Because Jewish Americans are grateful for the blessings of American citizenship, we're proud of the United States and the home that we have here.

And of course, Jewish history experienced a fundamental shift, a new epoch, when in 1948, the Jewish people

regained national sovereignty in the land of Israel. So for us, when Jewish Americans think about

the U.S. Israel relationship, we're thinking about two nations that we love, to each of which we feel

gratitude and from each of which honor. So you can understand why we come to imagine that the

relationship between the U.S. and Israel has a lot to do with us. It's what so many of us think about.

We teach our children about. We give money to. We vote on. It's an issue that consumes American

Jews. But what if the Jews of the United States don't really have all that much to do with the

American-Israel relationship? What if the most powerful factors that determine the intimacy

or the distance between the two nations emerge out of an argument among Gentile Americans?

And not even an argument about the Jews and the Jewish state, but an argument between Protestant

Christian Americans about the soul of America, an argument in which support for Israel is but a secondary

consequence. Welcome to the Tikva podcast on great Jewish essays and ideas. I'm your host, Jonathan

Silver. This week we go under the surface and look at the roots of the U.S. Israel relationship.

My guest is Dr. Michael Duran of the Hudson Institute, and our conversation revisits an

argument that Mike makes in a terrific essay from First Things magazine called the Theology

of American Foreign Policy. Mike demonstrates two rival theological orientations, Protestant modernism and Protestant fundamentalism,

and explains how these theological orientations inform the way that their adherents view America,

America's role in the world, and yes, how they think about the identity and purpose of the Jewish state.

Mike shows too how something in these two

theological orientations endures, even when they are secularized, so that non-religious

Americans, or at least Americans who don't think of themselves as religious, are still best

...