Luke Moon: The Evangelical Left Made Me a Christian Zionist

Luke Moon, thank you for coming on my podcast, the Conversations That Matter podcast, and being willing to talk to me as someone who is a self -described

Christian Zionist. I am that. So we could title the podcast How to Make $7 ,000

Really Quick, right? I wish. I mean, I really, one of these days, maybe it stacks up, maybe there's a bank somewhere where they store it for a while, but.

Well, I'm gonna add you on because you understand, I think, some of the issues at play in the whole discussion about Israel, Zionism, Palestine, the

West Bank, and also what you've done is very similar to something I've done. And I want the audience to know this because many people know me as the guy who tracked social justice in evangelical circles and saw that from the late 60s and early 70s forward, there's been this movement to reconcile new left ideas with conservative

Christian ideas, guys like Richard Mao and Ron Sider, 1973 Chicago Declaration, Lazine.

There's a whole bunch of names and events that I could mention. Most people that listen to me know about that. But I didn't focus on Israel, even though I came across it in the literature sometimes.

Sojourners in the 1980s is writing about the oppressive state of Israel and the poor plight of the

Palestinians. And I ignored it, I think, because we were dealing with the 2020 wokeness incursion.

Israel seemed like a peripheral issue. Now it's not a peripheral issue. And I am seeing narratives that I was exposed to in that research now coming out of the mouth of people who call themselves conservative, right -leaning

Christians. And it's almost the same kinds of things. And you told me that you had been researching this, but you had been focusing on that particular issue of why leftist, quote -unquote evangelicals, were anti -Israel.

And so I want to explore that in the podcast. Maybe tell us first a little bit about yourself and what even got you interested in the subject of Zionism, Israel, and that whole ball of wax.

Well, yeah, I actually grew up in Seattle, born and raised. And then my wife and I, just after we got married in the late 90s, we decided to join a

Christian mission organization called YWAM, Youth With a Mission, and spent years there, 12 years actually as a missionary.

And the first half was mostly doing evangelism, street preaching, that kind of thing in Asia.

And then starting in 2005, we started fighting human trafficking. And that got me really in the world of, you know, the social justice kind of space that I had not really actually even been aware of.

I'm not even sure where I would have called myself even at that moment, you know, because when you're focused on evangelism, it's always, how do you reach this people kind of thing?

And so I started, actually ended up going to get my master's in political and economic development with my expectation was to really focus on human trafficking.

And I felt like, you know, called to go to DC. And when

I got to DC, no one was hiring. And I ended up at an organization called the

Institute on Religion and Democracy, which was at the intersection of faith and politics. And I, for the first time, encountered what

I would call a Christian left. And I remember there was a flyer that I got, which had 40 days of prayer for abortion.

And it was being run out of, you know, the typical, like, you know, the

Episcopal Church in San Francisco teamed up with the United Methodist Church, but then also teamed up with the, you know,

ELCA Church. And the pastors signed on, the priests signed on to 40 days of prayer for abortion.

I was like, what? I had no concept of that. I had not seen that stuff before.

I was totally caught off guard and actually didn't really even know what to do with it because being in like a typical evangelical, one of our cardinal virtues is niceness.

And so then how do I engage on this issue with purely pure evil people, by people who are self -identifying as Christians?

And it, the response to Luke Moon was not so great.

I lost, I think something like 500 Facebook friends over the course of about a month and, you know, said and did things that, there was a lot of zeal, not a lot of wisdom in how

I was reacting to all this. And I got to a place where I realized that, you know, my role in this and how

I engage with the left, with the Christian left was, you know, where I wanted to go was

Matthew 18. You know, go to your brother and confront him. He doesn't change, you elevate, elevate, elevate.

But what happens when they post it on social media and they say, well, Christians believe that abortion is okay.

I'm like, well, it's not enough just to go to them and individually and say, hey, don't say that.

It's not right. It's not Christian. You have to confront it publicly. And so to me, there was a bit of a realization of a kind of like an

Old Testament prophet role, not in the foretelling, but in the calling the people back to what the

Bible says. And that's where I ended up. And so I ended up would typically go to a lot of Christian left conferences.

There was a very popular one called Wild Goose Festival every summer, which was kind of like all the big people came like, you know,

Jim Wallace and Ron Sider and Tony Campolo and Jane Claiborne and Brian McClaren, Sharon Harper, all of them would come.

And I would go, they would have, you know, different shows and talk at different events.

And they would say things to in that environment that they wouldn't say elsewhere.

And I would write articles about it and talk about it. And then these people, all of them happened to be going to an anti -Israel conference in Bethlehem in 2012.

And I was like, well, every time they would do something together,

I was like, oh, they're up to no good. So I convinced my boss to let me go. Before then, if you had asked me,

Luke, what do you think about Israel and Jews and whatever, I'd be like, I don't know, I don't care. Like, what does it matter to me?

Totally not care at all. And so I thought if I'm gonna spend a week in the

Palestinian territories, I should spend a week in Israel, like regular Israel. And so I rented a car, just drove up and down the country, saying, like, asking people, tell me your story.

Like, what do you think about this? What do you think about Israel -Palestinian conflict? And then

I did the same thing on the Palestinian side. And I realized it was, A, very different than what

I expected, that, you know, I remember sitting with a Palestinian peace activist, and I said, what do you want?

He says, I want peace. I said, well, so does Miss America, it's not an answer. Like, describe peace to me.

Like, what does it look like? And his picture of peace didn't have any Jews in it. And so I'm like, well, that, you know, and I was still, you know, on the edges of, you know, kind of advocating,

I would say to you, I'm advocating on the basis of justice. You know, like, I could play a good social justice warrior.

And I was like, how am I supposed to advocate for you if you're advocating for things that are unjust?

And so I started writing more articles about it. And the next thing you know, I'm like doing

Israel advocacy full time, and would fight the anti -Israel people in the

Presbyterian Church USA, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, all the main lines.

I went to all their conferences. I got, I was like, I know how all these denominations think about this, you know, and they would use, they would test out their ideas.

And then not just on Israel, but on all the social justice issues, they would test them out in the churches.

And if they landed well in the churches, then they would take it to the unions and the school teachers union and the workers, you know, the

SEAU, like all like the mainline denominations were the real proving ground for the social justice warriors arguments.

I saw it so much. And if you would ask me in 20, even like say 2014, 2015, you know,

Luke, are you a Christian Zionist? I'd be like, well, no, I'm a Zionist who's a

Christian, but I'm not a Christian. I'm not like one of those because my, I feel like the people who are

Christian Zionists, they're weird. They're like, they're really obsessed with the

Jews. And I'm like, well, I'm not one of them, but here I am 10 years later.

I'm like, at some point I was like, forget it. I like, I'll just, whatever people think of me, they think of me.

I think it's interesting that you got into it because you were initially motivated by tracking the evangelical left and seeing what they were up to.

And you just happened to follow them to Israel or at least to the West Bank and then realized that this was one of the core things that was animating them.

And what year did you say that was? 2012 was the first time I went. 2012. And so I obviously haven't been focusing on that issue in the evangelical left camp, as I said before, but I've been aware on the periphery that this is an issue for them.

How much would you say this is a motivating factor as far as all the other things that they advocate? Like where does

Israel stack up for them and the issue with Palestine? Well, it ebbs and flows.

I would say that before October 7th, 2023, my typical progressive friends, evangelical leftist friends, their posts would be the full range of progressive causes.

It would be like Me Too, Black Lives Matter, whatever the cause was at the moment they had to rail against.

Trump's even ban on Muslims back in 2016, the

World Relief put out a big ad in the Washington Post and they got

Max Licato to be the first signer, like that kind of stuff.

I'm like, that was the kind of stuff that you would see. And then

October 7th happened and all of a sudden it became like the motivating factor by so many of them.

Like to this day, I would say the majority of my progressive friends who even in early 23 had a broad range of causes,

Israel became like the cause. Now, I think it's,

I'm hopeful actually, it shifts back to the broad range because it's way more helpful for me because the 24 seven focus on this is exhausting because it just doesn't let up and it's hit from so many different angles, it's hard to manage.

So I wanna talk about that 24 seven cycle that you're talking about where Israel's kind of viewed as an interpretive grid more or less as sort of channeling all these terrible things and it's a different list for the left and the right but Israel's behind the problems essentially.

I wanna talk about that narrative and what it looks like on the left. Since the left, they're the first ones to go this direction in any kind of significant fashion.

