In March 1992, Christianity Today, a prominent evangelical Christian magazine based in the US, featured a cover story dedicated to Christian Zionism – a theological and political movement that believes that all Jews should immigrate to Palestine to trigger the return of Jesus Christ.
The article warned that the movement was witnessing a “decline” in its support, most of which comes from conservative evangelical Christians, who traditionally vote for the Republican Party.
But in the following three decades, Christian Zionism thrived. It is estimated that it has tens of millions of followers, mostly in the southeast and south-central regions, known as “the Bible Belt”.
Commanding significant political sway and financial resources, Christian Zionism played a key role in establishing unconditional US support for Israel among the right-wing base. The movement also helped elect George W Bush for two terms and rallied support for his devastating war on Iraq, which was theologically justified by some Christian Zionists as necessary to usher in the rebuilding of Babylon, the second coming of Jesus Christ and the end of times.
More than 30 years later, another publication declared the imminent decline of the movement. In its November 2025 issue, Jacobin, a leftist magazine based in the US, predicted the “end-times for Christian Zionism”.
The magazine’s obituary of one of the most powerful political groups in the US came in the wake of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has seen a plunge in American public support for America’s closest ally. The war, which saw more than 72,000 Palestinians, including 38,000 women and children killed, has created a divide within the evangelical base.
But despite the dwindling public support, Christian Zionists still have considerable influence over the US power structure due to their substantial financial resources and institutional heft.
The lobby arm of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a Christian Zionist organisation, for example, spent more than $670,000 on lobbying in Washington to strengthen sanctions on Iran, among other issues. CUFI has also worked to secure billions in funding to Israel.
Christian Zionists have used their influence to help stoke the current war on Iran. Prominent Christian leaders praised the Trump administration for launching what they saw as a religious war that could trigger the fulfilment of another biblical prophecy about a war between Israel and “Persia”.
So, can they sustain their influence amid declining support for Israel in the US? Or is a fall imminent this time?
Cracks in the support base
The Christian Zionist movement cuts across denominations, but evangelical Christians make up its core. They tend to embrace Zionism out of the conviction that they have the religious obligation to support Jews, God’s chosen people. Other Christian Zionists see Israel as a natural ally of the US and a protector of the Holy Land.
One of the reasons Jacobin and some scholars predict “a decline” is because recent studies have shown diminishing support for Israel within both groups, especially their youth.
In a 2021 survey, which focused only on evangelicals under 30, just 33.6 percent of respondents said they supported Israel.
The scholars who commissioned the poll, Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin, hypothesised that one of the reasons for the dramatic shift in attitudes among young evangelicals was a diminishing belief in a key biblical interpretation: premillennialism – which they identified as more “hospitable to Israel and the Jewish people”.
Premillennialism is the belief that Jesus Christ will return to earth to rule for 1,000 years before the end of times. For this to happen, several prophecies need to be fulfilled, mostly linked to the restoration of biblical Israel. Premillennialists, therefore, believe that modern-day Israel needs to be supported in an existential battle against regional adversaries and assisted in building the Third Temple on what today is Al Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest site.
In the 2021 survey, just 21 percent of respondents said they believed in premillennialism; by contrast, a 2011 survey by the National Association of Evangelicals found that 65 percent of evangelicals across all ages followed this belief.
Apart from changing religious views, there has also been a shift in political attitudes due to events in the Middle East, such as the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli-US war on Iran.
Polls released by Pew Research reveal a dramatic drop in support for Israel among young conservatives and among Christians in general.
A recent poll by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) also shows a growing perception among young Republicans that Israel has too much influence in US politics. It also demonstrates that these unfavourable attitudes may translate into voting patterns.
Money and power
According to experts, so far, these changing attitudes among young Christians in the US have not had a palpable impact on the power Christian Zionism is able to project.
“Today, [Christian Zionism] may be becoming less universally popular, but less popular does not mean less powerful,” Reverend Fares Abraham, a Palestinian-American Christian pastor and author, told Al Jazeera. “[It] is highly organised, well-funded, and closely allied with secular and Jewish Zionist groups. That alliance gives it structural durability.”
But how was this power achieved?
According to Daniel Hummel, research fellow in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Christian Zionism became so powerful as a movement because it aligned with already existing theological and cultural attitudes towards Israel and American exceptionalism, particularly among evangelical Christians.
