Christian Zionism at War with America's Founding Principles

Part II of an interview with Dr. Clifford Kiracofe, Jr. author of Dark Crusade: The Israel Lobby and Christian Zionism.

By Michele Steinberg –

Part I of this interview was published on July 22, 2026. We discussed how the Founding Fathers were absolutely opposed to any sort of government-imposed official religion and rejected any discrimination against disfavored religions. These principles were written into the 1787 United States Constitution. In the first part of his interview, Dr. Kiracofe reported that Christian Zionism, in contrast, was an alien religious ideology that actually was invented in England in the 1820s and ‘30s and came into the United States from England. In Part II, we elaborate these points.

In the Introduction to his book, Dr. Kiracofe writes:

We must recover the vision of the Founding Fathers for local self-government and for constitutional government of this federal republic. We must also recover the sound values and principles that informed the foreign policy of the Founding Fathers. The Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s Farewell Address, and the Federalist Papers are a good place to begin. As for our ship of state Thomas Jefferson once said, “I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern.” Indeed, it can be said that Faith, Hope, and Charity are fundamental to the American character. (from Dark Crusade: The Israel Lobby and Christian Zionism)

Michele Steinberg for (ASN): You have referred to Christian Zionism as an “alien” religion that has penetrated the body politic in the United States, particularly in the military. How does it undermine the idea of a republic?

Dr. Clifford A. Kiracofe, Jr. (Screenshot)

Cliff Kiracofe (CK): Basically, the way you could view it as in the ancient Roman Republic where you had an alien cult – the Mithra cult — becoming quite active in the army, military of ancient Rome. This alien cult was a factor in the fall of the republic and transition to an empire.

Here in the United States, I see it as an almost exact repetition or parallel between the use by the British Empire of Christian Zionism in the early 19th century, and the use by the Trump administration, grabbing on to Christian Zionism as a “Make America Great Again” justification for imperialism, for the U.S. Empire. That’s exactly the parallel that one can make.

ASN: You trace Christian Zionism in the U.S. to John Nelson Darby and his British co-thinkers almost a century before the declaration of a State of Israel. And you note that there are some Christians who are Zionists in support of Israel who do not have the Darbyite theology. So how did Darby’s religion come to the United States and how does it differ from traditional Christians?

CK: This particular alien ideology of Christian Zionism was invented by a group of people in the 1820s and 30s in study circle in England—the Albury Circle, named for London banker Henry Drummond, Jr.’s estate, and a couple of other groups of people that were studying prophecy and religious stuff. They were eccentric people and cultic, actually.

Drummond’s own book, published in 1828, Dialogues on Prophecy, maintained that the last days were imminent and that God was about to judge the visible church and return the Jewish people to Palestine. (from Dark Crusade: The Israel Lobby and Christian Zionism)

And one of the participants of these cultic meetings in England was John Nelson Darby, who formed his own religious offshoot called the Plymouth Brethren, and it espoused Christian Zionism. He had been a clergyman in the Irish Protestant church but was defrocked. He was run out of the church by his superiors for whatever. But Darby invented or distilled, let’s put it that way, the musings of these cult groups that he belonged to into a system, a system of Christian Zionism.

And according to Darby’s belief system, there, for example, seven epochs in the world—seven dispensations—and the believers are called dispensationalists. According to them, we’re entering the Eighth Dispensation, we’re entering the End Times, the end of history. The battle of Armageddon will come, and that will bring the return of Jesus, who will then reign for 1000 years.

Now, that’s nowhere in the Bible. That’s nowhere in any Orthodox Christian denomination or traditional denomination. It’s not in the Roman Catholic Church; it’s viewed as a heresy. It’s not in the Orthodox Russian or any of the Orthodox churches; it’s viewed as a heresy. It’s not in the Coptic Church in Egypt; it’s been denounced as a heresy in Egypt. It’s not in any normal Protestant church in the United States, Episcopalian, Presbyterian.

However, it is in the churches associated with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Protestant churches associated with the National Evangelical Association. They are dispensationalist in their eschatology, that is to say their belief in the End Times, the belief in how things are going to unfold based on their interpretation of the Bible.

But it is not in the Bible. It was invented by Mr. Darby.

