The Mystery of Evangelical Philosemitism
Faith, Paradox, and the Irreducible Jew
American Evangelicals are among the world’s most ardent philosemites, despite being deeply, insistently Christian. The key lies in a unique political-theological structure created at America’s founding, a negative space that allows the Jew to remain irreducible and even beloved.
“How is it possible [that he] should represent the Hebrews in such a contemptible light? They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth.” —John Adams
“The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.” —Samuel Adams
“While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader...” —Samuel Adams
Evangelical philosemitism isn’t mysterious in itself. They cherish the Bible. They love the Jews because the Bible tells them to:
“And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and be thou a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curseth thee will I curse; and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” —Genesis 12:2-3
The deeper question is why they can see Jews’ Biblically mandated worth when most of Western Civilization cannot. How have they avoided Christianity’s near-universal tendency to turn against the Jews? I suspect even Evangelicals themselves cannot fully explain it. I will attempt to approach it from a Jewish vantage point.
I. Christian Yet Not Christian
Most theories of antisemitism refuse, for ideological reasons, to perceive its age or universality. Thus, they also cannot account for exceptions to the rule. I wrote recently, in agreement with David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism, that Western Civilization and Christendom have chosen at every step of their development to see the Jew as the embodiment of wrong thinking since the Church Fathers and even earlier.
Yet, some strands of Western thought come close to being exceptions. One is a specific strain of liberalism that gave birth to the American Revolution. It traces its roots from Locke and Montesquieu to the Founding Fathers. By the time we reach Washington, Hamilton, and John Adams, we find rare, perhaps unprecedented, collective philosemitism. What’s more, this love of Jews was not personal. It was intellectual, and without explicit precedent among the thinkers considered part of the philosophical canon of the American Revolution. Philosemitism lies at the root of American exceptionalism and the first conception of the American Republic. The Founding Fathers did not inherit a philosemitic tradition. Instead, they seem to have elevated those thinkers and texts that they could reconcile with a political order inclusive of Jews.
How is this possible? Doesn’t it contradict the general contention that “The Holocaust is the Culmination of Western Civilization”?
It may be that some of the Founders were already disposed to perceive the Jew differently, not as an artifact of Christian hostility, but as a witness to G-d’s sovereignty. The remark that “they are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth” is not easily reducible to mere instrumental politics.
A more plausible reading is that this instinctive reverence enabled the very structure that followed. At the religious margins, certain strands of non-conformist Protestantism in Britain had long begun to read the Hebrew Scriptures with unusual warmth. English Puritan millenarianism, 17th-century Hebraists, and even debates over the readmission of Jews under Cromwell quietly prepared a small but important reservoir of philosemitic sentiment. The Founders gifted us a constitution that formalized, often without full self-awareness, the moral instincts already stirring beneath their political vision.
Since the Founding Fathers sought a moral order rooted in Divine Law but defanged of destabilizing European sectarianism, Jewish antiquity—Moses the Lawgiver, the moral cry of the prophets—became useful. One strain of ancient Christian thought paints Moses and the prophets in opposition to the Jew. Whatever is true in the “Old Testament,” it argues, is already Christian, and whatever is not Christian in those works is not true. If, however, you wish to form a new polity springing from Christendom but religiously neutral in public, it requires a certain sleight of hand. The deep religious roots of a liberal yet ordered polity must permeate everything, yet not as a particular Christian belief. These roots are necessary for that liberalism to be principled and sustainable, but pose a sectarian risk to its principles and sustainability.
Polities solved this modern tension in different ways. The French and Russian Revolutions pretended they were grounded purely in reason. The church-bound monarchies, such as Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia, and Restoration France, claimed to be free while remaining steadfast extensions of their respective churches.
