Tucker Carlson interviews theologian JD Hall on the origins, spread, and decline of Christian Zionism
Tucker Carlson interviews theologian and Substack writer JD Hall on the Tucker Carlson channel.
Summary
Tucker Carlson interviews JD Hall, a theologian and writer at the publication Insight to Incite, about the origins and theological foundations of Christian Zionism. Hall argues that Christian Zionism is not historic Christianity but a novel 19th-century invention by John Nelson Darby, disseminated through the Scofield Reference Bible with backing from political Zionists at Oxford — the same institution that published the Balfour Declaration. Hall contends that the mainstream Christian theological tradition, from the early church fathers through the Protestant Reformation, has always held that believers in Jesus — not ethnic Jews — are the true heirs of Abraham's promises, citing Galatians 3 and Romans 9 and 11. He further argues that the modern state of Israel actively funds a $729 million public diplomacy campaign targeting American Christians, including geo-fencing churches and deploying propaganda buses to church parking lots, and that the Israeli government bars Jewish Christians from the right of return. Hall also details the Ottoman period of stewardship over Christian holy sites, noting that Muslim authorities rebuilt the Church of the Holy Sepulchre three times and did not tax churches, in contrast to the treatment of Christians under the modern Israeli state. Hall closes by arguing that Christian Zionism has corrupted American Christianity by subordinating Jesus to ethnic Jewish identity and by directing church offerings toward what he calls a genocide fund rather than toward evangelism.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the Question of Christian Zionism
Tucker Carlson: JD Hall, thank you for joining us. I think you're one of the clearest writers on the internet, so it's an honor to have you here. I've been trying to figure out for several years — you write on theology on Substack and other places, very clearly. I just want to say: clarity being the goal of expository writing, you achieve that. Few do. I've been trying for the last several years to figure out what Christian Zionism is. Not because I have an inherent interest, but because it's affected the shape of the world, a lot of people have died because of it, and it has real-world consequences that we're living through right now. What is Christian Zionism? Where does it come from? Is it Christian? What's your assessment?
JD Hall: Well, if you listen to people online, every Christian is a Zionist just naturally. So the proponents of it will tell you that it is the de facto position on Israel, and it always has been for Christians, to believe in the establishment and support and protection of a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine.
Tucker Carlson: Doesn't it say in the Bible that those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who don't will be cursed?
JD Hall: Yeah. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you've had probably about a thousand different people tell you that. That's something that we hear every single day as Christians.
Tucker Carlson: I couldn't find it. I got my concordance out. I couldn't find it.
JD Hall: Well, I remember the interview with Huckabee, and he couldn't find it either, which is weird when you cite it all the time. Or actually, that was Ted Cruz that couldn't remember where it was. I'm not sure that Ted even knew if it was in the front of the Bible or in the back of the Bible.
Tucker Carlson: I have no idea.
JD Hall: Yeah. So Genesis 12:3 says, "I will bless those that bless thee and curse those that curse thee." And from that — and I'm simplifying it — but from that comes this more philosophical notion than theological, that we as Christians have a duty-bound obligation to protect and to defend and also to help establish a nation for the Jewish people in Palestine. And it hasn't always been Palestine. When political Zionism first developed, they had posited Morocco, Galveston, Texas, Ohio, Siberia, different places.
Tucker Carlson: Galveston, Texas?
JD Hall: Yeah. There was a substantial number of Jews there, and they thought this could be sort of the safe space for Judaism worldwide, which made sense because the United States has always been a pretty hospitable place for Jews. But anyway, so far as it concerns Christian Zionism, that is tied to a theology called dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is a theology invented by John Nelson Darby.
Tucker Carlson: What does the word mean — dispensationalism?
JD Hall: Well, the term refers to different dispensations of time by which God operates differently and deals or interacts with man differently depending upon what dispensation of time it's in.
Tucker Carlson: Huh.
JD Hall: So dispensationalism is juxtaposed against covenant theology. And those are your two basic viewpoints of Christians throughout the history of Christianity. For the most part, there are only those two perspectives. You can get lost into the weeds really easily.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
JD Hall: So John Nelson Darby — he belonged to a bizarre Irish sect. It was sectarian. They had basically schismed their way outside of the established church. They had several different theological hang-ups. One is that they rejected all forms of church authority. They were what I would call sectarian minimalists. They rejected the organized church, the established church. And part of the reason is because their beliefs were so eccentric and weird they would have been excommunicated had they remained in the established church. So after moving from Ireland to Plymouth, England, the notion of dispensationalism grew. And essentially the difference between dispensationalism and covenant theology is that God in covenant theology is interacting with man in accordance with the old or the new covenant. The bulk of the church from the first days of the apostles through the church fathers, through the Protestant Reformation — whether we're talking Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant reformers — all of them are what you'd call covenantal in their theology.
Tucker Carlson: So you said — and I'm sorry to be pedantic, I was trying to understand this because I really think it matters and you understand it better than anyone I've ever talked to — the premise is that God's promises change according to the time, according to the dispensation, the era, the epoch.
JD Hall: So dispensationalism can be complicated. Classical dispensationalism separates the epochs of time into seven different eras. It can definitely be complicated. There's something called leaky dispensationalism, which is a little bit less structured. But essentially the big difference is this: covenant theologians have always believed that God saves people via covenant. There was an old covenant — that's what "testament" means, by the way, not testimony. It's the old covenant. And then there is the new covenant that has been established, and that Jesus came and inaugurated a new covenant. He did that at Passover right before he was crucified. The Last Supper, which was the last Passover supper — the last authentic Passover supper — was also the first Lord's Supper. It's the first communion or Eucharist.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
JD Hall: And Jesus says, "This is my new covenant, or this is the new covenant in my blood that's poured out for many." So in the new covenant, Jesus Christ is the means by which God's people are saved.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
JD Hall: In the old covenant, the covenant people of God were Israel. And God, being very gracious, gave Israel rights and rituals for them to see as an explanation — a word picture — of who their Messiah would be. So that when their Messiah came, they would say, obviously, that's what this is about. The Passover is a good example.
Tucker Carlson: They would recognize the Messiah.
JD Hall: They would recognize the Messiah. In fact, it would be hard for them not to recognize that Jesus was the Messiah. He's crucified at Passover. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. All the imagery is right there for the Jewish people to see — that this is the moment that we've been waiting for. Jesus installs the new covenant in his blood. And by God's grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, we are redeemed by faith in that, and then we become God's chosen people.
So a covenant theologian, when someone quotes Genesis 12:3 — "I will bless those that bless thee and curse those that curse thee" — is going to quote to you Galatians chapter 3, which is a book of the New Testament in which the Apostle Paul is writing to the church in Galatia. He tells them that if you have faith in Jesus, you are God's children. He actually says you are the children of Abraham — it says it twice. So by faith we're adopted into God's covenant people. And then at the very end of Galatians chapter 3, not only does it tell us that we are the children of Abraham, those who believe, but also that we are the heirs of the promises. In Galatians 3:7, the Apostle Paul very clearly explains that that promise is not for the Jews. It never was for the Jews. The mission of God was much bigger.
Tucker Carlson: And that's clear in the Old Testament, isn't it?
JD Hall: Right. It's in the Old Testament. God is preaching through the rights and rituals of the Old Testament the gospel before Jesus came, so that they could understand concepts like grace and judgment and forgiveness and repentance. Because it was never about the sacrifice of bulls and goats. It's not as though that bloodshed ever took away sin. It gave them a picture of the bloodshed that Jesus Christ would one day give for us, so that they could believe in what we call types and shadows — putting their faith in the rituals that would one day be lived out in reality through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.