Now, Mr. Hegseth [the Secretary of Defense], who you mentioned earlier, is a zealot within this weird cultic world of Christian Zionism, biblical Christian Zionism, dispensationalism. So that, and what you reported about the commander instructing his troops [Armageddon and the Iran war] is Hegseth’s point of view, and it’s exactly the Darby cultic view.

That alien ideology was brought to the United States from Britain by Darby in the late 1850s and 1860s, when he visited North America—Canada and the United States––and held meetings with many ministers, Protestant ministers and conferences.

So, after the American Civil War, during the 1870s, 80s, 90s, this cult spread through various Bible schools that were established and various Protestant ministries, which as I said, were not the traditional ones, but offshoots, so we had a very large base of active ministers and churches in the late 19th century in the United States, which still exist today.

So, it’s grown from the post-Civil War period of our history to now. And I have no idea of the size; no one really does. The Christian Zionist ministers claim that 25 million to maybe 50 million Americans believe in their cultic ideology, let’s say 10% of the American people, let’s just say 35 million Americans believe this fake ideology.

ASN: This whole history is what you go through in your book, Dark Crusade.

Cover photo of a woman amid the horrible desolation of Gaza in the current ongoing war.

CK: Yes, I go through it chapter by chapter from the 1820s forward, from Napoleon forward. I bring it to the United States and go through it just chapter and verse, very, very detailed and very objective.

It’s kind of an academic book, although this current edition I put some edge on it and, given the current situation with Trump and all this, so it’s a bit more political than the earlier editions, which were more academic. I also, because I had some requests to add some theological material to it to explain the weird ideology of the Christian Zionist cult, and also to better or to more broadly explain the traditional Christian theology, which is opposed to this cult.

And I basically did that using the expertise of an Anglican minister in England who has written several books on Christian Zionism in the Anglican church. And then a friend of mine who’s a minister here. I worked with him on some of the biblical interpretation of Revelation and all that. So I added, in response to requests, some traditional Christian theology to explain why this cult is not Christian. Basically, it’s actually not Christian. It’s not a Christian cult. It’s a heresy.

ASN: You’ve said a main objective of your writing and publishing this current edition of Dark Crusade is to restore our foreign policy to the founding principles of the United States.

CK: Yes. I asked the publisher last year—I said, “Gee, I really think we need to do an updated paperback edition because it turns out that the Gaza situation has inspired American youth on campuses to rally for human rights and so on.” I wanted to provide an affordable paperback edition for young people who were more and more interested in knowing about Gaza, about lobbies, about genocide.

Fortunately, the publisher agreed.

We need to keep the spirit of the republic, original republic, going, which Nancy and her friends and colleagues do, have done, are doing [through American System Now].

And so, my message is to familiarize ourselves, refamiliarize ourselves with such basics as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, particularly George Washington’s Farewell Address, for example, the fundamental documents, fundamental principles of our republic, and to think about classical history of Greece and Rome, and those ideas that from that era of Western civilization that gave rise and inspired our Founding Fathers.

ASN: Thank you, Cliff. We look forward to the new edition.

Addendum:

Pete Hegseth, now the U.S. Secretary of Defense, spoke enthusiastically in 2018 about the “miracle of the Third Temple” being restored on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The destruction of the Al Aqsa Mosque and rebuilding of Third Temple, is the goal and obsession of some of most extremist Zionists in Israel today, such as Itomar Ben Gvir, Israeli Minister of National Security.

In 2018, Hegseth was invited to speak to a conference of the ultra-rightwing Israeli newspaper-TV-radio empire, Arutz Shiva. In his speech, which (see below) been repeatedly removed from the YouTube platform, presumably by Arutz Shiva or elements in the U.S., Hegseth put this Third Temple “miracle” in line with the other “miracles” that “created” the Zionist state: 1917, 1948, 1967, 2019 (Jerusalem declared the capital of Israel by Donald Trump).

Besides the video (posted below, but it may disappear), Hegseth’s words have been preserved in reports from The Times of Israel and the Christian Post:

“There’s no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible,” Hegseth said.

“I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen, but I know that it could happen,” he added.

“That’s why going and visiting Judea and Samaria and understanding that sovereignty — the very sovereignty of Israeli soil, Israeli cities, locations — is a critical next step to showing the world that this is the land for Jews and the Land of Israel.”

“If you walk the ground today, you understand that there is no such as the outcome of a two-state solution. There is one state.”