Responses by Christian leaders to today’s war in the Holy Land are 50 years in the making.
The horrific attacks on Israel on October 7 came almost 50 years to the day since the start of the Yom Kippur War. Then, hostilities began after the surprise invasion of Israel by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan on October 6, 1973. This time, the violence began with a brutal onslaught by the terrorist group Hamas.
Comparisons between the two can be overwrought. But tracking how evangelicals (and especially American evangelicals) responded to these crises 50 years apart—how our reactions changed, but also what stayed the same—is revealing. Evangelicals are paying closer attention to the Middle East now than we were then, and we’re doing so from a wider range of perspectives.
Just days into the conflict, we’ve already seen prominent, public evangelical responses to Hamas’s unprecedented acts of violence and hostage-taking. CT’s own Russell Moore called for Christians to “stand with Israel under attack,” and the National Association of Evangelicals’ statement condemned violence on both sides.
Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, declared on Twitter/X, “Hamas is the new ISIS and must be stopped!” Shane Claiborne, the evangelical pacifist and activist, criticized both Israel and Hamas for “doing things that do not lead to peace.” Greg Laurie, pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in California, speculated that the attack by Hamas was prophetically significant.
These responses are unsurprising. Today, we take it almost as a given that dozens, if not hundreds, of evangelical associations, para-church organizations, churches, and leaders will weigh in on this tragic situation, and that those statements will vary in …