And the greatest mystery of the gospel, Paul calls it, is that Jesus was not just a Jewish Messiah. He was a global Messiah. He was everyone's Messiah. And that by faith, we become the children of Abraham. And by faith we receive Abraham's promises. The very first part of Galatians chapter 3, he says that when the promise is given to Abraham and to Abraham's seed, Paul says it doesn't say "seeds" plural — it says "seed" singular. The promise is not given to the Jews. The promise is a reference to Abraham's seed. That's Jesus Christ, because Jesus was of the lineage of Abraham.
So the promise is not "bless the Jews and God will bless you." The promise is "bless Christ and God will bless you." Furthermore, not only is that promise just for Christ, but by the end of the chapter in Galatians 3, the Apostle Paul says, "You are the heirs of the promise" — meaning that promise is extended to us. So the irony is you have these so-called Christian Zionists who believe that we have to bless Jews in order for God to bless us, and they're actually giving away their own inheritance. That's our promise. I'm a child of Abraham. If you're a Christian, you're a child of Abraham. We receive the promises of Abraham because we inherit them by virtue of adoption in Jesus Christ. That's what Christians have historically believed.
There are other supporting texts. You've got Romans chapter 9, where the Apostle Paul says that Jews who do not believe in Jesus are not children of Abraham. You've got Romans chapter 11, that paints the picture of the tree of faith in which unbelieving Jews are branches on this tree that have been cut off and severed from both Abraham and God, and in their place are grafted in believing Gentiles. So we are brought into the family of Abraham and in covenant with God by virtue of faith.
So when someone like Mike Huckabee or Ted Cruz or any other politician or preacher preaches a message that if you want God to bless you, you need to do X, Y, or Z for the Jews — they're handing away Christian promises. Those are for us. We have those in Jesus. We are the children of Abraham.
The Scope of God's Promise in the Old Testament
Tucker Carlson: It doesn't make inherent sense, the theology that you're describing — dispensationalism. And also, before I ask you about how it spread and why: is it true, or is it a product of my bad memory, that there are glimpses in the Old Testament that God plans to redeem the entire world? That God's mission on earth is not just to protect this one group of people but everybody?
JD Hall: Right. So what dispensationalists will do is they will look at verses in the Bible about the end times — we call that eschatology. They'll look at these eschatological texts about what God will do with ethnic Jews, the children of Abraham physically, and they'll say, "See, the Jews are special to God in a way that other ethnicities are not." And it's unfortunate because three different times in the New Testament the scripture says God is not a respecter of persons. And each and every time it's a reference to the Jewish people. But they have in their head: Jews are special. They look at a verse about what God is going to do one day in the eschaton or in the end days for Jews and walk away from that saying, "Therefore, we need to support the nation-state of Israel. This must be a part of that grand plan that God has designed for the Jewish people."
But Isaiah chapter 19, just to give you an example, tells us that the Egyptians and the Assyrians will be redeemed by God in the end days and be brought to Zion, to Jerusalem, to the promised land. It calls Egypt God's special people and says of Assyria that they are the work of his hands. These are two nations that are adversarial to the ancient Israelites.
Tucker Carlson: Well, they enslaved them in one case.
JD Hall: Right. And the Assyrians are constantly warfaring with them. These are bitter enemies. And yet the prophet Isaiah says that they will become special to God. He will call them his own and draw them to Zion. That's in Isaiah chapter 19. But that's not the only place. There are literally dozens of different scriptures throughout the text that tell us that every nation group in the end is going to be drawn to God through Jesus Christ.
As a matter of fact, it's in the Abrahamic promise in Genesis 12 — verse 4 of that promise, right after it says "I'll bless those that bless thee and curse those that curse thee" — it says every family of the earth will be blessed through Abraham. And so the Jews will tell you that it's because Israel is such a grand, wonderful place that all the different nations of the world are being blessed by Israel. Unfortunately, the dispensationalists will tell you that too. I say unfortunately because that's clearly a reference to Christ. Through Jesus Christ, God's saving love to sinners all around the world — every people group, every nation, every ethnos — is going to be drawn to God in the end. That's our hope as Christians: that God wins, that salvation is secure ultimately for every nation under the sun, that God will bring unto himself one chosen nation, one holy people for God's possession.
So yes, we can see places in the Bible where God has future plans for Israel. But we can also look to those very same prophets in those very same books and see that God has great things in store for Persia, for Iran. God has great things in store for Greece and for every nation — including, by the way, the ancient Philistines, who are modern-day Palestinians. God has plans in store for everyone. That is the good news of the gospel: that Jesus shed his blood for sinners and that by faith we can all become the children of God and, by virtue of that, children of Abraham.
When I was a kid in church, there was a song that we sang — "Father Abraham" — and it says, "Father Abraham had many sons. Many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them and so are you. So let's just praise the Lord."
Tucker Carlson: Probably raised Episcopalian — that one skipped.
JD Hall: Not in low-church evangelicalism. That song is probably sung in every Baptist and evangelical church. It's a song of covenant theology. By faith, Christians become the children of Abraham. And if a Jewish person does not believe in their own Messiah, they're not the children of Abraham. That's what Romans chapter 9 teaches — that not all who are of Abraham are really of Abraham.
Tucker Carlson: I mean, bigger picture, it feels like the story of Christianity is a universal promise to all people.
JD Hall: Sure.
Tucker Carlson: And dispensationalism seems like it reduces Christianity back to its pre-Jesus state, where no, this is a promise just to one group, one genetic line.
JD Hall: Yeah. I would say at its heart dispensationalism is a Jewish interpretive model. As a matter of fact, they will actually take that as a point of bragging — that we interpret the scripture the way the Jews interpret the scripture. Well, the Jews missed Jesus. He came in the flesh. He was there. They saw him. As a matter of fact, they saw him dead, buried, and resurrected and still didn't believe. So maybe that's not who we should be taking pointers from in terms of understanding biblical prophecy.
Tucker Carlson: What's Jesus's role in dispensationalist theology?
JD Hall: Well, it depends on whom you ask. So John Nelson Darby, the inventor of dispensationalism, referred to the church — the Christian church — as a parenthesis. That God's main plan is Israel. But because they've been naughty and disobedient, the church comes in and we're a parenthesis. So instead of being like the bride of Christ, the church is more like a summer fling. This is where the rapture comes in — that eventually God will rapture us, take us out, we're gone completely, and then Israel can resume its role as the big picture. It's a very Jewish way of looking at the scripture, where Jews and Judaism and Jewish people are always at the center of the scripture, as opposed to Jesus being at the center of the scripture.
So eschatologically, in terms of the end times, there are different ways that Christians have looked at it throughout history — there's amillennialism, postmillennialism, premillennialism, historic premillennialism. They all agree, though, that God only has one chosen people, and that's those who believe in Jesus, whether they're Jewish or Gentile. It doesn't matter. We're all the children of God if we believe. Dispensationalism is different from all of those different ways that Christians can view the end times because dispensationalism is saying, well, really God's main love is the Jewish people. And for a time in a so-called church age, in this dispensation of time, yeah, the church is here, but one day we're going to be sucked out of here. We're going to beam up to heaven and then Israel will come back and form the center of the show.
And so from my perspective and the perspective of historic Christianity, it's not only an insult to the church to act like we're some kind of summer fling for Jesus and that it's really about Israel — I think it's also disrespectful to Christ, because he didn't come to be like a tribal deity of some desert war cult in the Middle East. He came to be the Messiah and the savior of the world.
