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Evangelicals and U.S. foreign policy
...As I alluded to earlier, evangelical conservatives are a constituency among whom the belief is widespread that God put Bush in the presidency for "such a time as this." And Bush has projected this idea of a divine presidency onto the war on terror, talking about a "crusade" against "evildoers," and refusing to distance himself from comments by evangelical leaders he's extremely close to such as Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham who set off international incidents by calling Mohammed a terrorist and Islam an "evil, wicked religion." He went so far as to tell Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, that God told him to strike down Saddam Hussein. He stood in the Rose Garden and announced that one of the reasons he went to war on the Taliban was to rescue two Christian missionaries who'd been jailed there for proselytizing. As all of the official justifications for the war in Iraq have fallen away, the WMDs and the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, as even the fantasy of establishing a democracy there fades, all that's left are Bush's metaphysical justifications. The problem is, while Bush may have cultivated the idea of a Holy War against Islam because it played so well among evangelicals at home--and it has--that message has been absorbed all too well by Muslims abroad. We see it in the Ahmadinejad letter. We see it in the recorded messages from Osama bin Laden. Bush's evangelical rhetoric is not only providing an alibi for an increasingly unjustifiable war, it is also, in effect, helping to mobilize attacks on the United States.

Even more disturbing, this evangelical view of the war has filtered into the conduct of the war itself. Inside military academies we have evangelical commanding officers forcibly proselytizing cadets. We have military chaplains in Iraq forcing soldiers to get baptized if they want a bath. We have missionaries such as Franklin Graham coming in behind the barrel of a gun and distributing Christianity with food aid. American evangelicals have already set up at least seven new evangelical churches in Iraq, whose proselytizing has inflamed tensions between Iraqi Christians and Muslims. We have a general, Gerry Boykin, overseeing intelligence-collecting operations in the war on terror, who has said publicly and repeatedly that the war on terror is a war against Satan--a war being fought by a Christian army. And given all this, not so surprisingly, we have military police torturing detainees not only with electroshock, stress positions, and waterboarding, but by using Christianity as a weapon against Islam, forcing devout Muslims to eat pork and drink alcohol, or in the words of one Abu Ghraib detainee, "They ordered me to curse Islam, and because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus I'm alive. And I did what they ordered me."...

...While surveys show that most Americans generally support Israel, they show that evangelical interest in Israel is guided by the Bible.

For some, it is belief in an End Times theology with roots in the Book of Revelation, a vision in which Christ can only return to Earth after all Jews return to Biblical Israel. It's an anti-Semitic vision in which Jews will then either accept Christ or die horrible deaths, but in the current, pre-millenial moment, it translates into a commitment to Israel as a Jewish state and support for Jewish settlers in greater Israel, including the Occupied Territories.

For others, it is simply a belief that God granted the Holy Land to the Jewish people, and that God blesses those who bless his Chosen People. But even without the End Times factor, this translates into a commitment to supporting Jewish ownership of all of Biblical Israel, again, including much of the West Bank.

In policy terms, this means that a growing Christian Zionist lobby - whose major players are meeting in July to launch a new national organization that may soon eclipse the power of AIPAC on Capitol Hill - a growing conservative evangelical lobby, with enormous influence on Capitol Hill and in the White House, is lobbying for positions that are far to the right of the Israeli government itself. While the majority of American Jews and the majority of Israelis support some kind of land-for-peace deal, conservative evangelicals have, on the whole, fought tooth and nail against Palestinian control over any portion of what they call Judea and Samaria. It is fair to call this influence disastrously obstructionist of any possibility for Israeli/Palestinian peace....