I pointed out on my podcast, the secular left has been doing this for years obviously. On college campuses, since I was a little kid,

I remember people protesting on the college campus near where I live against Israel and the situation in Palestine and it just, it seems like every few years it would flare up, there'd be an issue and out would come the protesters.

Not to the levels we saw two years ago, that was on another level but it was always there in the water.

It was part of the leftist coalition was being, and I should say the hard left coalition because there's a lot of liberals on the left and there's only a few left.

John Fetterman's like one of the last Democrats that's still pro -Israel in some way but there was, in the hard left, there was always this, at least since I can remember, an anti -Israel kind of bent and I think it's likely just the evangelicals who are on the left just mirror that.

Is that a fair reflection that they're aping whatever the secular left is doing or is it something different?

I think so much of what the evangelical left does is react to what they think, what the right's about, right?

So it's interesting that one of the, as the founder of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell, was forming what became the moral majority and the religious right and kind of coalescing that demographic.

One of the things that was happening simultaneously is actually he would take all of his students at Liberty, in the early days of Liberty, they would always go to Israel and he was dispensational,

I'm not, but he was pushing a very pro -Israel message through that. I was hanging out with this old school

Christian Zionist guy about a month ago and he said that he got invited and asked by Reagan to speak at the

Republican National Convention and he was a very big pro -Israel guy and so he made the pro -Israel pitch at the

Republican National Convention. It's like, must've been 84 probably. And when he got off the stage, he was walking past James Baker and James Baker turned to him and said,

F the Jews, okay? So you, like, we're talking in the 80s. There wasn't this like, like Christian Zionism was there but it wasn't any what like it became a decade or more later.

But what you had was the, I mean, the first anti -Christian

Zionist conference in the United States was 1978. It was in like,

Range, Illinois, run by sojourners, actually did the invitations. But at that event was the

Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Young Life was there too.

Bunch of other kind of liberals, but it was this weird coalition of people that formed in reaction to Christian Zionism.

Like to me, the seminal event in that separated what would,

I think we could eventually call the evangelical and then the evangelical left was the conference on biblical inerrancy.

That to me, the conference on biblical inerrancy separated the wheat from the chaff. It's sheeps and goats,

Francis Schaeffer and that whole movement that began to actually hold that the

Bible actually has, like you really have to follow what the Bible teaches. And you have

Schaeffer basically providing a lot of the intellectual worldview orientation for a lot of leaders that would then come on.

The crack in between the two really begins there. And then you have the basically people who are saying the

Bible is just a book. It's like the mainline Protestants begin to kind of stay in the leftward track.

But the people who begin to then lean into what the Bible says X, we have to follow it begins to take another track and that becomes the majority.

And that's where Falwell and those guys begin to tap into this, like lean into biblical arguments for life, for the conservative orientation of American politics.

Why it was like those kinds of issues that were, I mean, Reagan won in 84 almost every state in the union, which is amazing actually.

For the viewers, they probably should know the Chicago Declaration that I keep referencing is 1973. And that's a social justice document.

It reads like a BLM type statement. The Chicago Statement, which came out of the biblical inerrancy debate.

That's a few years later. 76, I think I was going to say 76. I wasn't sure. And, but the

Chicago Declaration is a different group. And you did have Carl Henry actually signed that. And then he 73, he signed 73.

I think he signed both. And then he trashed it after the fact. So he was kind of doing a political thing in my mind.

The new evangelicals were kind of squishy. They were open to the right or left, but you had

Jim Wallace and Ron Sider and Richard Mao and Wes Scranberg -Michelson and Sharon Gallagher.

And the list goes on about all these sort of new left evangelicals. They'd been raised in these conservative households, but then they went to college or sometimes in high school, they got involved with Students for a

Democratic Society and that kind of thing. And so they form evangelicals from McGovern.

And then from that, that becomes the people that did that Chicago Declaration. And they fizzle out in the

Carter presidency because Carter is such a failure. And this populist movement comes roaring in in the 80s.

Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson are now through this new media called television, communicating with these mass audiences.

And it seems like it's not until 2010s that you really start seeing that social justice narrative start to pick up in a popular evangelical audience again.

And it's guys like David Platt and Russell Moore and to some extent, depending on the year,

Matt Chandler and sort of these new internet pastors who have been impacted by the social justice.

So anyway, I want to get back to Israel, but I - I love talking about this stuff though. Let me just - Do you? All right, yeah, we can talk about it.

To me, there's a couple of extra points here. One is you had the charismatic renewal that starts to form in the late 70s.

I think that you get the, and you get the Jesus people movement as well. Those two factors begin to change the dynamic, particularly of the mainline denominations because the charismatic renewal people were going to like Episcopal churches and PCUSA churches.

And they were coming out of those. And then you get guys like Chuck Smith and a bunch of the guys out of California who are starting new denominations like Calvary Chapel and the

Vineyard Movement and stuff like that begins to come out of those. So you get those types of movements are coming as well that provide, it's not enough for the

Southern Baptists to kind of undergird that populism that shifts towards Reagan and Falwell and Dobson, et cetera.

But I think what begins to happen is the late

Gen X and millennials are in some ways, I think, reacting to the

Boomer, Falwell, Dobson, that kind of, they're reacting to that going from a very clear black and white to third wayism.

I mean, third wayism becomes such a strong movement. Even like,

I remember when I was in DC, maybe 2011, I was at a meeting with this guy,

Gene Robinson, who was the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. Skye Jethani was there,

Matt Anderson was there, Tisa was there, and a couple more guys on the left.

And you could really tell the lines in that meeting because Skye Jethani was like, we gotta find a third way here.

And Gene Robinson was like, dude, I came for, this is terms of surrender.

You guys are gonna surrender, and I'm just here to negotiate terms of surrender. And I'm on the other side going,

I ain't gonna surrender nothing. I'm holding this line all the way. Me and Eric Tisa, we're hard on that. But it was clear to me that what comes out of that is you get this idea, that third way kind of orientation.

I mean, you get Phil Visscher, him and Skye Jethani now have had this podcast for a long time, been pushing this third way, the evangelical left, the kind of social justice stuff.

I mean, to some degree, that's where I think Platt and Moore are coming out of.

A lot of these guys are reacting to that. To me, there's this generational shift that is reacting to the boomers, this third way position.

But then to me, what actually excites me a lot is where Gen Z's at, because they're reacting to the third way guys, to me, in a very positive direction and going back to wanting big families, wanting to have like very, like really a traditional home is what they're after.

They're hungry for it, which is not third way. Yeah, I think, so third way is a contextualization approach.

In my mind, it was a way to reach the Blue City voter and say, well, you can sit next to our Republican voters.

The wine moms of Loudoun County are gonna be persuaded by. Right, you can all be together in the church and we're not gonna have any fights because we all have this common enthusiasm for Jesus.

The politics don't need to get in the way of that, except when it came to certain political issues on the left, all of a sudden, these are gospel issues.

These are issues of faithfulness. But if it was a right -leaning issue, it was political.

It was in a different category. We shouldn't really, so it was always leading everything towards the left. We're not the people of the donkey or the lamb or the elephant or the people of the lamb.

I mean, the number of garbage posts like that. Right, yeah, and Tim Keller, I think, was a big architect of some of this.

And he's in New York City. You understand why he's playing these dynamics. But it's also similar to stuff

I was reading in the 1970s from Jim Wallace and Ron Sider and Richard Mao.

They're saying very similar things about how, if we're gonna reach the youth, we can't just keep this old conservative political thing going.

And they had an assumption that if you were, even at that time, this is before Falwell, that if you're religiously conservative, you're also gonna be politically conservative.

And they didn't want that. And Fuller Seminary shifts and Wheaton College starts shifting, all these institutions that were not committed to conservative politics overtly become leftward -focused.

And so the Israel issue in all of this is,

I guess, what we're focusing on now because all the other issues, I think, people understand. They understand how BLM and Me Too get wedded to a

Christian understanding of justice and sort of syncretize and corrupt it. But when it comes to Israel, I think this has been harder for evangelicals to navigate because I think in their minds, and I'm talking about your common evangelical who just goes to church, wants to be faithful, doesn't have time to read every news article.

In their minds, and I very much empathize, I think you were this person. They don't really care about what a foreign government half a world away, actually on the other side of the world, is up to.

And to be made to care is what annoys them. It's not an issue that they're focused deeply on because it's like, give me the argument for why this should even matter to me.

