Christians and Zion: The British Stirrings of Christian Zionism
Long before American televangelists, the idea that Christians should help restore the Jews to Palestine took root in nineteenth-century Britain, among evangelical preachers, aristocrats and imperial strategists.
Christian Zionism is often seen as an American phenomenon, the politics of megachurches and end-times bestsellers. Its roots, though, lie in Victorian Britain. There, a blend of evangelical theology, romantic interest in the Holy Land and imperial strategy produced the idea that Christians had a duty to help return the Jewish people to Palestine.
The Presbyterian scholar Rev. Donald Wagner traced this history in a series of essays on Christians and Zion. He argued that understanding these British origins is essential to understanding the movement's influence today.
The theology: restoration and prophecy
The intellectual seeds were planted by Protestant readings of biblical prophecy. From the seventeenth century, some Puritan writers argued that the conversion and restoration of the Jews to their ancient land would precede Christ's return.
In the nineteenth century, the Anglo-Irish clergyman John Nelson Darby systematised these ideas into dispensationalism. On this view, God has separate plans for Israel and for the Church, and prophecy foretells the Jews' return to the land. Darby's teaching, spread through Bible conferences and later the widely used Scofield Reference Bible, became the theological foundation of much modern Christian Zionism.
The patrons: Shaftesbury and the restorationists
Theology found powerful allies. Lord Shaftesbury, the evangelical social reformer, lobbied the British government in the 1830s and 1840s to support Jewish settlement in Palestine. He famously described "a country without a nation for a nation without a country", a phrase that would echo, in altered form, for more than a century.
Britain opened a consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, and an Anglican bishopric was established there in 1841, partly with the aim of ministering to Jews. For restorationists, these were steps toward a prophetic future. For the Foreign Office, they were also a means of extending British influence in the Ottoman Empire.
From pulpit to policy
These ideas shaped the worldview of the politicians who issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Both Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had been raised in religious traditions steeped in the Bible. Historians debate how far theology, as opposed to wartime strategy, drove their decision. Few doubt that the cultural soil of British Protestantism made support for a Jewish national home seem natural to them.
The forgotten people
What the British restorationists rarely considered was the population already living in Palestine: Muslim and Christian Arabs, including some of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Critics like Wagner argue that this blind spot, inherited from the nineteenth century, persists in Christian Zionism today. In their view it leads many Western Christians to overlook the Palestinian Christians who share their faith.
Why the history matters
The British chapter shows that Christian Zionism was never only a religious movement. From the start it combined prophecy with politics and empire. Understanding that mix helps explain why it remains such a potent, and contested, force in debates about Israel and Palestine.