According to most Orthodox Jewish authorities, their adherents are generally forbidden from entering churches. Christian worship, according to this traditionalist branch of Judaism, is considered idolatry. The elevation of a man to divine status, a violation of the first and weightiest commandment. And they are right that something in American evangelical Christianity has become idolatrous. But they have identified the wrong object.
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The idol is not Christ. The idol is Israel.
Not the Israel of the patriarchs, not the New Jerusalem of Revelation, not the covenant people of Scripture read in their fullness. The idol is a modern nation-state, founded in 1948, governed by men, conducting foreign policy, and fighting wars. Upon inspection, it acts in the same manner as other countries, yet is treated differently.
In significant sectors of American evangelical Christianity, Israel is a theological object beyond moral scrutiny. This is not political support for an ally. It is worship. And by Christianity’s own doctrinal standards, it is sin.
No nation, no institution, no people stands outside the reach of a God who judges the living and the dead. That includes the Church. That has always included Israel. The prophets did not discover this as a weapon against the covenant. They discovered it as the covenant’s deepest demand. The same principle would apply without modification to the United States or any other nation were it granted the same theological immunity.
Idolatry
Idolatry in the biblical tradition is not primarily about statues. The prophets understood it more precisely than that. An idol is any created thing that occupies the position belonging to God alone. Anything placed beyond judgment, wrapped in ultimate significance, treated as an end rather than a means.
Isaiah mocks the craftsman who burns half a tree for warmth and from the other half carves a god: “He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray” (Isaiah 44:20). The delusion is not stupidity. It is the refusal to let the created thing remain merely created.
Paul names the mechanism in Romans 1:25 with precision: they “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” Idolatry is always an exchange. Something finite takes the place of the infinite, and the worshiper calls the transaction holy.
A charge must be named and set aside. To argue that the modern state of Israel is not beyond prophetic scrutiny is not to argue that the covenant has been transferred, that Israel has been replaced, or that the Church has inherited what Israel forfeited. That argument is supersessionism in its classical form and carries a history too grave to invoke carelessly. This essay does not make it.
The prophets who spoke most searchingly against Israel were Israelites. Amos was not stripping the covenant from his own people. He was insisting the covenant meant something. The argument here is simpler and older than any debate about replacement: no nation, no institution, no people stands outside the reach of a God who judges the living and the dead.
Invented Theology
Christian Zionism is a theological system, not merely a political sympathy, and it deserves to be engaged on those terms. Its architecture was assembled in the nineteenth century through John Nelson Darby and codified for mass consumption by the Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909. Its central claim is that the modern nation-state of Israel stands in direct continuity with the covenant promises made to Abraham, that its 1948 founding fulfilled biblical prophecy, and that Christians are therefore obligated to support it without qualification.
The system has now reached the State Department. Mike Huckabee, confirmed in 2025 as U.S. Ambassador to Israel, told his Senate confirmation hearing that his connection to Israel is not geopolitical but spiritual: he believes the Bible, and therefore the relationship transcends foreign policy. In a prior interview, he suggested Israeli borders extending from the Euphrates to the Nile were rooted in Scripture. He later walked back as hyperbole, but the instinct was already on record.
This represents a pattern, not a personality quirk. A sitting American diplomat frames his conduct of U.S. foreign policy in explicitly theological terms, toward a specific nation-state, in a specific direction. Darby could not have imagined a more complete vindication of his system.
All this is not a recent development nor an isolated personality. Richard Land, who led the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for twenty-five years, told an SBC briefing that supporting Israel is a matter of being obedient to God. The Bible belt, he said, is Israel’s safety belt. Huckabee did not invent this framework. He inherited it. What has changed is not the theology but its reach from the pews into the State Department.
What the system produces, functionally, is an object that cannot be questioned, let alone examined by prophetic standard. The nation-state has been placed above judgment. This is precisely what the Bible defines as idolatry.
Study the Prophets
The irony runs deep. Walter Brueggemann, in The Prophetic Imagination, argues that the central task of the prophetic tradition was to dismantle every claim of immunity from divine judgment, including Israel’s own. The prophet does not affirm the dominant order. The prophet names what the dominant order cannot bring itself to say.
The Hebrew prophets practiced exactly this against Israel. Amos preached to the northern kingdom and did not soften: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). The covenant did not protect Israel from prophetic critique. It made that critique more serious. Election was responsibility, not immunity.