They emphasize Jesus's Jewish messiahship all the time. You'll hear Jews who deny that Jesus is the Son of God — I don't even mean Messianic Jews, just Jews that believe the typical teaching in the Talmud about Jesus — but they will, when speaking to Christians, point out, "Well, you know, your Messiah is Jewish." Jesus obviously was a physical descendant of Abraham. There's no argument there. But the term that Jesus used for himself more than 70 times was "Son of Man." Jesus did not emphasize his own Jewishness. Jesus came as a savior of mankind and so he called himself Son of Man, which was a term from the prophet Isaiah. And so it not only reduces the big picture of Christianity to something that is much, much smaller — it reduces Jesus from a global Messiah to, well, he's a Jewish Messiah that they loan us for a while.
Jesus and the Gentiles — and Who Killed Jesus
Tucker Carlson: Jesus also goes out of his way in the Gospels to praise the faith of pagans. A Roman officer was the first person to recognize that Jesus was the Son of God at his death. The Roman officer whose slave he heals — he said, "I have not seen any faith like this in all of Israel." But he goes out of his way to minister to the Samaritan woman, et cetera. He's always picking people from outside the tribe.
JD Hall: You know, it's interesting that people ask the question sometimes: who killed Jesus? It's a big debate online. Every couple of weeks a new fight breaks out on X where dispensationalists and covenant theologians are fighting about who killed Jesus. And of course there's an obvious answer. The Jews killed Jesus. We know that because at least eight times in scripture — the scripture explicitly says that. The first sermon ever preached was the Apostle Peter's, that started by saying "Men of Israel," and a few lines later he says, "This Jesus Christ whom ye crucified." The Pharisees plotted to kill Jesus. If you remember in John chapter 4, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. They see it. They recognize that he's the Messiah. The Sanhedrin, which is the ruling council, comes together and they immediately plot to kill Jesus.
Tucker Carlson: And Lazarus later.
JD Hall: Yeah. It was an ancient cover-up operation, basically.
Tucker Carlson: They're going to kill the guy again.
JD Hall: Right. And Jesus looks to the Pharisees and he says, "You're plotting to kill me. This is what you're trying to do." So the question would be: why does the Bible seem to blame Jews for the death of Jesus? Obviously they're involved, but it was technically the Romans that nailed him to the cross. It was the Romans who killed him. And the answer is — well, Jesus himself, while he's on the cross, says, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do," and he's speaking of the Romans, not the Jews. He's talking about those who were actually doing the crucifixion.
If you think about what transpired before the crucifixion was done: the centurion recognizes that Jesus is the Son of God. Pilate very clearly was remorseful by the time he was done handing Jesus over to be crucified. And within a few decades, you had mass conversions of the Roman people and all throughout the Roman Empire to Christianity. By the third century, you had the full Christianization of Rome. That doesn't mean that every Roman on earth was therefore a Christian by virtue of being born in a Christian empire — we all have to have personal faith in Jesus Christ's death, burial, and resurrection. That's how we're justified before God. But you have the Roman people recognizing who Jesus is very quickly.
The Jews who saw Jesus dead, buried, and resurrected — many of them followed after him, but many of them persisted to persecute him. And then within a very short time, they're stoning Stephen to death. Stephen, as he's being stoned, points out to the Jews: "You've always killed God's prophets and you've killed Christ." So the reason why the scripture isn't throwing the Romans under the bus, so to speak, even though they obviously had a hand in Jesus's crucifixion, is because they saw ultimately who it was that they crucified and then they repented and they believed.
And the Jewish people — those who did not convert and follow Christ — ended up having to make a new religion in 70 AD when the Romans destroyed the temple. Because all of those rights and rituals that we discussed, that God had given the Jewish people for them to see and understand who Jesus was — the Festival of Booths, Passover, all of those various rituals and the different kinds of sacrifices — all required a temple. And it required an altar. It required blood. It required a priesthood to make that sacrifice. Those no longer existed after 70 AD.
And so over the course of hundreds of years, the sect of the Pharisees that grew into modern Judaism had to essentially invent a Judaism that is not what you see in the pages of the Old Testament. They renamed some feasts. They still call it Passover, but it's not. It doesn't resemble the Passover of the Old Testament. It's a completely new, disparate religion.
And that's why you have a desire among Christians throughout the last 2,000 years praying for the salvation of the Jewish people. To be very clear, the Christian or covenantal theologian message is not that Jews are totally cut off from God and that they cannot be saved and that God hates them or anything like that. It's that: congratulations, you're ethnically Jewish. That's great. God doesn't care. Like every other group of people on the face of the planet, you need to repent of your sins and believe the gospel. That's the Christian message.
John Nelson Darby comes along and the message towards the Jewish people begins to change and begins to evolve. And suddenly, instead of "you need to repent of your sins and believe the gospel," it's "you're special. You're special to God. God's going to bless you regardless of whether or not you have faith in Jesus, just because you're Jewish." And that's partiality. The scripture actually forbids that type of partiality. It's unfortunate that Christians believe that's historic Christianity, because it isn't.
The Invention and Spread of Dispensationalism — Darby and Scofield
Tucker Carlson: What was Darby's motive? Was it sincere?
JD Hall: I do think that Darby was sincere. I've studied Darby a lot. I think he was sincerely wrong. But I believe that he was sincere. Who wasn't sincere were the advocates of dispensationalism that saw its political value in the century that followed. Because Darby remained ostracized for about 90 years or so. You've got Charles Spurgeon, for example, at the London Metropolitan Tabernacle — couldn't stand Darby, and he called the theology novel. And the typical theological belief — and it's a good one — is that that which is new is not true, and that which is true is not new. So if it's new and novel, God isn't coming up with new theology. If someone invents a new doctrine, it's automatically wrong.
Tucker Carlson: Because God's already established his church. Jesus and the disciples would have told us about this.
JD Hall: Yes. So it was rejected by almost everyone because it was so novel and so new. Then we have Scofield, who hits the scene in 1907, and he's a bit of a scoundrel. I don't want to bash a dead person, but he was not what you would call a shining example of what a Christian should be. He abandoned his family, for example.
Tucker Carlson: We know that he abandoned his family.
JD Hall: Yeah. His wife and kids. So he shows up in New York. From New York, he goes to the UK. He winds up at Oxford, which is the hotbed of political Zionism. They print and publish a Bible — we call it Scofield's Bible, but it's not Scofield's Bible. It never was Scofield's Bible. He never owned the Bible. It's Oxford's Bible. He was the theologian allegedly whose notes in the margins of the Bible propagated the theology of John Nelson Darby. And that took off like wildfire in the United States.
It's because in low-church evangelicalism, most clergy at the time — and even to this day — are not classically trained in seminary. Back then, especially before the age of the internet and with the cost of publishing, the typical pastor in a Baptist or congregationalist congregation would own a Bible and that would be about it. They didn't go home to prepare their sermon with a collection of commentaries or a Bible concordance or a lexicon. All they had was a Bible. But if they could get their hands on the Scofield edition, they would have all of the study notes that they could read and learn and educate themselves with.
They were smart enough to know that the margins are not the same as inspired writ. But that became the de facto home education for a lot of clergy. Within a single generation, among low-church evangelical Protestantism, dispensationalism became the majority view because it's a handy resource that you read right there in the pages of the Bible. And a lot of uneducated Christians during that era were actually not educated enough to discern the difference between the inspired writ given by God the Holy Spirit, written through the hands of men, and the marginal notes in which this effectively schismatic cult in Ireland and then England had their theology on the side of the pages. And so they would look at that, not see the difference, and if you fast forward to today, people believe that that's the view the church has always held.
Tucker Carlson: So Darby comes up with this novel, cultish, non-traditional Christian theology, but it's disseminated effectively by this guy Scofield, the family abandoner. Scofield's name's on it.
JD Hall: Name's on it. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: What was his motive? Do we know?
JD Hall: I don't think that Scofield's motive is sinister either. I don't mean to throw him under the bus like he's a bad guy or a villain. I do think it was weird that he didn't think to himself: okay, so I'm a relative nobody. Why are strangers paying to sail me across the ocean to meet with people I don't know at Oxford?
