Christian Zionism — the evangelical doctrine that American Christians owe unconditional support to the state of Israel — is a subject John Kiriakou approaches from two directions at once: as an Orthodox Christian, and as someone who was invited to teach evangelical students and disagreed with them to their faces.
The disappearing congregations
Kiriakou frames the issue by its consequence rather than its theology. He cites the projection that by Christmas of that year “there will be no Christians left in Nazareth” — a city where “there have been Christians for more than 2,000 years, and they’ll be gone.” He names Bethlehem as another traditionally Christian city on the same trajectory.[1]
The question he puts is whether the trend can be reversed at all, or whether “the US government is all in to help the Israeli government push religious minorities out of the Holy Land.”[2]
He has also put the loss in numbers rather than cities. Historic Palestine, he says, “used to be 10% Christian. It’s now more like two or 3% Christian” — and most of those who left went to the United States.[3] From that he draws the charge in its sharpest form, calling Christian Zionism “one of the biggest problems that we have in this entire Israel Palestine situation”: American evangelical support for the Israeli government “has resulted in an ethnic cleansing and the destruction of Christian communities in historic Palestine.” The question he leaves is not rhetorical in his own framing — “Are you trying to save Christianity or are you trying to destroy Christianity? Because you’re destroying it right now.”[4][5]
Aware that the next line would cost him, he said it anyway: “if your religion was created in somebody’s basement in the 1800s, I don’t want to hear your position on Israel and Palestine. I don’t find it valid.”[5]
Teaching the people he disagreed with
Kiriakou was invited to teach classes at an evangelical institution by people who were not themselves evangelical but liked a position he had taken. He accepted, and does not regret it: “I said yes. I’m glad that I did. They were lovely people.”[6]
The disagreement, though, was foundational — “we had fundamental disagreements on the role of evangelical Christianity in the Middle East.” His own position leaves no room for negotiation: “I would posit that there is no role for evangelical Christianity in the Middle East, because evangelical Christianity, in my humble opinion, is an arm of Zionism.”[6]
The contradiction he cannot resolve
The core of Kiriakou’s objection is not political but internal to the faith being claimed. “I was never able to wrap my head around how these Christians — or these people who call themselves Christians — with a straight face can tell you that they’re doing the right thing by supporting Israel as it wipes out ancient Christianity.”[7]
His question to his interlocutor is put as a genuine one: “How is it that they’re able to justify this policy to themselves?”[7]
The missionary bound for North Macedonia
The anecdote Kiriakou offers as the clearest illustration concerns the daughter of an evangelical friend who volunteered for missionary work overseas. He asked where she was going. North Macedonia. He asked why. “Why not?” she said.[8]
His response was the obvious one: “Because they’re already Christian. Why aren’t you going to Africa? Or go to the Middle East somewhere.” Her reaction is the point of the story — “she looked at me like I had two heads.”[8]
The premise he draws out of it is that in this framework an Orthodox Christian does not register as a Christian at all: “an Orthodox Christian is not a real Christian, right? I mean, isn’t that what they’re led to believe these days?”[8]
Forcing God’s hand
The mechanism Kiriakou identifies in the doctrine is one of leverage over providence — that adherents “believe they can force God’s hand,” for instance by encouraging Jews to move to Israel, on the reasoning that the Messiah cannot return until all Jews have returned there.[9]
The question he keeps returning to is the plain civic one underneath the theology, and he notes that a few people are beginning to ask it: “Why are we supposed to do whatever Israel says? What does that have to do with American foreign policy?”[10][11]
At the International Court of Justice
Interviewed by Kiriakou in 2026, Roger Waters applied the term to the bench of the International Court of Justice itself, describing the Ugandan judge serving as the court’s vice-president as “a raging Christian Zionist” whose “belief in God trumps absolutely all feelings for other human beings,” and who in his account continues to act as she does because she believes the end times are coming and she has a part to play in them. He set that against the court’s own lopsided vote on provisional measures earlier in the case.[12][13][14]
Waters extended the point to American politics, naming a prominent Christian Zionist officeholder as “a perfect example” of a believer who cannot be argued out of the position because the position is not held on argumentative grounds — the expectation of a bodily return of Christ. Waters, an atheist, said the resulting theology is “complete insane nonsense” and that he is attacked in part because he says so.[15][16][17]
”Nothing in scripture”
Put to him that Christian groups are trying to make Zionism biblically sound, Kiriakou answers before the sentence finishes — “it’s not” — and states the position without qualification: “There’s literally nothing in scripture to support Zionism. Nothing.” Asked whether the theology is anti-Orthodox, he agrees “without any reservation.”[18]
He relays, approvingly, an Orthodox priest’s argument heard on a podcast that it is Israel that is the Antichrist — and supplies the definition the argument runs on: “An Antichrist is someone who acts in opposition to the teachings of the Christ. It’s that simple. It’s not a guy with horns and a 666 on his head.”[19] His verdict on American evangelical support is that it inverts its own aim: “I don’t understand how these poor, deluded, misguided American evangelicals think that supporting Zionism is somehow supporting Christ and Christianity. It’s anti-Christian.”[20]
The Huckabee interview, and the rapture’s date of manufacture
Kiriakou uses two Tucker Carlson interviews to frame the question of why American Christians hold the position they do. In the first, Mother Agafia — sister of George Stephanopoulos and a Greek Orthodox nun who has lived in the West Bank or East Jerusalem for decades — described at length how difficult life is for Christians in Israel. Carlson then went to Israel and interviewed Ambassador Mike Huckabee, an interview Kiriakou calls “a disaster, an unmitigated disaster for Huckabee,” who could not answer the questions and, when he did, “essentially turned the entire Middle East against the United States saying that God promised Israel to the Jews” — Israel meaning “everything from the Euphrates River to the Nile, which is essentially the entire Middle East, and they can go ahead and take it.”[21][22]
The question he draws out of it is the one he keeps returning to: why this is the prevailing position among American Christians “when it was Palestinian Christians who were the original Christians and they get no love from American Christians.”[23] Of the doctrine’s central expectation he notes only its date of manufacture — the rapture being “a late 19th century American evangelical invention.”[24]
He extends the accounting to Iran, asking what becomes of the nearly one million Christians living there under bombardment, and noting that many Iranian churches “go back more than a thousand years. There’s a long history of Christianity in Iran. That’s just ignored.”[25][26]