By the time Shlomo Goren—the chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces and himself a war-worn and accoladed major general—reached the Old City of Jerusalem, someone (some swift-footed junior officer, perhaps) had already planted the flag of Israel atop the Dome of the Rock. It was June 7, 1967. Two days earlier, the fate of the nascent state of Israel had appeared to be sealed. Hundreds of thousands of Arab troops—the combined forces of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan—were bearing down on the tiny state. Yet here was Goren, a mere forty-eight hours later, racing through the heart of the Old City—a Torah scroll tucked under his arm, a ram’s horn, or shofar, in his hand—triumphant and on his way to reclaim the Temple Mount.
The fighting had not yet ceased. There was still a determined corps of Jordanian troops maintaining positions around the Old City, firing wildly and in vain at the Israeli tanks. Bullets whizzed by Goren’s head. But nothing would stop him from rushing up to the Temple—not the Israeli commander shouting for him to turn back, not the knife-sharp pang in his chest.
“The Temple Mount is ours!” he heard someone say. His heart nearly burst at the thought.
Rabbi Goren had immigrated to Palestine from Poland in 1925. His father was one of the leaders of a movement of Religious Zionists who believed that the establishment of the state of Israel would soon initiate the coming of the Messiah and the redemption of humanity. Reared in an Orthodox village near Haifa called Kfar Hasidim, Goren was a man of almost preternatural intellect. At the age of seventeen he published his first book, a dense treatise on the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides titled The Crown of Holiness.
Maimonides believed it was the responsibility of every generation of Jews to strive to rebuild the Temple. It was the House of God, after all, the link between earth and heaven. Goren agreed, as did a growing number of young Orthodox leaders, radical settlers, and yeshiva students, who, in direct opposition to traditional Orthodox teachings, argued that it was not only permissible but mandatory for Jews to worship atop the Temple Mount—that simply praying for the Temple’s restoration was not enough; one had to fight for it. And here they now were, a nation at last, fighting for it.
Once atop the Temple Mount, Goren took a moment to catch his breath. The view was majestic: Mount Zion to the west. To the east, the Mount of Olives. There was Hebron! And there Jericho! The land promised by God to his ancestors, all of it, in his sights for very the first time.
With the ram’s horn pressed to his lips, Goren turned to face the Holy of Holies—now the Dome of the Rock—summoned what breath he had left, and blew. The Israeli soldiers trudging up Mount Moriah heard the call. They dashed to the top of the Temple platform and, in a sudden apocalyptic rush, enveloped the rabbi, raising him into the air as he continued to blow the clarion call announcing to all of Israel’s children the retaking of the Temple Mount.
Then someone took a picture.
I have that photo, here before me. Rabbi Goren is wearing Coke-bottle glasses, but I tell you, I can see the light dancing in his eyes. With the ram’s horn pressed to his lips he is Joshua, calling forth the wrath of God who crumbles mountains. He is Aaron, staring out with virgin eyes upon the land of milk and honey. He is Moses: see how the soldiers run to him through the parting of dust and rubble! Two thousand years of wandering in the wilderness, and now, at long last, Eretz Yisrael is secured. Surely redemption is at hand.
Rabbi Goren could hardly be blamed for such apocalyptic fervor. By the end of what came to be known as the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel had captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights—the totality of biblical Israel. Its external enemies had been laid to waste, and with ease. Who could deny God’s hand in the victory? For a great many Jews, Israel’s war with the Arab armies was understood not in the earthly context of governments and political affairs but in the cosmic context of good fighting evil, darkness defeating light. The Jewish David had smitten the Arab Goliath. The prophecy had been fulfilled. The End of Days was at hand!
Even the most secular Israeli could not fail to be moved by the thought that the war was divine providence. Within hours of the army’s taking of the Temple, bulldozers began destroying Palestinian homes in front of the Wailing Wall, making it accessible to the Jews for the first time in centuries. Within months, the first settlers, mostly Religious Zionists from Goren’s own village, Kfar Hasidim, and its sister village, Kfar Etzion, began settling the West Bank. With the victory of 1967 and the occupation of Palestinian lands, Secular Zionism, once anathema to many Orthodox Jews, was gradually being framed as merely a transient stage in God’s master plan for the Jewish people—a precursor to the reestablishment of the Kingdom of David.
The notion that the state of Israel was just a placeholder for the eventual rule of God was not new. It was, in fact, the core belief of Religious Zionism. The idea emerged in the teachings of a charismatic rabbi named Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook (1865–1935). Rabbi Kook and his disciples thought of the state as “an external shell that would later be replaced by a messianic future, whose overt purpose was the reinstatement of the religious ritual on [the Temple Mount].”
In 1921, Rabbi Kook established an institute in Jerusalem dedicated to rebuilding the Temple. “Our faith is firm,” he said, “that days are coming when all the nations shall recognize that this place, which the Lord has chosen for all eternity as the site of our Temple, must return to its true owners, and the great and holy House [the Temple] must be built thereon.”