Tucker Carlson: Oh, strangers did pay his way across to do that?
JD Hall: There's nothing in Scofield's life that would suggest that he would have had the funds to pay for that himself. There are a couple of things there that don't make a lot of sense, including the club that he was a part of in New York, with dues that it would not be reasonable to presume someone of Scofield's lack of employment would be able to afford. So yeah, he goes across the ocean and he meets with high society. It's Oxford. And they discussed putting this Bible into print. It was the first Bible of its kind in which the marginal notes have theological content — a built-in study Bible, which was totally new. So if you couldn't go to seminary, hey, it's okay. Just buy Scofield's Bible and believe what's within its pages.
Tucker Carlson: So it sounds like you're suggesting that he was himself, knowingly or not, kind of an op.
JD Hall: I think he was a patsy. Yeah. I think that the Zionists in the UK — the political Zionists — got wind of what the Plymouth Brethren were teaching. That's Darby's bunch. And they thought, well, at the same time you've got Theodor Herzl who is trying to get Europe to buy into the Zionist project, and this eschatology is growing over here which could be helpful to their cause. And yeah, they disseminated the Scofield Bible, I think, for clearly political reasons.
Tucker Carlson: So this came from the UK. Zionism as an idea really kind of gathered steam first in the UK, in England. Why? Any idea?
JD Hall: I don't know why specifically religious Zionism took off in England organically. I mean, that's where the Plymouth Brethren moved to, so that would make sense. But I would point out that the same institution that printed the Scofield Bible is the same institution that published the Balfour Declaration within a year.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. So it's practically the same people.
JD Hall: So within a year of the Balfour Declaration, you have this — hey, coincidentally — really great new theology that helps to support and back up the political ambition of the Zionists. I had no idea. That's amazing.
Tucker Carlson: So then it comes to the United States, where it really takes root. And that's about — this is pre-First World War that this hits the US.
JD Hall: Yeah. So it would have been 1907, I think, when Scofield was published, and so yeah, it came to the United States very quickly and it just grew like wildfire. Because you've got Baptists, Methodists, congregationalists. You have the Azusa Street Revival, which is just starting to kick off, charismaticism. So anybody in those circles — they're probably not going to a seminary. They're not mainstream Protestant, which would have had the brick-and-mortar seminaries — your Presbyterians, your Episcopalians, and so forth. Good for them. They got to avoid most of the dispensationalism problem for quite a long time. But now today, they're eaten up with dispensationalism. But it's really not theological for the mainstream Protestants. It's just soaked in through culture through various channels, but it didn't come through their seminaries and Bible colleges.
As a matter of fact, Presbyterians, for example — they are the arch covenant theologians. Their doctrine should be hostile to dispensationalism. But you'll still find a lot of Presbyterians who will tell you that Jews are God's chosen people, just because at this point we're receiving this through osmosis. As Christians, it's just everywhere: as a Christian, you're supposed to support Israel.
With Carrie Pyne Bowler — if I'm pronouncing her name right — I think she shocked a lot of people when at the religious liberty council meeting she said, as a Catholic, "We don't support Israel" or "We're not Zionists." And that shocked a lot of people, as though she's making that up. They don't realize that the vast majority of Christendom has a confession of faith for their specific church that does not allow for the belief that the Jews are the chosen people of God. Most people these days aren't that aware of what their own doctrine is supposed to be. There's a sort of doctrinal downgrade — that's what Spurgeon would have called it — a theological dumbing down where Christians don't know what their own beliefs are supposed to be.
Tucker Carlson: Interesting. So there does — even if you accept the precepts of dispensationalism as just described by you — it's still a jump to go from that to unlimited military aid to the modern secular state of Israel.
JD Hall: Right. No, it's a huge jump. On one hand, we can acknowledge — let's say I am a premillennialist and I believe that Jesus is going to literally come and reign from Jerusalem one day. It's one thing to believe that one day a bunch of Jews are going to get saved and become Christians. That would be wonderful if that happens. That's great. What does that have to do with me supporting the state of Israel today? God may one day save the Jews. Great. Hope he does. The promises are in the Bible that he will. So I believe that will happen one day. But that does not imply that I therefore have to become part of a protectorate to protect a kingdom of Jews whose king is not welcome.
And for me, that's the offensive part as a Christian — being told that I have to support the Israeli state. I support Jesus. Jesus is not welcome in the Israeli state. The right of return, for example, gives Jews the permission to come back no matter their blood quantum. They don't have to be a certain portion Jewish. If you have one grandparent out of four who is Jewish, you can come from anywhere in the world to Israel. They'll let you immigrate and become a citizen, because the thought process is Jews need a safe place in the world. Unless you're a Christian. If you are a Jew who believes in Jesus, you're not welcome back.
Tucker Carlson: Is that true?
JD Hall: Oh, that's absolutely true. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: You can be 100% Jewish by blood —
JD Hall: Yes.
Tucker Carlson: — but if you profess Jesus, you do not have the right of return.
JD Hall: You can be 100% Jewish by blood, ethnically, but if you believe in Jesus, you cannot return — even if you're under persecution in your home country, hypothetically, if that were to happen. So let's say they're persecuting Jews based on their ethnicity in some country somewhere. They don't care if they're a Christian — they're ethnically Jewish, they're going to put them to death. Now, the right of return would not allow them to return. The right of return specifically is for Jews who either remain Jewish or have not at least joined another religion. So if you are an atheist Jew, they don't classify that as a religion. You can come back. If you are an agnostic Jew, you can come back to Israel. If you're a Christian Jew, you cannot.
Tucker Carlson: So you can affirmatively, out loud, reject the Torah and the Talmud and all religious expression of Judaism — "I don't believe in Judaism, I think it's absurd" —
JD Hall: You can be a non-practicing Jew with the right of return.
Tucker Carlson: You can be an anti-practicing Jew, like an atheist, literally atheist.
JD Hall: Well, you can be a Satanist, as long as that is not organized Satanism. Unless you are a member with your name on the roll of an official Church of Satan somewhere — let's just say you practice the occult — you can come into Israel, as long as you have not joined another religion like Christianity.
Tucker Carlson: What do Christian Zionists say about that?
JD Hall: Well, first of all, a lot of them don't believe it.
Tucker Carlson: They don't believe that's true.
JD Hall: Yeah. They're like, "Well, that can't be true." Because they've been told that Jews and Israelis love Christians and that we have this shared religious heritage — which of course is not true at all — and that they are friends of Christians. So it boggles their mind. "Well, that can't be true." Well, that is true. Israel is not a friend of Christianity. Not at all.
There are laws on the books in the state of Israel that forbid evangelism over the airwaves, that forbid evangelism to minors. As a matter of fact, Ron Cantor — I don't know if you know that name — Ron Cantor is a Christian celebrity in Israel, and he was on X one day talking about how loving and kind Israel is to him as a Jew who believes in Jesus. And they will phrase it that way on purpose so as to not imply that they're a Christian, because if they say they're a Christian, they might have to leave. So they'll say "Jew who believes in Jesus" — they're trying to work the system. So I look him up, Ron Cantor, and he has a television station, a Christian television station in Israel. And in 2020, they took his broadcast license because they said that he was telling Jews that they needed Jesus. And so he had to promise that he would not give the gospel to Jewish people, that he would not try to spread the name and the fame of Jesus over the radio waves, so that they would give him his so-called Christian station back. And there he is bragging about how great Israel treats Christians — they took away his broadcast license for sharing Christ.
