Christian Zionism

Christian Zionism names Christian theological and political support for Jewish return to the Land of Israel, a current that historians trace back before the Jewish Zionist movement itself and before the word Zionism existed, to English Protestant restorationism from the seventeenth century onward, which read biblical prophecy as anticipating a future Jewish return to the land as part of God's unfolding plan for history.

Robert O. Smith's historical study of the movement's roots documents this restorationist current running through English and later American Protestant biblical interpretation for two centuries before Herzl's political organizing began, meaning Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism, while later intersecting and at times cooperating politically, have historically distinct origins and were not initially the same movement responding to the same immediate causes. The current most associated with contemporary Christian Zionism, dispensationalist premillennialism, developed in the nineteenth century through the biblical interpretation of John Nelson Darby and was popularized in the United States particularly through the Scofield Reference Bible, a framework that reads a future, national Jewish return to the land as a specific and necessary stage within its larger scheme of biblical prophecy and the end of history.

Christian Zionism is far from a consensus Christian position, and this atlas records the documented range of Christian theological responses as separate camps rather than a single Christian view. Dispensationalist premillennialism, prominent across much of English-speaking evangelicalism, holds Jewish national return as prophetically significant and, for many within this current, a positive religious good to be actively supported.

Pre-dispensational restorationism, the older English and American Protestant strand tracing to the seventeenth century, held a related but theologically distinct expectation of Jewish return without the specific dispensationalist framework Darby and Scofield later developed. Against these currents, a covenantal theological objection, held across much of Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant and Reformed Christianity, argues from a different reading of covenant and prophecy that does not attach the same specific theological significance to a modern political return, without this objection constituting a denial of Jewish peoplehood or right to self-determination as a political matter distinct from the theological question. A further documented position comes from churches situated in Israel, the Palestinian territories and the wider Middle East, whose theological and pastoral concerns this atlas records as their own distinct camp rather than folding into either of the other positions.