The American founders take a different approach. While many Founders are Episcopalians, it is precisely their relaxed, disestablished, post-Anglican sensibility that allowed them to separate personal piety from institutional enforcement. They seem to notice that it’s almost as if centuries of Christian antisemitism have been holding the Jews apart, at right angles to Western Civilization, for precisely this destiny. The Founders choose to ride the paradox. They hide the religious roots of American liberalism. Piety is left unstated, unquestioned, and perhaps even unknowable, even as it quietly shapes every aspect of the republic. What do you call a polity that believes in the G-d of Abraham at an individual level yet belongs to no warring Christian sect? You call it Jewish. Where better to hide a secret than in Western Civilization’s basement, with the Jews?
II. The Founders’ Apophatic Genius
So far, so instrumental. At first glance, it seems the Jews are merely being deployed by revolutionaries against the crimes of the Ancien Régime. However, a proper understanding of antisemitism points to an otherwise surprising outcome. Jew-hatred is not simply another prejudice; it is structurally entangled with idolatry. Since Sinai, the Jew has stood as a living witness that no finite form can claim ultimate sovereignty. The ancient Sumerian, the medieval priest, and the modern ideologue all find the Jews intolerably resistant to absorption.
The American founding, however, stumbled upon a method for sustaining liberalism that we could call apophasis, or negative knowledge. Donald Rumsfeld, advisor to an Evangelical President, might call it the “Known unknown.” The American founders sought not to clearly define their polity’s form of worship but to hold open a negative space, a chamber of possibility in which all worship seems possible, within a broader limiting structure that had to fade into the background. Paradoxically, it is only the founders’ piety and principle that granted them peace with contradiction. Historically, non-religious states have been unable to sustain American-style religious freedom. The sacred must exist, as Sam Adams would tell you. But its precise articulation must remain perpetually deferred on pain of collapsing into particularity.
In practice, rather than codifying a single official religious truth, American law tolerates a paradox. Contradictory private beliefs coexist, requiring no resolution. Jefferson wrote of the “quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.”
This technical-sounding, dry procedure has made all the difference for the Jews. The founders pretended that their liberalism had sprung into being like Athena, fully-formed, armored, long-limbed. By veiling its particular Anglo-Christian parentage, our political order appears free-floating and universal. This created space, a makom panui, allowed the Jews, long held apart by Christian history, to enter and be counted as “us.” As Washington famously wrote, “[H]appily the Government of the United States…gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” The American freedom of religion was born.
In other revolutions, Jewish particularism was either portrayed as the oppressive tool of the status quo (as in Russia) or the crime of the Ancien Régime to be abolished (as in France). Contradictions were tolerated only temporarily on the march toward totalizing synthesis. The American Founding Fathers deliberately embedded durable indeterminacy in the foundation. They built what might be called a proto-existential political order, one rooted not in metaphysical synthesis but in the individual’s moral standing before G-d. The state refuses to systematize ultimate meaning, entrusting free souls to seek their own reckoning, under a shared but undefined divine sovereignty. In this, whether consciously or not, they were creating the most philosemitic polity on earth. That negative space did not stay abstract. In the furnace of revivalism, it became a folk religion. Enter the Evangelicals.
III. Evangelical Personalism & Philosemitism
We can now confront the Evangelical case directly. Throughout this essay, I speak primarily of American Evangelical Christianity, which developed within, and remains inseparable from, the political-theological structure born at America’s founding.
In America, a thousand religions bloom. The more rigid and formal the group or church, the more prone it becomes to American antisemitism. The country club Brahmins, the KKK, and the “Death to Israel, Death to America” protesters of Dearborn all agree that Jews ruin their vision. Evangelicals also have their share of antisemites. From local lynch mobs to certain Pentecostal currents prone to conspiracy and hostility, deep reservoirs of Christian antisemitism have persisted. But the most enduring and mainstream Evangelical posture has leaned toward reverent philosemitism. CUFI’s annual Israel Summit packs an arena. Evangelical tour operators fill El Al flights throughout the year. Polls may waffle decade-to-decade, but Sunday-school maps of “Abraham’s journey” have hung on walls since 1920. Multiple Pew surveys since 2015 consistently find a clear majority, sometimes double that of mainline Protestants, expressing warm views toward Israel.