So there are these so-called Christian Jews in Israel — again, they probably don't call themselves Christian Jews, it's "Jews who believe in Jesus" — some of them are there like him, whose purpose it is to tell Christians how great it is in Israel. But you and I both know that Christians are not treated well in Israel at all.
Tucker Carlson: No. No, they're not. In fact, they're the subject of a lot of hostility and in a lot of cases violence. And it's interesting how many Christians were expelled from their lands and their homes in 1948 with the formation of the state of Israel.
JD Hall: Well, the church there is still having their property confiscated to this day for settlement. With the Orthodox church — Israel closed their bank, or froze their bank account, because they didn't pay their tax. It was a tax that they just suddenly threw on them. All this time they had not had to pay that tax. Israel throws it on them. They couldn't afford it because it was years' worth. And they confiscated their bank account and threatened to take their property. The Ottomans didn't charge churches tax. When the Ottomans were in control of the promised land for 400 years under the millet system, they didn't charge churches tax. Israel started just a few years ago. And so Christians have pressure applied to them — native believers, the ones whose churches have been there longer than Israel has been a state. They're the ones facing the pressure that it's very hard to get Christians in America to care about at all.
Tucker Carlson: And their Muslim rulers didn't do that during the Ottoman period.
JD Hall: Okay, so the answer is no. The Muslim rulers didn't tax churches during the Ottoman period. They were very kind to Christians. As a matter of fact, they took care of our holy sites. Islamic authorities rebuilt the Church of the Holy Sepulchre three different times over the centuries. They had a law protecting Christian pilgrims on their journey. Nobody messed with the —
Tucker Carlson: The Ottoman Turks, the Muslim rulers of the Holy Land, rebuilt the Church of the Holy Sepulchre three times?
JD Hall: Three times. Yeah. Either completely rebuilt it or a major renovation. One time it caught on fire and they redid the roof. But if you've seen the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, you can imagine what it took to redo that.
Tucker Carlson: It's an enormous roof. It's enormous and decaying. It's an amazing place.
JD Hall: Well, a lot of those sites have started to decay since 1948.
Tucker Carlson: That one definitely is decaying. The physical building, the plant, is kind of falling apart.
JD Hall: Some of the opposition to the Zionist project in Great Britain in the 1940s was on account of the Muslim authorities having taken such good care of our Christian sites — it was a bit of a gamble to let Jewish authorities do that. I've heard people say, "If it wasn't for Israel, we wouldn't be able to go visit our holy sites. There wouldn't even be holy sites anymore." And it's like, who do you think has been taking care of them this whole time? It's been the Islamic authorities who've had control in that region. Because of the Islamic view of Jesus, they've actually been quite kind to the holy sites in the region.
Tucker Carlson: What is the Islamic view of Jesus?
JD Hall: Well, I don't want to say that Muslims have a high view of Jesus. The reason is because Jesus is not fictional. Jesus is real. Jesus of Nazareth is a real biological person to this day. He still exists. He's in heaven. He's not here. I would say that Muslims have a false view of Jesus. It's not the real view of Jesus, but they're actually quite fond of him. They believe that Jesus was sent by God, that he was of God, that he said true things, that he performed real miracles, and that he's actually coming again.
Tucker Carlson: Muslims believe Jesus is coming again?
JD Hall: They do — as a prophet, not as the Messiah, but they believe in his return. That doesn't make them Christians.
The Political Construct Behind Christian-Jewish Alliance
Tucker Carlson: So there's been an effort to propagandize American Christians on this question in churches as well.
JD Hall: Yeah. I don't know how official it is, but when you listen to Christians talk about Islam, they'll say things like, "Well, we've got to maintain good relationships with Israel because Islam and Christianity are natural enemies." Well, I'm not saying that we're not, and I'm not saying that Islam and Christianity have ever had any kind of partnership. But honestly, it's rabbinic Judaism and Christianity that historically has been at odds. The idea that Christians and Jews have gotten along this whole time and that we have to band together to protect ourselves against the Muslims is a very recent notion. This wasn't something that was ever posited before the 20th century. That part is brand new, and it comes from the Jewish talking points that you see on the television and the news constantly.
Tucker Carlson: So it's a political construct that's been accepted as a theological reality by American Christians.
JD Hall: I would say that's the case. There's so much crossover between what is political and what is theological when it comes to Israel that sometimes it's really hard to determine what is theological propaganda and what is political propaganda. Because when it's being done to us, the people doing it — for them it's all political propaganda. They're not trying to change our religion when they tell us this stuff as Christians. They just want us to have a different political perspective. They have to come at it from the angle of theology.
Tucker Carlson: Yes. Right.
JD Hall: And so that's the sad thing about dispensationalism — at the heart of it, there are people who really believe this.
Tucker Carlson: For sure.
JD Hall: Darby believed it. I think Scofield believed it. Christians today, they believe it. They're very committed to it. But it's being promoted and propagated by people who don't believe it at all.
Tucker Carlson: And who don't care one way or the other. But they find it very helpful for their purposes.
JD Hall: So one of those interested parties is the actual government of Israel.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. What is the government of Israel doing to convince American Christians that supporting the secular state of Israel is their religious duty? What does that propaganda campaign look like?
JD Hall: So I believe it's $729 million that the Knesset set aside to fund the project through the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. $729 million through their public diplomacy unit — that's what they call it. $729 million that was budgeted for the year 2026. They have a part of that $729 million for public diplomacy called Project 545, which is a $145 million budget set aside to affect or manipulate AI and search engine results, primarily for Americans.
Just to give you an idea of how much that is: at the height of the Soviet Union, their budget was $3.5 million for what they called their active measures. Active measures was Soviet propaganda. $3.5 million. But that had to cover essentially five continents because the Soviet Union was everywhere. It was a bipolar world. Had to cover most of the world. And it was through that program that they did their Comintern exercises, infiltrating communist propaganda into education and religion and all these different avenues where it could affect Americans and also people from all over the world.
So $3.5 million is what the Soviets spent at the height of it for their active measures. The public diplomacy unit under the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is about a quarter of that — but that's all spent on the United States. They're not spending that on other nations on different continents and different countries that can't benefit them politically. Israel just has to have the United States as an ally. It doesn't have to work hard to gain Brazil as an ally, or anyone else. We are the ones with the veto power at the UN Security Council.
Tucker Carlson: Of course.
JD Hall: All they need is us. So we're the nice recipients of that $145 million affecting even what our AI says and our search engine results — all of that is affecting how we view Israel. But on top of that, you see the religious infiltration. Through the different pay-throughs — what is — I mean, just give us a broad outline of what the propaganda effort against American churches from Israel looks like. Geo-fencing, for example — what is that?
Tucker Carlson: Yeah.
JD Hall: So there were four different organizations that had basically signed up and registered with FARA — the Foreign Agents Registration Act. I think it was Clock Tower X and then also Show Faith by Works and then a couple more. And the geo-fencing thing — basically, they're outlining churches on a map invisibly so that when you go there and you leave, it'll ping your phone with different types of propaganda.
Tucker Carlson: Yes. Assuming that you went to church there, so maybe you would be more susceptible to some dispensational advertisement about why it's your duty as a Christian to support Israel.
JD Hall: But there's a lot that hasn't been discussed that really has the geo-fencing campaign. And I think that once it got exposed, they had maybe said at some point — Brad Parscale had —
Tucker Carlson: Yes, taken a step back and said maybe we won't do the geo-fencing thing. That was just a suggestion or we wanted to do that.
JD Hall: It was a $4 million — it was the same group — $4 million sending a bus with basically an Israeli propaganda bus with VR headsets and things. It was targeting young men ages 16 to 24. So it would roll into church parking lots and it would have a multimedia display for the young men to watch the IDF in action. It would show what happened on October 7th and then how heroic the IDF is — in church parking lots — so that they would leave not learning anything more about Jesus, or God, or scripture, or the Torah. It wasn't theological. It was purely political.
