Amid the unrelenting cavalcade of appalling Trump administration appointees announced in recent weeks, one pick slid past without nearly enough scrutiny: the selection of Mike Huckabee to serve as the United States’ ambassador to Israel. With no diplomatic experience whatsoever, Huckabee will take up the crucial posting in the middle of a war. But it’s not Huckabee’s lack of experience which makes the choice so eyebrow-raising, it’s his apocalyptic Christian Zionist notion of Israel.
This column is not about the war in Gaza, or about Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, or about any other facet of what the media has somewhat crudely boiled-down into a two-sided argument. This column is about the third side in that argument: neither Jewish nor Palestinian, nor impacted in any tangible way by realities of the conflict on the ground, Christian Zionists in the United States have their own dog in that fight, and the next ambassador to Israel is prepared to let it off its leash – possibly to the detriment of everyone else.
A Baptist minister turned politician, Huckabee has never been shy about his fondness for Israel, a nation he claims to have visited at least 100 times. Though he traded the pulpit for the podium more than three decades ago when he became Lieutenant Governor and then Governor of Arkansas, Huckabee has never fully left the pulpit behind, and has continued his regular trips to the Holy Land throughout his time as a public figure. During his aborted run for the presidency in 2008, the fusion of pastor and politician became Huckabee’s brand, and his staunch support for Israel was never far from the conversation. For Huckabee, there is no gap between his Christian faith and his love of Israel, and that’s where the problems begin.
Huckabee has been vague about some particular details of his theological leanings during his public life, but his denominational affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention and his long record of statements about Israel over the last thirty years heavily indicate that the future ambassador is what’s called a “dispensational premillennialist.”
Without wading too far into that deep puddle, suffice it to say that Christians hold a wide array of beliefs about the end times. Though it’s a common Christian belief that Jesus Christ will return at the end of the world, different sects differ on when, why, and how Christ’s return will happen. When you mix and match those different beliefs in a certain way, you get dispensational premillennialism (or premillennial dispensationalism – how fun is that). In the shortest responsible summary, dispensational premillennialists believe that Christians will be taken up to heaven in “the rapture” in the end times, while Israel is scattered and destroyed by the enemies of God – after which, Christ will return again and offer Israel a chance for repentance and restoration by becoming Christians. They believe, crucially, that the existence of the state of Israel is a precondition for the return of Christ, so that it may be overthrown in accordance with their prophecies.
As a somewhat tortured outworking of this belief, it is common for dispensational premillennialists to identify as Christian Zionists: they believe firmly in the importance of the Holy Land, seeing it as part of their own destiny. If there is no Israel, they feel, then the pieces are not in place for the return of Christ. In 1948, many dispensational premillennialists regarded the founding of the modern state of Israel as a prophetic sign that the end times were beginning to approach.
By all indications, this is what Mike Huckabee believes, and his political career has been supported and boosted by others who believe the same thing.
During (and since) his quest for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination, Huckabee was endorsed and supported at a number of high-profile events by Tim LaHaye. As the author of the Left Behind series of books – which traumatized many of my childhood friends whose parents would not let them watch PG-13 movies but gladly handed them a grisly series about the end of the world – LaHaye was arguably the most significant dispensational premillennialist in American culture before his death in 2016. The Left Behind series, which sold more than 65 million copies, was so influential that Notre Dame-based scholar, Jason Springs, has argued that it helped pave the way for widespread adoption of QAnon among evangelicals.
Like many other Christian Zionists, though, LaHaye – who fancied himself a great supporter of Israel, like Huckabee – has come under fire for the inherent antisemitism in his beliefs. As Tablet Magazine wrote shortly after the author’s death, “The Jews are tolerated and even celebrated in Left Behind because of their role in bringing about another religion’s messianic redemption, which occurs at the expense of the Jews’ metaphysical truth-claims and their existence as a religion and a people.” Huckabee has also maintained a long relationship with prominent and controversial Christian Zionist pastor John Hagee, going back at least 17 years.
