Prominent Christian leaders, including Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of the renowned Billy Graham and president of AnGel Ministries, and Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, will be traveling to Israel next week to show support for Israel in the midst of the conflicts in Gaza.
The trip, which will take place on August 17-22, was planned by the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) and led by Dr. Jerry Johnson, the president and CEO of NRB. He expressed in a statement that, through this trip, he desires to show that Christians stand in support of Israel during this period of unrest.
“Countering rising anti-Semitism in the international press and on the streets, this friendship visit will communicate to Israel and to the Palestinians who stand in opposition to Hamas that we, leaders who represent the Christian community, stand with them,” he said.
Lotz also expressed a similar desire. “My prayer is that God’s people in this country and around the world would intercede for heaven’s involvement in Israel, that God would defend and protect her from her enemies,” she said, according to a report by the Religion News Service.
Despite the growing opposition towards Israel from the general public in the midst of the overwhelming Palestinian deaths during the Gaza conflict, these leaders have strong concerns as to why American Christians should be supporting Israel. Tony Perkins explained in a statement that there are two main reasons.
“We have the Jewish people to thank for our faith and we are instructed in Scripture not only to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, but are told that those who bless Israel will be blessed,” he explained.
“Secondly, it is in the national security interest of the United States to support Israel. To abridge our commitment to the State of Israel would be an act of hostility not just to the Jewish state but would do damage to our own interests.”
It seems that evangelicals, and younger evangelicals in particular, however, have been increasingly ambivalent about how to think about Israel.
“While older evangelicals grew up on stories of Israel overcoming the odds in order to survive, younger evangelicals see Israel as an established, wealthy and powerful nation,” wrote Dale Hanson Bourke, the author of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, in a blog post. “They are drawn to underdog. In the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Palestinians are seen as poorer and less powerful than the Israelis. For some young evangelicals, Palestinians are seen as the victims in a power struggle.”
Overall, however, a Pew Research poll showed that when asked the question, “In the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, who do you sympathize with more?” 72 percent of Christians said they sympathized with Israel, and that this statistic had been stable since 2009.
