I recently posted about Israel’s dependence on Christian Zionist support in this country.
The Brookings Institute (a conservative think tank) has also released a study examining Israel’s dependence on American evangelicals. The study also identified Israel’s new cause for concern — young evangelicals are
turning away from their parent’s traditional pro-Israel politics.
Frankly, this article brings joy to my heart! I hope this new generation of evangelical young people will read my next book.
The article is entitled “As Israel increasingly relies on US evangelicals for support, younger ones are walking away: what polls show.”
Here is an excerpt:
As the recent eruption in Israel/Palestine brought attention to shifting Democratic attitudes toward Israel, including among younger Jewish Americans, Israel’s focus on the evangelical right as a cornerstone of U.S. support for the Jewish state has proven increasingly important. As our University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll research has shown, evangelical attitudes toward Israel account for most of the Republican Party’s support for Israel; without evangelicals, Republican attitudes on Israel do not substantially deviate from the rest of America.
These trends in American politics may explain the recent statement by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer that Israel should spend more of its energy reaching out to “passionate” American evangelicals than to Jews, who are “disproportionately among our critics.” Criticizing Dermer,
Israel’s former consul general in New York, Dani Dayan, added that “our embassy in the United States capital has invested most of its energy in the relationship with conservatives, Republicans, evangelicals, and a certain type of Jews only.”
But a new survey commissioned by University for North Carolina at Pembroke researchers, carried out by Barna Group, has exposed what we have been finding for some time: younger evangelicals are much less supportive of Israel than older evangelicals, by a widening margin. The poll found a dramatic shift in attitudes between 2018 and 2021: support for Israel among young evangelicals dropped from 75% to 34%. This raises questions about the sustainability of the strong evangelical support for Israel that the Israeli right has cultivated for years and that proved reliable during the Trump administration.
Read the entire story here.
