Why I Am Not a Christian Zionist

September 17, 2024

By Ian Stackhouse

As someone who imbibed Christian Zionism in the early eighties during a six-month university scholarship in Israel – time in Ashkelon being part of that – I am able to answer quite readily why I am not, or no longer, a Christian Zionist. Quite apart from the apocalypticism it encourages in mainstream Israeli politics, as well as its oppressive stance towards Palestinians, which I shall get to, the main reason I did a U-turn on the matter, over the next couple of decades, was because I could no longer reconcile the territorialism of Christian Zionism with the broad sweep of Christian faith. Which is not to say that our Christian faith is a purely spiritual matter, any more than my conversion away from Christian Zionism implies replacement of the Jews. Strangely enough, the less I believed in Christian Zionism the more I found myself wanting to evangelise my Jewish friends. After all, the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, first to the Jew. But what Saint Paul also expounds is a gospel to the Gentile also, and a coming together of both in a new people of God. And as I began to expand my horizons to grasp this vision, it was simply a case of not being able to find a place anymore for what I now come to regard as a very crude literalism.

The irony in all of this is that by the time I had dismantled the ideology in my head, I got appointed in 2004 to lead a church that had been something of an epicentre of Christian Zionism here in the UK. Without me really saying anything, a whole number of families left during those early years because they intuited that I was not going to tick their box. It wasn’t that I had suddenly become pro-Palestinian; more that my revisionism refused to endorse the theological agenda of Christian Zionists and could no longer ignore the plight of Palestinians which I witnessed first-hand on subsequent trips to the West Bank. To this day I can’t quite recall whether I changed my theology and then my politics or changed my politics then my theology. I suspect it was more the former. But the other main reason I am no longer a Christian Zionist is because I can no longer stay silent on the gross expansionism as well as militarism that it endorses.

Do I believe Israel should exist? Absolutely. Does Israel have a right to defend itself? Of course. Rightly so, Christian Zionists monitor these things. What they also do, however, is confirm Israel in her exceptionalism, which in the world of realpolitik has proven disastrous. One of the reasons I wrote Beyond Christian Zionism: A Travelogue of a Former Ideologue, which I submitted to Wipf and Stock as a manuscript at the end of September 2023, is because I wanted to explore, free from the burden of end time propheticism, a way forward that honours the Palestinians (many of whom are Christian of course); that ceases to instrumentalise the Jews (which is the irony in all of this); and, instead, contributes to a way of peace across the divide. This surely is what followers of Jesus ought to be about. The thrust of the New Testament is not the erection of walls but their dismantling, and the building up, in its place, of heterogenous communities in which there is no Jew or Gentile, but all are one in Christ.

Ian Stackhouse is the Senior Pastor of Millmead, Guildford Baptist Church, UK. He also lectures at various seminaries in the UK and abroad and is the author of several books including, more recently, Praying Psalms (Cascade 2018), and Letters to a Young Pastor (Cascade 2019).