Explores the roots of evangelical Christian support for Israel
through an examination of the Southern Baptist Convention. One week
after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, delegates
to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) repeatedly and
overwhelmingly voted down resolutions congratulating fellow
Southern Baptist Harry Truman on his role in Israel's creation.
From today's perspective, this seems like a shocking result. After
all, Christians - particularly the white evangelical Protestants
that populate the SBC - are now the largest pro-Israel constituency
in the United States. How could conservative evangelicals have been
so hesitant in celebrating Israel's birth in 1948? How did they
then come to be so supportive? Between Dixie and Zion: Southern
Baptists and Palestine before Israel addresses these issues by
exploring how Southern Baptists engaged what was called the
'Palestine question' whether Jews or Arabs would, or should,
control the Holy Land after World War I. Walker Robins argues that,
in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, most Southern
Baptists did not directly engage the Palestine question
politically. Rather, they engaged it indirectly through a variety
of encounters with the land, the peoples, and the politics of
Palestine. Among the instrumental figures featured by Robins are
tourists, foreign missionaries, Arab pastors, Jewish converts,
biblical interpreters, fundamentalist rebels, editorialists, and,
of course, even a president. While all revered Palestine as the
Holy Land, each approached and encountered the region according to
their own priorities. Nevertheless, Robins shows that Baptists
consistently looked at the region through an Orientalist framework,
broadly associating the Zionist movement with Western civilization,
modernity, and progress over and against the Arabs, whom they
viewed as uncivilized, premodern, and backward. He argues that such
impressions were not idle - they suggested that the Zionists were
fulfilling Baptists' long-expressed hopes that the Holy Land would
one day be revived and regain the prosperity it had held in the
biblical era.
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