Origins of Christian Zionism, How It Corrupted American Christianity and Why It’s Finally Collapsing

**Tucker Carlson** (0:04)
JD Hall, thank you for joining us. I think you're one of the clearest writers on the internet, so it's an honor to have you here. I've been trying to figure out for several years, you write on theology on Substack and other places, and very clearly, I just want to say, clarity being the goal of expository writing, you achieved that.

**J.D. Hall** (0:21)
Right.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:22)
Few do. I've been trying for the last several years to figure out what Christian Zionism is, not because I have an inherent interest, but because it's affected the shape of the world, and a lot of people have died because of it, and it has real world consequences that we're living through right now.
What is Christian Zionism? Where does it come from? Is it Christian? What's your assessment?

**J.D. Hall** (0:46)
Well, if you listen to people online, every Christian is a Zionist, just naturally, right? So the proponents of it will tell you that it is the de facto position on Israel, and it always has been for Christians, to believe in the establishment and support and protection of a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine.
Christian Zionism-

**Tucker Carlson** (1:13)
What does it say in the Bible that those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who don't will be cursed?

**J.D. Hall** (1:18)
Yeah, and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that you've had probably about a thousand different people tell you that. That's something that we hear every single day as Christians.

**Tucker Carlson** (1:28)
I couldn't find it. I got my concordance out. I couldn't find it.

**J.D. Hall** (1:30)
Well, I remember the interview with Huckabee and he couldn't find it either, which is weird when you cite it all the time, or actually that was Ted Cruz that couldn't remember where it was. I'm not sure that Ted even knew if it was in the front of the Bible or in the back of the Bible.

**Tucker Carlson** (1:45)
I have no idea.

**J.D. Hall** (1:46)
But yeah, so Genesis chapter 12 verse three says, I will bless those that bless thee and curse those that curse thee.
And from that, and I'm simplifying it, but from that comes this more philosophical notion than theological that we as Christians have a duty bound obligation to protect and to defend and also to help establish a nation for the Jewish people in Palestine. And it hasn't always been Palestine. You know, so when political Zionism first developed, they had posited Morocco and Galveston, Texas, Ohio, Siberia, different places.

**Tucker Carlson** (2:30)
Galveston, Texas?

**J.D. Hall** (2:32)
Yeah. There was a substantial number of Jews there, and they thought this could be sort of the safe space for Judaism worldwide, which made sense because, you know, the United States has always been a pretty hospitable place for Jews.
But anyways, so far as it concerns Christian Zionism, that is tied to a theology called dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is a theology invented by John Nelson Darby.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:02)
What does the word mean, dispensationalism?

**J.D. Hall** (3:05)
Well, the term refers to different dispensations of time by which God operates differently and deals or interacts with man differently depending upon what dispensation of time it's in.
So dispensationalism is juxtaposed against covenant theology. And those are your two basic viewpoints of Christians throughout the history of Christianity. And for the most part, there's only those two perspectives.
And you can get lost into the weeds really easily. Yes. So John Nelson Darby, he belonged to a bizarre Irish sect. It was sectarian. They had basically schismed their way outside of the established church. They had several different theological hangups. One is that they rejected all forms of church authority. They were what I would call sectarian minimalists. So they reject the organized church. They rejected the established church. And part of the reason is because their beliefs were so eccentric and weird, they would have been excommunicated had they remained in the established church. So after moving from Ireland to Plymouth, England, the notion of dispensationalism grew. And essentially the difference between dispensationalism and covenant theology is that God in covenant theology is interacting with man in accordance to the old or the new covenant. And so the bulk of the church from the first days of the apostles through the church fathers, through the Protestant Reformation, whether we're talking Catholics or Eastern Orthodox or Protestant reformers, all of them are what you'd called covenantal in their theology.

**Tucker Carlson** (5:11)
So you said, and I'm sorry to be pedantic, I was trying to understand this because I really think it matters and you understand it better than anyone I've ever talked to. The premise is that God's promises change according to the time, according to the dispensation, the era, the epoch.