Anti-Zionism in the Name of Christ

As Holy Week reaches its climax Sunday, many Christians exhibit a surreal response to the barrage of Iranian missiles pummeling the land of Jesus’ birth and its current inhabitants. Instead of expressing outrage at the attackers, those Christians express outrage at the victims. That anger intensifies as Israel and the United States respond by pummeling Iran in return.

One word succinctly defines the outrage: anti-Zionism. Its adherents claim it represents legitimate political and theological positions. That excuse, however, masks centuries of hatred toward Jews. It not only contradicts the position of many churches. It not only encourages historical manipulation. It ultimately ignores the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection.

Perhaps the most organized Christian exponents of anti-Zionism are traditionalist Catholics. The most visible include podcasters Candace Owens and Jason Jones—who equates Zionism with Satanism—and former government officials Carrie Prejean Boller and Joe Kent.

Boller, fired from the White House Religious Liberty Commission, calls Israel “evil” and “a terrorist state.” She posted that “Catholics reject Zionism,” that Christianity has been “hijacked” by Zionism’s “heretical teachings” and that “We Catholics are taking Christianity back.”

When Israeli authorities prevented the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, from celebrating Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, Boller made this vitriolic X post:

“The Israeli government hates Christians. We’re seeing now how Christians are treated in occupied Palestine. You can no longer hide it. This is the fruit of your heretical teaching of Zionist supremacy.”

Joining Boller and her traditionalist comrades are such traditionalist outlets as LifeSite News, Crisis Magazine and The Remnant. Their collective stance reflects the position of Pope Pius X, who rejected a request in 1904 from Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, to support Jewish settlement in Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire.

“We cannot give approval to this movement,”Pius said. “We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem—but we could never sanction it. The soil of Jerusalem, if it was not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church I cannot tell you anything different. The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.”

Archbishop Angelo Roncalli begged to differ. Roncalli, a papal diplomat based in Turkey during World War II, dedicated himself as early as 1940 to helping Jews reach Palestine, which the British secured after World War I. In 1944, he managed an operation using baptismal certificates, immigration certificates and visas—some forged—to get Jews out of Europe. Since Nazi officials recognized the documents as legitimate, the bearers had unimpeded travel access. Many went to Palestine.

In 1958, Roncalli became Pope John XXIII, who called a council to help the Catholic Church navigate the modern world. One of the many documents that emerged, Nostra aetate [In Our Time], renounced Catholicism’s historic antisemitism.

“Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues….

“Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.

“Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

Nostra aetate has since become part of the Catholic catechism.

In 1993, Pope John Paul II opened diplomatic relations with Israel, making Pius’ objections moot.

R.R. Reno, ethicist and editor of the Catholic journal First Things, dismissed Boller’s assertions in a Washington Post op-ed.

“In fact, the Catholic Church advances no specific teaching on Zionism,” wrote Reno. “I am a Catholic and a Zionist. But my position is not ‘Catholic Zionism.’ Rather, it is plain-old Zionism: The Jewish people are justified in establishing a sovereign nation in the land of their ancestors.”

Joining traditionalist Catholics in their anti-Zionism is a group of Millennial Calvinist pastors whose views reflect those of R.J. Rushdoony, who created a legal system called Christian Reconstructionism that would supplant Constitutional law with the Mosaic Law in toto.

Rushdoony not only equated Zionism to Nazism. He dismissed the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust and even dismissed the Jewish genealogy of European Jews.

The most visible of these pastors is Joel Webbon, pastor of Covenant Bible Church in Georgetown, Texas and founder of Right Response Ministries, which promotes Christian Reconstructionism. On X, Webbon revels in his contempt for Jews:

“Religiously speaking, I believe that Judaism is ‘anti-Christ.’ I believe it is a pernicious evil. I fully recognize that many Jews are secular, and do not practice Judaism. However, ... American [sic] was profoundly shaped by Christian thought and Christian values. Likewise, Israel has been deeply shaped by a religion that has as its foundation, a complete rejection of Christ.

“A people shaped by a rejection of the ‘Logos’ ... will have at least some degree of hostility towards God’s natural order. They will resist, and at times even seek to subvert, natural distinctions and hierarchy.”

