintain that the Trump administration is the best friend to Jews in the United States and around the world. Part of this relates to the fact that, consciously or not, in much of American Christian Zionist discourse Jews are equated with Israel, and thus anti-Semitism is equated with criticism of Israel. As Jonathon O’Donnell (2020, 14) notes

In Christian Zionist theology, ‘Jewishness’ is inextricable from territoriality—specifically, the territoriality of the nation-state of Israel—and as such the ‘proper’ spatial location and eschatological role of ‘Jewishness’ is one that is fully contained and constrained by (Israeli) territorial limits.¹³

Consequently, so long as Trump continues to say positive things about Israel, and continues to vilify Muslims, this will be sufficient for Trump’s Evangelical Christian Zionists supporters to maintain that they, as Trump’s biggest supporters, are entirely absolved of their own support for the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States. It is also indicative of some of the heavy lifting the category of religion can do—downplaying the social and material conditions that can lead, in this instance, to an increase in anti-Semitic violence and conspiracy theories, while at the same time absolving their complicity in those social and material conditions due to their support for Israel which, to invert O’Donnell’s point cited above, is equated with support for “Jewishness.”

Conclusion

In Religion, Empire and Torture, Bruce Lincoln (2007, xi) emphasizes that rather than attempting to determine whether “beliefs or material interests constitute the real motive force in history,” the two should be recognized as being mutually sustained through a dialectical relationship. “The problem to be addressed” Lincoln states, is not “which comes first” but rather “how a given group reshapes its consciousness (of self, other morality, and purpose) through select acts of discourse such that its members feel licensed … in pursuing their material advantage in increasingly aggressive ways” (Lincoln 2007, xi). Taking Lincoln’s advice, I have tried to demonstrate how American Christian Zionists, and those who share their discourse, have constituted Trump as God’s instrument, in an effort to shape the world in ways that reflect their ideological and material interests as they relate to Israel and projections of American power. At the same time, this constitution is not a one-sided affair. Trump has also contributed to this discursive construction in, to use Lincoln’s phrasing, a mutually sustaining way through both his actions and his words.

During the eight years that spanned the Obama administration’s two terms, his critics and opponents spent a considerable amount of time and energy demonizing him as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, due to his stilted relationship with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as his pursuit and successful passage of the Iran Nuclear Deal. The latter was construed as foolish diplomacy when what was really needed was raw military might. For Christian Zionists influenced by dispensational theology these critiques were injected with even greater urgency due to the theological lens through which they were interpreted. For them, Obama was quite literally demonized as an agent of Satan attempting to destroy Israel, inviting divine judgement on America in return. Within this cultural context the conditions to constitute Trump as God’s instrument were easily established. Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, his withdrawal from the Iranian Nuclear deal, verbal sparring with Iran, and, most recently, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, have provided opportunities for Christian Zionists to constitute him as God’s instrument. For these Christian Zionists, God is using Trump to return America to its global position of power, and save Jews from destruction, thus paving the way for Jesus’ return—all of which hinge on the fact they are framed as reversals of the previous administrations’ intentions.

For those persuaded by it, the discourse surrounding Trump’s identity as the typological heir to King Cyrus and Queen Esther arguably works because Trump’s actions fit within a preexisting philosophy of history, which acts as an interpretive framework through which social and political conflicts are often understood or explained as part of the worldly manifestation of a cosmic battle between God and Satan. Consequently, Trump’s decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal capital,” to withdraw from the Iran Nuclear Deal, and, in the case of Soleimani’s assassination, to use violence to eradicate its enemies firmly establishes his administration as being on God’s side. Consequently, such acts are represented as important turning points that are helping return the country to its purportedly Christian roots and increasing divine favor as the world heads into the end times. Moreover, the fact that Trump won the election despite its seeming impossibility enables Christian Zionists’ to reaffirm their truth claims that God blesses those who bless Israel.

Understanding this philosophy of history and the theological and eschatological assumptions underlying it, in conjunction with the way many Christian Zionists construed the Obama administration’s poor treatment of Israel, provides some further explanation for why Christian Zionists and conservative evangelicals more broadly remain supportive of Trump. Moreover, this article demonstrates how religious discourse functions as a legitimating discourse for those who seek to gain, or maintain, positions of power. Finally, it also contributes to resolving the paradox of how American Christian Zionists—self-styled as a bulwark against the rising tide of anti-Semitism—also remain some the greatest supporters of an administration that is overseeing anti-Semitism’s rise.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Sean Durbin received his PhD from the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity, and Myth in John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (Studies in Critical Research on Religion, Volume 9, published in hardcover by Brill Academic Publishers in 2018 and in paperback by Haymarket Books in 2020). His articles have appeared in The Journal of Religion and Violence, Religion and Culture, The Journal of Contemporary Religion, and Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception. He currently lives in London, UK.

ORCID iD

Sean Durbin

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