Of course, rebuilding the Temple would mean razing the Dome of the Rock. A story is told about Rabbi Goren: After blowing the ram’s horn, the rabbi ran up to General Uzi Narkiss, the commander of the Israel Defense Forces, and urged him to blow up the Dome of the Rock—now, before things settled, before the politicians and the peacemakers appeared. General Narkiss brushed Goren off, and control over the Temple Mount was returned to Jerusalem’s Muslim authorities. But the dream of the Religious Zionists to seize control of the Temple Mount in preparation for the coming of the Messiah never diminished.
At the heart of the Religious Zionist movement is the belief that the Jews are asleep, that they must be forcibly awakened and spurred into action. The temporary capture of the Temple Mount was the wake-up call. The Religious Zionists argued that the war of 1967 had been God’s design: God had compelled the Arabs to attack Israel in order to force the Jews to fight back and thus liberate all of the Promised Land. Rabbi Kook’s eldest son, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, the founder of the radical settler movement Gush Emunim (The Believers’ Bloc), argued that even the Holocaust had been “a cruel divine operation in order to lift [the Jews] up to the Land of Israel against their wills.”
With the call of the shofar ringing in their ears, the Religious Zionists set to work creating an unalterable reality on the ground by settling captured Palestinian lands. Settlement was never meant to be official Israeli policy—not initially. But there was little the government could do to prevent it. The state held no sovereignty over the religious beliefs of the settlers. “The wholeness of the Land of Israel is not within the realm of the government of Israel’s decision,” declared Ya’akov Filber, a disciple of Rabbi Tzvi Kook.
Tzvi Kook died in 1982, but his spirit lives in the settler movement he left behind. In fact, over the last three decades, Gush Emunim has transformed itself from a small band of Religious Zionists centered in and around Rabbi Goren’s hometown of Kfar Hasidim into the largest and most powerful social movement in Israel, “a semi-official governing body,” in the words of political scientist Ian Lustick, one whose organizational network spans the entire country. Gush Emunim has for years managed to dominate Israeli politics by insinuating its goals into the political platforms of radical religious parties like the ultra-Orthodox Shas, the Yahadut HaTorah, and the Jewish National Front party, which seeks to replace the civil law of the state with the religious law of the Torah. However, its current alignment with the right-wing Likud party, whose platform rejects the possibility of a Palestinian state and refers to the Occupied Territories by their biblical names, Judea and Samaria, now allows members of Gush Emunim to engage directly in the implementation of government policies in the Occupied Territories.
Like their Zealot predecessors, Gush Emunim and like-minded Religious Zionists insist on a state governed wholly by religious law, one in which the land is cleansed of its “foreign” inhabitants so as to hasten the return of the Messiah; non-Jews, and even secular Jews, have no place in the divine Israel imagined by the Gush. Indeed, just as zeal provided a symbol of spontaneous individual action that united the various revolutionary groups in first-century Palestine across regional, religious, and social boundaries, so now does it unite a broad coalition of Religious Zionists, ultra-Orthodox haredim, ideological settler groups (residents of Itamar, Rahelim, Yitzhar, Shalhevet Ya, Amona, Har Bracha, and dozens of other mostly illegal settlements dotting the West Bank), and yeshiva students, who together have formed what the French scholar of religions Gilles Kepel terms a “re-Judaization movement” in Israel. By carving out a distinct and separate collective identity for themselves that is beyond the control of both the secular authority of the Israeli state and the religious authority of Israel’s Rabbinical Council, these modern-day Zealots are actively engaged in supplanting the secular Zionism that has defined Israel’s political identity since its inception with a messianic Zionism whose ultimate goal is the dismantling of the secular state altogether.
In repeated confrontations with the Israeli army, most recently in Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the Religious Zionists have shown that they would prefer civil war in Israel to peace with the Palestinians. That is because these Jews define their national identity in terms not of civic loyalty to the state but of religious obligation to the land. For them the state of Israel has no intrinsic value, other than to serve as a vehicle for the settlement of Jews. Their national narrative begins not with Dreyfus and Herzl but with Moses and Aaron. Their divine mission is to ensure that the Occupied Territories are permanently annexed into the state of Israel, that not one inch of God’s promised land will ever be returned to the Palestinians. And as they have repeatedly demonstrated, they will go to any length to disrupt peace negotiations that may lead to a Palestinian state, even if it means killing their fellow Jews. Thus, the homes of Israelis who have criticized illegal settlements have been bombed, and fliers have been distributed in Jerusalem offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who kills a member of the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now, which favors dismantling the settlements as part of a peace plan with the Palestinians. As a settler leader told The New York Times in 2008, the Jews must decide “whether they are on the side of the Torah or the state.”
