If you were to survey the landscape of Western Christendom today and ask which institutions most consistently oppose Christian Zionism, defend the Palestinian cause, advocate for Israeli divestment, and provide organizational cover for anti-Israel activism under the banner of "justice and peace" — you would not find the answer in a fringe political movement or a marginal academic journal. You would find it in some of the oldest and most prominent Protestant denominations in the English-speaking world: the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ — and presiding over them all like a kind of ideological clearing house, the World Council of Churches.

This is not a recent development. It is the fruit of decades of theological drift, leadership elitism, and the systematic capture of denominational bureaucracies by a small but highly organized network of anti-Israel activists. And it stands in direct, documented, ongoing contradiction to the Word of God.

The Gap Between Pulpit and Pew

One of the most important and consistently overlooked features of the mainline church's anti-Israel position is that it does not reflect the views of the people sitting in the pews. A 2013 Pew Research Center survey found that 82% of white evangelical Protestants believe Israel was given to the Jewish people by God. Even among mainline churchgoers, surveys have repeatedly confirmed that rank-and-file members are broadly sympathetic to Israel. They understand, at a basic level, that Israel is a democratic nation fighting the same enemies of civilization that threaten the free world — and that terrorist acts are not the "hapless but heroic" gestures of the disadvantaged but the deliberate murder of civilians.

What the pews believe and what the denominational assemblies decide are two entirely different things. That gap is not accidental. It is the product of a deliberate strategy: a small, tightly organized coalition of anti-Israel activists who have learned to work the denominational assembly process with the precision of career lobbyists. They arrive at conventions pre-organized, occupying the microphones, steering debate, and shepherding resolutions through committees while the majority of delegates are still trying to find their seats. The result is that the official foreign policy positions of multi-million-member denominations are being set by a vocal minority whose views those members do not share — and frequently do not even know about until the damage is done.

A Movement in Decline — But Still Dangerous

The mainline Protestant denominations leading this anti-Israel charge have been hemorrhaging members for decades. The Presbyterian Church (USA) had five million members in the 1920s; it is now closer to 1.1 million. The Episcopal Church has lost roughly 40% of its membership since the 1960s. The United Methodist Church has been in sustained decline for over fifty years. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has watched its membership fall from 5.3 million in 1987 to under 3 million today. These are not institutions on the ascent.

Meanwhile, the conservative, broadly pro-Israel evangelical churches have grown substantially over the same period. The Southern Baptist Convention grew from 10.7 million members in 1965 to over 16 million. The Assemblies of God expanded nearly 200% in the same timeframe. The correlation is not coincidental. Denominations that have honored Scripture — including its unambiguous teaching regarding Israel — have grown. Those that have abandoned it have shrunk.

But the danger of a declining institution should not be underestimated. These denominations still command significant financial resources, historic institutional prestige, and access to political corridors that their membership numbers alone would not justify. Their pension funds, foundations, and endowments run into the billions. When they move that money, markets notice. And when they speak from the floor of an international ecumenical body, governments listen — even when their own pews are emptying.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) — Point Man for Divestment

The modern church divestment campaign against Israel has a clear point of origin: the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly in Richmond, Virginia, June 2004. By a lopsided vote of 431 to 62, the Assembly passed a resolution directing the church's Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment to "initiate a process of phased, selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel." The Presbyterian Church at the time managed investment funds totaling approximately $7 billion. The initial target was Caterpillar Inc., whose bulldozers were used by Israel in security operations.

At the same Assembly, the Presbyterians formally rejected Christian Zionism as "incompatible with Presbyterian theology" — labeling it an offshoot of "premillennial dispensationalism" and effectively placing it beyond the pale of acceptable theological discourse within the denomination. In the same session, a resolution opposing Israel's security barrier was passed regardless of its location, including within Israel's own pre-1967 boundaries.

The reaction from the Jewish community was swift and sharp. Leaders of major American Jewish organizations communicated their profound concern. The Washington Post reported that "Jewish-Presbyterian relations have been in turmoil." The divestment campaign was understood, correctly, not as a targeted financial protest but as the opening move in a broader campaign of delegitimization. In February 2005, the World Council of Churches followed suit, commending the Presbyterian resolution as "rooted in faith."

Facing a backlash from within its own ranks — and the inconvenient reality that divesting healthy Israeli stocks would damage pension funds whose beneficiaries were Presbyterian clergy — the Assembly partially reversed course in 2006, replacing the 2004 divestment language with softer "corporate engagement" language and issuing an acknowledgment of the "hurt and misunderstanding" the original resolution had caused. The vote was 483 to 28, suggesting the 2004 measure had been a hijacking, not a consensus.

