Religion or Realpolitik? Christian Zionism and the Transformation of U.S. Policy on Jerusalem under Donald Trump

Jerusalem Old City, viewed from the Mount of Olives.

Over decades of cooperation in security, intelligence, and regional strategy, along with political and economic ties, Israel has become an exceptionally close and enduring U.S. partner. It enjoys tremendous security and political support regardless of the American administration. But while American stated support for Israel is steady, both the scope and reason behind it are shifting in ways that could have a detrimental impact on the stability of the region and the prospects of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Donald Trump’s Israel foreign-policy decisions, which include recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017 and the inauguration of the embassy at a compound in Arnona located partly in West Jerusalem and partly in the former 1949 no-man’s-land, are actions that challenge the established post-1967 diplomatic framework and the decades-old American approach to Jerusalem.

Among the principles underlying that framework, UN Security Council Resolution 242 affirmed the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by war. Were Trump’s decisions Realpolitik-based and driven by strategic interests, or were they influenced by Christian Zionism, which, following the 1967 Six-Day War, has steadily grown stronger and gained more political prominence, organization, and mobilization? To what extent did Christian Zionism influence the Trump administration’s transformation of U.S. policy on Jerusalem, relative to strategic, domestic-political, and electoral explanations?

Historically associated with dispensationalism and an apocalyptic end-times reading of the

Bible in which the Jewish return to Israel is understood as fulfilling biblical prophecy before the second coming of Christ, Christian Zionism also renders various forms of support for Israel for many other reasons. They include appreciation of the Jewish people for providing the theological underpinning for Christianity, the belief that God will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel, remorse for the Church’s past antisemitism, fear that God will judge nations on Judgment Day based on how they treated the Jewish people, gratitude to Israel as a friendly democracy, and reliance on the Jewish state as the West’s only firewall against Islamist terrorism (Spector, 2009).

Scholarship from Hummel emphasizes institutional, international, interreligious, and intergenerational collaboration between Christians and Jews from within the U.S. and Israel to mobilize evangelical support for Israel. In his book, he emphasizes that this two-way partnership was not only religious but also political and diplomatic. Drawing on new religious and government archives, he offers examples from the influential relationships between Billy Graham and Nixon and John Hagee’s engagement with Donald Trump (Hummel, 2019).

International evangelical Christians inaugurated the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem in 1980 in response to countries moving their embassies out of Jerusalem. The U.S. criticized Israel’s unilateral annexation decision and continued to maintain its embassy in Tel Aviv while insisting on Jerusalem’s final status through negotiations. Pastor John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI) in 2006. The Trump administration deliberately opened the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018—the 70th anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence—in the presence of two senior evangelical pastors, Hagee and Robert Jeffress, who delivered the benediction and opening prayer, respectively. The question that arises is: Did these evangelical pastors and others influence the decision to move the embassy, or does this only show more religious institutionalization, political access, and symbolic proximity to power?

CUFI’s activity prior to the embassy inauguration suggests that evangelical involvement extended beyond symbolic proximity to political advocacy. The organization’s own materials indicate that embassy relocation was a central priority for its 2017 agenda and that Hagee used meetings with President Trump and Vice President Pence to advocate directly for relocation. More than 260 CUFI leaders participated in a Washington lobbying project, while its members sent over 137,000 messages to the White House supporting the move (Christians United for Israel, 2017). In May 2017, Hagee joined sixty other Christian leaders in a letter urging Trump to fulfill his campaign commitment, while Pence later told CUFI’s Washington Summit that moving the embassy was a question of “when, not if.” CUFI subsequently reported that Hagee met privately with Trump in late summer 2017 and received assurances that the Jerusalem promise would be kept despite opposition from foreign-policy advisers (Christians United for Israel, 2021).

Vice President Mike Pence provides an additional link between Christian-Zionist mobilization and the administration. Pence had long grounded his support for Israel partly in his evangelical faith and maintained close relations with CUFI. Speaking at CUFI’s Washington Summit in July 2017, shortly after Trump had delayed the embassy move, Pence assured the organization that Trump “hears you” and that relocation was “not a question of if; it is only when.” Contemporary reporting following Trump’s December decision further identified Pence as among those who strongly advocated for the Jerusalem declaration within the administration. Pence therefore represented not merely evangelical access to the White House, but a potential channel through which religiously grounded policy preferences, supported by an organized Christian-Zionist constituency, could enter executive decision-making.

This evidence establishes sustained access, mobilization, and direct advocacy before Trump’s December 2017 decision, making Christian-Zionist influence more plausible than the embassy ceremony alone would suggest. It does not, however, establish that religion was the decisive cause. Trump publicly justified the decision as recognizing political “reality” and implementing the bipartisan (Clinton administration) Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 (Trump, 2017).

In July 2018, speaking at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City, Trump referred to the Jerusalem embassy and remarked: “The biggest fan may very well be the evangelicals. They wanted that built” (Trump, 2018a). Furthermore, at a September 26, 2020 campaign rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania, Trump, talking about the same topic, said, “You know who likes that the most? Even the evangelicals like it the most.” In another official White House statement, Trump discussed the embassy move and said that the Jewish population and evangelicals were “unbelievably happy” about it (Trump, 2018b).