Jeremiah watched the temple crowds invoke its presence as a guarantee of divine protection and called them liars: “Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord’” (Jeremiah 7:4). The dwelling place of God was not beyond scrutiny. How much less a modern nation-state.
The God of the prophets does not grant exemption from judgment to those he loves. He holds them to a higher standard. The evangelical posture that places contemporary Israel beyond moral assessment does not recover the Hebrew prophetic tradition. It inverts it entirely.
The Counterargument Examined
The defense is predictable and not without surface plausibility: Christian Zionists do not exempt Israel from judgment. They affirm a covenant while holding the nation accountable, as they would any other. Support is not worship. Political alignment is not idolatry.
The test, however, is not what a theology claims. It is what a theology permits. A system that produces little sustained prophetic challenge, critique exists, but it is rare, costly, and treated as disloyalty. This discourages someone standing before the nation and saying: “You have sinned.” It is a system of functional immunity regardless of its stated terms.
The doctrine may allow for criticism in the abstract, while the culture renders criticism unspeakable in the concrete. When Huckabee frames his ambassadorship as spiritual rather than geopolitical, he does not open Israel to higher scrutiny. He closes it. A relationship that transcends foreign policy cannot be held to foreign policy standards. A nation wrapped in biblical destiny cannot be unwrapped by moral argument.
The mechanism does not require anyone to consciously believe that Israel is beyond judgment. It only requires that every attempt at judgment feels, to those inside the system, like a betrayal of something sacred. That feeling is the idol doing its work.
Borrowed Sin
Before John Nelson Darby, no established Christian theological tradition held that political support for a Jewish national state was a divine obligation incumbent on the Church. The Reformers did not teach it. The patristic writers did not teach it. Augustine’s City of God contains no chapter on the believer’s duty to a future Israeli state, because the category did not exist.
What Darby constructed in the nineteenth century was not a recovery of suppressed biblical truth. It was a new architecture, and embedded in that architecture was a new sin: insufficient support for the Jewish national project.
This is original sin’s mechanism applied wholesale. Original sin, in its classical formulation, is not a wrong the individual commits. It is a condition the individual inherits, already operative before the first choice is made. Darby’s system produced the structural equivalent.
A Christian born into the tradition of the Scofield Bible does not decide to regard Israel as theologically protected. They receive it. The guilt for non-support is in place before they arrive. To question it is not to raise a disagreement. It is to discover that dissent has been pre-classified as faithlessness.
The Reformers had a name for this: will-worship. The imposition of obligations God has not imposed, dressed in the language of divine requirement. The obligation to support a nation-state was not received from the prophets. It was manufactured in the nineteenth century, refined for mass distribution in the twentieth, and delivered to the twenty-first as though it had always been there. That it feels ancient is not evidence that it is. It is evidence that it works.
The Exchange
A created thing. A nation-state with borders, an army, and a government. Which has been wrapped in the language of ultimate significance and placed beyond prophetic challenge. The mechanism Paul describes in Romans 1 is precisely this: exchange. The living God, who judges nations, has been exchanged for a nation that may not be judged.
What is lost in this exchange is not accurate geopolitics. What is lost is the prophetic function of the Church. When Christianity sanctions a nation-state with divine authority, it surrenders the only ground from which it can speak truthfully to power. The prophet does not bless the king unconditionally. They stand before the king and say: “You have sinned.” Nathan before David. Elijah before Ahab. The Church before Caesar. This is not political opposition. It is the Church being the Church.
Huckabee does not stand before Israel and say: “You have sinned.” He stands before American Christians and says that the relationship transcends judgment because the Bible requires it. He has not recovered the prophetic tradition. He has abolished it and called the abolition faithfulness.
A Banner Raised
The response that has proven faithful in every prior instance of this corruption is a return to the sources, to the prophetic tradition, and to a God who has never, in either Testament, exempted his people from the obligation to be examined. Brueggemann calls this the task of the prophet: to keep alive the memory of a God who cannot be domesticated, managed, or deployed in service of power.
The door of the church. The Orthodox Jew who cannot enter because he knows idolatry when he sees it. He is looking in the right place. The question American evangelical Christianity will eventually have to answer is the one the prophets always asked: “What have you put in the place of God?”
For a growing and influential sector of that tradition, the answer is not complicated. It has a flag.
Michael Mellette is a philosopher and writer. Read more at michaelmellette.substack.com.