Tucker Carlson: Well, not just — but it's being done in church parking lots with the knowledge of the pastor of the church, I would assume.
JD Hall: So when they did their FARA filing, they didn't say "We're going to these specific churches." They did say "We're going to churches in these states." But yeah, you can bet your bottom dollar that if they have permission to roll into a megachurch parking lot and set up shop with their bus for young men to come out and see the videos about how great and heroic the IDF is, I'm sure that the pastor would have given them permission to do that.
I mean, Christians oppose abortion probably for a bunch of reasons, but fundamentally because it's the murder of innocents. The baby didn't do anything wrong. You can't kill the innocent. And Christians know that and they stand on that. The IDF has the most brutal military in the world, which is globally renowned for murdering innocents —
Tucker Carlson: Right.
JD Hall: — at scale.
Tucker Carlson: Right.
JD Hall: How could any Christian pastor allow pro-IDF propaganda on his property?
Tucker Carlson: You know, I wonder how many of those pastors understand that it is propaganda. Keep in mind, they're not going out of their way to consume media that is outside of the ecosystem — the news ecosystem — of that which is controlled by pro-Israel or, if not pro-Israel, pro-neocon, pro-war programming. I mean, they're getting pro-war ideology from places like Fox News. If you took a sample of a hundred megachurch pastors and asked where they're getting their news source, probably all of them are going to put Fox News as number one.
JD Hall: So that's what they're getting. When you talk to these pastors about Israeli war crimes — you know, did you know that they got caught, the IDF on camera, sodomizing a prisoner so badly his large intestine fell out, he went into critical condition and almost died in the hospital, and then they just let him go back to Gaza and said he couldn't return, so they couldn't have the trial of the IDF soldiers who did that because the victim can't come back to testify? And the pastors, Christians, whoever you talk to about this will say, "That doesn't sound right. That must be Hamas propaganda."
It's like when you talk to them about the death stats in Gaza and you say, "Do you realize that almost eight people out of ten that are being killed in Gaza are civilian non-combatants?" It's really easy to look at you and just say, "That's propaganda. That's clearly from the Gaza Ministry of Health." And when Israel admitted those figures in February, then that doesn't make the news and they don't see it.
And it's really hard to convince someone who believes that Israel is chosen by God and special in a way that you're not special. It's really hard to get that person to then evaluate what's happening in light of biblical ethics. Because who am I? I'm not special. Who am I to question God's special chosen people over here? And so that notion of God playing favorites, God having a special people based on ethnicity — that clouds their judgment from start to finish. It almost beats down mentally the person who holds that view. It dismantles their ability to look objectively at what's happening in the Middle East.
Tucker Carlson: It's almost that way.
JD Hall: Yeah. It's a self-loathing, because you're just a Gentile. These people — these are the chosen people. And God — yeah, God's loving, he's kind, he let you into their religion, but you're never going to be Jewish. They're special. And it's so infuriating because the scripture teaches the exact opposite message. I'm God's chosen. I'm the child of Abraham. According to the scripture, very explicitly in Galatians 3 and in 1 Peter chapter 2, the Apostle Peter says that we are God's chosen nation and royal priesthood and people for God's own possession. He's talking about the Christian church, which is chock-full of Gentiles. He's not talking about Jews. We're the chosen nation.
They're a desert war cult who's murdering a lot of innocent people. It's okay to judge them. God's not going to be hostile with you because you've looked at what's happening over there and said, "You know what? It's not okay to bomb an apartment building because there might be a terrorist in apartment 3G."
And there are so many different things about the IDF that Christians need to know, but they don't have a frame of reference because there's not an effective news source breaking through to evangelicals, who are all pigeonholed in this neocon-influenced news environment. Their targeting program — their AI targeting program that is designed to, I think, maximize civilian damage — is called "the Gospel." That's what the IDF named it. There are two of them — well, there are three.
There's "Daddy's Home." You've heard of this one?
Tucker Carlson: No.
JD Hall: Oh, "Daddy's Home." Okay. This is astoundingly inhumane. So their AI targeting program that lets them know when a target comes within a specific location — essentially geo-fencing, but instead of a church, it's their home — it will notify essentially Skynet when to send the missile, when to drop the bomb. And it's called "Daddy's Home" because it waits for the terrorist — alleged terrorist. Keep in mind, these aren't people who've been tried or anything. There's no trial for them. The alleged terrorist gets home and then it pings: Daddy's home. "Daddy's Home" then sends the missile to kill them and the family. They would say that that is a target and the target used human shields, and if human shields die in the process, that's on the terrorists. But it's called "Daddy's Home" because it's waiting for them to get home.
That's not something that the American military does. We don't wait for targets to get home before we bomb them, but the IDF does. So it is about 85 to 90% of the people dead in Gaza who are civilian non-combatants. That's not from trying to miss civilian non-combatants. That's like you targeting them. It's like doctors testifying that more than 400 kids that they've seen in the last remaining hospital in Gaza that's still open — 400 kids dead with a sniper-round caliber wound in the head. It's not from shrapnel. And so yeah, they're waiting for people to get home before they blow them up.
There's another one that's called "the Gospel." And I think —
Tucker Carlson: Why do they call it "the Gospel"?
JD Hall: I think because it's deadly and kills a lot of people, and that's their way to mock Christianity — that that is their good news.
Rabbinic Judaism, the Temple, and the Nature of Atonement
So let me explain: the bloodshed of the old covenant religion of Moses is what symbolized the forgiveness of sins. It allowed them to see and understand the Messiah and what Jesus would do on the cross, and by his blood we're actually forgiven. But after the temple fell in 70 AD — with no altar, no temple, with no priesthood to make those sacrifices, with no blood being shed — where does the blood come from in rabbinic Judaism? And I think it comes from their fixation on war. I think that they view it as almost an actual real atonement, that they are accomplishing something of spiritual value when they go to war and kill Gentiles. That seems controversial, I'm sure.
But their version of Passover — which is not the Passover that God gave Moses, it's the one the rabbis made up — did you know that?
Tucker Carlson: How is it — I ask you to pause — how is it different from the Passover described in the Torah?
JD Hall: Well, because there's no actual sacrifice. There's no actual bloodshed. So all the different rights and rituals of the Seder that they observe — none of that is in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, there was unleavened bread and there was wine and bitter herbs and then the sacrifice itself, where an animal would be killed for the purposes of atonement in the Passover.
Their Passover version — between the third and the fourth cup, they drink to the damnation of the nations, and in particular to Rome, who they associate with Christianity.
Tucker Carlson: Presently?
JD Hall: Presently. So whenever Mike Huckabee says "Happy Passover" — it's a very common thing for dispensationalists to wish "Happy Passover" to their Jewish friends — they don't realize what they're saying. They're not observing the ritual that God gave Moses. They're observing the ritual that the rabbis made up in the centuries following Jesus. The third and fourth cup — they take a drink and they pray a prayer specifically for the destruction of the nations, and in particular Rome. And in Jewish and rabbinical writings, they associate Rome with Christianity because Rome became Christianized. That's the association that you see together in rabbinical literature.
One of the prayers that Jews pray three times a day prays for the destruction of their enemies. Rabbinic Judaism is not Christianity minus Jesus. That's what Christians need to understand.
Tucker Carlson: It is a completely different faith from what you see in the pages of your Old Testament, because that faith required the presence of a temple where God lived.
JD Hall: Yes, absolutely. It's in the architecture of the religion. God designed it so that it could not endure without the temple. That's why God is always promising the Jewish people in the pages of the Old Testament that if they misbehave, he will have the land vomit them out. He will bring them into exile. He will wipe the land free of them. And he created a religion that would be temporary. It all revolves around the temple. And they weren't free to change that religion either.
