Evangelical Zionism
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Evangelical Zionism, the American Christian movement that supports the state of Israel on theological grounds, is one of the few subjects on which John Kiriakou speaks in openly religious terms, and one he expects to be unpopular for.

The doctrine as he describes it

Speaking one-to-one with an American evangelical of this kind, Kiriakou says, you will be told that they are close to Israel because they want all Jews around the world to move to Israel, since according to the Book of Revelation the Messiah comes when all the Jews have returned. He calls the underlying philosophy the belief "that they can force future biblical events through contemporary political means", and says that although it sounds insane to him, they genuinely believe it.

His verdict is blunt: much of American-based evangelical Christianity "is a cult. It's not a religion", a cult constantly trying to recruit, which has allied itself with Zionist Israel at the expense of the original Christians of the region. His own Greek Orthodox framing is that Orthodox Christians do not consider such groups to be Christianity at all, but right-wing political groups.

Liberty University

Kiriakou's evidence is partly personal. From 2008 to 2012 he was an adjunct professor of intelligence studies at Liberty University, Jerry Falwell's evangelical university, teaching in its Jesse Helms School of Government, and he is careful to say he is not himself evangelical. He disagreed with his colleagues on nearly everything, he says, but they agreed on torture, which they said was not Christian. What he took away was an "inexplicably simplistic" view of the Middle East, and, on the faculty mailing list, a vociferous hatred of Palestinians disguised as support for Israel and opposition to terrorism.

The transaction

Kiriakou does not present the alliance as a shared faith but as a trade. The Israelis, he says, are smart enough to know they can exploit this stupidity on the part of American evangelicals, money for megachurches in exchange for encouraging Jews to "come home", so that the two are now joined at the hip for wildly different reasons. For an intelligence service, he notes elsewhere, evangelical Christians and pro-Israel Jewish Americans constitute a natural constituency already predisposed to help, though a good service will not stop there. The electoral mechanics follow: a Republican running for national office needs those evangelicals to get elected, and so pledges allegiance to Israel.

The cost

Kiriakou ties the doctrine directly to the destruction of the region's oldest Christian communities, the Palestinian Christians, the Lebanese Christians, the villages of southern Lebanon connected to early Christianity whose churches, religious sites and cemeteries are being levelled. He does not think the movement cares about Christianity at all: "I think it's all about their own deluded view of Zionism and of the apocalypse." His accounting is of the dead: how many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have died over the years "because of this stupid cult-like belief that they can force the hand of God."

See also

- The Greek Orthodox Church
- John Kiriakou
