On the Calvinist roots of Zionism

This essay is part of my series, The Mysteria, which looks at the relationship between occult ideas, political theology, and our current world. These posts are usually only for paid subscribers, and you can now get a paid subscription for 20% off.

For quite a few reasons, not least because of the situation in Palestine, I’ve been thinking a lot about my time on the island of Patmos this summer, as well as the time just after it, in Athens. It seems important for some that I was there, but I don’t yet understand why.

In case you escaped all this somehow, Patmos is where a certain John penned his visions of catastrophe and the end of the world. Lakes of fires in which the sexually immoral would burn forever, broken seals and blown trumpets announcing the ripping of flesh from bone and children from mothers. You know, all that lovely stuff.

Those visions still hold great power over the cosmologies of millions of people, especially many evangelicals in the United States. For them, and also for many more touched by them, what is happening in Palestine now has profound religious significance.

I’ve been meaning to write about this, especially the matter of “Christian Zionism.” I was myself quite steeped in it when I was still Christian in the United States. Even after becoming a pagan, I kept checking back in on some of the more fervent evangelicals to see how close they believed we were to the “end times.”

Being completely honest, I should admit I’d not been keeping up with their words only out of curiosity or for research. Of all the various aspects of Christian doctrine, its eschatology was the one bit I could never easily shake. Neither the concepts of sin nor redemption hold any meaning within my world: both are as foreign and irrelevant as “national service” or “submission to authority” have always been for me. I don’t believe in a virgin birth, nor that a singular god created the world, or really any other bit of the Christian cosmology.

Despite all that, some part of me shudders uncomfortably each time some televangelist points to some new sign or wonder heralding Christ’s return. It’s not that I believe Jesus is coming back, of course. Instead, it’s because I believe in magic and gods and spirits, and I’ve learned enough in the past twenty years to understand the power of collective belief.

It’s one of the most basic principles of magic and of psychology that beliefs shape the way you perceive and then behave in the world. Race theory is the easiest way to illustrate this. If you believe that there’s such a think as a black race and a white race, and that those races come with certain traits, you’ll filter your experiences of people in those categories according to that framing. This goes for the white nationalist and the social justice versions of this belief. Each time you hear of a black person committing a crime, you’ll see the crime as either caused by their blackness or excusable because of their blackness, depending on which version you adhere to. The same goes for situations involving other racial categories.

It goes further, though. Racial beliefs can cause you to immediately trust or distrust someone in any interaction, to weigh their opinions more heavily or to dismiss them, according to your preferred allegiance. The more fervent this belief is, the more you’ll also shape the physical conditions of the world around you. You might advocate and vote for punitive and discriminatory policies against one group or in favor of another, and by doing so help create the conditions which affirm your belief in race. In other words, you “reify” race, making it a thing, or as a magician might say, you manifest it into the world.

Race is essentially a religious and cosmological belief, and its power is on the level of theology. It’s a division of the world assumed to have been preordained by either a natural or divine force. At that level of belief, only a deep change in the cosmology of the person, what they think is the “order of things,” can really uproot it.

Imagine the manifesting power of the millions of people in the world who believe race is really a thing. And then, imagine the manifesting power of just as many people believing the return of Jesus and the end of the world is going to happen any day now.

Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake — the entire world is being convulsed by a religious struggle. The fight is not about money or territory; it is not about poverty versus wealth; it is not about ancient customs versus modernity. No. The struggle is whether Hubal, the Moon God of Mecca1, known as Allah, is supreme, or whether the Judeo-Christian Jehovah God of the Bible is Supreme.

Those words were part of a pro-Israeli speech spoken by the late Pat Robertson, one of the most stalwart American Christian supporters of Israel. When he died, Israeli papers wrote qualified tributes to him, memorializing his long commitment to Zionist expansion while bemoaning his repeated praise of Jews for being shrewd financiers with enviable skills in accumulating vast wealth. Most notoriously, in an interview Robertson conducted with Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the televangelist gushed about how Jews are never “tinkering with their cars on the weekends or mowing their lawns,” and that they are more often “polishing diamonds” instead.

Many rightly criticized Robertson’s remarks, but seemed not really to notice that Daniel Lapin, the rabbi he was interviewing, fully agreed with him. Besides giving Torah-based financial success seminars to investment, religious, and even political groups (including Turning Point USA, Wallbuilders, CPAC, and the US Congress), Daniel Lapin — dubbed “America’s Rabbi,” — is also the head of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians. That group, the AAJC, is one of several US-based Zionist groups that raise money and propagandize in defense of anything the State of Israel does.