But it did matter to the religious right crowd, eventually.

And maybe some people will say this is because Jerry Falwell became friends with Begin who bought him a jet plane.

And it's these manipulative things that lead to this, whether that's true or not, we can talk about. And then on the left, it's sort of this commitment to, hey, you want to be consistent on social justice.

I'll give you an example here. I wrote down a few quotes. I haven't even gotten to any of them. But in 2002, this is over 20 years ago,

Sider and Perkins signed a statement that said the theft of Palestinian land and the destruction of Palestinian homes and fields is surely one of the major causes of the strife that has resulted in terrorism and the loss of so many

Israeli and Palestinian lives. And in 2007, Ron Sider and a bunch of others,

I think this was one with Lisa Sharon Harper and Jamar Tisby, Preston Sprinkle, I think might've been at this, if I'm not mistaken.

But they signed something that said the significant number of American evangelicals reject the way that some have distorted biblical passages as the rationale for uncritical support for every policy and action of the

Israeli government instead of judging all actions of both Israelis and Palestinians on the basis of biblical standards of justice.

And so I could read you a lot of other quotes and you know more than me, but it's like what they're trying to do is they're saying, hey, this justice thing that we're applying to our domestic issues, if we apply it in Israel, then these

Palestinians are clearly in a position of being treated unjustly by the

Israeli government. And it's a shame, it's a tragedy. We must repent of the fact that we support

Israel as Americans and if people don't care about this, they're not caring about the lives of innocents, they're not caring about babies who are being slaughtered by the

IDF. And this is what I think motivates them. And so here we are in 2026 and I wanna speak to that person that you were and that person in some ways that I still am, like I don't really want to be so consumed with this conflict on the other side of the world, but we're being forced to care about it because it's becoming like the number two, three, one issue, even to people now on the right that are saying things that sound very similar to what those on the left were saying 10 years ago.

So maybe walk us through that a little bit, just anything that I said that maybe caught your attention that you could provide clarity for that common evangelical voter who just wants to do the right thing.

I think there's a couple of factors here that they're at play. One is, again, I think there's a lot of, you can never do away with the people reacting to how things were done before.

And one of the things, I remember taking the top Southern Baptist church planters to Israel in 2017.

And I asked them, we were sitting around at dinner, and I said, when was the last time you taught out of the book of Revelation?

And every one of them said, I don't. And this was, and a lot of what was causing them to not wanna talk about it was when they were in their teens was when the

Left Behind series was very, very popular. So Left Behind series sold 60 million copies.

It was like the Harry Potter of the mid -aughts, right? Everybody read it. And then everybody was like, oh, if this is dispensational,

I don't want anything to do with this, this is, ugh. And so there was a big reaction to it.

At the same time, you have the rise in just about every major seminary in the

United States was starting to listen to a couple of people. One is they were moving in an anti -Baptist direction, meaning like Jesus was nonviolent.

Pacifism. Pacifism. You had the open theism debates that were taking place in the mid -aughts as well.

And guys like N .T. Wright, still perhaps one of the most influential theologians in the world right now, all of whom were pushing like a nonviolent

Jesus. And with it came a reaction to any form of violence by people perceived to be good.

Like if Israel is the people of God and they're committing violence against these poor

Palestinians, well, that can't be right because Jesus was nonviolent.

Jesus expects us to be a pacifist. Jesus, like the pacifist wing of this has been and is still a major driving factor.

I mean, the inability of pastors on the weekend after,

I mean, the massacre of Jews in Israel that took place on October 7th was on a

Saturday. The next day was a Sunday. And the inability of pastors all across America to actually call out

Hamas or the evil that they had done, it was actually pretty rare.

I mean, there was not a lot. There was some say, I mean, I remember being in church at a PCA church that was like, you know, we gotta, you know, both sides need to tone it down and put down their weapons.

And like, no, evil was like real evil came out of October 7th, really nasty stuff.

And so I would post things like, I think we gotta pray for the destruction of Hamas in the same way

I would call, I think, you know, we would hope that people in the 40s were praying against the destruction of Nazism.

You know, you don't want people obviously just randomly slaughtered, but Hamas is an evil and you gotta call it out.

And the inability to call it out was really evident to me. And it showed to me how deeply the

Anabaptist orientation had come into major evangelical institutions, churches, et cetera.

And so if you don't have anybody that's providing an understanding of, hey, the long history of just war theory as a major doctrine of the church, what you're then left with is an inability to wrestle with real evil and violence and war, and can there be a good and a bad person in war, et cetera.

And I feel you just end up in this place where people are like, I don't know how to think about this. And so when they see their social media feed full of dead people and dead babies and, you know, violent things are exploding and it's terrible.

And it seems that Israel is being overly aggressive, et cetera, et cetera. It begins to then, like there was no speed bump against it on the right, right, on the evangelical, right, on the non -theological supporting right.

In mostly Zoomer and younger millennial circles since October 7th, 2023.

Because it's really since then that I've seen such a huge overnight interest in Jews and Israel, which are actually not the same question, but they get conflated all the time.

Because you'd have to believe the Jewish media is the one that's opposed to Israel by giving them mad press.

It like doesn't make any sense if you conflate them, but they're often conflated. And I think what was happening is we had all this compromise in 2020.

There was some attention to China as a foreign influencer in BLM, the election, COVID, you know, really everything that happened at that period of time.

But it was very temporary. And as an explanatory device, and I'm not exactly sure how this,

I have my suspicions, but how this became the main thing, well, look at all these Jews in various capacities who have been involved in Hollywood, who have been involved in pornography.

Look at the Democrat Party, how much they vote for Democrats. So on the right, this is starting to happen, an awareness that Jewish people in the

United States, mostly secular Jewish people, are contributing to this, the moral decay that we have.

And then that joined with pictures of Palestine.

I don't know how many times I saw on my social media feed, even friends of mine posting a picture of what looks like a hellscape.

And I've said this on the podcast. I mean, it looks like the moon. It looks like, really?

Like, did you have to go that far, Israel, when the whole place is decimated in the frame of the picture, and then you have crying children, and it rips your heart out.

And that's the only thing you're seeing, right? I didn't see those same pictures from October 7th at all.

It really was, I just saw the reaction, because that's what the media is reporting in our country.

And I think the combination of those two things created an environment where I am seeing just a ravenous, like, unhinged kind of anti -Jewish, anti -Israel, like, we'll give up the whole coalition, the right -leaning coalition, and even maybe band with the left in some cases if we're not gonna oppose

Israel, and the idea that Trump's controlled by Israel, and Israel must be now behind everything. I mean, this has happened very quickly.

And I don't think we're gonna answer every question, but I do want to get into this a little bit, because I don't think it's fair.

I do think what you were saying before is true. There's a moral equivalency, at the very least, that has been built up, that, well, there's just violence on both sides, and since Israel has bigger guns, they were able to do more violence.

And so, you know, and maybe use as a case example, I think Tucker Carlson is actually a very good example of this, even though he's not an evangelical.

He's an Episcopalian, I think. No, he actually, he's not anymore. He is,

I think he would basically call himself an evangelical at this point. Would he? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he calls himself a

Christian all the time. He just did at this Middle Eastern forum. He's like, I'm a Christian, and I'm here at the seat of Islam, and I'm comfortable.

Yeah, it's like, look, and there's no churches, Christianity's forbidden, but he's like, oh, it's great.

Anyway, it's comical, but I think part of the reason he comes down on this, it may not be the full reason.

I think there's an anti kind of elite sentiment he also has, but there's also this pacifism. There's this, like,

I don't want people to die, and I look at this situation, and there's people in Palestine or in the

Gaza Strip that are dying, and this can't be right, and so I think your conclusion is correct that if you really go down this road, if someone attacks you, you can't ever really defend yourself, because that's also violence.

So maybe help us out with this. Let us know how, why you started to care about this, why you went from,

I don't care, Israel's on the other side of the world, to, oh my goodness, these evangelical leftists care about this so much, and it actually is a problem, and I think there's actually merit to the way

Israel's handling this. It's not a moral equivalency. I've done a bunch of reconciliation initiatives, and I spent a month in the

Belfast, Northern Ireland. I spent time in Nigeria. Yeah, I went to all the countries of the

Balkans doing reconciliation initiatives, bringing people who have hated each other together, and how can you find a path forward.

