With Trump’s second presidency, Christian Zionism may be returning to the White House stronger than ever before. His recent nomination of Mike Huckabee as US ambassador to Israel and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense mean that militant, hardline Christian Zionists stand to be in control of the Pentagon and US military—and, of course, at the helm of the US-Israel relationship. After over a year of Democrat-backed Israeli genocide and belligerent escalation in Gaza, Lebanon, and across the region, the US and Israeli Right are poised to work together towards an even more brutal and dystopian agenda, ranging from full Israeli annexation of the West Bank to war against Iran and beyond.
In a 2010 New Yorker profile, Mike Huckabee describes becoming born-again during the heady Jesus Movement of the early 1970s, and dates his political involvement—like so many others of his generation—to the birth of the Moral Majority at the end of that decade. A 69-year-old Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee’s long political career has included a decade as governor of Arkansas, two unsuccessful bids for the Republican presidential nomination, and nearly two decades as a talk show host on Fox and Christian media.
From the very beginning, Huckabee has been a stalwart Christian Zionist. Having taken over 100 trips to Israel since 1973, Huckabee has aligned consistently with the hawkish Israeli Right and its agenda of permanent occupation, expansion, and Jewish supremacy in Palestine.
This February, Huckabee sat down for a conversation with Bishop Paul Lanier, board chair of the prominent global Christian Zionist organization International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), at the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) in Nashville. At this year’s convention of the NRB—a leading international network of evangelical media outlets with a combined audience in the hundreds of millions—an Israeli ambulance was parked on the convention floor; attendees could watch gruesome footage of the October 7 attacks on virtual headsets; Israeli government officials and hostage families were in ample attendance; and a resolution was passed to use ‘Judea and Samaria’—the term favored by Israel’s settler movement—to describe the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Huckabee made it clear to Lanier that his Zionism is built on an overriding Biblical conviction. “When people use the word ‘occupied’,” he explained:
I say yeah, Israel is occupying the land, but it’s the occupation of a land that God gave them 3500 years ago. It is their land. The title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs…I never use the term West Bank, I find it offensive, We’re talking about Judea and Samaria…we need to use the Biblical language.
And part of the reason that I’m as passionate as I am is that unapologetically I’m a person of the book. I believe the scripture. And so in Genesis when we’re told that God will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel, I’m simple-minded enough to say ‘there it is! What am I going to do? I’m going to believe that’…this is a Biblical mandate and we need to stand on it from that perspective.
Huckabee’s ‘Biblical mandate’ has led him to march in lockstep with the maximalist Israeli Right. As leading Middle East analyst Lara Friedman has documented, he has: claimed there is “no such thing as a Palestinian”; called a Palestinian state a “fantasy”; called on the US to fund West Bank settlements; and considered buying a home there himself. On Wednesday, a day after far-right Israeli Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that “2025 is the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” Huckabee affirmed that “of course” full Israeli sovereignty would be possible under a Trump presidency.
While Huckabee’s political agenda may not be all that different from that of David Friedman, Trump’s Israel ambassador during his first presidency, the optics of Friedman lent the impression that the US-Israel ‘special relationship’ was primarily a Jewish issue. Huckabee’s nomination makes the truth more clear—in a country ruled by Christian nationalism, the tens of millions of evangelicals who form the core base of support for Israel deserve one of their own at the helm of their treasured ‘special relationship’.
‘I read about you in the Bible!’
Then there’s Pete Hegseth, whose 2020 book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, Jeff Sharlet wrote about this week. Nominated to lead the world’s most powerful military, the 44-year-old Fox News host served as a National Guard officer in Iraq and Afghanistan and served at Guantanamo Bay, the detention operation known for its flagrant human rights violations whose expansion he’s called for. Hegseth’s severe lack of qualifications for the Defense Secretary position is matched by his fervent commitment to the ‘war on woke’ in the military, unquestioning support for Trump, and predilection for Crusader iconography tattoos associated with the Christian far-right—tattoos that led the National Guard to remove him from duty when his unit was called to serve in DC for Biden’s inauguration.
While he was raised Baptist, as scholar of Christian nationalism Matthew Taylor has documented, Hegseth is rooted in an even more fringe Christian nationalist tradition than Huckabee’s relatively mainstream evangelicalism—the network of Reformed Reconstructionist churches known as the “theo-bros”, often dominated by hardline dominionism and chauvinist male influencers. “Open up your Bible—God granted Abraham this land,” Hegseth declared, explaining his support for Israel on Fox.
“I never met a Jewish person until I went to college,” Hegseth admitted in a 2016 interview. When I did, the first thing I said to him was, “I read about you in the Bible!” Hegseth sees Israel as a “patriotic state of faith” in rebellion against a “multicultural, secular, humanist world…It’s the story of God’s chosen people. That story didn’t end in 1776 or in 1948 or with the founding of the UN. All of these things still resonate and matter today.”
This story of divine providence, linking 1776 and 1948, is core to the Christian Zionist imaginary of the United States and Israel as twin ‘shining cities on a hill’ (to paraphrase Reagan, who borrowed it from Puritan John Winthrop), charged with a crusade to save the West. Hegseth summed it up in a March 2019 speech at the annual gala of the National Council of Young Israel, an Orthodox Jewish organization—“Zionism and Americanism are the frontlines for Western civilization and freedom.”
Since October 7, Hegseth has used his Fox News platform to champion hardline US-backed Israeli aggression against Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon. He’s lent support to the most hardline elements of the Israeli radical Right, including Hebron settlers, and even toured the Temple Mount with leaders of the Temple Mount movement, whose goal to destroy Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple over its ruins would spark unimaginable conflagration.
In 2018, Hegseth spoke at a Jerusalem conference organized by the Israeli religious Zionist outlet Arutz Sheva. Soon after Trump’s evangelical-backed decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, the mood was celebratory, and Hegseth hoped for more miracles on the horizon:
There’s no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible…I will submit to you, in light of the support you have in Washington DC, the support you have amongst patriotic Americans, amongst Evangelical Christians, amongst Believers, amongst Republicans even amongst some Democrats…buy the [lottery] ticket, take your action, do what needs to be done here in Israel. Because I truly believe this is a moment where America will have your back.
Hegseth’s sweeping command would likely be even more bold today—and this time, he stands to play a direct role in helping the Israeli Right “do what needs to be done.”
