Daniel G. Hummel. Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations.

Abstract

In the heyday of the Moral Majority, one of many grassroots organizations representing US Christian Zionists called itself “Goyim for Israel” (178)—it’s something of a shame that the group’s moniker didn’t catch on in the public consciousness as it illustrates the central dilemma of this movement: What’s particularly “Christian” or “Zionist” about Christian Zionism? Daniel G. Hummel’s new book Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations takes the reader back in time to the 1948 “roots” of the Christian relationship with Israel, following the “shoots and branches” of this history over the past five decades, both domestically and globally, as a transnational movement that has blossomed into a force to be reckoned with across the world. At the heart of Hummel’s argument is the religiopolitics of “reconciliation” between Christians and Jews, a “dialectic between religious belief and political action” (237)—dispelling popular mythology about the end times rapture and the fire...