I did all that kind of work, and so I was very aware, and I knew how

I know all the social justice guys, and I know all the Anabaptist guys, because that's a very strong part of what they're doing, and I just found it was a hard issue, and I was like, oh, let me mess around and see what happens, and the more

I got involved in it, and the more I saw the degree to which like these evangelical institutions in the

United States were captured by this very anti -Israel message, but they were all aligned with very leftist, either leftist or Islamic.

If you're really focused on, I mean, there are 200, maybe 300

Christians left in Gaza. Like, if you're going out as a

Christian strong for Gaza, you're not actually leaning it, you're not doing it for the

Christians, because they're not there. It is 99 .9

% Muslim and Arab. It's probably the most ethnically homogenous place on the planet, okay?

But what I had seen, and what frustrated me so much, early 2014, maybe early 2015,

I went to the Justice Conference, and it was being held at Gateway Church in Dallas.

Andy Stanley was a big preacher at that, and Hillsong had a song, like a concert on one night, and it was to raise money for refugees in Iraq, okay?

And the big part of what I was doing at that time was twofold. One is raise awareness about Christian persecution in the

Middle East, and encourage Christian support for Israel, because we saw Israel as, it has rule of law, it has freedom of religion,

Christianity is growing there. Maybe that's a model for the Middle East as opposed to the problem of the Middle East.

Like, let's try that, because this is not working. And what I found was, in Iraq, in Jordan, in Syria, in Lebanon, there were no

Christian refugee camps. There was Sunni refugee camps, there was

Yazidi refugee camps, there was Shia refugee camps, but there were no Christian refugee camps. Where were the

Christians? They were fending for themselves in shopping malls, in renting homes, sleeping in schools, like, there was no place.

And so, if you are a Hillsong, and you're raising money for refugees in Syria, you're gonna give that money to, like, some

Christian do -gooder organization, and they're helping refugees, they're not helping Christians. And I was like, guys,

I mean, Paul says to us, "'Do good to all men, but first a household of faith.'" And who is he talking to?

You gotta help your Christians first. And I went to my own pastor, and I said, I said, why aren't we doing more for Christians?

Why aren't we focused on Christians? And he says, Luke, we can't be tribal like them. But, you know, the

Jews stick together, and the Muslims stick together, but we can't be like them, because we gotta be for all people.

And I'm like, but that's not what Paul says. Literally, he says, do good to all men. And I'm like, who is going to look after the

Christian? And I said, I feel like we're going all over the place, saying, hey, come, become a follower of Jesus.

But man, if you become a follower of Jesus, I gotta tell you, we ain't gonna get your back. If something happens to you, you're screwed.

You're on your own, man. Sorry, it's the way it is, right? Because I can tell you to this day,

I can raise more money in, like, a month than I have in 10 years of trying to help

Christians who are being persecuted. The amount of stuff, and so, for me, it all actually started with, you have this sea of conflict in which

Christians are being decimated. And there's a saying amongst the jihadis, first the

Saturday people, and then the Sunday people. First they kick out the Christians, and then, or kick out the

Jews, and then they kick out the Christians. I was standing on a bridge in northern Iraq with a

Christian Iraqi whose town had basically been destroyed by ISIS.

And I said, and he said, I remember when I was a kid, we would play with Jews. And I said,

I wish I knew then what I know now, because I might have behaved differently.

Meaning, like, they kicked out the Jews, when he was, you know, he was an old guy.

So they kicked out the Jews in his town, and now the Christians have left.

And when I started doing that work in 2014 to try and help Iraqi Christians who were fleeing

ISIS, there was about a half a million Christians in Iraq. Today, there's maybe 150 ,000 left.

In the region, tell me how Christians fare under the Israeli government, because I hear all the time that they are targeting

Christians, that they're killing Christians, they're anti -Christian, they're

Christ deniers. Obviously, if you're Jewish, you don't receive Christ as the Messiah. We shouldn't partner with them because of all these things.

And it's ridiculous for Christians in the United States to think that they should ever support a country that's opposed to Christ.

That's the very common narrative out there. Yeah, well, tell us how Christians fare in Israel as opposed to these other places.

Well, in Israel, actually, because they're not required to join the military, the

IDF, they actually get to go straight to school. So actually, they tend to be, they have the highest matriculation level, meaning going from high school into college and good colleges.

Most of the hospitals are run by Christians. Most of the doctors are Christians. Lots of professional people in Israel are

Christians. At the same time, what's currently in my feed and what

I'm getting hassled for right now is there's a video of a bunch of Jewish guys walking past the door of the

Garden of Gethsemane. And a couple of them spit into the doorway.

And this guy posted, this needs to get sent to every dispensational pro -Israel

Christian guy. I'm like, okay, most Israelis never met a

Christian. And they don't know any Christians. And what they do know of Christians is the

Inquisition, the Holocaust, there is a... You just said, though, that there's

Christians in all these fields. There are, but there's not very many. It's a population of 10 million people in Israel.

There's 185 ,000 Christians, okay? So the numbers of Christians, meaning they might know you're not

Jewish, but do they know you're like... They don't know you as a Christian who is necessarily evangelical or like...

They just don't, there's not a... The groups don't actually mix much in Israel, actually.

So is that population going up, going down? Are they limited in their civil rights? It's all going up for them.

Christians are increasing. Christians are increasing. They have really positive fertility rates. They're also, actually, the number of converts is growing, which drives a bunch of non -Jewish people.

Jesus following Jews is crazy. Well, they have free speech in Israel, kind of like a Western country.

But what you get, so what's... It's a little more complicated than we have here in the

United States, because you'll have a Christian Arab town next to a

Jewish town, but you don't have a lot of places where Christians and Jews live in the same neighborhood.

That doesn't happen. Honestly, it doesn't happen in the Middle East very often. It's very unusual.

Like, people live with their own people, okay? The other challenging factor for most,

I think, people outside of the Middle East understand is that religion in the

Middle East is more about culture than it is about faith.

Meaning, like, I once got my hair cut in Nazareth. Nazareth, as in where Jesus is from.

And I was sitting with the guy, and I said, are you a Muslim or a

Christian? Because he was not Jewish. And he goes, I'm a Christian. I said, oh, what church do you go to?

He said, oh, I don't go to church, I'm an atheist. Like, the largest, there's a

Communist Party in Israel that is, and it's in the biggest chapter of the

Communist Party in Israel is in Nazareth. And it's mostly populated by Christians, okay?

There's a Palestinian terrorist organization called PFLP, Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine.

It is a Marxist terrorist organization. Okay, meaning it's secular, not

Islamic. It was started by a Christian and currently run by a Christian. So there are

Christians that are on both sides of the conflict between Muslims and Jewish people in the

Middle East. So you've told the story, we never really finished it. I think you were gonna say it's not really normative for Jewish people to spit on Christians.

That's like a very uncommon thing. It's an uncommon thing. It happens, but it's like, and what got me in trouble with this, or not in trouble, but what

I was being reacted to was I said, well, if they met you, if that Jewish person spit in front of your door, spit like, what would, do they know how, like, do they know anything about you?

Like, if you don't know any Christians, if you don't know any Christians and have any positive relation and don't know, all you've grown up with is

Christians hate us, Christians tried to kill us, Christians are attacking us, which is what the media, if they're reading half of TikTok, they're also getting that.

If they read the New York Times, that's what they're getting. So why should they not spit, actually?

Well, they shouldn't. I mean, obviously, but it's like, what do you expect? What kind of witness have you offered?

I mean, this is my critique of a lot of the guys on the right who are so adamant against Israel and the

Jews. It's like, what kind of, are you an actual Christian? Do you actually care about people's souls being saved?

Because we are not allowed to be arrogant about the grace that we have been given as Gentiles.

Paul is explicit about that numerous times. He actually says to the

Jew first and then the Greek, okay? So Paul, in his ministry, started with the

Jews. And here you are attacking them like this?

Like, you think that you're drawing them anywhere near faith in Jesus?

You are pushing, like all these guys, I'm like, to me, I support

Israel. I think Israel has a special place in God's redemptive plan for the world.

I believe that. I don't expect every Christian to believe that. But what I do expect of every

Christian is to actually model the fruit of the Spirit in relationship to Jews.

And actually anybody else for that matter. Well, I want to get into the, maybe a little bit of the prophecy and reasons to support

Israel and all this kind of stuff and untangle that if we have time. But I think you made a great point that I want to emphasize.

And that is, with all the attention that Israel and then also Jewish people separately are getting, you would think for Christians, this would spark a mass evangelism campaign.