It was one of these Jewish radicals, Yigal Amir, who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after he had signed the Oslo Peace Accords, which promised to return lands seized in 1967 to the Palestinians as a first step toward a lasting peace. Amir’s actions almost single-handedly derailed the peace process and put an end to the Oslo Accords—just as he had intended. Asked why he would commit such a heinous crime and under whose orders, Yigal Amir replied that he had acted alone and without guidance from anyone save God—just like Phinehas. His actions, he argued, had been justified both by Jewish law and by precedent. “According to the Halacha [Jewish law] you can kill the enemy,” he told the magistrate at his trial. “My whole life, I learned Halacha. When you kill in war, it is an act that is allowed.” It was quite simple, really: Rabin was giving away God’s land in return for peace. He had therefore forfeited his identity as a Jew. He was now “the enemy,” a traitor, an apostate. His sin was a blight upon the whole of the land; it had to be wiped away. By killing Rabin, Amir believed, he was saving Israel from God’s judgment. He was, according to his wife, sacrificing himself for the sake of God’s people.
Yigal Amir has been branded a zealot, a radical, a terrorist, even a madman. But the truth is that his views on the sanctity and inviolability of biblical Israel, and the measures that could be taken according to Jewish law to cleanse and preserve the totality of the Promised Land, are surprisingly widespread in modern-day Israel. A 2006 poll conducted by the Dahaf Institute for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth revealed that nearly a third of Israelis favored pardoning Amir for Rabin’s assassination. Among self-described “religious” Israelis, support for Amir’s release reached 50 percent. In 2007, on the thirteenth anniversary of Rabin’s murder, a packed soccer stadium in Haifa erupted in chants of “Yigal Amir! Yigal Amir!” when the announcer asked for a moment of silence to honor the former prime minister.
It is not only in Israel that one finds support for men like Amir and his fellow Jewish cosmic warriors. When Pat Robertson, America’s premier evangelical preacher, heard about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, he was convinced it was part of God’s master plan for the region. “This is God’s land,” Robertson declared, “and God has strong words about someone who parts and divides His land. The rabbis put a curse on Yitzhak Rabin when he began cutting up the land.”
Robertson is not just an evangelical media mogul. He is one of the principal figures in a coalition of evangelical organizations, based mostly in the United States, dedicated to helping Israel’s cosmic warriors maintain their grasp on the whole of the land. These so-called Christian Zionists (the term was coined by Theodor Herzl to refer to the Christian colonialists who supported the creation of the state of Israel) are motivated by the conviction that the politics of Israel, and indeed of the entire Middle East, are being orchestrated by God. And like their Jewish and Muslim counterparts in Israel and Palestine, they are actively engaged in working against the peace process, which, they argue, is “an international plot to steal Jerusalem from the Jews”—a plot that, in the words of the evangelical writer Mike Evans, is being controlled by “a master collaborator [Satan] who is directing the play.” As the megachurch pastor John Hagee, the high priest of Christian Zionism, has proudly declared, “God doesn’t care what the United Nations thinks. He gave Jerusalem to the nation of Israel, and it is theirs.”
Like Israel’s Jewish cosmic warriors, these Christian cosmic warriors believe that the Jews must rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem in order to usher in the return of the Messiah. Of course, as Christians, they believe that the Messiah is Jesus Christ and that when he returns to earth the Jews will have to either convert to Christianity or be damned. But remarkably, the last act of this cosmic drama seems not to matter much to either the Jews or the Christians in this messianic coalition. That is because what binds these two very different religious communities together under a single, transnational, collective identity is not a shared theology but a common cosmic worldview and, more important, a common cosmic foe. “The line between the political and the biblical is disappearing,” explained Josh Reinstein, the director of the Israeli Parliament’s Christian Allies Caucus, whose purpose is to create a covenantal relationship between Israel’s Religious Zionists and America’s evangelical Christians. “Around the world, we see the rise of radical Islam come against our Judeo-Christian values, and we must meet it with a well organized response.” Islam is a cosmic enemy that, as the evangelical writer Hal Lindsey, the author of the apocalyptic blockbuster The Late Great Planet Earth, has written, “seeks not only to destroy the state of Israel, but also the overthrow of the Judeo-Christian civilization—the very foundation of our western civilization.” For Lindsey and his fellow Christian cosmic warriors, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is not a political problem to be diplomatically resolved but “Ground Zero in the end time events.” In their imagination, the armies of Good and Evil are already gathering in the Holy Land in preparation for that final battle, when this valley of gently sloping hills and gnarled olive groves will be filled with the machines of war, with blood, and with the bodies of the fallen.
