How the Rapture Explains the Rupture Over Israel on the Right

 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/03/08/gop-maga-israel-evangelicals-theology-premillennialism-00818312

It’s no secret that Israel is losing ground in American public opinion on both the left and the right, even as many American Jews feel newly besieged by rising antisemitism. On much of the left, activists and intellectuals increasingly interpret Israel and Zionism through anti-colonial and anti-racist frameworks, casting the conflict in the moral language of oppressor and oppressed.

But the story here is larger than Israel. The Christian right that coalesced in the Cold War was not simply a political movement with religious voters. It was an interpretive system — a way of turning geopolitics into spiritual meaning. As that system thins out, what replaces it may be something colder: a politics of grievance in which religious identity persists, but the theology that once disciplined it does not.

For conservatives who care about Israel, and for Christians who care about the moral integrity of their public witness, the implication is uncomfortable: The old alliance was sustained by doctrine, not just by party. Once doctrine recedes, the guardrails it provided — however imperfect — recede with it.