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The Roots of American Christian Affinity for the State of Israel Robert O

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ABSTRACT “More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation”: The Roots of American Christian Affinity for the State of Israel Robert O. Smith, Ph.D. Mentor: Barry G. Hankins, Ph.D. This dissertation seeks to show that popular American affinity for the State of Israel draws from the taproot of apocalyptic hope informing American identity and national vocation from the revolutionary era to the present. The English Protestant tradition of Judeo-centric prophecy interpretation informing these American adaptations of apocalyptic hope was first developed in the early Elizabethan period and refined through the first half of the seventeenth century. Brought to North America by English colonists with Puritan commitments, the tradition provided a foundational framework for American self-understanding. Given this Judeo-centric tradition’s direct contribution to American popular Christianity and civil religion—through varying degrees of national- covenantalism, premillennial dispensationalism and cultural fundamentalism—claims that American popular affinity for the State of Israel is generated primarily by external manipulations or lobbies strain the bounds of credulity. Grounded, in part, in the Protestant historiography developed by Lutheran and Calvinist reformers, this English Protestant tradition of Judeo-centric prophecy interpretation was from its inception a political theology. The tradition openly constructed friends (Jews) as well as enemies (Muslims and Roman Catholics), while cultivating an occidentocentric discourse that discounted Eastern Christians. The tradition’s most visible and direct impulses are manifested in Christian Zionism, understood as political action, informed by specifically Christian commitments, to promote or preserve Jewish control over the geographic area now containing Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. The conviction that Jews had a central role to play in God’s end-times drama led English and Anglo-American interpreters to construct Jews as allies while constructing Catholics and Muslims as Antichrist. Despite the banishment of Jews from England, Judeo-centric content became common within English Protestant articulations of apocalyptic hope. These hermeneutics, adapted by English colonists, were transposed into the apocalyptic foundations of American national identity and vocation. This historical trajectory, rather than the premillennial dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby, best explains the foundations of American popular affinity for the State of Israel and the characteristics of contemporary American Christian Zionism. “More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation”: The Roots of American Christian Affinity for the State of Israel by Robert O. Smith, B.A., M.A., M.Div. A Dissertation Approved by the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies ___________________________________ Christopher Marsh, Ph.D., Director Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved by the Dissertation Committee ___________________________________ Barry G. Hankins, Ph.D., Chairperson ___________________________________ Linda S. Adams, Ph.D. ___________________________________ Phillip J. Donnelly, Ph.D. ___________________________________ Thomas S. Kidd, Ph.D. ___________________________________ Charles A. McDaniel, Ph.D. Accepted by the Graduate School December 2010 ___________________________________ J. Larry Lyon, Ph.D., Dean Page bearing signatures is kept on file in the Graduate School. Copyright © 2010 by Robert O. Smith All rights reserved CONTENTS Figures............................................................................................................................... iv Tables................................................................................................................................. v Acknowledgments............................................................................................................. vi Dedication ...................................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER ONE Introduction: Broadened Historical Horizons for the Elucidation of the Present ................................... 1 Review of the Literature ........................................................................................ 3 Trajectory of this Project .................................................................................... 12 CHAPTER TWO Blessing the Jew: The Traits of Contemporary American Christian Zionism ............................................. 17 The Enduring Witness of Contemporary American Christian Zionism .............. 22 The “Selfish Reason” of Christian Zionism ........................................................ 26 A “Veteran Bigot”? Hagee on Catholicism, Islam, and Arabs .......................... 33 Hagee, Jews, and the Question of Conversion ................................................... 37 CHAPTER THREE Supporting the Jew: Culture, Doctrine, and American Popular Opinion on the State of Israel ....................... 47 Measuring American Attitudes ........................................................................... 48 American Attitudes, Evenhandedness, and the Peace Process ........................... 53 American Religion and Public Opinion .............................................................. 58 Early Efforts to Measure Religion and American Sympathies for Israel ........... 60 Measuring Religious Complexities ..................................................................... 65 Interpreting the Data—Is Dispensationalism the Cause? .................................. 71 Interpreting the Data—The Black Protestant Test Case .................................... 72 Concluding Observations .................................................................................... 80 CHAPTER FOUR Mythologizing the Jew: The Reformation Foundations of Judeo-centric Prophecy Interpretation (1530–1603).. 82 iii The Dual Antichrist of Martin Luther and John Calvin ..................................... 84 Toward the Development of Protestant Historiography ..................................... 93 The Geneva Bible and the Developing Judeo-Centric Consensus .................... 102 Apocalyptic Historiography and the Foundations of English Nationalism ...... 105 Hopes for Absent Jews ...................................................................................... 109 Toward the Seventeenth-Century Christian Zionist Synthesis .......................... 115 CHAPTER FIVE Militarizing the Jew: Judeo-centric Prophecy Interpretation, Thomas Draxe to Joseph Mede (1608–1627).. 119 Thomas Draxe and the Personal Assurance of Salvation ................................. 122 Brightman, Covenantal Nationalism, and the English Apocalypse .................. 125 Brightman and Judeo-centric Apocalyptic Hope .............................................. 129 The Hexapla of Andrew Willet .......................................................................... 134 A Growing Climate of Judeo-centric Interpretation ......................................... 137 Henry Finch and the World’s Restauration ...................................................... 142 The Judeo-centric Content of Joseph Mede’s Millenarian Conversion ........... 148 Joseph Mede, Prophetic Certainty and Divinely Sanctioned Slaughter ........... 154 CHAPTER SIX Admitting the Jew: Parliamentary Authority, Christian Zionism, and British Imperial Identity ................. 160 Judeo-centrism and the End of Parliamentary Censorship .............................. 163 Judeo-centrism and Millenarian Politics .......................................................... 166 Judeo-centrism, Church Confessions, and Toleration ...................................... 169 The Apology of Edward Nicholas and the Covenantal Logic of Christian Zionism ................................................ 175 Menasseh ben-Israel, the Lost Tribes, and the Question of Conversion .......... 180 Cromwell, Strategic Indecision, and Jewish Recognition ................................ 186 Judeo-centric Thought and the Shape of British Identity ................................. 189 CHAPTER SEVEN Typologizing the Jew: The Judeo-Centric Foundations of America’s Covenantal Vocation ........................... 194 “The eies of all people are upon us”: John Winthrop and the Colonial Covenant ................................................................................ 195 Primitivism and Millennialism .......................................................................... 198 Censorship, the Millennium, and the Judeo-Centric Tradition ........................ 200 The Intellectual Climate of Israel’s Salvation .................................................. 202 The “Antick Fancy of America’s being Hell” ................................................... 208 Judeo-centrism and the Work of Redemption ................................................... 219 Toward the Redeemer Nation ........................................................................... 224 iv CHAPTER EIGHT Systematizing the Jew: John Nelson Darby and the Putative Paternity of Christian Zionism ........................... 231 The Dominance of the Exegetical ..................................................................... 232 The French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Jews ............................................. 236 William Miller: Heretic of American Civil Millennialism ...............................
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