Yet while these Christian Zionists believe that the final battle on earth will begin in Jerusalem, the attacks of 9/11 and the resulting War on Terror have, in their minds, expanded the theater of conflict and shifted the epicenter of the cosmic war to what they like to call “God’s New Israel”: America. Americans have always had a sense of divine destiny. The Puritans who settled this untamed land were convinced they were reliving the story of the Exodus in the New World. “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people,” Herman Melville wrote, “the Israel of our time.” Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century fire-and-brimstone preacher best known for his phlegmatic sermon “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,” liked to describe America as “the new Canaan,” declaring that “America has received the true religion of the old continent.”
The Founding Fathers consciously conceived of the United States as “the Israel on the Potomac”: a light onto the nations; a city on a hill. When asked to draft a seal to represent the new nation, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams drew up a seal that depicted Moses on the shores of the Sea of Reeds, his staff raised, the waters surging over Pharaoh’s army. The motto: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”
That is not to say that the United States was founded as “a Christian nation.” This is a modern fantasy constructed primarily upon the pseudo historical musings of the Calvinist theologian Rousas John Rushdoony, whose best-selling books The Messianic Character of American Education and Intellectual Schizophrenia launched the Christian nationalist movement in the 1960s. Yet in throwing off the yoke of an institutional church, the new nation gradually developed into a kind of church itself. Patriotism became a form of religious devotion. The flag was transformed into a totem. The Declaration of Independence was cast as a covenant between God and his new chosen people. The Constitution took on the patina of divine scripture.
From Manifest Destiny to the War on Terror, the American experience has always been infused with a sense of sacred purpose, a conviction that America’s values are God’s values, meant for the whole of the world. If, after all, the principles upon which the country is founded are not just universal but self-evident, granted by God to all men yet established in only one nation, then it must be the task of that nation to deliver those principles to all other nations; to, in effect, carry out God’s will on earth—by force if necessary. “America,” preached the nineteenth-century Congregational minister Lyman Beecher, “is destined to lead the way in the moral and political emancipation of the world.”
Belief in America’s divine providence was not solely a Christian sentiment. As wave after wave of immigrants of all faiths and religious traditions began arriving in the New World, they too gradually adopted the notion that the United States was, in the words of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the Austrian Jewish immigrant who helped found Hebrew Union College in 1875, “now and forever the palladium of liberty and its divinely appointed banner-bearer, for the progress and redemption of mankind.”
There is, of course, an obvious corollary to the idea of America’s divine purpose and national righteousness. If America is the agent of God, then America’s enemies—whether internal or external—must be the agents of Satan. This cosmic duality has served American politicians well, particularly in times of conflict and war. During World War I, the Committee on Public Information was tasked by the U.S. government with convincing Americans that the war was being waged “by the saints against unmitigated evil” and that the “Huns”—by which the Committee meant the Germans—“were the very creatures of Satan, completely devoid of human compassion and totally committed to wrecking the free world.” Similar themes drove the propaganda of the Second World War, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt expressly painted as a battle between the cosmic forces of good and evil. “The world is too small to provide adequate ‘living room,’ for both Hitler and God,” Roosevelt defiantly announced to Congress on January 6, 1942.
The half-century Cold War that followed World War II effectively shifted this cosmic duality onto an ideological plane, wherein the conflict was not so much between God and Satan as between God and godlessness. When Ronald Reagan, who regularly invited evangelical ideologues such as Hal Lindsey, Jerry Falwell, and Mike Evans to the White House to tutor him on scripture and prophecy, first labeled the Soviet Union “The Evil Empire” in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, he was using coded language that his Christian audience would have implicitly understood. Reagan was not decrying any particular Soviet action as evil. This was evil as a metaphysical force: nameless, primal, omnipresent. The opposite of good. The opposite of us.
Such brazen use of Christian rhetoric in support of war is, as we have seen, a legacy of the Crusades, which not only solidified the notion that physical combat against “the enemies of Christ” could be a valid expression of Christian faith but altered the very language of Christianity. The appearance on the battlefield of priests and monks, bishops, and even a pope (Leo IX), as well as members of religious military orders such as the Templars and the Hospitalers—all of them armed with “the cross of Christ”—permanently embedded into the Christian religion metaphors of war and militancy that to this day can be heard in churches around the globe, where the faithful are encouraged to “put on the armor of God” and “carry the banner of Christ into battle” and where the most mundane activities are saturated with martial imagery.
“The Christian home is to be in a constant state of war,” says Ted Haggard, the disgraced former pastor of one of America’s largest and most politically influential evangelical megachurches, New Life Church in Colorado Springs.
“The local church is an organized army equipped for battle, ready to charge the enemy,” declared the late Jerry Falwell, the man most responsible for the meteoric rise of the Religious Right in America. “The Sunday school is the attacking squad,” Falwell continued, and the task of the Christian missionary is to “bombard our territory, to move out near the coast and shell the enemy … to set loose on the enemy’s stronghold.”
Again, these are merely metaphors. Just as the Israel Defense Force employs religious symbols to bolster its military agenda, the Religious Right uses the symbols of war and militancy to buoy its social agenda. For centuries, firebrand preachers have spoken of Christian faith as a battle to be waged against the demonic forces of this world.