If they're really so bad and they're in such desperate straits and they reject

Jesus, then one of the first things and the main thing that a Christian should do is find some

Jewish people and witness to them. Tell them about Christ. And maybe even do some hospitality.

Not just to, because I think with a lot of Jewish people, they're very used to a stereotype of Christians.

And they don't understand even the differences between Protestant and Catholic. So you do have to take some time,

I think. And the same would be true for a Muslim. They don't understand this either. But I'd say the same for Muslims.

The gospel and efforts to convert Jewish people, that seems like that would solve some of the problems that you say are happening, right?

So that's a really, I think, good point that I don't want anyone to miss. Because if you're concerned about Israel or Jewish people, consider what you can do to help them in this way.

But I don't want to leave also the topic, because it was an excellent point, but we were talking about which is Christians and their conditions in the

Middle East. Would most of the Christians of the 185 ,000, would they be supportive?

The ones who live in Israel, would they be supportive of Israel? Or do they think that this is, we're being oppressed?

Like, how do they think of it? I think I tend to divide the groups into about third, third, third, right?

So you get a third that are really in, they support

Israel, they serve in the IDF, they're very -

Even though they don't have to. They don't have to, they choose to. They choose to. They're invested in being part of the nation of Israel as Christians, okay?

Then you get this kind of group in the middle that is like, eh, like, I'm just like, listen,

I just want to work nine to five, and I want to go home, and I want to eat my hummus and watch my

TV. It's always hummus. And like, just do whatever, right? Like, I don't have, I don't care.

I'm not a political person, you know? They just want to live life. And then you get about a third that's like antagonistic.

Okay, like, that's pretty much. And then on the Palestinian side, which there's, you know, a few, it's not,

I think it's in the 50, 60 ,000 range, okay? On that side, it's also, you know, there's a bunch that are

Islamists, like not Islamists, but like pro, the pro -terrorist wing, let's call it.

Then there's a nationalist wing. And then there's a, like a regular, just usual evangelical way.

And there's a bunch of guys out there that are doing evangelism and hospitality, taking care of widows and orphans.

And when people ask me, like, who can we support in the Palestinians? There's a few names

I give, but I have to say like, but you can't say I named them and I won't even name them now.

Because it's just like, they get in trouble if they're associated with me, so. So if you're in those regions, you can't criticize, whether it's

Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. But if you're in Israel, you can criticize the Israeli government. And they do it all the time.

So that might influence the narrative that you hear publicly, because there's only one that's allowed to be heard.

Right. So in Israel, for the 185 ,000

Christians that are growing in the population, they enjoy full civil rights, it sounds like, what you're saying.

Some of them will serve in the IDF, even though they don't have to. It's a better place, and this is the point

I was thinking you were gonna make and I was kind of hoping you would make, because I know this is true, than any of the surrounding countries in the

Middle East, to be a Christian. Oh, by far. And so when you see Tucker Carlson go to Qatar or Saudi Arabia, not to make it all about Tucker, but he's just been very prominent lately in trying to elevate these

Muslim countries as places that are great to be, and he'll say it as a

Christian. He always mentions, I'm a Christian and I love this place. That you don't have public alcohol -ism, or alcohol's not sold, right?

And he'll say, these elements of Sharia are so great. And he's not worried about the threat from Islam.

But then he'll turn around and criticize Jewish people for, or Israel, I should say, for, a church gets destroyed in Gaza.

So maybe, well, I didn't wanna make this about Tucker, I just feel like that's in the water, so we have to talk about it. If you go to Gaza, and you see these hellscape images, and now we know that there are

Christians, apparently, in the IDF who are also, with the Israeli military, making it look that way.

How can you justify this, Luke Moon? How can you, as a Christian, say that this is the way that we should treat other people?

That just seems horrible. Well, I think that there's a long history of just war theory within Christianity.

It goes back, actually, from Augustine's a big, is kind of the person who kind of brings it into Christian theological thought, and Aquinas picks it up.

We lost a lot of that, but I'll give you an example. How many innocent people are allowed to get killed to take out one bad guy?

Let's say you have a bad guy, he's got a rocket, he's gonna launch it at Israel, and he's standing there, and he's got five people around him who are not soldiers, or let's say 10, or 20.

So, I'll tell you what, Israel has a number, which is a very weird thing to think about, and I actually don't know why they came up with this number, but it's five.

So, if there is a person waiting to launch a rocket at Israel, and there are 10 people who are not fighters with him, they won't take him out.

If there are five, they will. I don't know why it's five, but that's what they decide. We all have seen the shows, like there's that,

I love the latest, Magnificent Seven, it was super fun, in which the bad ranchers are coming, and it's gonna be this horde, and they're gonna be like, whatever, and what does the town do?

They set up the pikes, they cut the ditch, they fill it with oil, they do all this stuff, they set up like, and basically, the whole of Gaza was set up like that, okay?

Everything is booby -trapped, everything was booby -trapped. There was not a single room.

You talk to the IDF guys, there's not a single room they didn't walk into that they didn't find some type of explosive guns, planted explosives, ready for more, like, every place they went.

And so, early on in the war, Israel was trying to go house to house, and there was a lot of guys who died in trying to just root out the bad guys in going into a building, because the entire building was booby -trapped.

In one of the hospitals, there was a report where seven

Israeli soldiers were killed in one blast in a hospital, okay?

And these guys walked into the maternity ward of the hospital, and under the beds were moms holding their babies.

Behind them was Hamas fighters. They blew up the whole room, okay?

Like, that was what Israel was up against. And what do you do with that? The problem is, on TikTok, it was 35 to one pro -Palestine to pro -Israel messaging.

On Instagram, 17 to one. It's weird, because I just saw this. It's an older clip.

The recital's like 2018 of the CEO, I think, of TikTok saying, we're trying to stop antisemitism on the platform and stuff.

And people will think that's a recent clip, and that this is, but I've also read what you're talking about, that it's exceedingly pro -Gaza on TikTok.

I don't know why. I joined TikTok in like the fall, and I made three reels.

I put it on my Instagram. They had no issue on Instagram, but I put them on TikTok, because I thought, oh,

TikTok's where everybody's at. And I heard there was this issue of stuff getting shut down.

And I did a reel. When Tucker said, Christian Zionism is a heresy,

I did a reel where I said, when

God says to Abraham, I will give this land as an everlasting covenant, you have to believe that everlasting doesn't mean everlasting.

If you believe that where Paul says the gifts and callings to the

Jews are irrevocable, you have to believe somehow that they're revocable, okay?

As a Christian Zionist, I believe everlasting means everlasting. I believe irrevocable means irrevocable.

That's what my message said. TikTok pulled it within three hours of me posting it. They pulled it?

Pulled it, yeah. Like, it's not there anymore? It's not there anymore. Or what violation did they use? They just said it violated the terms.

Literally, I was quoting the Bible. That's all I was doing, walking down the street, quoting the

Bible. And if that's, if that's, this is me coming in fresh,

I can't imagine, like, I talked to a lot of guys who early on started, were trying to post, and that had big followings, hundreds of thousands, millions, and as soon as they went into the

Israel stuff, they got, they were blocked, or they were warned, they were put on a 24 -hour, like, hold, that kind of stuff.

So it was, it had a massive chilling effect. Let me give you one other thing, because this comes up a lot, is the situation with the two churches in Gaza.

One was a Greek Orthodox church, and the other is a Catholic church, okay? Yeah, I'm familiar with that, yeah. Okay, now the

Greek Orthodox one was the first one that got supposedly hit by a rocket, okay?

The church was not hit by a rocket. The building next to the church was hit by an

Israeli rocket and fell on the church, like, basically the auditorium, and that did kill

Christians, and it was tragic, but it wasn't, like, the church was not targeted. The second situation was when the church was hit by a mortar, the

Catholic church was hit by a mortar, and there is a, around the church is a no -fire zone, meaning, like, everybody knows you're not allowed to, like, every

IDF can't fire in that area, okay? Because of that, Hamas actually is on the grounds of the church.

I talked to several people. I talked to even the head of the Catholic church who admitted there were

Hamas fighters on the grounds of the church, okay? What do you do with that? It didn't get, it was an accident that the church got hit, for sure, because they were trying to launch, there was a mortar trying to get over the church to hit some guys that were using the church as a point of targeting of Christians.

Like, that's what's going on. It's never gonna make the news.