But the reversal did not hold. In 2012, a new divestment resolution narrowly failed, 333 to 331 — two votes. In 2014, meeting in Detroit, the General Assembly voted 310 to 303 to formally divest from three companies: Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions. The Presbyterian Church became the first major institution in the world to divest specifically from companies it accused of profiting from Israeli operations in the West Bank. In 2022, the Assembly passed resolutions declaring Israel guilty of "apartheid" and committing the church to "Confessing our Complicity in Christian Zionism." And in July 2024, meeting in Salt Lake City, the General Assembly voted by unanimous consent to divest from Israeli government bonds.

The World Council of Churches — A Structural Anti-Israel Machine

The Presbyterian Church did not act in isolation. Behind every major denominational move against Israel stands the World Council of Churches (WCC), a Geneva-based body representing 347 member churches, denominations, and fellowships across more than 110 countries. Founded in 1948 — the same year the State of Israel was re-established — the WCC has grown over subsequent decades into what is effectively a structural engine for anti-Israel advocacy within global Protestantism.

The WCC's record on Israel follows a consistent pattern. At its Nairobi Assembly in 1975, the WCC endorsed the PLO as the "rightful voice" of Palestinian national aspirations. At its Vancouver Assembly in 1983, it called for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Since the Six-Day War of 1967, the WCC has issued a sustained series of statements placing virtually exclusive blame for Middle Eastern conflict on Israel while treating Palestinian terrorism as a regrettable but understandable response to oppression. More recently, at its 2022 Assembly in Karlsruhe, Germany, the WCC narrowly declined to formally label Israel an "apartheid" state — not on principle, but because the venue (Germany) made the optics untenable.

The WCC has formally characterized Christian Zionism as a view that "distorts the interpretation of the Word of God" and "damages intra-Christian relations." It has established multiple subgroups — the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum (PIEF), the Jerusalem Liaison Office — all structured to advance a Palestinian narrative and place Israel under permanent scrutiny, while remaining conspicuously silent about Hamas terrorism, Iranian proxy warfare, and the persecution of Christians in Arab-majority nations. The WCC has refused to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, arguing that it is "too vague." The Board of Deputies of British Jews has condemned the WCC's EAPPI program as "inflammatory and partisan."

It is worth pausing on a remarkable irony: the WCC professes to represent the global church and claims to speak for justice, human rights, and the dignity of all people. Yet it has produced not a single sustained campaign against the persecution of Christians in Saudi Arabia, where Christianity is illegal. It has not mounted sustained pressure on China over the mass imprisonment of Christian believers. It was largely silent about the genocide of Christians in Sudan under Omar al-Bashir. Its moral energy is directed, with remarkable consistency, against the world's only Jewish state and the only country in the Middle East where Christianity is permitted to flourish freely.

Sabeel — Liberation Theology in the Service of Delegitimization

The organizational engine driving the anti-Israel agenda within the mainline denominations is not the WCC itself but an NGO it has long supported and amplified: the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, headquartered in Jerusalem. Founded in 1989 by the Reverend Naim Ateek, a former Canon of St. George's Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem, Sabeel describes itself as "an ecumenical grassroots liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians." Its actual function, as documented by NGO Monitor, CAMERA, and numerous independent scholars, is to serve as the most effective anti-Zionist evangelical operation working within American and European mainline Protestantism today.

Ateek's theology applies the framework of Latin American liberation theology — which reads Scripture through the lens of class struggle and oppression — to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, casting Palestinians as the perpetual victims of Israeli aggression and mapping that oppression onto the suffering of Jesus Christ Himself. The results are not subtle. In a 2001 Easter message, Ateek wrote that the Palestinian people represent a modern-day crucifixion: "it seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him... The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily." In another sermon, he described the Israeli "occupation" as the stone placed over the entrance of Jesus' tomb, and declared Palestine "one huge Golgotha."

This is not theology. This is ancient deicide imagery — the charge that Jews are "Christ-killers" — dressed in the language of Palestinian human rights. Dexter Van Zile of CAMERA has documented in detail how Ateek "traffics in the anti-Semitic canard of Jewish deicide" that every responsible Protestant and Catholic church officially renounced after the Holocaust. The EU Working Definition of Antisemitism identifies exactly this kind of imagery — applying contemporary political conflicts to classic anti-Jewish religious tropes — as antisemitic. Yet Sabeel's literature circulates freely through WCC channels, denominational bookstores, and seminary curricula. Its "Friends of Sabeel" network maintains active branches in North America, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. Its message reaches tens of millions.

The funding trail is instructive. Sabeel's donors have included the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church of Canada, the United Church of Canada, the United Church of Christ, and multiple European WCC-affiliated bodies. The anti-Israel campaign running through the mainline denominations is not a grassroots uprising. It is a professionally organized, internationally funded operation — and the pews are paying for it.