Hagee, who runs an organization named Christians United for Israel (CUFI), is a frequent lightning rod for criticisms of Christian Zionism. Having been characterized as “pro-Israel, anti-semitic,” the sharp edge of Hagee’s Christian Zionism is even more apparent than LaHaye’s. Hagee has claimed that Hitler was doing God’s will via the Holocaust, eventually helping the Jewish people return to the land of Israel, while also claiming that Hitler was born to a family of “accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews.” Additionally, Hagee believes that the Antichrist will be “partially Jewish” (and gay, oddly).
When the announcement of Huckabee’s ambassadorial appointment broke last month, Hagee greeted it with enthusiasm. “There is no better person to represent the American people in Jerusalem at this time,” Hagee’s statement fawned, referring to Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal and undivided capital.”
Unlike Hagee, Huckabee does not have a record of openly antisemitic comments. Quite the opposite: he has routinely given the Jewish people high praise. But the same criticism Tablet leveled at LaHaye can be leveled at Huckabee: he claims to love the Jewish people, but that love is tied up in a belief system which sees the Jewish people as playing a role in his salvation, while not necessarily ensuring their own.
“I worship a Jew! … I have a lot of Jewish friends, and they’re kind of, like, ‘You evangelicals love Israel more than we do,’” Huckabee commented in 2010. “I’m like, ‘Do you not get it? If there weren’t a Jewish faith, there wouldn’t be a Christian faith!’”
It is anyone’s guess how these beliefs will play out once Huckabee takes up residence in Jerusalem next year, but the signs we have regarding his mindset are not positive.
“We’re not dealing with an issue that is political, social, economic, or geographical,” Huckabee said on a trip to Israel last year. “We’re dealing with an issue that is spiritual.”
This is a fine sentiment for a priest or a rabbi or an imam, but it is a preposterous sentiment for a diplomat, whose job is to deal with the political, social, economic, and geographic. But it’s not just Huckabee’s lofty, detached view of the geopolitical realities in Israel which suggest trouble during his tenure as ambassador: it’s his fundamental views about the role that Israel and the Jewish people play in his own metaphysical drama. Specifically, a supporting role.
To be clear, Huckabee, Hagee, LaHaye, and other Christian Zionists believe that the Jewish people who they claim to love so much are all – every single one of them – damned to an eternity in hell if they do not eventually accept Jesus Christ as their savior. That’s not love, it’s apocalyptic paternalism.
When dispensational premillennialists talk about the Jews being God’s chosen people, they mean that they believe God will give the Jewish people one last chance to convert – a chance they believe will not be given to any other group – before being damned to hell. They see this as a generous offer.
In Hagee’s telling, this is the entire underpinning for the dispensational premillennialist view of an end times in which Christians are airlifted to safety while the Jewish people are scattered before being given the chance for “repentance and restoration.”
“This prophetic portrait paints the following sequence of events for the future,” Hagee has said. “America and Europe become weakened and cannot respond to Israel in the time that Russia and the Arab invasion begins against Israel…This is God’s plan. Why? Because he wants the Jewish people in Israel and around the world to know that He — the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — saved them.”
As Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute pointed out on NPR earlier this year, this is not a belief in the liberation of the Jewish people. It is a belief in their subjugation. “Even the part of Christian Zionism that has to do with Israel, you have to understand that, at the end of [that vision], Jews bow their knees to Jesus.”
Though one could expect Christian Zionists to make common cause with the rest of the Zionist coalition, many outspoken Zionists find the reasons behind Huckabee’s support for the cause repellant. “He’s a Christian fundamentalist, and I suspect his support for Israel is largely based on his belief in the rapture,” New York Congressman Ritchie Torres said last month. “As a secular Zionist, I find nothing remotely appealing about the fundamentalism of Mike Huckabee.”
Torres is right: fundamentalism is not an appealing trait in an ambassador, much less an ambassador who will be tasked with overseeing a conflict which is already spreading through the region, threatening innocent lives and shedding blood daily. The situation in Israel requires an expert, a seasoned hand in the ambassador’s chair, someone with experience and a deep knowledge of the pieces on the board, who can maneuver U.S. and regional interests safely through a complex knot of allies, enemies, and ambiguities.
What the situation does not need is an ambassador eagerly intent on bringing about the end of the world – but that’s what it’s going to get in Mike Huckabee.
“One small step for Trump,” political scientist Uriel Abulof of Tel Aviv University quipped about the nomination. “One giant leap for Armageddon.”