Would Trump have made the same decision to relocate the embassy without Christian-Zionist demand and influence? Three alternative considerations could have led to the same decision. First, he was fulfilling an act of Congress from 1995, the implementation of which had been waived every six months for twenty-two years, including by him six months earlier. Second, in Trump’s own words, previous presidents thought that relocation would not advance peace in the region. He argued that over twenty years was enough proof that peace had stalled. It was time to change the policy and try a different path to peace. Third, he was fulfilling a campaign promise (Trump, 2017).

It follows that Christian Zionism and electoral considerations are not necessarily rival explanations. Evangelicals are a core component of Trump’s electoral base and were critical to his election as president, while the embassy relocation fulfilled an important campaign promise. White evangelical Protestants constituted around one-fifth of the 2016 electorate and supported Trump by 77 percent to 16 percent (Pew Research Center, 2018). The logic of the equation is not necessarily that Christian-Zionist theology influenced Trump’s personal beliefs, but that moving the embassy was a religiously significant evangelical policy preference that prompted substantial political advocacy and mobilization. This created an electoral incentive and campaign commitment that was ultimately translated into policy through the recognition of Jerusalem and relocation of the embassy.

Religion may therefore have influenced policy indirectly, through domestic political mobilization and electoral incentives, rather than through Trump’s personal adherence to Christian-Zionist theology.

To test whether this issue was simply an electoral promise fulfilled or part of a more substantive influence within the architecture of his foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine, it is worth investigating the Jerusalem component of his proposed Israeli-Palestinian “deal of the century” peace plan, Peace to Prosperity, which he presented in two phases. He presented the economic component in June 2019 at a Bahrain workshop, and the full political vision on January 28, 2020, in the presence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and in the absence of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The test focuses on Jerusalem’s status and how the plan treats it. Of note, the absence of Abbas followed the rupture between the Palestinian leadership and the Trump administration after Trump’s December 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Examining the text of Peace to Prosperity reveals the incorporation of a substantially predetermined Jerusalem outcome into the proposed settlement—Jerusalem remaining Israel’s capital while proposing a Palestinian capital, Al Quds, in areas of East Jerusalem outside the security barrier (White House, 2020). This differs significantly from the Palestinian position claiming East Jerusalem as its capital, and from the pre-Trump U.S. approach of leaving Jerusalem’s final status to negotiations. For Christian Zionists, Jerusalem is not merely another Israeli foreign-policy issue; it has profound biblical, theological, and eschatological significance. Yet its integration into the peace plan does not by itself establish Christian-Zionist causation. Rather, it demonstrates that Trump’s earlier change in U.S. policy on Jerusalem was subsequently embedded in the administration’s substantive peace framework.

Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman primarily developed the peace plan. In 2017, they engaged both Israeli and Palestinian officials; Kushner and Greenblatt met Abbas and his senior advisers in Ramallah in June 2017. Following Trump’s December 2017 recognition of Jerusalem, however, Palestinian leaders largely suspended political engagement with Washington, while the administration continued developing Peace to Prosperity and consulting Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.

The Jerusalem provisions could therefore also be understood primarily as a logical extension of Trump’s 2017 recognition of Jerusalem, combined with Israeli-government and administration preferences.

The evidence therefore suggests that Christian Zionism mattered, but mainly through political rather than theological transmission. There is insufficient evidence that Trump personally adopted Christian-Zionist theology, but stronger evidence that Christian Zionism helped shape the political environment in which the Jerusalem decision was made. CUFI mobilization, Hagee’s direct lobbying, Pence’s internal advocacy, evangelical electoral importance, and Trump’s own acknowledgment of evangelical enthusiasm all point to meaningful influence. At the same time, the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, Trump’s campaign strategy, his stated belief that previous diplomacy had failed, and Israeli-government preferences provide credible alternative or complementary explanations.

The distinction between religion, domestic politics, and Realpolitik is therefore not absolute. Christian Zionism did not need to determine Trump’s personal religious convictions to affect policy; it helped make the Jerusalem policy politically valuable and electorally useful, while that policy was subsequently embedded within the administration’s broader peace framework. Christian Zionism need not convert the policymaker in order to influence foreign policy; religious ideas can become politically consequential when translated into organized constituencies, electoral incentives, and policy commitments.

References / Bibliography

Christians United for Israel (2017) ‘CUFI welcomes Pres. Trump’s Jerusalem policy’, 6 December. Available at:

Christians United for Israel statement (Accessed: 23 August 2026).

Christians United for Israel (2021) The Promised Land. San Antonio, TX: Christians United for Israel.

Hummel, D.G. (2019) Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

University of Pennsylvania Press book page

Pew Research Center (2018) ‘An examination of the 2016 electorate, based on validated voters’, 9 August.

Pew Research Center study

Spector, S. (2009) Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Trump, D.J. (2017) ‘Statement by President Trump on Jerusalem’, 6 December. Washington, DC: The White House.

Trump, D.J. (2018a) ‘Remarks by President Trump at the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States National Convention’, Kansas City, Missouri, 24 July. Washington, DC: The White House.

Official White House transcript

Trump, D.J. (2018b) ‘Remarks by President Trump at a roundtable discussion with state, local, and community leaders’, June 2018. Washington, DC: The White House.

Trump, D.J. (2020) ‘Remarks at a campaign rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania’, 26 September.

White House (2020) Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People. Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President.

Full Peace to Prosperity plan