The BDS Movement and the Church's Role in Delegitimization

Divestment is not simply a financial instrument. It is a weapon — and it was designed as one. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, formally launched in 2005, explicitly models itself on the international campaign that dismantled apartheid South Africa. The analogy is deliberate: if Israel can be successfully branded as an apartheid state in the court of global opinion, then the logic of the South Africa campaign — total isolation, economic strangulation, and ultimately regime change — applies. The goal is not to change a policy. The goal is to eliminate a state.

The mainline churches have provided this campaign with something no political movement alone could supply: moral legitimacy. When a 1.1-million-member Christian denomination votes to divest from Israeli bonds, the move is reported internationally not as a political act but as a moral verdict — the judgment of the Church against a sinful nation. When the WCC frames Israeli security measures as violations of "human dignity," it is not offering a policy analysis; it is issuing a theological indictment. The language of faith, deployed against Israel, carries a weight that no op-ed or UN resolution can match. That is precisely why Sabeel, the WCC, and their denominational allies work so hard to keep the institutional church pointed at Israel.

The specific companies targeted by church divestment campaigns are also telling. Caterpillar is targeted because its equipment is used in Israeli construction. Hewlett-Packard is targeted because it manages information technology for Israeli security systems. Motorola is targeted for providing communications infrastructure. These are not weapons manufacturers. They are civilian technology and construction companies doing legal business with a sovereign democracy. The targeting of these firms is designed not to stop specific harms but to impose costs on any entity associated with Israel — to make the Jewish state radioactive to international commerce. That is not peacemaking. That is economic warfare by proxy.

What the Silence Reveals

Perhaps the most damning indictment of the mainline church's anti-Israel agenda is not what it says about Israel but what it refuses to say about everyone else. The World Council of Churches has never mounted a sustained divestment campaign against China, where millions of Christian believers are detained, surveilled, and persecuted under a totalitarian state. It has not divested from corporations operating in Saudi Arabia, where Christianity is illegal and apostasy from Islam is punishable by death. It expressed no coordinated outrage over the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, the destruction of ancient Christian communities in Syria and Iraq, or the systematic elimination of Christian life from regions of the Middle East that were Christian centuries before Islam existed.

The selectivity is not incidental — it is definitional. An institution that reserves its moral thunderbolts exclusively for the world's only Jewish state, while maintaining a diplomatic silence about every other human rights catastrophe on the planet, is not engaged in justice. It is engaged in something else. The Word of God is clear about what it means to curse those whom God has blessed. It is also clear — with a clarity that requires no interpretation — that those who divide His land will answer for it:

A Note on Prof. Paul C. Merkley

The analysis in this article draws substantially on the scholarly work of Professor Paul C. Merkley, a historian specializing in the history of Zionism and Christian attitudes toward Israel. Prof. Merkley is the author of several landmark works on the subject, including The Politics of Christian Zionism: 1891–1948 and Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel. A Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, he has spent decades documenting the organized campaign against Israel within mainline Protestantism with a scholar's precision and a Christian's grief.

His core observation — that what presents itself as a debate about "the occupation" is, at its structural core, a campaign against Israel's right to exist — is as relevant today as when he first made it. The instruments have evolved. The divestment votes continue. The language of apartheid has been added to the repertoire. But the objective has not changed: to make Israel indefensible in the court of international Christian opinion, and to do it from within the Church itself.

Christians Standing With Israel neither accepts nor claims authorship of Prof. Merkley's work. It appears here as an educational resource. His conclusions are his own. But we commend them, and we commend his courage in advancing them in the face of an institutional culture that does not welcome such scrutiny.

What the Church Is Called to Be

None of what is documented above is the final word on what the Church is, or what it can be. The same God whose covenant with Abraham is everlasting is also the God who grafted Gentile believers into the olive tree of Israel's covenant (Romans 11:17) — not to replace Israel but to join her in the purposes of God. The Church at its best has always known this. It is why Puritan theologians in the 17th century were writing books about the Jewish return to the land. It is why Lord Shaftesbury lobbied European monarchs on behalf of Jewish restoration. It is why hundreds of thousands of Christians today stand with Israel in prayer, in advocacy, and in love.

The tragedy is not that the mainline church has theological differences with Christian Zionism. Theological disagreement, conducted honestly, is legitimate. The tragedy is that the institutional church has, in significant sectors, ceased to engage the biblical text on its own terms and become instead the willing instrument of a political agenda that is, at its root, an agenda against the people God calls the apple of His eye. That is not a theological position. It is a spiritual catastrophe — and those who have presided over it will, in time, answer for it.