This religious group, which makes up almost a third of the US population, emerged as a more organised voting bloc in the 1970s, when it helped elect Richard Nixon, then Jimmy Carter.
Support for Israel was inserted gradually into the list of their concerns by evangelical leaders, such as Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell, who forged close relations with the Israeli government in the 1970s.
In 1979, he founded the conservative Moral Majority movement that helped unite and politicise the Christian right in the US and secure Ronald Reagan’s two terms as president. Just two years after he founded the organisation, Falwell bragged that he could “mobilise 70 million conservative Christians for Israel”.
Today, the Evangelical Christian community accounts for 90 million voters.
Because of the decentralised nature of the movement and lack of a single registered lobby group, there is no financial data to reveal its economic strength.
To gauge Christian Zionism’s fundraising reach, Al Jazeera investigated the financial status of organisations whose leaders have been identified as “Israel’s top 50 Christian allies” by the US-based Israel Allies Foundation (IAF) in the past five years. These include mega-churches, religious broadcasters, charities and NGOs.
Al Jazeera was able to find public financial information of 36 organisations. Their combined yearly revenues totalled $2.8bn.
By comparison, in 2024, the National Association of Realtors, one of the largest lobbying organisations for the real estate sector – had revenue of $360m; the National Rifle Association – which lobbies for pro-gun legislation – had $174m.
Christian Zionist organisations, however, do not operate as standard lobby organisations. According to Melani McAlister, Professor of American Studies and International Affairs at the George Washington University, their focus is not so much on lobbying politicians through campaign donations as it is on growing the number of their followers.
“The point of these [Christian Zionist] organisations it to get large groups of ordinary people behind them,” she said.
Some organisations are able to achieve that through proselytising; mega-churches on Al Jazeera’s list, such as Free Chapel, boast hundreds of thousands of followers and yearly revenues as high as $103m.
An imminent decline?
The shifting attitudes among young Christian conservatives may not have resulted in political change, but they have caused concern in the US and Israel.
Before his assassination last September, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, an organisation focused on mobilising the conservative youth vote and credited with helping Trump secure a second term, sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“In my opinion, Israel is losing the information war and needs a ‘communications intervention’,” he wrote.
In October, Israel contracted a US-based firm to undertake a “geofencing” campaign focused on evangelical churches to promote pro-Israel digital content and to pay pastors for pro-Israel outreach.
In December, Israel hosted 1,000 American pastors and influencers to train them to act as its ambassadors and reach out to young Americans.
In late April, the Knesset approved a record $730m budget for pro-Israel PR – four times the amount spent last year.
Does all this signal that Christian Zionism faces a decline? Experts do not see a radical shift in the short term that could affect the 2026 midterm elections, but long-term trends could erode the movement’s power.
According to McAlister, the story that Israel is able to sell about being an ally against an imagined “Muslim threat” still appeals to the US public. At the same time, criticism of Israel remains costly, and it is unlikely to feature prominently in election campaigns this season.
“The pro-Israel side is [still] able to inflict pain on people who disagree with them,” she said.
In her view, Christian Zionist support for the war on Iran is unlikely to reflect badly on the movement or on Israel either. It could, however, encourage the isolationist trends on the right.
For Hummel, Christian Zionism faces a major challenge from changing theological attitudes. In seminaries and some Christian media, long-held evangelical beliefs about the end of times and the centrality of modern-day Israel within them are being increasingly challenged.
In his opinion, this is having a big impact on young evangelicals who no longer see Israel through the lens of biblical prophecies but through the lens of social justice: the Palestinians being the oppressed, and the Israelis – the oppressors.
“The deeper religious culture is shifting in a way that – for me – makes it hard to imagine a reversal to a very unified, strong pro-Israel evangelical community in the future,” Hummel said.
He also sees that the inter-denominational conservative consensus that people like Falwell built in the 1970s and 1980s could break up. The result could be growing divisions along denominational fault lines – Evangelicals vs Catholics – that could impact the ability of the Republican Party to mobilise young voters.
In Rev Abraham’s view, there is also a risk of fragmentation within the evangelical community and that the war on Iran, just like the genocide in Gaza, could intensify the contradictions between the political rhetoric conservative Christians are exposed to and the teachings of Christianity.
“The deepest threat to Christian Zionism and to the politics surrounding this war is not just strategic failure. It is moral exposure. It is the fragile theological ground it stands on,” Rev Abraham told Al Jazeera.