Still, it is difficult not to notice how this kind of militant Christian rhetoric has, over the last century, become a staple of the American evangelical movement represented by its pillars, Haggard, Falwell, and Pat Robertson. Indeed, contemporary evangelicalism seems to have so utterly absorbed the notion that warfare can be a valid expression of Christian faith that, according to research done by the preeminent scholar of American evangelicalism, George Marsden, evangelicals are far more likely than other Americans to sanction and support war. This has certainly been the case when it comes to the so-called War on Terror. A survey of the twenty-four fastest-growing evangelical churches in the Pacific Northwest, conducted by James K. Wellman of the University of Washington in 2004, revealed overwhelming enthusiasm for America’s campaign in Iraq: of nearly three hundred evangelical clergy and lay leaders interviewed by Wellman, only fifteen failed to express unqualified support for the war. Two years later, when approval of the war was at an all-time low in almost every other sector in American society, another survey, this one conducted by Baylor University, concluded that 60 percent of evangelicals in the United States continued to support the war in Iraq (50 percent remained convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Saddam Hussein had been directly involved in the attacks of 9/11).
It is not that evangelicals advocate war in general. However, there is something in the evangelical worldview that, in contradiction to traditional Christian teachings regarding forgiveness and nonviolence, allows for far greater zeal for war, especially if the conflict is presented through a cosmic lens. (Think of the success that Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” or George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” had in capturing the evangelical imagination.) To understand why this is the case requires a closer look at the roots of evangelicalism.
Evangelicalism is not so much a religious sect as it is a social movement, focusing as it does on what it considers to be the social implications of the Gospel story. More precisely, it is a coalition of diverse and highly individualistic submovements, each of which traces its theological origins to the Christian revivalist trends that dominated Protestant churches in the United Kingdom and the United States throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It would be inaccurate to consider evangelicals a distinct denomination within Christianity. Rather, this is a transdenominational movement that pulls from a host of Protestant traditions—from the Methodists to the Presbyterians, the Southern Baptists to the Pentecostals.
Modern American evangelicalism grew out of another distinctly American religious movement called fundamentalism, which arose in the early twentieth century, was a period of grave uncertainty for many conservative Christians. New and unfamiliar ideas such as Darwinism and feminism were posing extraordinary challenges to traditional Christian beliefs; the scientific revolution in general seemed to make a mockery of the idea of biblical creationism. A new generation of Christian scholars, encouraged by innovative theories of literary criticism, began scrutinizing the Bible according to such novel considerations as “cultural context” and “authorial intent.” Their efforts resulted in a movement of Christian liberalism that sought to reconcile traditional Christian values with new American ideals of scientific progress, cultural relativism, and religious pluralism, all of this at a time when the rapid modernization and secularization of society had led to a swift decline in church attendance, while a massive influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants into the United States threatened to permanently alter the face of religion in America.
Fundamentalism (the term derives from a series of Christian tracts entitled The Fundamentals, published between 1909 and 1915) was a means of pushing back against these new forces in American society. Originally, the term “fundamentalism” was used to describe a militantly ultraconservative wing of the American evangelical movement (“A Fundamentalist is an Evangelical who is angry about something,” George Marsden wrote). Fundamentalists argued that it was not enough merely to believe in God and obey the teachings of the Gospels. One had to make a personal, confessional commitment to Jesus Christ, so that he could wash away one’s sins with his “redeeming blood.” Only then could one reenter the world in purity and innocence as “born again.”
Fundamentalist leaders preached a radical return to the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Chief among these was an uncompromising belief in the infallible, inerrant, and absolutely literal nature of the Bible. Fundamentalists regarded the Bible as one sustained historical narrative—from the creation of the world to its imminent destruction—in which every single word is “God breathed,” to use a biblical phrase. In other words, not only is the Bible without error, but its myths and fables must be read as historical fact.
The fundamentalist position was a departure from traditional Christianity. Although the early Christians considered the Bible’s human writers to be conduits through which the word of God was revealed, they recognized that the texts themselves had nevertheless been written by men. That is why they canonized four gospels, even though the gospels often contradict one another on such sacrosanct issues as Jesus’s genealogy, the events of his birth, the chronology of his life, the date and time of his death, and the circumstances surrounding his resurrection. Rather than conceal or apologize for these discrepancies, the early Christians openly acknowledged them as part of an ongoing dialogue over the meaning and significance of Jesus’s words and deeds.
For fundamentalists, however, adherence to the literal and inerrant nature of the Bible was not merely a matter of dogma, it was a test of Christian loyalty, a means of differentiating themselves from other Christians. In the 1920s and ’30s, fundamentalist preachers began exhorting their flocks to regain control of Christian orthodoxy and check the rampant secularization and liberalization of American society by breaking away from mainline denominations within the larger evangelical coalition. Fundamentalist groups began forming their own independent churches, often in homes and schools. To promote their cause and to combat Christian liberalism, they built large networks of voluntary organizations whose mission was to spread their uncompromising beliefs throughout the country.
