(OPINION) – The number of young Evangelicals in the United States who support Israel and view it as crucial to the End Times is declining as they increasingly move toward amillennial and postmillennial eschatology, according to a recent study.
The Jerusalem Post noted earlier this year that support for Israel among young Evangelicals has cratered by more than 50% over three years, as laid out in the 2023 book Christian Zionism in the Twenty-First Century: American Evangelical Opinion on Israel, by Kirill M. Bumin, Ph.D., and Motti Inbari, who serves as professor of Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.
Drawing on three original surveys conducted in 2018, 2020 and 2021, the book examined the religious beliefs and foreign policy attitudes of Evangelicals in the U.S. and found that a generational divide appears to be emerging over such issues.
According to data Bumin and Inbari presented at The Center for the Study of the United States (CSUS) at Tel Aviv University in February, 33.6% of young Evangelicals under 30 expressed support for Israel in late 2021, compared to 67.9% in 2018. In 2021, 24.3% of young Evangelicals said they support the Palestinians, compared to only 5% in 2018.
Bumin, who serves as an associate dean of the Metropolitan College at Boston University, told The Christian Post that he and Inbari discovered in their research that premillennial pastors are significantly older than amillennial and postmillennial pastors, and less ethnically and racially diverse.
“Conversations with some of the leaders in the young Evangelical community — such as Robert Nicholson and Luke Moon of the Philos Project, as well as other anecdotal evidence —
lead us to believe that the greater racial diversity of amillennial and postmillennial pastors, combined with their relative youthfulness in comparison to the premillennial pastors, helps attract a larger share of the under-30 Evangelicals to those churches and eschatological positions,” Bumin told CP.
As amillennialism and postmillennialism grow increasingly attractive to under-30 Evangelicals, Bumin said that demographic is “thinking less and less about the role of Israel and the Jewish people in the End Times as catalysts for the Second Coming and salvation.”
“And, without explicit eschatological relevance, support for the Jewish people and support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes a matter of a peripheral concern,” he continued, adding that postmillennialism especially gathers younger adherents because of its emphasis on social justice and improvement of the human condition through social activism.
Bumin maintained that postmillennialism “resonates with young people and aligns with a pro-Palestinian, rather than a pro-Israel, view in the current political environment in the United States.”
While both forms of premillennialism separate the Second Coming and the Last Judgment, pre-tribulational premillennialists — or “pre-tribs” —
believe that the tribulation described in Revelation 7 will take place after the Church is raptured, and that Christ will return with the Church to reign for a 1,000-year period before the Last Judgment. Such a view was popularized by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in their bestselling Left Behind series.
“Post-trib” premillennialists, by contrast, adhere to the belief that the Second Coming will occur after the tribulation, followed by the millennium and finally, the Last Judgment. Mid-tribulational premillennialists fall in between, believing that the Church will be raptured midway through the tribulation and spared the brunt of it.