It's left for me and the edges to fight over, but then it's, you know, what's frustrating is all these guys saying, oh, like,

Israel's targeting Christians, Israel hates the Christians, Israel's doing the, you know, blew up this church, it's doing this thing, it's doing that thing, as if there's a, not another side who's actually, like, they give no agency to the

Palestinians, and everything belongs on the Israelis, which is absurd. Okay, so there was another one, and I don't know if it's related to any of these, where it was some snipers supposedly had shot some

Christians in a church. Did you hear about that one? I mean, there's so many stories coming out of this, and I looked it up, and I tried to make heads or tails of it.

Well, the problem with snipers is they're snipers. How do you know? It was

Israeli snipers. The thing that stood out to me is that the Israeli government opened an investigation on it.

They never, they haven't concluded it, and I don't know if they will or not. I mean, some of these areas are so, it's not like a crime scene that you can go, and like, it's, you're talking a destructive event where the evidence isn't exactly there anymore, but the fact that Israel would even care enough to open an investigation into it, and they contested it at first, and then it's inconclusive, essentially, what happened, and was it crossfire?

We don't really know, and we don't have enough information to, and what I told people online who were making a big stink about this,

I said, look, it's like a puzzle. I don't have all the pieces, and I don't think it's right to come down on a firm side when we don't have all the information.

I'm not just gonna assume, because mostly pro -Palestinian publications assume this, that this is what happened, and in these stories, in a conflict like this, you're gonna have a lot of contested things, because things happen in war, and I just feel like, well,

I know, that a lot of Christians in our country just don't understand the reality of what

Israel is fighting. Israel is, I think, a lot more similar to us than the Gazans are, as far as they want families, they want to live and to pass down things from generation to generation, they want peace in general.

I'm saying for the regular population. In Gaza, though, there's a mentality that it's better to die if Jews die with us, and paying families whose children grew up to be terrorists and die, and kill themselves in terrorist acts.

I mean, they paid them, and they get probably more money than any other group on the planet has ever gotten from NGOs, in aid, and this goes into weapons.

They brought in things through, I think it was the Egyptian port of entry that Israel gave up years ago, and they bring all this stuff in to put together four -wheel drive vehicles, and anti -tank weapons, and missiles, and all these things, and on October 7th, they did a massacre, and it wasn't just a massacre of we're going to target military and police installations or something, no, they killed innocents, they tied girls to trees and raped them repeatedly, they took phones and streamed to, or they called the mothers and parents of these children, and showed them what they were doing to their children, torturing them, dismembering them, cutting off arms and legs, they killed children, there was no, and it wasn't like they were trying to get someone else who was in the military and was an accident, no, they were targeting, and then behind them, hundreds, if not thousands,

I mean, they had hundreds of, not Hamas people, just regular Gazans coming in to loot, to steal, to kidnap, it's a mentality that I think the

West doesn't understand, and I realize this from my own analysis of the situation, unless I'm willing to grant that there can be a people group so given over to evil that they don't want the same things

I want, they don't want, they're not after freedom, survival, passing down a legacy to their children, they literally would prefer that their children die in terrorists if it takes out

Jews, I can't analyze the situation, and I know there's so many pieces of evidence, there's that,

I think, to save a life foundation, where they're trying, Israel is giving heart surgeries and stuff to these children, and then the mother, there was a documentary where the mother says, at the end of this whole process, working with Jewish doctors, says, what do you want your kid to grow up to be?

I want him to be a terrorist. That's the mentality of the population there.

Well, I'll give you a totally different example, there was, during the war, last, actually, last year, there was a, there were 40

Gazans who had chronic health conditions that were evacuated out of Gaza and flown to Malaysia for treatment, because they had, like, you know, they had kidney or heart issues or something, then they had to get regular treatment.

The hospital that they were staying at refused to allow them to leave the compound, so they rioted and burned the hospital to the ground.

This is in Malaysia. Yeah, last, like, last January. These aren't Hamas. These are not, these are just, like, regular folks who were like, what, you want to let me leave?

Riot, burn the hospital. And they, like, the whole Malaysia saw this and were like, yeah, we don't want any more of those people, right?

Like, why didn't, why didn't Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Egypt, Syria, like,

Israel tried to give it to Egypt. Like, none of them, none of them want it, okay? That is, it's not nothing.

But, like, let's say even, I find, we can go,

I think, all day long talking about, like, these different examples of Israelis behaving badly,

Jews, you know, Palestinians behaving badly. I mean, I don't want to say that, like, obviously there's

Jews that are, you know, who are attacking Palestinian farms. There really are.

And the difference is, is how does the nation, how do the people respond to that, right?

So when, I mean, there's been a few instances in the last week of some settlers who have attacked a farm in the

West Bank. And they caused some riots. IDF shows up and arrests the people, the settlers, who started some, who started arson fires.

They did, like, it happened this week, okay? No one's passing out candy. No one's, like,

Jews are not celebrating these incidences. But if you have, if a kid comes up, and there's a, or a major attack against Israelis in Tel Aviv or something, and three or four

Jews get killed in the process, Palestinians are passing out candy in the streets.

The cartoons they watch, you know, Israelis aren't watching Mickey Mouse cartoons that glorify killing

Palestinians, but Palestinians are watching, at a young ages, cartoons that are glorifying killing

Jews. It's a different mentality. It is a different mentality. And I think, you know, as it is nothing about this conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is evil, is evil, is easy to solve.

It is very complex. It is very layered. I mean, the Muslim world is a shame and honor culture, okay?

Jews are a guilt and redemption, a guilt and redemption people.

Like, you think differently about how to satisfy the difference.

Like, how is guilt addressed with redemption? That's like, that is a very biblical model.

That's why we as Christians, actually in America and most of the West, we also have a guilt and redemption understanding, okay?

But there's a lot of places in this world, the Muslim Middle East, also into Asia, they have a shame and honor, right?

Like, a bunch of the, I know, I have a friend who did

Muslim evangelism in the West Bank and had a friend who came to faith in Christ, who came from a

Muslim family. When his family found out, they forced him to go and attack an

Israeli soldier with a knife and try and kill an Israeli in order to satisfy the shame that was put on the family by him converting to Christianity.

So when I hear, you know, oh, there was an attempted stabbing on a soldier, I often think, is that just a random incident or is that person doing that out of an attempt to satisfy the shame that was put on his family?

I can tell you stories for days like that where girls who were raped, then by someone in the village and in order to satisfy the, to restore the honor to the family, she straps on a suicide vest and tries to pull herself up.

Like, that happens again and again and again. That is a very different mentality.

And if we in the United States, we look at that through our lens,

I'm sorry, you are utterly confused. Now, I think the challenge is for us, and I think the reason why

Israel is so much the center, you know, stuff, bad stuff happens all over the world every day.

I mean, like, you know, the stuff that was happening in Sudan like a couple months ago, it puts everything that happened in Gaza, it like pales in comparison, okay?

We have satellite footage of mass graves, massive curse, 10 ,000 people being killed in villages in one night, that kind of stuff.

In the Darfur region of Sudan, there was massive slaughters in the last three or four months, okay?

Like, in the Syrian Civil War, the Russians would be like, they would bomb from the air a village, level it, kill every living thing in it, okay?

Bomb another village, okay? Then Assad's people would go to the next village and say to them, would you like to relocate to the northern part of Syria?

And the people were like, yes, why, yes, we would. In the Obama administration, there was a celebration because the

Russians had secured peace for, like, to allow, you know,

Syrians to evacuate to another area and be safe from harm. Like, none of what had happened leading up to that was included in those stories, okay?

Like, that happens all the time. The number of kids that die around the world.

In Iran right now. Every day, like, is significantly more than what was killed in Gaza on a daily basis.

And yet, it is the, like, the attention of the entire world was on Gaza.

It's because the attention of the whole world is on Israel. And I think, like, to me, the fact that there is this irrational obsession with Israel and the

Jews, to me, says, is there something more? Is there something deeper here that I'm not, like,

I think there is, but I'm also okay if there's not. But I think there, it just seems, it seems like a weird obsession around the world.

Well, I'd like you to talk about why you call yourself a Christian Zionist because that word

Zionist, I always had thought that meant you believe that Israel has a claim to the land.

And at this point, even if it's right of conquest, that they can defend their land. I thought that's all it meant. But now, and for Christians, there were certain rationales in the settlement period of there's prophetic restoration.