But by the 1960s, thanks in part to the friendlier, more inclusive evangelicalism espoused by the tent-revival preacher Billy Graham, the term “fundamentalist” began to fall out of favor in America, though fundamentalism itself did not disappear. Instead, its rigid social ideology and militant worldview were gradually reabsorbed into mainline evangelicalism. The result was a rift in the American evangelical coalition that led to the formation of two distinct submovements: the more socially and theologically relaxed strand, represented by groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals and by Jim Wallis’s social justice organization Sojourners; and the more ideologically intransigent and socially conservative strand, represented by such groups as Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family (scholars of religion tend to refer to the former movement as “evangelicalism” and the latter as “fundamentalist evangelicalism”).
Ultimately, the term “evangelical” is a self-designation, one that, according to polls conducted by Gallup and the Princeton Religion Research Center, more than a third of all Americans apply to themselves. There are, however, a few common traits that unite this kaleidoscopic collection of Christians under a single collective identity. The first is an uncompromising adherence to a set of fundamental doctrines that include belief in the literalism and inerrancy of the Bible; emphasis on an unmediated relationship with Jesus Christ; a zealous devotion to the conversion of others; and a cosmic worldview in which, to quote George Marsden, “the universe is divided into two—the moral and the immoral, the forces of light and darkness.” Though such beliefs exist in one form or another in many Christian denominations, what distinguishes the evangelical movement is the conviction that these doctrines, when adopted rigidly and as a whole, result in a kind of spiritual rebirth that separates evangelicals from all other Christians (hence the evangelical belief that salvation belongs only to those who have been “born again”).
Beyond belief in these doctrines, however, what most distinguishes evangelicals as a single community of faith is their overwhelming sense of feeling under siege. This is a reactionary movement that has, from its inception, thrived on tension and conflict, not just in its interactions with the secular world but also, and perhaps more often, in its confrontations with other Christian sects and denominations (particularly Catholicism and Mormonism, neither of which is considered a valid form of Christianity in the evangelical worldview). There exists in this movement a socially constructed atmosphere of crisis, conflict, and threat derived from the perception that, as those who have been “born again,” evangelicals have inherited God’s covenant from Israel. They are the new chosen people, and, like the Israelites of old, they must forever be tested by God and despised by the world.
This self-imposed worldview of constant embattlement can be impervious to reality. In the United States, where there are more than one hundred million evangelicals and nearly one thousand evangelical megachurches (defined as churches with more than two thousand members), where in 2004 almost half of the Senate and a third of the members of the House of Representatives were given an approval rating of 80 to 100 percent by evangelical watch groups, and where, until recently, the president and a great many members of his cabinet and staff were practicing evangelicals, a constant lament of evangelical leaders such as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention is that the rights of evangelicals are being trampled upon because, for instance, they are not allowed to have prayer in public schools or post the Ten Commandments on government property. As the sociologist Christian Smith has noted, the evangelical movement’s vibrancy, its ability to sustain a distinctive religious subculture, is owed precisely to this constructed sense of siege. Without it, Smith writes, the movement would “lose its identity and purpose and grow languid and aimless.”
Just as vital to the vigor of the evangelical movement in America is its fervent religious nationalism—the conviction that the United States is “a Christian nation,” appointed by God to establish Christian values throughout the rest of the world. For many evangelicals, “Christianization” and “Americanization” are inseparable ideas—the cross and the flag bleed into a single national emblem. A few evangelical groups, such as WallBuilders, Battle Cry, the Coalition on Revival, the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and the Family Resource Council, even talk of replacing the Constitution with the Bible and civil law with the law of God. These Christian nationalists (sometimes called “Dominionists” or “Christianists” by scholars—the latter term is meant to emphasize their startling resemblance to adherents of another form of religious nationalism: “Islamism”), seek to “redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to take political power,” as Chris Hedges writes in his study of the movement, American Fascists.
In the cosmic worldview of American evangelicalism, the United States has been elevated to sacred status. America’s national success serves as confirmation of God’s blessings; America’s enemies are God’s enemies. Surveys have repeatedly shown that large numbers of American evangelicals believe that God actively favors the United States in international conflicts. And perhaps this fact, more than anything else, explains why evangelicals seem to be more willing than other Americans to support state-sanctioned war. In the evangelical imagination, such wars are not merely conflicts between armies and nations; they are cosmic battles between the forces of good, represented by America, and the forces of evil, represented by America’s enemies. The attacks of 9/11, which according to evangelical leaders like Mike Evans was “a dress rehearsal for Armageddon,” seemed only to confirm this view, even as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq quickly took on the tenor of a cosmic conflict against demonic forces. As Charles Stanley of the Southern Baptist Convention argued, “While we do have a real enemy who seeks our destruction, we are not defenseless. We have the strength and the energy given to us by Christ Himself. Nothing is stronger than this. The same power God used to raise His Son from the grave—resurrection power—is ours.”