I spoke a bit about such groups last week on my second appearance at The Popular Show.2 Discussing the oversized influence of Christian Zionism on US foreign policy, I noted the strange disconnect between what they believe and what the actual religiously-Jewish Zionists believe about what’s to come. Yet, both groups are quite happy to use each other, despite the apparent abyss between them.

Both groups want to see the third temple rebuilt. For the Christians, the temple must exist again for Jesus to come back, while for the right-Zionists, the temple must be rebuilt so blood sacrifices can begin again and the Messianic age and the “repair of the world” can start. Both sides are trying to accelerate the manifestation of prophecies, to “immanentize the eschaton,” as it were.

Unfortunately for each side, and also for the rest of the world, two holy Muslim sites are currently on the temple mount. That’s not really an obstacle to them, however. Both groups have been funding efforts to prepare for the third temple anyway. Two months prior to the events of 7 October, Israeli television had just run a report about how “almost everything is ready for the Third Temple,” since several pure red heifers had finally been bred and many priests had been trained. That breeding program, incidentally, was heavily funded by American Christian Zionist groups and many large evangelical churches, including one to which I once belonged.

Of course, not all Christians believe Israel must exist or that the third temple must be rebuilt for Christ to come back. In fact, Christian Zionism is limited primarily to evangelicals and its fundamentalist offshoots, of which there are no more than 700 million in the world. Of them, those who take such a literal approach or believe that humans can actually accelerate the second coming are certainly a much smaller number.

Likewise, the amount of Jews who actually believe that a rebuilt temple would usher in a new messianic age — or who would even like such a thing — is probably quite small. I’ve done no polling of my handful of Jewish friends on the matter (most of them are atheists or pagans, anyway), but I think I can quite safely say not a single one of them has the slightest interest in seeing the return of Jewish blood sacrifice after its 2000-year hiatus.

So, it’s only a small portion of Christians and of Jews trying to rush the eschaton. However, as in social justice identitarianism, the extreme fringe of each group has intense and very outsized influence over the rest of the group. The Jews in Israel who’ve no interest in a new temple nevertheless find their political choices determined by that issue —especially in state policies towards Gaza and the West Bank — just as the Christians on Europe and the United States who find this whole matter absurd regardless get drawn into support for Israel by the extremists.

Though they have different reasons, the Christian and the Jews who are pushing for the third temple share a cosmological framework that has roots in Gnostic belief.

Earlier, I mentioned the phrase, “immanentize the eschaton.” This phrase was first popularized by William F. Buckley, but he derived it from the work of political theorist Eric Vögelin. Vögelin had theorized that mass political ideologies, especially Nazism and Soviet Communism, were essentially Christian gnostic heresies, wrongly believing it was possible to manifest heaven on earth rather.

The problem with his observation, however, is that it doesn’t really account for the anti-materialist framework of gnosticism. Gnostics didn’t just believe that it was possible to have special observations about physical reality that others couldn’t obtain, nor only that it was possible to live in accordance with those insights. They also believed that the material world was both an illusion and also a kind of prison or an error that needed eventually to be destroyed.

Neither Communism nor Nazism shared this belief. In fact, the atheist-materialist framework of Soviet Communism — insisting that the material world is all there is — was especially inimical to that core Gnostic belief. A case could potentially be made that certain Nazi occultists had sympathies for this belief, but it’s really impossible to argue that fascism asserts that the physical world doesn’t actually exist.

On the other hand, Christian and Jewish Zionism both have roots in a particular gnostic reading of the Kabbalah and especially the concept of tikkun olam. Usually translated as “repairing the world” or “improving the world,” tikkun olam originally referred to a very specific doctrine of legal justice. It’s been re-interpreted many times, including most recently as a kind of social justice doctrine in which Jews have a particular responsibility to rectify injustice and fight against inequality. However, in the 16th century, a Gnostic interpretation of the concept came out through the kabbalistic teaching of a rabbi in Palestine name Isaac Luria.

Luria taught that, in order to create the world, God “contracted” or withdrew a part of himself, leaving a void which was filled with matter. The general idea here is that, because God was everywhere and there was nothing else, he would have needed to make space for creation by diminishing the space he took up. By withdrawing himself, however, some parts of his own being naturally remained in the space of material creation. These bits, or “divine shards,” are essentially trapped within the world and the beings therein, and are constantly hoping to be reunited with the rest of God.