Webbon also uses X to broadcast the quiet part at ear-splitting volume. In response to Tucker Carlson’s comments at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, in which Carlson accused the Jews of killing Jesus, Webbon disagreed yet agreed.

“We all killed Jesus by our sin.” Webbon wrote. “Also...the Jews killed Jesus.”

On February 26, Webbon stated his views more emphatically:

“When your Christian theology puts you on the same side as those who killed Christ then you do not know God.”

Like Webbon, the late Dr. John MacArthur was a Calvinist. Unlike Webbon, the former president of The Master’s University and pastor of Grace Community Church, both in Metropolitan Los Angeles, admonished those who shared Webbon’s views.

“I think we are obliged to stand as protectors of the Jews,” MacArthur said, “and they’re constituted now, obviously, globally in their own nation, and so we should be protectors of that people and that nation.”

One of Webbon’s ideological comrades is the Rev. Calvin Robinson, a former Anglican priest who either left or was expelled from four denominations since the Church of England refused to ordain him in 2022. In a March 14 post on X he asserted:

“Christ died for us. The Jews had him killed. The two are not mutually exclusive.”

Robinson made an interesting comment on X on February 28 when the United States and Israel killed many of Iran’s key political and military leaders—including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—in a surprise bombing attack:

“Israel has proven itself to be the greatest threat to the world. Zionism is the greatest threat to the West/Christendom. That much should be obvious by now....”

Robinson followed on March 21 by posting that “Israel has no right to exist” and declared the next day that “Israel is a terrorist state. Zionism should be proscribed.”

The former Anglican also holds the term “Judeo-Christian” in contempt. In a December 18 post on X, he wrote:

“I am a Christian, not a Judeo-Christian. My faith is the Christian faith, not Judeo-Christian faith. I believe in and am a follower of Jesus Christ, not Jesus Judeo-Christ. I try to live by Christian values, not Judeo-Christian values.”

Such ignorance reflects blatant disregard for basic biblical history.

Without Judaism, Christianity would not exist. The Tanakh constitutes most of the Christian Bible. Christianity’s fundamental moral framework came from those Jewish scriptures, especially the Ten Commandments. John the Baptist’s proclamation of Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” reflected the Mosaic Law’s demands for sacrificial atonement.

Jesus was Jewish. A genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel traces Jesus’ ancestry to David. All of Jesus’ earliest followers were Jewish, as the first nine chapters of the New Testament’s Book of Acts demonstrate. They worshipped at the Jerusalem Temple. Peter was on his way there when Acts 3 describes him healing a lame man sitting at one of the Temple’s gates.

If the earliest Christians were not Jewish, the Sanhedrin would have had no authority to interrogate Peter and John in Acts 4 nor Stephen in Acts 7.

The Sanhedrin also had the authority to try Jesus but no power to execute capital punishment. Only the Romans, the civil authority, had it. That explains why the Sanhedrin transferred custody in John 18 to Pontius Pilate, Judea’s governor. Though Pilate had the power to release Jesus, as John 18 and 19 describe, he placated a mob by refusing to exercise that power. Roman soldiers then tortured Jesus before crucifying him. Thus the Romans bear the ultimate responsibility for killing Jesus.

Before his death, however, Jesus made an astonishing claim.

“The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life, only to take it up again,” John 10 quotes Jesus as saying. “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

Centuries earlier, in a passage Christians consider to be messianic prophecy, Isaiah wrote something even more audacious:

“It was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer.”

So who killed Jesus? The Jews? The Romans? God, whom Jesus claimed to be his father?

In the final analysis, all discussion about culpability vanishes in the face of Christianity’s ultimate claim: Jesus rose from the dead to make reconciliation between sinful humanity and a holy, righteous God possible. As Paul the Apostle—a former Pharisee devoted to persecuting Christians—wrote to believers in a major Greek city, Corinth:

“If Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. And we apostles would all be lying about God—for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. ... if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost!”

In terms of Christian theology, therefore, it matters not whether the Jews, the Romans, the Martians, the Klingons or any other group killed Jesus. It only matters to those who wish to promote a pernicious ideology.

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Joseph D’Hippolito is a contributor to the Ideological Defense Institute.

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