Bill Berkowitz
August 11, 2005

Christian Right's piece of the "Promised Land"

Israel offers evangelical Christians land near the Sea of Galilee in the hopes of solidifying their support and boosting tourism

After more than 30 years of organizing testimonial dinners for right wing Israeli politicians, handing out checks to Israeli charities, and forming alliances with conservative Jewish leaders and organizations to support Israel, Evangelical Christians may finally be getting a piece of the "Promised Land."

In a move geared toward solving Northern Israel's unemployment crisis, increasing tourism to the country, and solidifying relations with US Evangelical Christians, the Israeli government has offered 35 acres of land on the shore of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) for development by Christian Evangelicals. The Israeli government is hopeful they will build a large conference center, complete with the requisite amenities, to attract hundreds of thousands of evangelical tourists from the US and other countries.

According to officials at Israel's tourism ministry, more than 400,000 Christian tourists brought $1.4 billion into Israel in the past year.

An Audience with, and a Gift from, Sharon

In May, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and former Prime Minister and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently resigned his post due to opposition over what he called the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza settlements, made the offer at a meeting with a host of evangelical leaders, which included Pastor Sunday Adelaja of the Embassy of God in the Ukraine, Pastors Brian and Bobbie Houston of Hillsong in Australia, Louis Cortes of Esperanza USA, and Ted Haggard, the Senior Pastor of the Colorado Springs, Colorado, New Life Church (website) and the president of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals (website). For more on Haggard and New Life Church, see Jeff Sharlet's article, "Soldiers of Christ: Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch."

Also on hand was Dr. Paul Crouch, founder and president of the Costa Mesa, California-based Trinity Broadcasting Network (website) -- a giant in US Christian broadcasting whose web site claims the network is the "Largest Worldwide Religious Network" -- and Jay Sekulow, the Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ - website) -- a Christian-based law firm founded by the Reverend Pat Robertson in 1990 in order to counter the activities of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

According to the Daily Pilot, a newspaper covering Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, California, Crouch makes $403,700 a year and his wife Jan takes home over $300,000. "Both of them have an array of perks, including a private jet. They live like Saudi Arabian royalty in a huge mansion in the Newport Beach area."

Recently, Crouch, brought his team of lawyers into a controversy involving charges that he had sex with former TBN employee, Enoch Lonnie Ford. According to the New York Daily News' Lloyd Grove, after Crouch's lawyers "sent a terse letter to the new NBC Universal-PAX TV reality show, 'Lie Detector,' the producers shelved a scheduled episode featuring [Ford] ... who claims to have had sex with the 70-year-old Crouch." Ford had submitted to a polygraph examination conducted by Dr. Ed Gelb, the show's resident forensic psychophysiologist and the results were going to be revealed on an episode to be aired in mid-March.

"Crouch's lawyers threatened to sue everyone except for me," the show's host, Rolonda Watts, told the Daily News.

Crouch has repeatedly denied the allegations. (For more details see Christianity Today's blog).

Sekulow, a Jew who turned to Christ, has been a prominent spokesperson for the Christian right for more than a decade, and is currently one of the leading supporters of Judge John Roberts, President Bush's nominee for the US Supreme Court.

According to its website, the organization which started up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, "has expanded its work and reach" to include the founding "of the European Centre for Law and Justice, based in Strasbourg, France and the Slavic Centre for Law and Justice, based in Moscow, Russia." According to its website, the organization "has a network of attorneys nationwide and its national headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. -- just steps away from the Supreme Court and Congress."

Tightening the Ties

Ted Haggard, a highly influential evangelical leader with close ties to the Bush Administration, told Charisma, a Christian fundamentalist-oriented magazine, that the land in question is in close proximity to where Jesus conducted a good portion of his ministry, including, where he may have delivered the "Sermon on the Mount."

While the offer of land in Israel came unexpectedly, Haggard told the Financial Times that under the right conditions perhaps as many as one million evangelicals would visit Israel annually.

On his blog, Joel C. Rosenberg, an evangelical Christian who comes from an Orthodox Jewish background and the author of two best selling books, "The Last Jihad" in 2002 and "The Last Days" in 2003, pointed out that a "growing number of Israeli leaders want to reach out to evangelical Christians in the U.S. and around the world."

According to Rosenberg, who served as a senior advisor to former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a government official told him that "The government will provide the land, the infrastructure, and all the zoning and other assistance required, and will leave the design and vision of the complex to the evangelical community. 'We don't want to interfere with the vision,'" the official said. "We just want to help make it happen. Catholics have so many sites here, as do the Greek Orthodox. But our best friends don't have any [major] site they can call their own."

The Bible and Politics make Strange Bedfellows

Support for Israel by evangelical Christians grows out of both the Biblical role that Israel plays for Evangelicals, as well as practical political considerations.

Veteran journalist and author Frederick Clarkson pointed out In his book, "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy" (Common Courage Press, 1997), that in the twentieth century, "most evangelicals" were "pre-millenialists...Christians who believe it is not possible to reform this world until Jesus returns." The Second Coming is then "followed by a 1,000-year rule of Jesus and the Christians." That is where "The Rapture" comes in, which Clarkson describes as "an event in which all the saved Christians, dead and alive, are brought up into the clouds with Jesus prior, during or after (depending of the school of theology) a period called 'the tribulation."