This blending of martial and cosmic imagery to describe America’s sacred status as God’s favored nation is certainly not new to U.S. history, though it did reach new heights under the presidency of George W. Bush, perhaps the most forcefully religious president in recent memory. In the days and weeks following the attacks of 9/11, Bush consciously painted the conflict with Jihadism in unapologetically cosmic terms, repeatedly declaring America’s intention to “rid the world of evil.” For months after the launch of the War on Terror, Bush refused to call Osama bin Laden by his name, referring to him instead as “the Evil One”—a reference to Satan from the New Testament that would not have been lost on his evangelical base (nor on the Jihadists). Bush not only elevated the United States to sacred status, he made it the agent of God’s “infinite justice” (the name he originally chose for the military campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan). In fact, he went so far as to endow the United States with Christ’s salvific power when, standing on the shores of Ellis Island, he declared, “America is the hope of all mankind…. [It is] the light that shines in the darkness; and the darkness shall not overcome it”—an allusion to Jesus from the Gospel of John (1:5). As Gregory Boyd, himself an evangelical pastor, noted in his critique of President Bush’s rhetoric, “In this paradigm, what applies to Jesus (‘the light of the world’) can be applied to our country, and what applies to Satan (‘the darkness’) can be applied to whomever resists our country. We are of God; they are of the Devil. We are the light; they are the darkness. Our wars are therefore ‘holy’ wars.”
Bush himself took on a messianic aura in the minds of some evangelicals, as Lieutenant General William G. Boykin suggested in a much-publicized speech at the Good Shepherd Church in Oregon. “Ask yourself this,” Boykin asked the congregation. “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning, he’s in the White House because God put him there for such a time as this. God put him there to lead not only this nation but to lead the world, in such a time as this.”
General Boykin has since retired from the military, though he remains affiliated with an evangelical missionary organization called Faith Force Multiplier, whose stated mission is to “enlist, train, and empower a great army of believers for the sake of the Kingdom of God,” and to “send and maintain military missionaries in strategic locations throughout the world” (italics mine). Faith Force Multiplier, in fact, is part of a well-coordinated and well-funded effort, under way since before 9/11, to convert members of the U.S. Armed Forces into what Boykin himself has termed “a Christian Army.” This systematic evangelicalization of the armed forces has been taking place at the very highest levels of the U.S. military; indeed, right inside the Pentagon, where another influential evangelical organization, the Christian Embassy, has become so deeply entrenched that it has been referred to as “a quasi-federal entity” by members of the military’s top brass. As Army Brigadier General Robert Caslen boasted when he appeared in a promotional video for the group, the Christian Embassy is “the aroma of Jesus Christ here in the Pentagon.”
The mission of the Christian Embassy is simple: convert high-ranking diplomats and military officers to evangelical Christianity so that they can then press the evangelical gospel upon their subordinates, both in the United States and abroad. The strategy is working. In the last few years, news reports, watchdog groups, and even an internal military investigation have uncovered numerous instances of overt and aggressive proselytizing by evangelical officers and faculty members at military bases and service academies across the United States. The most glaring transgressions have taken place at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a city hailed as the Vatican of the fundamentalist evangelical movement. Colorado Springs is home to Ted Haggard’s New Life Church and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, both of which maintain close ties with the academy, offering cadets Sunday services and Bible study workshops. The city is also home to the missionary organization Campus Crusade for Christ, whose director, Scott Blom, has publicly declared his organization’s intention to turn cadets at the Air Force Academy into “government-paid missionaries.”
In 2006, an independent investigation conducted by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State discovered that chaplains at the Air Force Academy had repeatedly prodded evangelical cadets into proselytizing their nonevangelical classmates, who would otherwise, the chaplains said, “burn in the fires of hell.” The academy’s evangelical faculty members were cited for regularly introducing themselves to their classes as “born again” and encouraging their students to speak to them about their faith. A Christmas greeting, published in the academy’s official newspaper and signed by three hundred members of the faculty and staff, including sixteen department heads and deputy heads as well as the dean of the faculty, not only declared that “Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world” and that “there is salvation in no one else” but also encouraged cadets to seek out the signatories of the document in order to “discuss Jesus.” The investigation concluded that these and other activities at the Air Force Academy constituted “egregious, systematic, and legally actionable violations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
Certainly, service members must be able to fulfill their spiritual needs (it should be noted that the Air Force Academy currently employs eighteen full-time chaplains and twenty-five reserve chaplains to attend to approximately four thousand cadets). But as the investigators who wrote the report for Americans United charged, the atmosphere of rampant evangelization at the Air Force Academy has become so pervasive that there is now a widespread perception among cadets that “to please their instructors, [they] should embrace the instructors’ faith” and that “mimicking their superiors’ religious beliefs and practices is necessary to succeed at the Academy.”
