A prominent US evangelical leader has warned that parts of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement are turning against Israel with rhetoric he says is “worse” than the Nazi Party platform of 1920, as he brings more than 1,000 pastors and Christian influencers to Israel to push back.
Dr. Mike Evans, founder of the Friends of Zion (FOZ) Heritage Center and Museum in Jerusalem, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday that a “very serious” anti-Israel current has emerged inside parts of the American Right, led by influential media figures close to senior US officials.
“Right now we are having a movement within the MAGA movement that is anti-Israel,” Evans said. “It is very serious because it is led by Tucker Carlson, who is very close to the vice president. He is coming out and saying worse things presently than the Nazi Party said at their platform in 1920.”
Evans claimed that Gulf states hostile to Israel, especially Qatar, have invested heavily in American universities and media and are now using artificial intelligence to shape the views of young Americans, including young evangelicals.
“Qatar has put hundreds of billions into the United States and into the university campuses, and now they are using the big ‘Antichrist monster’ of them all, AI, to poison the minds of the young people,” he said.
1000 US Christian pastors and influencers arrive in Israel
Against that backdrop, more than 1,000 US Christian pastors and influencers are arriving in Israel this week for what FOZ describes as the largest ever American evangelical delegation to the country, aimed at launching a coordinated ideological and media campaign in defense of Israel.
The weeklong program, organized by FOZ with support from the Foreign Ministry, will begin in Jerusalem and include visits across the country. Participants are expected to be commissioned as “Friends of Zion Ambassadors,” a cohort that FOZ says collectively reaches tens of millions of Americans.
Evans argued that while Israel has been forced to fight military, diplomatic, and legal battles since October 7, it has never built a sustained strategy to fight the “ideological war” that its enemies are waging.
“Israel’s enemies are fighting only an ideological war,” he said. “They are fighting an ideological war in Gaza; you cannot win with bullets, because you cannot kill a demon with a bullet. When you have millions of people who do not believe in a state of Israel at all but an Islamic state, it is an ideological war.”
The delegation includes megachurch pastors, Christian television and radio station owners, university presidents, and leading evangelical media figures.
“These are pastors with churches of 10,000, people who own television stations, presidents of universities,” Evans said. “We have people who have come in from the White House as part of the delegation. It is strategic and huge. It has never happened before.”
The program is structured around both education and symbolic acts of solidarity. The delegation is scheduled to visit the Nova music festival site with hostage families and survivors, travel to Mount Herzl to lay flowers and place flags on the graves of soldiers, and gather at the Western Wall to pray for the families of victims.
“They are coming here not on a tour,” Evans stressed. “They are coming here to learn, to be educated, and to be activated, to help Israel fight an ideological war.”
Evans said the concept behind the “Friends of Zion Ambassadors” project was developed a decade ago with the late president Shimon Peres, who served as FOZ’s international chairman.
“The pulpit has to speak louder than the propaganda,” he said.