Ryan Dobson was looking forward to his first trip to Israel, and it was everything he hoped for and more.
“It was life-changing. People tell me that. It really was. We were there with 1,000 Christian pastors and influencers. It was the largest delegation the Israeli Foreign Ministry has ever hosted.”
What the founder of Rebel Parenting wasn't prepared for was the outpouring of vile antisemitism directed toward him when he posted a picture of him in the Holy Land next to an Israeli flag.
“The amount of anti-Semitic vitriol and anger from people that call themselves Bible-believing Christians. I was stunned that the American Evangelical Church is allowing antisemitism into its ranks,” he said.
Aside from the spiritual battle being waged, Dobson says evangelicals are being hit with disinformation.
“Money from Qatar. There's money from the Middle East that is paying propagandists. There's the George Soroses of the world that pay protesters,” he said.
Some of the loudest calls come from inside America’s borders as big-platform conservatives like Tucker Carlson have come down on Israel as sucking away U.S. resources that could be allotted elsewhere.
It’s a position that’s been growing.
A Barna Group survey found that support for Israel among young evangelicals had fallen to 34% in 2021 from 75% in 2018.
Likely related to the decline is the result of a Gallup poll from 2022 that found that just 20% of American describe the Bible as the literal word of God — an all-time low.
How to fix the problem? Antisemitism skews young, and Dobson says we need to teach the next generation about our common spiritual roots in the Old Testament. In fact, he's working on a media project that he says does exactly that.
“Education. It's education. Honestly, we're doing a new version of the Chosen called the Covenant, and we're starting back in the Old Testament."
