By guest contributor SouthernDiaspora.

We all recently witnessed what can only be described as the Israel-first “Woke Right” launching a coordinated attack on Tucker Carlson for interviewing Nick Fuentes. For those who missed it, here is the link. Regardless of your view of Fuentes and his antics over the past few years — some of which are indeed abhorrent — it is undeniable that an Israel-first faction has been working overtime to disavow and cancel Carlson simply for conducting the interview.

We saw the same backlash when Carlson pressed Ted Cruz with fair, pointed questions about his own unwavering support for Israel. Because of this, Tucker has been labeled as antisemitic. Lately, Tucker has been challenging conservatives to explain why America must blindly back Israel in every action, especially as the Israeli government’s recent moves appear designed to drag the United States into a wider Middle East war.

This raises a larger question: Why is the American Right so tightly bound to Israel? In sharing some history and analysis below, I hope to shed light on the roots of this entanglement.

Why does the American Right seem to have unwavering support for Israel, no matter the consequence? Why do American politicians such as Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and many Evangelical leaders use Scripture out of context to support the current Nation/State of Israel? Besides the obvious money AIPAC is shelling out to these groups, the answer goes to a theological position called Dispensationalism.

Dispensationalism represents a theological framework within protestant theology that examines the roles of biblical covenants, the nation of Israel, the church, and eschatological (End Times) events. Unlike orthodox (historical Protestantism and Catholicism) thinking, wherein the Church has been grafted into God’s promise to his people, Dispensationalism separates that of the Church and Israel in Old Testament prophesy and revelations and says that rather than the Church being a continuation of God’s promise to Israel, it is a new creation entirely and only relevant to the New Testament. They pull passages from the Old Testament like Ezekiel 36–37 and say that God is talking about a literal ethnic nation state instead of the church and her people. Paul addresses and refutes this kind of thinking in his Letter to the Romans in chapters 9–11.

The history of this theological framework can be attributed to three men: John Nelson Darby, who hammered out this theological framework in his Collected Writings of J.N. Darby (1866­–81); Dwight L. Moody, who founded the Moody Bible Institute, which was key in helping to push this framework; and then finally C.I. Scofield, whose Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909, helped push this framework to the American Evangelical Church. This helped make Dispensationalism massively popular in the American church. This is not a view that is held by a majority of Christians outside of the United States, and is a view that did not exist prior to the late 1800s.

But what does this mean? Why is this information vital to understanding the unwavering support for Israel? The reason this rot exists — and why it is so dangerous — is that it stems from flawed theology that shapes the political ideology of large swaths of Americans. Using the simplified yet thorough definition of Dispensationalism, one can apply literal readings of Old Testament prophecy — divorced from the New Testament — to justify unwavering support for the modern Nation of Israel. This theological framework, barely a century old and long simmering within the American Church, reached its culmination with the establishment of Israel in 1948. It is from here that the average Evangelical on the American Right derives his or her staunch ideological support for Israel.

This is why it is taboo on the American Right to question our unwavering support for Israel: it has been baked into the American Evangelical ethos for the past century through poor theology. This is why great men like Pat Buchanan and movements like the John Birch Society have been branded antisemitic. It is why so many on the Evangelical Right are now attacking Tucker Carlson and accusing him of Jew-hatred. We must stand by those who raise these questions and carefully examine those among us who push back against these conversations so aggressively. At the end of the day, the American Right must recognize that Dispensationalism is not orthodox to Protestant or Catholic theology — and we must push back against it.