It is obvious why these evangelical organizations have targeted the military. This is fertile ground for religious conversion, as Cadence International, a military missionary organization near Fort Jackson admits: “Deployment and possibly deadly combat are ever-present possibilities. [The cadets] are shaken. Shaken people are usually more ready to hear about God than those who are at ease, making them more responsive to the gospel.”
However, there is something else at work here, as Cadence International itself admits. Military personnel are particularly valuable targets for conversion because, once converted, they have the ability to “spread the gospel as they move from assignment to assignment.” The fact is, the systematic efforts of evangelical groups such as Cadence International, Christian Embassy, and Campus Crusade for Christ (to name but a handful of such organizations) to convert members of the military in a time of war is part of a larger, coordinated initiative to use American soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan—countries where Christian missionaries are not welcomed—to convert Muslims to evangelical Christianity. An investigation by the McClatchy Newspapers found that American soldiers dressed in military fatigues and surrounded by tanks and armored Humvees have been passing out New Testaments and evangelical pamphlets while out on patrol. “I am able to give [Iraqis] tracts on how to be saved, printed in Arabic,” Captain Steve Mickel, an army chaplain in Iraq, enthused. “I wish I had enough Arabic Bibles to give them as well.”
Some Iraqi children have received colorful comic books depicting Muslims burning in hell for not accepting Jesus as their savior. At a checkpoint in Fallujah, the scene of a gruesome U.S. offensive against Sunni insurgents in 2004, U.S. marines were caught handing out shiny coins to Iraqis crossing into the town. One side of the coin asked in Arabic, “Where will you spend eternity?” The other side had a verse from the Gospel of John: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
“Because we are weak this is happening,” said a shop owner in Fallujah when given one of these coins—the comment as much a threat as a statement of fact.
Such actions violate the U.S. military code of conduct, which expressly forbids soldiers from proselytizing their religion while serving in foreign countries, and more than a few service members have been severely reprimanded for doing so. Yet it may be difficult to fault these men and women in uniform for treating the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as missionary opportunities when, from the start, both campaigns, and indeed the larger ideological conflict with Jihadism that the campaigns are supposed to represent, have been deliberately imbued with cosmic significance by their superiors. When the commander in chief of the armed forces declares that God instructed him to remove al-Qa’ida from Afghanistan and to strike at Saddam Hussein in Iraq, as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported Bush as saying in 2003; when the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, emblazons the president’s top-secret briefings with what the journalist and Bush biographer Robert Draper calls “Crusades-like messaging” and verses from the Bible (“Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand” Ephesians 6:11–13); when the secretary of the army, Pete Geren, explicitly defines the war in Iraq as a battle between America and “radical Islam” during a commencement speech at West Point; when the head of the U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, exhorts his soldiers to “hunt down” the country’s Muslim population for Jesus (“Get the hound of heaven after them,” Hensley was caught on tape saying, “so we get them into the kindgom. That’s what we do, that’s our business”); when the largest and most powerful defense contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater, is headed by a man, Eric Prince, who, according to a former employee, views himself as “a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” it is difficult to imagine how these young, pious, and “shaken” soldiers could construe their military mission, and indeed the entire War on Terror, in any way other than as part of a new crusade—a cosmic war—between the forces of good (us) and evil (them).
No doubt that is how the Jihadists understand the U.S. mission. Indeed, the United States’ conduct in both Iraq and Afghanistan—the evangelizing soldiers, the humiliation of Muslim prisoners forced under torture to eat pork and curse Muhammad, the Crusader rhetoric of the military officers and political leaders—has not only validated the Jihadist argument that these wars are “a new Crusader campaign for the Islamic world” conducted by “the Devil’s army,” it has provided Jihadists with the opportunity to successfully present themselves as the last line of defense against the forces that seek to “annihilate Islam.”
For bin Laden in particular, the war in Iraq has become a call to arms for Muslims everywhere to awake from their slumber, to embrace Islam’s own tradition of cosmic war, and to take the battle directly to the enemies of God. “To my brother holy warriors in Iraq,” he wrote at the height of the U.S. military campaign in that country, “to the heroes of Baghdad, the house of the caliphate—and all around; to the Ansar al-Islam, the descendants of Saladin; to the free men of Baquba, Mosul, and al-Anbar; to those who have emigrated for the sake of God to fight for the victory of their religion, leaving their fathers and sons, leaving their family and homeland … the Romans have gathered under the Banner of the Cross to fight the nation of beloved Muhammad…. Lord, give us patience, make us stand firm and help us struggle against the infidels. God [will be] victorious.”