This theology is driving young Christians away from Israel

Young Christians in the United States are abandoning support for Israel as they increasingly move toward the theology of amillennial and postmillennial eschatology.

Support for Israel among this group has dropped by more than half over three years, as documented in the 2023 book “Christian Zionism in the Twenty-First Century: American Evangelical Opinion on Israel” by Kirill M. Bumin and Motti Inbari. Christian Zionism is the biblical belief that  God has not broken his promise to the Jewish people to give them the land.

“Conversations with some of the leaders in the young evangelical community as well as other anecdotal evidence lead us to believe that the greater racial diversity of amillennial and postmillennial pastors, combined with their relative youthfulness in comparison to the premillennial pastors, helps attract a larger share of the under-30 evangelicals to those churches and eschatological positions,” Bumin says.

As amillennialism and postmillennialism grow increasingly attractive to under-30 evangelicals, Bumin said that demographic is “thinking less and less about the role of Israel and the Jewish people in the end times as catalysts for the second coming and salvation. And without explicit eschatological relevance, support for the Jewish people and support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes a matter of a peripheral concern.”

Bumin said postmillennialism “resonates with young people and aligns with a pro-Palestinian, rather than a pro-Israel, view in the current political environment in the United States. Postmillennialism teaches that the second coming and last judgment will take place at the same time following an extended period of Christian dominance on Earth, while amillennialism teaches that the millennium is symbolic and that Christians have been in the end times since the first century.”

Richard Land, president emeritus of Southern Evangelical Seminary, attributed the decline of young evangelical support for Israel in part to the influence of cultural Marxism in U.S. colleges and universities He also said the children of many pretribulation premillennialists are increasingly changing their views to post tribulation premillennialism, a trend he said he could not explain.

“I don’t know exactly why, but I do know the result,” he said. “The result is that they are much less focused on Israel. There’s a cause-and-effect relationship: as ‘pre-trib’ wanes and ‘post-trib’ waxes, the intensity of the support for Israel wanes.”

–Dwight Widaman | Metro Voice