Chirstian Groups’ Changing Attitude Towards Jewish People And The Impact On American Middle East Policy

There are many influencing factors in the making of American Middle Eastpolicies. In recent years, scholars usually pay attention to the influence on USgovernment by lobbyist groups and Jewish forces. However, the author of this paperargues that a more powerful political force influencing American Middle East policyshould be the Christian group led by Evangelicals. The focus of this paper will be thecauses of the Christian groups’ changing attitude toward Jews and Israel.This thesis takes Evangelicals as an example to analyze the attitude ofEvangelicals to Jewish people and the reasons of their changing attitude. Then thisthesis analyzes American Christian groups’ impact on government’s Middle Eastpolicy.The author first discourses Christians’ changing attitude toward Jews. In westernChristian world, anti-Semitism lasted for nearly2000years. The Jews were treated as“evil”. As a country with a strong Christian tradition, anti-Semitism also existed in US,though not so strong in European countries. But after WWII, especially after TheSecond Vatican Ecumenical Council, Christian groups in US began to change theirviews towards Jews due to the changes in the interpretation of Bible and began toparticipate in the political support for the Jews to return to Israel. This thesis focuseson the religious reason why Christian groups support Jews to go back to Israel,especially from evangelical theology, such as Dispensationalism, Biblical inerrancy,eschatology and so on, to analyze why Evangelicals strongly urged Americangovernment to make Middle East policy beneficial to Israel’s expansion.The pro-Israel Middle East policy that the United States government makes underthe influence of Christian groups not only prevents Middle East Peace process butalso harms America’s own interests.