And a lot of guys, Thomas Brightman, I wrote a few names down, Sir Henry Finch, William Gouge, John Milton, they all believed in this future restoration of the

Jews in Canaan. And we're talking basically Renaissance period. I mean, this is right after the

Reformation. This is a very old English Christian thinking on this.

And in this, and there has been a tradition in England and in the United States of Christians having a concern, both evangelism and this idea that because, as Paul argues in Romans, I mean, the only reason he ever brings up Israel, I mean, you think about it in the book of Romans, he doesn't just randomly bring up Israel because now we're gonna talk about the

Jews. He brings up Israel to say, if God is keeping his promises, and Israel's the proof, he's not gonna reject the promises he made to you,

Christian, because he's not rejecting the promises he made to Israel. That's the whole entire point that Paul is making.

And the people who try to get around it and say that, I've even heard people say this is just to Christians.

Paul's not even talking to ethnic Jews. I'm like, you're missing the entire reason Paul brings that up. He's bringing up another group to prove to the

Christians that God keeps his promises. That's the whole reason. And so Christians in England and in the

United States, many of them have a tradition, and this is way predating dispensational anything, of thinking that there's a restoration and that maybe in God's prophetic plan, we'll be part of that.

Oh, guess who owned that region? England. Like this just so happens to be England that owns this region after the

Turks are defeated. I was gonna read, I'll just read for you this one, and then I'll get your reaction.

This is a quote, actually two quotes I'll do here. And then I want you to sort out kind of why you're a

Christian Zionist. Make the case for people who genuinely haven't heard a good case. They just know crazy stuff.

Like maybe, I don't know if you'll get in trouble for me. I'm naming the name, not you, but they just hear, they're like,

I'm not John Hagee, you know? So here's a quote, Southern Baptist Convention. This is a resolution from 1873.

So this is kind of a long time ago. Resolve that we do gratefully remember this day our unspeakable indebtedness to the seed of Abraham and devoutly recognize their peculiar claims upon the sympathies and prayers of all

Gentile Christians. And we hereby record our earnest desire to partake in the glorious work of hastening the day when the superscription of the cross shall be the confession of all

Israel, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Now you say that today as a

Christian, you're gonna have an army of people online saying that you're the

Zionist shill, dispensational heretic, right? This is 1873,

Southern Baptist Convention. One more quote, evangelical leftist, Richard Mao, 2018.

This is when Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, which we know the significance of that is we're actually going to honor the claim to the land that the

Jews have. We're recognizing that they actually have a claim. To my fellow evangelicals, what you're cheering in Jerusalem is shameful.

If we want God to bless Israel, we should keep calling the present Israeli government to treat the Palestinians as those who are born among you.

And so this is a guy who influenced Tim Keller quite a bit. He was the president of Fuller Theological Seminary.

He was instrumental in the Gospel Coalition. He sounds a lot like now people who say they're on the right and their critique of Israel.

The Southern Baptist Convention in 1873 sounds an awful lot, and I'm not saying they're parallel in every way, but it's like, is that Jerry Falwell or is that the

Southern Baptist from 1873? You are someone who I would say carries on that tradition of Anglo -American concern for the

Jews, concern for Israel. How does this fit into your foreign policy? Why do you support the

Jews? Why don't you come down with Richard Mao or just be like the way you used to be and say, who cares what happens to Israel?

So make the case. Yeah, so there's so many places I can start.

I tend, let me just start where I get the word Zionism from, and it's actually from Isaiah 2.

It says, the nation shall go up to the mountain of the Lord. They will learn of the God of Jacob. The law will go forth from Zion, the word of the

Lord to the ends of the earth. And then he goes on to say that God will judge between nations and they will turn their swords into plowshares and their spears into burning hooks.

That to me is the picture that God is unfolding of how we get to world peace in a sense, because I think we all want,

I mean, what is, I mean, Tucker doesn't want there to be more war. I mean, that's a big part of his thing.

And what I'm, what I'm, what I think Isaiah, God is saying through Isaiah in that passage is that I'm not, is a guy like me, who's not

Jewish. I'm a proper European mutt. Like we go up to the mountain, we learn of the

God of Jacob, which is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which is the God that, you know, the

Old Testament's talking about. And it says, the law will go forth from Zion, word of the Lord to the ends of the earth.

And then all this stuff happens. And what do we see happening? We see the, when the Bible goes places, those nations are transformed.

When William Carey went to India and preached the gospel to the country of India, and they stopped practicing widow burning because he got it outlawed because he found that the

Bible said that was wrong. That is to me, the working out of that, okay?

And so where is, Zion's a place. We go up to the mountain of the Lord. Where is that?

That happens to be a place on this planet called Jerusalem. Okay?

And you can get on a plane right now and go there, which is to me, kind of mind blowing. And so a big part of what got me kind of going, okay, like, what is, that's significant.

And the physicality that I see unfolding throughout scripture, that God didn't just do everything rational in my head, but actually,

I mean, heck, the incarnation. What is the incarnation? It is God becoming flesh,

God becoming man in order that he might save the whole world, okay?

But the physicality matters in a significant way. When God speaks to Abraham, he says eight times, to your offspring,

I will give this land. He says, I'll give it as an everlasting covenant, right?

So you get into Colossians, or sorry, Galatians three is a very popular passage to say like, oh,

God's done with all that sort of stuff. But in Galatians three, I think it's 16, he says that the law came 430 years after the promise and the covenant that comes after does not nullify the covenant that comes before it.

To me, that sets up a principle then, okay? Is the first command of God to humanity, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

Is that command nullified by the new covenant? No, are we supposed to be fruitful?

Yes, we are, actually, okay? What is the UN hate above all else?

Two things, one is babies in the womb and the nation of Israel, why?

Because they hate God and they hate the first command to be fruitful and multiply.

And then God gave, he destroyed the earth with a flood and he gives Noah a covenant.

And the sign of the covenant is in the rainbow. And he gives the Abrahamic covenant.

And the Abrahamic covenant was, through you all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

But it's the land is connected to the people. I think that's hard for a lot of people to understand is like the people and the land go together, which is why

I tend to say, I support Israel and the Jewish people because I'm trying to connect those two things because God does over and over and over again.

So you get this very physical continuation. The covenants are not nullified by the covenant comes after.

So the next covenant is the Mosaic covenant, which is the law, okay? That, and, but what does

Paul appeal to when he's talking about us Gentiles who are coming into faith in God, he's appealing to Abraham because we're not obligated to the law.

Paul says that all the church decided that Gentiles, we are supposed to not worship idols, not strangle animals, eat strangled animals, not eat blood and not fornicate.

Now we barely can do that, okay? But that's what Gentiles were told was expected of us.

And so, and who's the first person talking about a new covenant, talking about, I will take away their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.

That's Jeremiah. Jesus is picking up Jeremiah's language and he's dragging it in. But how's the

New Testament open? The New Testament opens in Matthew with a genealogy from Abraham to Jesus.

So to me, he's connecting actually to that covenantal promise of the land and the people go together, okay?

And then you have in Acts 21, you have the very end of Paul's ministry after he's already written

Romans, written Galatians, written a bunch of his epistles, and he's back in Jerusalem in Acts 21, and he gets and meets up with James.

And James says, there are some Jews who are saying that you are telling Jews who live amongst the

Gentiles to forsake Moses, to not circumcise their children, and to not follow our customs.

Therefore, go take four men with you who are under an oath and pay for them and offer sacrifices in the temple.

And Paul does it. Is Paul not the same guy who says Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice?

That Jesus is, like, Paul's written all this stuff. He knows that, but he doesn't diminish the fact that there is a physical, that a sacrificing a lamb and understanding the significance of that act is pointing to a deeper spiritual truth.

And like, when we take communion, we are taking a bit of bread and a bit of wine or grape juice, and we're pointing at this deeper spiritual truth.

That is, this is my blood poured out for you. This is my flesh broken for you.

Like, we actually regularly practice a physical act pointing to a spiritual truth.

And to me, Israel is a physical place pointing to a spiritual truth, that God has picked a place on this planet to be his instrument, to point to the world, to remind the world that I, that the physical matters is not just all in our heads, that it actually what we do on this earth is important.

And I think what I find, and I've been thinking about this a lot this week, I find that Israel, in some ways, for a lot of people, can be a stand -in for God.

What they're, like, when they're reacting to and when they're blaming Israel or blaming the Jews, like, you know, take,

I'll use Matt Gaetz as an example. Right, he was a congressman, and he was under investigation for sleeping with underage girls, right?