I'll give you an example. There's a story in the Old Testament of two guys that were left behind to essentially guard the altar as Moses and the elders go up on the mountain. Their names were Nadab and Abihu. They took their own light and decided to light the altar with their own fire. The King James calls it "strange fire" because it wasn't native to the altar. It was their own light. They used their own Zippo, in other words. And God destroyed them. He killed them. Those two guys — the ground swallowed them up and ate them. Destroyed them in fire. Because the faith of the Old Testament was given — the cultic religion to Israel — very specifically. It had to be observed a very specific way, through the specific means that God gave. They weren't supposed to deviate at all. It's like the guy that reached out to grab the Ark of the Covenant before it hit the ground and God killed him. God didn't tell him to touch it. He told him not to touch it. Follow God's rules is the point.
It's a very precise religion because everything is designed to point to Jesus in a very specific way. And so the Passover right that they're observing — and in fact most of rabbinic Judaism — is way more deviated from the Old Testament than just what Zippo was used to light the altar. It's a complete manufacture of new rights and rituals that aren't in the text at all. It's not the same religion.
So when people say "Jesus was a Jew" — well, yes, in a sense he was. He was a physical descendant of David and of Abraham. But if you're implying that Jesus was a rabbinic Jew, no, he wasn't. That was a completely different religion. And most Christians don't grasp that. They think that Jesus was a Jew like Ben Shapiro. Jesus would not have recognized Ben Shapiro's religion. The Apostle Paul would not have recognized it. They would have taken a look at it and said, "What is this?" Because it didn't exist.
Tucker Carlson: It didn't exist. They call some things the same words, but it's a fundamentally different religion.
JD Hall: So most Americans are not aware of that. You would think that ordained ministers would be aware of that. Mike Huckabee is an ordained minister. He was a pastor at a church for years in Arkansas. You would think that Mike Huckabee would know, as he quotes Genesis 12:3, that Galatians 3 specifically says that's not for Jews. So then you're left with one of two options. The first one is: Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, knows his Bible. The Bible says in Galatians 3, Paul says, "I'm not talking about Jews. It's not about Jews." That verse is about Jesus. And the promises are for Christians. They're the heirs of the promise. That's option A. He knows that, but he's lying.
The other option is he genuinely doesn't know that. He's totally ignorant. He's never read Galatians in his life. I don't think that's really plausible. I would suspect he has read it. I don't know what he does with it, other than at a certain point we have to start asking ourselves if there's active concealment. If you know what the scripture says — that these are promises for Christians — but you are applying it to Jews in direct contradiction to what the Apostle Paul said in terms of how that should be interpreted, at what point do we start looking at them as the bad guys?
Tucker Carlson: Well, I definitely look at them as the bad guys. I'll say that. As to motive, though, it's a little muddier, I think. I mean, I look at someone like Huckabee and it feels to me — unknowable, of course — but it feels like he really believes what he says, but it's so obviously in contradiction of what he says his faith is that there seems to be like a delusion or something going on.
JD Hall: Huckabee is a weird one because yeah, he's a Baptist. Most Baptists are dispensationalist. But with Huckabee, you see things that I can only characterize as deceit. For example, Huckabee saying that with Jonathan Pollard — he acted in your interview as though he was vaguely familiar with Pollard.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, I had him. He came by. He stopped by the embassy and I let him. He just wanted to say thank you — as though I could just do that, right? Just stop and talk to the ambassador.
JD Hall: But I was watching that interview and I had just done an article at Insight to Insight, my Substack, that laid out how Huckabee had been working for years to get him released from prison before he was released. So I'm watching that and I'm going, did he forget that he had been working and advocating for his release for years? Like 20 years.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, it was a long time.
JD Hall: So has he been that much of a hardcore dispensationalist this whole time — that as he was governor of Arkansas, or even before, he sees a spy who stole our nuclear secrets to give them to Israel, who would then give them to Russia — did he even back then love the Jews so much he was trying to get a spy sprung from an American prison? Because that's a little bit — so that's so hardcore dispensationalist. I don't really think that's a spiritual thing. In other words, I think that's a political corruption. I don't think that's a spiritual corruption. I think that the political corruption is using spirituality and Christianity as a shield to do evil and wicked things. And I think that's a lot of what you see in the dispensational marketplace of ideas, so to speak.
You're seeing a lot of good, honest, God-fearing Christians that we go to church with and we may work with — good folks, our neighbors — who have this mindset that, "Well, I have to support Israel because the Bible tells me to." But the people at the top that are spreading that message — the Mike Huckabees of the world — they do know better than that. They know better. And they're defending things that cannot be defended, and they're doing so in the name of Christ.
The Collapse of Christian Zionism and the Fracturing of Evangelicalism
Tucker Carlson: Is that — I should say for people who haven't followed your career, you've been writing about intra-Christian disputes for a very long time and you're one of the American experts on this topic. So you know what's going on in Protestant Christianity in the US, I think. Is that changing? Is this reflexive commitment to a non-Christian theology that has resulted in very weird political positions — like Christians supporting genocide — how could that happen? Is this changing?
JD Hall: Absolutely it is. So at Insight to Insight, the average age of my audience is probably over 50. It's a pretty old audience. And it is every single day that I have people say, "I never knew that Genesis 12, the Abrahamic promise, is specifically reserved for Christians," or "I never knew that Romans 11 says that Jews without faith in Jesus are cut off from God and Abraham." And they're coming to these conclusions for the first time. And a lot of that is because of the internet.
The internet's been around a long time at this point, but these discussions on theological polemics have not been readily available online. Polemics is a field of theological study — like apologetics, but it deals with those who claim to be Christians but are not, as opposed to apologetics, which deals with other religions.
Tucker Carlson: Right.
JD Hall: Polemics is more internal. For example, Mike Lee says a couple of weeks ago that Mormons are Christians. It would be polemics — it would be the field of theological study where you'd come along and say, "Well, let's evaluate the claims of Joseph Smith and compare that to the Bible and see whether or not that's Christian." So that might be more of a polemical thing to do as opposed to apologetic. That's new. And so there are a lot more Christians — at least this is my finger on the pulse of evangelical Christianity online — a lot more Christians desiring to be discerning, where they're actually looking at what people say in the name of God and comparing that to the word of God to determine whether or not what they're being told is accurate. And the first thing that they're discovering is: the Bible actually doesn't say I have to defend Israel no matter what it is that they do.
Tucker Carlson: So it sounds like there's a kind of second Reformation going on within Protestant Christianity.
JD Hall: Yeah. The reason I hesitate at "Reformation" is I would like to see it be a little bit more robustly theological. So it's still on Israel. It's still political at this point. I think right now evangelicals are kind of angry that they've been lied to about what Israel is. And one of the reasons why I think they're freaking out on their side when they look over and say, "Look at all of this anti-Semitism" — they're seeing people that are mad at Israel. For the vast majority of people, for Christians who have finally figured out that Israel is not the chosen people of God irrespective of denying Christ, it's that for the first time in their life, they figured out that they've been lied to about something and they're kind of mad right now. I think most people will calm down if you give them a little bit of time.
So there are a lot of people whose eyes have been opened to: hey, what they taught me in Sunday school for 20, 30, 50 years is nonsense. And they get a little bit feisty. They're upset.
Tucker Carlson: Well, they should be upset.
JD Hall: Well, that's the natural result of what happens when we're lied to. Temporal questions — they're of limited significance. Theological questions, which bear on eternity, are inherently meaningful.
Tucker Carlson: Oh, right. Yeah. Is there any popular Protestant American Christian leader who is explicitly rejecting dispensationalism and all its political implications?
