No, Tucker: Darby Didn't Invent Christian Zionism

Tucker Carlson hosted a man introduced to his audience as a theologian, J.D. Hall. For more than an hour Hall walked viewers through dispensationalism, the Scofield Bible, and a familiar set of accusations against Israel and its Christian supporters. Along the way he repeated one of the most common claims in anti-Zionist polemics: that Christian Zionism began with John Nelson Darby. According to this narrative, Christians believed one thing for nearly eighteen centuries, then an Anglo-Irish preacher arrived in the nineteenth century and invented a new theology that convinced millions of Christians to support a Jewish return to the land of Israel. Christian Zionism, in this telling, is not an ancient conviction rooted in Scripture but a recent innovation that spread through evangelicalism by means of Darby, the Scofield Bible, and American fundamentalism.

IDI frequently responds to the misinformation spread by Carlson and his guests, but for the moment it is worth focusing on just this one claim. The assertion that John Nelson Darby originated Christian Zionism is historically false.

Dispensationalism and Christian Zionism are related, but they are not identical. Dispensationalism is a particular system of biblical interpretation. It offers answers to questions about prophecy, the relationship between Israel and the Church, and the sequence of events surrounding the end times. Christian Zionism is merely the belief that God intends to keep His promises to Israel. When God promised Abraham descendants, a nation, and a land, those promises were not transferred to someone else and stripped of their original meaning.

Darby certainly held that conviction, but he did not create it. To claim otherwise requires ignoring centuries of Christian history. Long before Darby was born, prominent Protestant thinkers were already arguing that the Jewish people had a future in God’s plan and that the promises concerning the land retained a literal dimension. The belief appeared in some of the most influential currents of Protestant thought.

One of the clearest examples is the Geneva Bible of 1560, published nearly three centuries before Darby’s major writings. The Geneva Bible was the Bible of the English Reformation, the Bible carried by the Puritans, and the Bible that crossed the Atlantic with many of the settlers who helped shape early America. Its marginal notes frequently reflected an expectation that God’s dealings with Israel were not finished. The prophets were not simply speaking about the Church under another name. Israel remained a meaningful category within God’s redemptive plan.

The same pattern emerges among the Puritans. Increase Mather, one of the most influential figures in colonial New England and later president of Harvard College, published The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation in 1669. Mather argued that the Jewish people would one day experience national restoration and once again possess the land promised to Abraham. More importantly, he challenged the habit of turning every biblical promise made to Israel into a purely spiritual promise for the Church.

Mather was not a dispensationalist. He was not a nineteenth-century prophecy teacher. He was a Puritan Calvinist writing in seventeenth-century Massachusetts more than a century before Darby’s birth. Yet the central issue he was addressing is the same issue debated today: when Scripture speaks about Israel, should Christians assume that it really means the Church, or should they allow Israel to remain Israel?

Mather was hardly alone. Across the Protestant world, long before Darby’s birth, influential theologians were reaching similar conclusions. The German Pietist leader Philipp Jakob Spener encouraged prayer and expectation for the conversion and restoration of the Jewish people, a theme developed even more explicitly by his disciple August Hermann Francke and later Pietist writers. In England, the Puritan theologian Thomas Brightman argued in the early seventeenth century that the Jews would return to their land and experience national restoration before the end of history. His views influenced a generation of English Protestants, including figures such as Joseph Mede, whose prophetic writings anticipated a future conversion and restoration of Israel. In New England, Increase Mather’s son, Cotton Mather, continued the same expectation, writing that the Jewish people would one day be gathered and restored according to the promises of Scripture.

What all of those men shared was the belief that God had not finished with the Jewish people and that the promises made to Israel in Scripture could not simply be dissolved into the Church. Long before Darby systematized his prophetic framework, Protestants across England, Germany, and colonial America were already reading the Bible and concluding that Israel still had a future in the purposes of God.

When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, he was already confronting a temptation that would accompany Christianity throughout its history: the temptation of Gentile believers to conclude that Israel’s story was over. Romans 11 is Paul’s direct response. He warns Gentile Christians against arrogance toward the Jewish people. He reminds them that they have been grafted into a covenantal story that began long before them. Most importantly, he rejects the idea that God has cast away His people. Whatever debates Christians may have about the precise meaning of Paul’s statement that “all Israel shall be saved,” it is difficult to read the chapter honestly and conclude that Paul believed Israel had simply vanished from God’s purposes, or as Hall told Tucker Carlson, that the Jewish people had “just become like any other nation.”

While forms of supersessionism eventually became dominant, particularly after Christianity became intertwined with imperial power, the idea that God retained future purposes for Israel never disappeared entirely. The rise of replacement theology was not the inevitable outcome of Christian reflection. It was a historical development shaped by particular theological and political circumstances.

Once Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, many theologians increasingly interpreted the Church as the complete and final replacement for Israel. Promises once associated with the Jewish people were reinterpreted as promises fulfilled exclusively in the Church. Over time this became the dominant framework throughout much of Christendom. Yet even at its height, alternative readings persisted beneath the surface.

The Reformation brought many of those older questions back into view. By returning to Scripture as the highest authority, Protestant thinkers reopened debates that had long been considered settled. As they worked through the prophets, the covenants, and Paul’s writings, many discovered that the biblical text did not fit comfortably within the assumptions they had inherited.

At its heart, Christian Zionism is a theological claim about the character of God. It asks whether God’s promises remain trustworthy even when centuries pass between the promise and its fulfillment. It asks whether the covenants made with Abraham can simply be reassigned to another people. It asks whether the God who bound Himself to Israel in Scripture intends to keep the commitments He made.

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@DanBurmawy is the Chief Executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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