Within this framework, tikkun olam, “repairing the world,” became more than just a matter of justice or a good way to be in the world. It also became the method of freeing trapped God shards from their material prisons. Once all those shards are finally re-united, the Messianic age can begin. Unfortunately for all things living, however, Luria’s understanding of the Messianic age results not in a “repaired” world but a completely unmade or obliterated one. Once everything returns to God, he will stop contracting a part of his being, and there will be nothing else in existence except God himself.

Isaac Luria’s beliefs spread quickly through Jewish communities in Europe. They were particularly influential in the creation of a millenarian Jewish movement the next century called the Sabbateans (because of its supposedly messianic leader, Sabbatai Zevi). They also greatly influenced two other Jews with particularly close ties to Calvinism, Menasseh Ben Israel and Isaac La Peyrère.

Menasseh Ben Israel is probably best known as Baruch Spinoza’s teacher. He was also a fanatic believer that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were likely the “lost tribes of Judah,” an idea picked up again by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. However, Ben Israel’s most significant influence on the world was convincing Oliver Cromwell to lift the centuries-old ban on Jews settling in England in order to hasten the coming of the Messiah. That’s an idea that Ben Israel had gotten from a much more peculiar character, the Jewish Calvinist, Isaac La Peyrère.

Isaac La Peyrère is widely considered to be one of the forefathers of race science, best known for an idea called “pre-Adamite polygenism.” Basically stated, he asserted that God had created many different kinds of humans before deciding to create a superior one: Adam. It was to Adam and all his descendants to whom God gave his covenants, while the rest of the humans (Africans, Asians, and pretty much all other darker-skinned people) were of an entirely different and lower kind of people, or race.

Being born Jewish, La Peyrère thought of himself as part of the Adamic race, of course, but he also extended this category to all Calvinist converts as well. This might seem a bizarre contortion, but you need only remember that Calvinists believed themselves to be part of an elect who were called to God not out of their own will but a kind of divine recognition of their already-elect status. In other words, they already saw themselves as the spiritual (and sometimes even racial) inheritors of the covenants God made with Adam, Noah, and Abraham. The conversion experience was for them just a moment of submitting to this, rather than trying to attain it.

La Peyrère’s ideas were quickly picked up by a peculiar group of extremist Calvinists called by a name no American needs introduction to: the Puritans. Especially, they were quite taken in by La Peyrère’s earlier book, Du rappel des juifs. In that book, he outlined pretty much everything that the Christian Zionists now believe: Jews would eventually return to Palestine, many of them would be converted, and the construction of a third temple would usher in a new messianic age. And, except for the conversion part, this is also what many of the most religiously extreme Jewish Zionists believe.

That means that, though Jewish Zionism didn’t start among Jews until the very end of the 1800’s, it technically started with the Calvinists in the mid-1600’s. Not long after La Peyrère theories were published (and often burned), they were taken up both by other Jewish converts to Calvinism and by Puritans in both England and the American colonies. Notably, Increase Mather wrote about his belief in Jewish return to Palestine in The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation.

It’s hard not to wonder if it’s then better to call Zionism a Christian heresy, rather than a Jewish politic. Zionism only became an officially-Jewish idea when Theodor Herzl took it up in 1895, centuries after La Peyrère had first suggested Jews need to return to Palestine for the Messianic age to begin. Whether or not Herzl had read La Peyrère, it’s evident that at least La Peyrère’s race ideology had influenced Herzl’s views.3

At the very least, it’s perhaps fair to consider the term “Christian Zionism” a redundant concept. The primary framework began with a Calvinist Jew, who had mixed together Isaac Luria’s understanding of tikkun olam with his own theories of race and eschatology, throwing in John Calvin’s belief that Christians were the inheritors of the original covenants, and aided by Menasseh Ben Israel’s propagandizing influence.4

We should never think of Christian Zionism as an oddity. It spread much faster first among Calvinists and Puritans than it did among the Jews, and only later became a Jewish mass politic.

Again, the problem with all this is that, if you even slightly believe in magic or in psychology, the beliefs of all these groups are shaping the geopolitical struggles now. If you truly believe that the re-establishment of Israel and the building of a third temple will usher in either a messianic age or the second coming of Christ, you’ll do everything to make sure those things happen. Though not the hoped-for return or the new messianic age, a catastrophic change will happen regardless, as we have already begun to see.