This strikes us as a mystery. Thanks to enduring perceptions from the second Bush administration, Evangelicals are meant to be this millennium’s poster children for fundamentalist, absolutist, anti-intellectual religion. We could expect them to use the Founding Fathers’ negative space to wage war on the Jew. It is one of the oldest and most persistent Christian traditions. Why do they disproportionately carry forward the structural philosemitism of the American founding to new heights?
Of course, some Evangelicals express philosemitism in eschatological terms. Dispensational premillennialism, popularized through 19th- and 20th-century prophecy conferences and the Scofield Reference Bible, amplified Evangelical engagement with Jewish destiny. Yet while these movements framed Jews as key to prophetic chronology, they coexisted with and often evolved into genuine affection rooted in personal reverence. The Jews are not merely characters in a prophetic timetable.
This affection doesn’t mean they’re less Christian or fixed in their beliefs than their coreligionists. Nor would being “less Christian” help the Jews. As we’ve said, modern secular “tolerance” flattens and absorbs Jewish identity. For example, in late 19th-century France, the Dreyfus affair revealed how secular republicanism could be antisemitic. Its ostensible dissolution of sectarian identity meant nothing when encountering a particular Jew.
Evangelical philosemitism is no false pluralism, no Greek tolerance. Rather, Evangelicals have also stumbled upon the trick of apophasis. They have created a negative space within the American negative space.
This religion developed over time, when waves of Evangelical revival, especially in the Second Great Awakening, bypassed centralized ecclesial authority entirely, deepening a culture of direct personal connection with Scripture unmediated by system. Despite churning out scholars and elites, it has resisted elite institutional consolidation, formal hierarchies, and theological centralization. So, while American Evangelical Christianity may seem absolute in effect, in structure, it is anything but. As best as this Jew can tell, it is a folk-theological religion rooted in personal connection, direct experience of grace, biblical immediacy, and suspicion of institutional theology. It is about raising a beacon of sincere devotion upon the dark and woolly Ozarks of unfathomable mystery.
System is not its salvation; relationship is. A system saves by removing contingency. A relationship saves by trusting love to persist when understanding fails. A religion of personal connection doesn’t redeem by answering every question. It instead allows one to love the unanswered and unanswerable. This explains why they sometimes seem so rigid. A mediating system offers flexibility, a kind of ideological shock absorber, but faith is either clinging to G-d Himself or it is not. It also explains their “anti-intellectualism.” In relational reasoning, we never expect to fully understand the other. On the contrary, it is one of love’s most beautiful powers to allow us to accept the idiosyncrasies of the beloved without explaining and without even a desire to explain.
In Europe, political toleration advanced, but supersessionism—the idea that Christianity fulfilled and thus replaced Judaism—remained. The Jew might be tolerated as a citizen, but only by surrendering his covenantal claim. Even atheist rebels like Marx repeated the pattern. Evangelicals may, on paper, subscribe to the same theological claims of the gospels that birthed this pattern. Yet they can let the contradiction sit, untroubled. They place the personal and relational before any totalizing structure, even as they are devotionally or politically absolutist.
This is not to say that Evangelicals are moderate or pluralistic in the way secular liberalism defines tolerance. They are, in many respects, rigid in both personal conviction and moral demand. But their rigidity lives in the space of personal salvation, not in a total system seeking to reduce the Jewish denominator.
Evangelicals declare the entire Bible literal and inerrant, while simultaneously navigating contradictions through a relational instinct that resists full systemization. They seem at home in this tension. Likewise, the Evangelical demands personal submission to G-d but does not need to rewrite metaphysics to erase the Jew’s standing mystery. One minute, these Christians pray aloud for Israeli hostages, reciting Psalms for the protection of Jerusalem and reading Isaiah’s promises of Israel’s restoration, weeping for strangers they’ve never met. Then, they mourn unsaved Jewish souls. They do both because the Bible told them to. The religion’s paradox is being insistently, even annoyingly, Christian, while holding what that means loosely and personally.