In her seminal work on the rise of the Christian Right in the United States, "Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right" (South End Press, 1989), Sara Diamond wrote that the relationship between Christian evangelicals and Israel changed considerably when "popular broadcast ministries, especially those focused on studies of the 'end-times,' drew evangelicals to pay closer attention to Middle East politics." Diamond credits Hal Lindsey, author of "The Late Great Planet Earth," with adding "Israel's security" to the Christian Right's list of political concerns.

In 1988, at the National Religious Broadcasters convention, Israeli government and military officials held a private briefing for Christian media preachers. That meeting was organized to "tell the untold story about the situation [between Christian evangelicals and Israel] and counteract distortions currently being presented in the media."

Ten years later, then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed an American group in Washington called Voices United for Israel. Most of the 3,000 in attendance were evangelicals, including Ralph Reed, then the executive director of the Christian Coalition and other prominent members of the fundamentalist Christian community.

Over the past few years, a number of veteran Christian right leaders have joined forces with Jewish conservatives to launch pro-Israel organizations. Gary Bauer -- the former head of the Family Research Council, who now runs a group called American Values -- joined forces with Rabbi Daniel Lapin, head of the conservative Jewish organization, Toward Tradition, to form the American Alliance of Jews and Christians. Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, who is currently running for the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, joined with Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, to launch "Stand for Israel." According to press reports, Stand for Israel is a project they hope will have the same political impact as the powerful Jewish lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Will the need for tourist dollars overcome suspicions that many Jews in Israel harbor about evangelical Christians? How will Palestinians react to a proposal that encourages tourism by a group that has been outspoken in its opposition to President Bush's Road Map to peace in the Middle East?

"Evangelical Christians are highly motivated with a sincere feeling of connection to the land of the Bible. They will be interested in investing in a project they can identify with in Israel," Ari Marom, an Israeli official in charge of tourism marketing in the US, told the Financial Times. "The need and desire to strengthen our relationship with the evangelical community and encourage them to visit and support Israel not just from afar but up close, cuts across party lines."

Opposing the 'Road Map' while Encouraging Evangelical Tourists

Since President Bush introduced his "Road Map to Peace in the Middle East," a significant number of evangelical Christians have been unalterably opposed to it. According to the Financial Times, "some prominent US pastors are unyielding towards Palestinians' own yearning for statehood and have joined settler groups in Israel in campaigning against Sharon's plans to withdraw from the Gaza Strip."

In 2003, at an Interfaith Zionist Leadership Summit in Washington, DC, a number of Christian right organizations including Americans for a Safe Israel (website), Gary Bauer's American Values (website), The Apostolic Congress (website), the Christian Broadcasting Network (website), the Christian Coalition of America (website), the Religious Roundtable, and the Zionist Organization of America (website), came together to develop a strategy for opposing the "Road Map.

The Action Alert invited participants to:

"Come if you are ready for action: 1) To oppose rewarding murderous Palestinian terrorism with statehood -- mocking our own war on terror and ultimately encouraging renewed Arab aggression against an Israel made invitingly vulnerable; 2) To expose how President Bush's stated policy of June 24, 2002 specifying essential pre-conditions for support of Palestinian statehood has been seriously undermined, eroding America's credibility and debasing our enduring national interest; 3) To lay bare the inherent absurdity of our State Department promoting a Road Map to Arab-Israeli "Peace" from a Quartet whose other three members -- Russia, the E.U. (France and Germany) and the U.N. -- repeatedly disparage U.S. interests and are demonstrably hostile to Israel; 4) To document the responsibility of Iran, Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia for supporting Islamic terrorism; 5) To combat media ignorance and bias in Middle East coverage and virulent Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic agitation on campus; and 6) To solidify and chart future strategy for the emerging alliance of Jewish and Christian Zionists."

"We [Israel and the Palestinians] need to learn how to co-exist. When there is a peaceful resolution to the conflict, pilgrims will come," Riah Abu el-Assal, the Palestinian bishop of the Anglican Church in Jerusalem said. "They always have. We don't need to give out pieces of land."

"While I don't know the particulars of the Israeli government's offer, I have long been an advocate for the Israeli government encouraging significant numbers of evangelical Christians to move to Israel and make the Holy Land their permanent home," Rabbi Shmuley Boteach told Media Transparency via email.

Rabbi Boteach, a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, the author of 15 books, and a syndicated columnist, believes that while Israel should always maintain "a sizable Jewish majority," evangelical Christian immigrants should be welcome in Israel as long as they "respect the integrity of the Jewish faith by foreswearing the proselytization of the Jewish population."

Concerned about security and the "well-being of the State of Israel," Rabbi Boteach said that "There is no better way to demonstrate this then to have a few hundred thousand evangelicals making Israel their home, and serving in the Israeli army to save the Middle East's only democracy from destruction at the hands of the many Arabs who have fought for its destruction."

"I certainly don't expect to see large-scale immigration of evangelicals to Israel," Gershom Gorenberg, the associate editor of The Jerusalem Report and the author of "The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount," told Media Transparency. "Nor, for that matter do I expect to see them eschew proselytizing, "since that is a core value."