The Evangelicals Trying to Convert Israelis on the Battlefield

this is an excerpt from a larger article

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

There was never any doubt that America’s influential band of Christian Zionists would embrace the Gaza war with enthusiasm. Three days after Hamas committed its infamous October 7 atrocities, the most prominent Christian Zionist of all,   John Hagee, founder of  Christians United for Israel, delivered an ecstatic  YouTube sermon . “Good morning, America and the world,” he boomed in his finest Cronkite, “Israel is at war.” This was a battle between good and evil, Hagee said, before vowing to “lift up their warriors and leaders in prayer.”

But some evangelical Christians are looking to uplift with far more than cosmic invocations. Overwhelmingly supporters of Israel both politically and spiritually, some of the most strident of these advocates are using the war to proffer something that is more often left unsaid: In order to fulfill the prophecies these Christians hold most dear, Jews must convert to Jesus. And while the idea of bringing Jews into the tent is as old as Saint Paul the Apostle, it’s not simply American Jews that some of the more nefarious evangelicals are seeking to convert—it’s Jewish people in Israel, the ultimate supersoldiers for their holy mission.

One figure in this milieu particularly stands out. Curt Landry, described by one Israeli writer as “sometimes ‘Pastor’ sometimes ‘Rabbi’ but always missionary,” ministers to a congregation of around 100 in rural Oklahoma—but his true mission field is a long way from the prairies.

Shannon Nuszen, a Jerusalem-based former evangelical Christian missionary turned Orthodox Jewish convert runs an organization called Beyneynu, which monitors foreign missionaries targeting Jews as converts. She recently received a complaint from an Israel Defense Forces soldier on duty in the Gaza war, who claimed that a campaign of proselytizing was underway, seeking to convert Israelis fighting on the front lines.

“His unit was visited by a group of missionaries who brought donations,” she told me, supplying evidence. The soldiers were given a copy of Landry’s book,   Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage: How Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity Can Transform Your Faith ,   which outlines a way that Jewish people can come to Jesus through what’s called the “One New Man” doctrine. “The representative explained to the soldiers that if they would agree to be photographed with the book, the ministry would continue to provide donations to the IDF.”

Landry’s own website  boasts  about these efforts. “ Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage  book distribution project inspired 10,000 IDF soldiers,” it says. Further distribution “will bring hope to 12,000 more! Keep the prophetic momentum going.” Each $20 donation to Curt Landry Ministries, it says, gives an IDF soldier a copy of Landry’s book, a hat embroidered with their unit logo, and a bookmark that takes them to a site “that answers their [frequently asked questions].”

Curt Landry doesn’t have John Hagee’s sway in Washington, but his ministry is doing the kind of work that the Hagees of the world cannot. His House of David church in Oklahoma is a Messianic Jewish church in all but name, and Landry’s practices and preaching undoubtedly count him as belonging to this controversial branch of evangelical Christianity—one that is finding new energy in the darkest of times.

Churches labeled as Messianic Judaism have been around since the 1960s, when the charismatic wave of Pentecostalism found new converts through the Jesus People movement that was wildly popular in California. Wearing hippie clothes and producing great music, the Jesus People swept a generation disillusioned by the Summer of Love off their feet. Many of those the Jesus People sought to bring into their fold grew up in Christian homes, but there was a small cohort who grew up in Jewish households too. The latter became known as “Jews for Jesus,” and while they found many converts, in time, a growing number of non–ethnically Jewish people became enamored with finding a way of celebrating Jewish customs while celebrating Christian faith.

Messianic Judaism might follow laws of the Torah, observe Shabbat, and even undertake circumcision, but the ultimate belief that believers must accept Jesus as their savior means that they are not recognized by any of the major Jewish denominations. However, a growing number of mainstream Jewish media, political, and even religious figures are happy to break bread with these congregations, thanks to their unswerving political support for the state of Israel.

Today, there are an  estimated  175,000 to 250,000 Messianic Jews in the United States, and some 350,000 worldwide, with a small minority living in Israel. Though Messianic Jews identify as “Jewish Christians,” around half of those attending Messianic services in America are not ethnically Jewish.

Nuszen’s tip-off piqued my interest, because back in 2021, I visited Curt Landry’s House of David, a sprawling mansion outside of Fairland, Oklahoma, to see the modern expression of the movement for myself.

Instead of worshiping on a Sunday morning like most Christians do, House of David conducts its primary service on Friday night, in line with Jewish custom. An amped-up band opened with standard white evangelical devotional music, before a group of men led by a guy in a “WRSHP” baseball cap were called to the altar. There, they raised ceremonial shofar horns into the air and blasted  tekiah : a long, deep sound that calls people to attention.

Smooth and syncretic as they come, Landry urged his people to “flow into Sabbath and surrender to the Holy Spirit within, where the supernatural happens: miracles and healings.” It was an unusual experience, to say the least, in a part of the world where traditional Jews aren’t exactly plentiful. Listening to the service, it felt at times as though the congregation worshiped the modern state of Israel as much as it did Jesus.

Landry and his fellow Messianics would argue that this is exactly the point. He rejects the label, writing, “We are an evangelical congregation made up of both Jew and Gentile Believers.” But for all intents and purposes, Curt Landry Ministries is a Messianic Jewish church—and it is at the vanguard of a global, highly political movement with unquestionable evangelical sympathies.

Squaring this merger of evangelical practices with Jewish appearances has been made all the more difficult by a long history of subtle antisemitic tropes existing alongside philosemitic beliefs in the evangelical movement.

A 1972 White House meeting between President Richard Nixon and evangelist in chief Billy Graham—a bog-standard Southern Baptist but one who is  revered  by Landry— laid these contradictions bare . The Jews “swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel,” Graham told Nixon. “But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.”

The next year, during the Yom Kippur War, Graham  campaigned  for the largest airlift in U.S. history to aid Israel. His subsequent “Key 73” evangelism campaign made a  landmark statement  opposing “all forms of coercion, intimidation and proselytizing” to Jews. It heralded a new era of Christian Zionism, where evangelicals would give full-throated support to the state of Israel and ask for nothing in return.

That is to say: in theory, at least. Graham paved the way for the evangelical movement to understand the Jewish people. Usually spoken in hushed terms, this has become far louder since the outbreak of the Gaza war. There are “good Jews”—Israelis going into battle at the ultimate frontier—and “bad Jews,” who are left-wing, college types in the West, espousing socialism and protesting the repression of Palestinians.

“God’s Machine Gun,” as Graham was known, might have established a widespread embrace of Christian Zionism among American evangelicals, but Landry’s work in the Holy Land highlights that for the messianically inclined, political support is a means to an end—specifically,  The  End.....