To the Evangelical, these apparent contradictions do not feel like contradictions at all. They arise only to outside observers, especially to Jews or to systematic theologians, who assume that loving chosenness while affirming supersession should logically conflict. The Evangelical lives comfortably within this unresolved space because relationship, not resolution, defines the faith.
Billy Graham is a useful illustration. Publicly, he declared the Jews G-d’s chosen people and supported Israel as a biblical duty. Yet he once shared privately with Nixon typical Christian suspicions of Jewish worldliness corroding society’s morality. The inconsistency hardly troubled him. In another religious culture, such tension might produce cognitive dissonance; here, it simply coexisted. Paradox? Certainly. But there are worse things than paradox.
Catholicism, for example, has historically prized formal definition. Dogmatic precision was often necessary to resolve theological and political disputes under conditions of ecclesial authority. These definitions accumulate into what resembles an all-encompassing system, requiring careful harmonization across centuries of doctrine. Mystery is acknowledged, but always contained within a defined scaffolding. Suspicion of Jews and reverence for the Hebrew Scriptures were quickly harmonized into an official framework for punishing the Jews. Over the centuries, it was doctrinally formalized and institutionalized. It spawned restrictions on Jewish economic activity, ghettos, ritualized forced sermons, and theological declarations of obsolescence. The Church ensured that every tension was resolved into policy, and every ambiguity was converted into structure. Billy Graham, unmoored from ecclesial hierarchy and lacking a pathological need to “make things fit,” never needed to do this. His contradictions remained intimate, unregulated, and personal. For Rome, this incoherence demanded resolution. For the Evangelical, it remains simply another mystery held within relationship. Graham’s theological instincts allowed him to revere the Jewish people even while holding private biases that, in other contexts, would have turned seamlessly into hostility.
Traditionally, experts frame Evangelical philosemitism as mere instrumentalism. Dispensationalist theology, they argue, reduces Jews to eschatological chess pieces in service of Christian end-times narratives. Geopolitical interests, strategic alliances, and defense priorities further fuel pro-Israel sentiment. And many Evangelical missions aggressively proselytize Jews. These charges are not entirely baseless. But they misunderstand what makes this philosemitism distinct. Evangelicals do not resolve these contradictions, but live inside them. If it were so simple to pray sincerely for the Jews’ flourishing while simultaneously longing for their eventual conversion, everyone would do it. If mere political alignment were the key, philosemitism would well up across Europe. These framings, in my opinion, do more explaining away than explaining. They are not confronting the striking exception of this phenomenon. Rather, it is precisely the willingness to suspend final resolution, to tolerate and even cherish dissonance, that sets American Evangelical philosemitism apart.
In sum, The Founders’ refusal to define a singular theological order created an open field. Many political and strategic forces have shaped Evangelical support for Israel, but these alone cannot explain the unusual theological accommodation Evangelicals make. They achieve what Tertullian, Augustine, and Chrysostom never could. They make room for Jewish chosenness while retaining their Christian absolutes. They live comfortably within tensions that produced antisemitism on other shores.
IV. Evangelical Personalism & Philosemitism
Evangelical philosemitism arises in America for a reason. To some extent, even many American Catholics and mainline Protestants have absorbed this foundational American ambiguity. By contrast, other mystically inclined, personal, folk Christianities, as one finds, for example, in Eastern Europe, seem not to be as insistently philosemitic. Nor is Islamic Sufi mysticism a general exception to the established Muslim relationship with the Jews. In those cases, personal acceptance of mystery is subsumed within a broader ethnic identity that limits its reach. Not so in America. An iconoclastic personal faith on these shores, seeking its cultural and legal limits, finds only the edges of the negative space the Founding Fathers created. Only in America can the Evangelical retain his interpretation of scripture about the Jewish people without contradiction. Elsewhere, whether in Lithuania or the ummah, such contradictions collapse and vanish.
