Most of the religious groups reaching the shores of the New World
were formerly persecuted members of smaller churches, Protestant
denominations from Western Europe who considered their biblical faith
and the conduct of their everyday moral life to be of the utmost importance,
as organic part of their mission to establish the ‘new Zion’, an ideal ‘new
Israel’ in the New World following their exodus from Europe. This guiding
principle or call for religious messianism, particularly through the zealous
activism of reborn ‘Zionist Christians’, as we shall witness on the following
pages, tends to reappear even in the dimension of the twenty-first century
Middle East-policies of the United States, especially in the political acts of
certain Republican presidents, such as Donald Trump.
Two centuries after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers, one of the best
foreign connoisseurs of America, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville,
mentioned in his famous book Democracy in America (1835) that ‘Americans
of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations.
They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which
all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral,
serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.’5
One may wonder whether these religious aspects and concepts have
anything to do with contemporary American society at the turn of the third
millennium, within the context of a postmodern, heterogeneous socio-
political environment and in the realm of progressive think tanks and
decision-makers. What effects and importance do deeply religious groups
and denominations, particularly the Protestant ones, hold in their relations
with the American political landscape and key decision-makers?
The topic of this study on the nexus between religious ideas and
politics per se has significant relevance, and poses an intriguing intellectual
challenge when it comes to certain contemporary global security issues
and religiously inspired civilizational conflicts, such as the threat of
Islamic terrorist attacks or the war in Gaza, with serious historical religious
implications around the Holy Land.
