‘I had a black slave in The Alamo, and I had a number of blacks in The Green Berets,’ he said. ‘I’ve directed two pictures and I gave blacks their proper position,’ he said. Wayne was also asked at the time if Hollywood is doing enough to have diversity. When asked if the government should pay reparations to Native Americans, he said: ‘I don’t know why the government should give them something that it wouldn’t give me.’ ‘I hope they haven’t been careless with their wampum.’ Jerry Falwell, in the middle of a public defense of Israel at a 1987 rally in Richmond, Virginia, joked that a Jew "can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose" (5) and shocked Jews with his 1999 assertion at an evangelism conference in Tennessee that the Antichrist will.The cover of the May 1971 issue of Playboy is seen above But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. Graham is then heard to remark that "They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff," and that the Jewish "stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain." In the recording, Graham also explains that ". Billy Graham and President Richard Nixon included Graham's agreement with Nixon that left-wing Jews dominate the news media. A tape released in 2002 of a conversation between Rev. Nor should this be thought of as simply the dirty past of Christian Zionism's forerunners. Arno Gaebelein, for all his eager immersion in Jewish culture, believed that the possible legitimacy of the Protocols and held ideas about an international Jewish-communist conspiracy to destroy Christian civilization. William Bell Riley, arguably "the most important fundamentalist minister of his generation," (2) also embraced the Protocols and asserted a Jewish-communist-modernist conspiracy. It was Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent and its 1920 publication of a collection of articles, The International Jew, that brought The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to the attention of the American public. William Trollinger notes that the ambivalence toward the Jews inherent in premillennial dispensationalism meant that while most adherents remained sympathetic to the Jews, some made "the not so enormous jump" (1) into ideas that put the Jews at the center of an international conspiracy. Thus, Christian Zionists see their own solidarity with the Jews and the modern nation-state of Israel as paying homage to the God of Israel.ĭespite Christian Zionism's contemporary image as supporters of Israel and lovers of the Jews, the movement is not without its dark history. In their reading of the Bible, God has decreed a special role and status for the Jews sealed in an eternal covenant, together with a promise to restore them to their land.
Christian Zionists see their Zionism and focus on the Jews simply as a logical extension of their evangelical commitment to God and his word.
Those two passions bring together Christians across the evangelical spectrum into both broad, international parachurch ministries such as the International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem (ICEJ) or Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and local organizations and smaller ministries. Christian Zionists are distinguished from evangelicals more broadly by their two intense and intertwined emphases: Israel and the Jews. Christian Zionism is a general label for a specific orientation and emphasis within evangelicalism that ascribes vital theological, and often eschatological, importance to the Jews living in Israel.