While the United States did not manage to go to war over the Holocaust, it remains the safest and most prosperous harbor for Jews in the history of our exile. Yet the Founding Fathers’ willingness to live with known unknowns is crumbling, and the safety with it.
Today, the apophatic consensus strains under pressure from both directions. New technocratic universalisms flatten all identities into managed, bureaucratic categories, while post-liberal, integralist visions seek to harmonize religion, nation, and state into a single, theological order. The refusal to collapse either side of the American paradox—to neither reduce the country to a set of mere procedures nor to remove the negative space and embrace a complete Christian identity—requires an electorate with a confident moral and intellectual outlook. The republic requires keeping. In the end, it comes down to self-perception, courage, and trust.
The individual who can say, “There is a Divine truth but it transcends its imposition,” and, “There is no tyranny, because you are a sovereign Divine being in your own life,” must at base believe in the human soul even before righteousness and freedom. They must trust that a man, both alone and in a group, can both work toward his vision of paradise and trust others to get there at their own pace and by their own path. They must believe that a paradise earned by flattening the soul is a hell. They must believe it so strongly that they are willing to allow paradox and dissonance to reign.
Even as America wrestles with its current crises, it remains, for now, the most durable refuge for the irreducible Jew, an inheritance from the Fathers. American Evangelicals love Jews because they put relationship before system within a genuinely pluralist civilization. In this, they embody a kind of practical American mysticism. They carry the Founders’ torch. Philosemitism requires humility in the face of mystery paired with a pluralistic political structure. Without both, the Jew is either erased, absorbed, or resented.
And so we arrive not at politics, but at spiritual discipline. Philosemitism is not a happy accident. It is a fierce, grown-up reverence, the strength to let what is other remain other, and to accept that G-d’s world contains truths beyond our judgment. If Jews seek enduring friends, they need not flatterers, but those strong enough to love what they cannot control.
If the Jews want more Americans to love them, it cannot be through adapting our behavior to their moral standards. This never works because Western Civilization has designed each given moral standard in hostility toward Jews. The solution, instead, is to help more people be more like the Evangelicals. Not in their politics. Certainly not in counterproductive “Judeo-Christian values” which flatten true Jewish difference into generic moral tropes palatable to Christian identity. There is no great virtue in Jews diluting Judaism or Christians diluting Christianity to feign reconciliation. As if, without dialogue exploring artificial common ground, hatred ought to be the default. The Evangelicals prove the exact opposite. The cause of hatred is not ignorance but false certainty.
Greater “tolerance” is not the Jews’ salvation. Our task is far more radical. It requires not moral softness but moral strength. It requires something like existential courage. Not the metaphysician’s demand for synthesis and coherence, but the existentialist’s willingness to remain in unresolvable tension. True philosemitism is not a system of answers, but a posture of humility before what cannot be mastered. It is the grown-up recognition that G-d’s world is larger than our categories, and that a neighbor who remains inexplicable to us may nevertheless remain beloved of G-d. The moment we turn the other into either a tool for our validation or a threat to our self-definition, we have already trespassed. The discipline to refuse the safety of totalizing ideology is where true peace begins. In short, it is spreading an appreciation of Neshama and Elokus.
Philosemitism is not sentimentality. It is reverence arising from spiritual discipline, the refusal to reduce the other to system, trusting G-d’s infinite image reflected in each soul. It demands practicing respect for what remains unexplained, to pray for Israel not because it fits a prophetic chart, but because G-d said “I will bless those who bless thee,” and letting that be enough.
For the Jew, this golden shore yet remains the world’s most precious paradox. Whether it endures depends on whether Americans remain strong enough to love what they cannot control.