That was a big problem. He was gonna be our attorney general, but then Trump was like, yeah, no, I can't do it.

And now he's over at OAN railing on Israel and the Jews. Okay, I think it's a total, he does not want to admit his sin.

He does not want to admit and repent of the sin that he committed. And instead, he's gonna attack

Israel because Israel's the place, Israel's the people who gave that moral,

God's moral law to this world. And the world hates him. And when you are in sin, and when you have this, like,

Israel is like that bone stuck in your throat that you just can't reach, and it's there, and you just gotta, and you just have to somehow, it becomes this all -consuming thing to attack because you don't wanna deal with the hound of heaven that is coming and calling you to repent from your sin.

That's an interesting thought. I've thought this before, and I don't wanna overly psychologize it, right?

Because I don't, I'm not always comfortable if I don't have good quotes, good studies, good graphs, you know, to evaluate something.

But I have sensed before that this whole issue gives people a moral superiority when their own lives, they have committed grave sins, blunders.

I know some people personally that just, they messed up big time in their life. Some are in ministry, and it's like they've, but this gives them a sense of,

I'm actually, I'm doing okay, I'm good. I have a moral uprightness compared to those people, compared to the

Jews, compared to Israel. I don't wanna say that's, you know, in every circumstance, that's the criticism, but I've noticed it too often.

And so, you know, what you're saying, do you need to go, by the way? I wanna. No, no, I'm good until 4 .30.

Okay, all right, I don't even know what time it is right now, it's 3 .45. All right. The Geneva Bible of 1557.

I think that that had more of a profound influence on the English Christian world, and then that transferring to America on how they viewed the

Jewish people than the Schofield Bible did later. Schofield Bible gets all this press. Even though Schofield wasn't, he wasn't a

Zionist, but that's usually the thing that's used. No, I think it happened before that.

And I think the Geneva Bible, in its notes on Romans chapter 11, and what it meant for all

Israel to be saved, that, if you go down that path, and I don't care what your eschatology is, if you start thinking physical

Israel will be saved eventually, there's other things that start coming with that.

Because the other two chapters talk about promises that God made to Israel, to them belong the covenants, to them there's something special about ethnic

Israel. The land promises start coming into this. And I think that this is why so many

Reformed Christians were so supportive of Jewish evangelism, and also the settlements.

I'm not saying the establishment of the state in 1948, but the settlement leading up to that, even before the

Balfour Declaration, because they saw two things. They saw they're persecuted, they need a place to go for that reason, and they also saw

God is gonna do something with them still. And it's gonna happen, it's gonna be a Jewish kingdom, and it's gonna be the kingdom of David, essentially.

And that's not a crazy belief. That's not a heresy. That's not, so I guess my question for you is,

I see all that, I understand that, but you do have, and we've had for years, a group of Christians that seem to make the jump from that to, okay, now we gotta give them millions of dollars in foreign aid and military equipment in the modern state of Israel, which isn't explicitly

Messiah honoring. We need to support them in whatever they do. And that's what

I think a lot of people reject, I think, including myself, that sees this modern state necessarily is that,

I think it could be a stepping stone to that, but that it is that, and that we're obligated in our foreign policy.

I mean, how do you see that? Do you see, what do you think the United States relationship with Israel should be?

Do you like where it's at? No, well, I think, I mean, the whole aid to Israel thing is kind of, to me, an absurd thing, because it's basically the equivalent of corporate welfare in the same way that the

WIC program is corporate welfare for grocery stores. Like, it is 90 % of that money that is given to Israel for aid is required to be spent in the

United States on US -made equipment. So we're basically, it's a $3 billion grant to defense contractors.

Okay, if you want, okay. I'm happy to have the conversation about corporate welfare all day long.

I would be totally fine if the US government stopped funding every single thing that it funds.

Like, stop funding US universities. That would be, do amazing things for, like,

I don't know why we're giving money to universities. I don't know why we're giving money to, there's lots of people, organizations, businesses in the

United States getting billions of dollars from the US government, okay? Happy to have that conversation all day long, okay?

But that's not the conversation we're having. We're having the conversation about the fact that it goes to Israel and then kicks back.

It goes, same bunch of money goes to Jordan, bunch of money goes to Egypt, same rules. They gotta buy that equipment from the

United States, send it to them, whatever, okay? I find that that conversation to me is, it's annoying and drawn out.

I think where I, I don't quite know what to do with the political state of Israel in the unfolding of what

I believe is God's redemptive plan. Somehow it will be used and is going to be used, and I don't know.

I think that Providence is involved. I find it really interesting that there was a, why did the

English government, the UK, decide that May of 48 was gonna be when it walks away from the

Middle East was because there was a giant snowstorm in February of 47 that shut down the

UK for a month. Literally, the canals were frozen. People were, like, unemployment went from two million to four million.

No, nothing was happening. People were starving to death. People were cold, and they ran out of money.

And so when they get together, they're like, how can we save money? We got all these troops stationed all over the world.

We're paying all these people. This is a horrible use of money. We don't have any money, so let's pull them out.

That was the decision. The decision was made in the end of February in 47 to pull out of Israel in May of 48, and it was directly related to a giant snowstorm.

Now, you can say that that's just time and chance, and who knows, the world's a complicated place, or be like, maybe, maybe.

It just so happens that God has a plan. And I'm of the mind also, when

Nehemiah went back, because I think what we're seeing now is similar to when

Nehemiah in Israel went back from, he was the wine cupbearer for the -

Arctic Xerxes. Exactly. And he goes and drags a bunch of people with him and go to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, and then they rebuild the temple.

Like, who goes with Nehemiah? And what was the form of government that Nehemiah instituted when he went back with these guys?

I mean, I don't think the people who went over with Nehemiah were like the nobility, the upper -middle -class

Jews of Baghdad, or wherever they were, who went back. No, it was like the people who went west, you know, in the 1800s to log, you know, the

Washington State, or maybe it was like the people who came over from England, escaping religious persecution.

Like, I feel like we shouldn't be surprised that when a nation, when

Israel comes back to life after 2 ,000 years, which is what happened in 48, that it isn't suddenly, that like the biblical kingdom of David instantly taking shape, okay?

Things like this build over time. Like, rarely does something happen where it's like falls, like what, the temple's gonna fall out of heaven kind of thing, or is it gonna be built like normal?

I don't know. Even 48's not, like this was late 1800s, you had settlements and the expansion of the

Jewish population, and then agreements made with the Arabs, and there were already Jews in the land, and England's gotta, this, people start to clock them, but that's not where the clock starts.

And even 67, to me, is more significant, because that's when Israel proved, we're gonna stick around here for a while, because people were betting against them.

And I think that's more when we started becoming more close with an ally, because they were buying from the France for that.

And they were aligned with the Soviets because they were, a lot of them were communists. Right. So it was a big, there was a big international play for this whole space, and it doesn't, but to me, where you hit the kind of,

I find it interesting, particularly on the reformed side, as I'm reformed, so I can attack my own, that we will, we shouldn't believe so much in time, chance, and just like the, the oriented things that happen in the world are just without providential application.

I mean, we actually, as, I think as reformed people lean into the sovereignty of God having a big stake in human affairs.

But what happens suddenly with a bunch of reformed people is they go, well, that's not, that doesn't count for Israel.

Doesn't, like, that's not, God's not involved there. That's not providential there.

Like, it's like, please, pick a lane. I'm like, I'm really open to God's sovereignty being at play here in this land, and how it plays out,

I have no idea. But what I see, Paul, and the scripture unfolding in the

New Testament is that God has a purpose and a plan, and I'm more than happy to be a part of it, and I think the,

I don't know why people have to be such jerks about it. And on that note, that's how

Luke Moon went from your typical kind of right -leaning Christian to a

Christian Zionist. Exactly. By tracking the evangelical left and what they were concerned about, and that's a good articulation, and we could be here all day, but we've already spent almost close to two hours, which

I need to thank you for. Thank you for your time, and I wanna plug your website, so if people want to support you, which

I'm assuming you take donations for your advocacy. Well, the donations are at GenerationZion, so gen -zion, gen -zion .org.

All right, and then 2hammers .com. 2hammers is like how you can, is basically, it's

Luke, right? If you wanna invite me to come talk to your crew or watch the random stuff, the videos

I'm in and on, and the things I write and stuff, it's all found there. All the social media, so they can follow you if they wanna follow you.

All right, well, sounds good. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your perspective, and God bless.