JD Hall: So what's happening in evangelicalism is a complete fracturing of the movement as a whole. The big-name leaders like your John MacArthurs and your R.C. Sprouls — those guys are dead, basically, is what's happening. So there's a balkanization that's basically happening in American Protestantism and evangelicalism. You have a lot of people flocking to Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, which — as a Protestant, I never thought that I'd live to see that. But evangelicals are responding to their —
Tucker Carlson: I didn't know what Eastern Orthodoxy was. I had no idea what that was.
JD Hall: Catholicism without the Pope — that's what most people think. They wear black instead of white. It's the Eastern Church. They are — Catholic light, if you're a Protestant looking through Protestant eyes. They both have incense. Their priests look like they wear dresses. They say words we don't know what they mean and they speak in different languages. It all looks like hocus pocus when you're a Protestant. But yeah, there's a lot of difference between the Eastern and the Western church.
Protestant evangelicals are balkanizing, though, even within American evangelicalism, because we recognize that there is a sickness among Protestants who have decided to cater to worldliness — by that I mean doing what is popular in the culture as opposed to what is scriptural.
And so I think there is hell to pay for megachurches and for your big-box evangelical super-center churches, because for so many years their church growth methodology was just to see how big they could get. Almost growing a church the way Rome satisfied the Romans there at the end — just bread and circuses. I used to joke about churches shooting midgets out of cannons just to get a crowd on Sunday. Pastors were coming in on zip lines. It's always something attractional. And that's really great until the first time in your life you hit a real crisis or you have something that is deeply troubling you. You have an issue in your life that a good time on Sunday morning doesn't help you overcome. You need something deeper.
And people are right now, I think, fighting — almost resisting — the big-box megachurch experience in the United States, which is good and they should. And I hope that many of those big churches — not because they're big, but if they're big because they were trying to water down the doctrine and just see how many warm bodies they could put into a room at the same time and call it church — they should die. Because that's not actually biblically what a church is.
So anyway, with the balkanization, you have Christians going their own way. You don't see a lot of those huge names anymore. The big ones like Greg Laurie — they've all got their own scandal right now. They're all scandalized and going away. But there are some mid-tier names — I call them mid-tier names — of guys that are not bending the knee to Israel, and they're going to be in the camp that you would call covenantal or reformed. But they exist. I work with, for example, NXR. Joel Webbon — I do a Substack for him and he's been very good on this topic. There are a couple of guys in Ogden, Utah with what's called New Christendom Press that have been very good on this issue too. So they're out there. You have to look a little bit harder.
You're not going to see anytime soon a church marquee that says "We do not stand with Israel." That's not going to happen. But I know for a fact that there are a lot of people inside American evangelical churches that are approaching the pastor privately saying, "Can we talk about Israel? Why are you promoting this? On Sunday's sermon, why did you say Israel is the chosen people of God? What are we? Are we not the chosen people of God?" And making them wrestle through those important issues.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Because the point is not just that it's inspired American Christians to support genocide — which it has — or the Netanyahu government, the buffoonish criminal government of Netanyahu, but that it diminishes Jesus within Christianity, and it corrupts the Christian faith. I mean, that's the real cost, it seems to me.
JD Hall: Yeah, it does. And it's frustrating too, because you see the very people whose alleged ancestors crucified Jesus almost using him as a mascot for genocide. They don't believe in Jesus, but they will look at you as a Christian and they'll say, "You know, your Messiah is Jewish." And I'm like, well, yeah, and your ancestors killed him. I don't owe you anything. Mike Huckabee said — was it this week or last week — that "we have an eternal moral debt to the Jewish people." That line frustrated me so much. What do you mean we have an eternal moral debt to the Jewish people? Jesus paid my debts. I'm a Christian. I don't have any debt to anyone. Especially not on ethnic grounds.
Tucker Carlson: That's absurd. As a matter of fact, the new covenant —
JD Hall: The ultimate identity politics.
Tucker Carlson: Oh my.
JD Hall: The new covenant that Jesus installed — the difference is now the parents eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are not set on edge. We're not paying for what our parents did. And so the eternal moral debt thing is just an affront to what Jesus actually accomplished.
But you have people who don't believe in Jesus trying to take property and ownership of Jesus. And that's why we push back on them sometimes over the "Jesus is Jewish" thing. Some of us troublemakers push back on that. We don't mean to say he's not an ethnic descendant of Abraham, but he's not rabbinically Jewish and you don't own him. No one owns him. He's the Son of Man. He belongs to the entire world. He came from the Jews — that's true. But he came for the nations. He came for everyone. And frankly, anyone who believes in Jesus is more an authentic child of Abraham than any Jew who doesn't.
So at the end of the day, that's frankly my promised land. Because the scripture says I'm a joint heir with Jesus Christ, not them. I'm the joint heir. Jesus is entitled to all of the Middle East. He owns everything. And the frustrating part of listening to the dispensationalists is that they get too caught up on who has the keys to the desert trailer park. Who has ownership of this little strip of land in the Middle East? And it's like — let me get this right. God the Son became an embryo and planted himself into the womb of a virgin, lived a life on earth that we should have lived, and then he died a death on our behalf. God the Father imputing sin to him. He died as a substitute in our place, vicariously, on our behalf. And then, proving that his sacrifice was accepted and that he truly is the Son of God, he rose again from the dead. Forty days later, ascended into heaven, and he's coming back again. And what you're worried about is who has the keys to the West Bank and Gaza?
The Christian message is that Jesus is the owner and operator of every square inch of God's creation. Every bit of it — not just this tiny little strip here. And dispensationalists are so busy focusing on how does this prophecy play out and how does that prophecy play out that they miss the big picture.
Tucker Carlson: They miss that it's a message of hate and division and violence and avarice, whereas the Christian message is love and unity and peace between people.
JD Hall: I was thinking the other day how messed up it is that the message that you get from the Jewish front basically, regarding the Iranian war right now, is: if you love Jews, the way you can prove that — if you really love Jews as a Christian — the best way for you to prove that is to give them money so they can buy more bombs to blow up more children over there, whether it's Lebanon or Gaza or in Iran. How offensive is it as a Christian to be told that the way I prove I love Jesus is to give you bombs to murder people? Who, by the way — if we're talking "I'll bless them that bless thee and curse them that curse thee" — those people are related to Abraham too, through Ishmael.
Tucker Carlson: Yes, of course.
JD Hall: They're his ethnic lineage also. It's like you want me to give money to one child of Abraham genetically to murder another one, and that's how I prove my Christian faith. That's not Christian faith. That's downright satanic. Jesus said, "If you harm a little one, it'd be better that you tie a millstone around your neck and cast yourself into the sea." And here we have this whole Jewish-Christian cottage industry where we are collecting millions of dollars every Sunday into the offering plate to go directly to the Israeli state. Not to share the gospel, not to tell anyone about Jesus and the good news of what Jesus did on the cross to save sinners from the wrath of God, but to give money essentially to a genocide fund.
Mike Huckabee was a pastor. Do you think Mike Huckabee has ever stood on a street corner and told the Jewish people who their king is? There's not a chance in hell that he's done that, or else he wouldn't be the ambassador anymore. They'd have bought him a plane ticket. And so it's like: if you love Jesus, first and foremost, if you're a Christian, tell the Jews about Jesus. Because God wants to bring them to a saving faith in the king that they've rejected. And then, just like anyone else that you love, just because you love them doesn't mean you necessarily give them what they want. Because what Jews want from Christians is political clout in the United States to continue this violent Ponzi scheme that they have going on in the Middle East. And doing that in Jesus's name — we can't as Christians participate in that.
Tucker Carlson: No. JD Hall, thank you for that. That was great.
JD Hall: Good to be with you.