We are now live on the Conversations That Matter podcast, and I'm your host, John Harris.

We're going to talk about Zionism today, specifically Christian Zionism.

Of course, I'll have to define Zionism, so we'll be a little more broader than just talking about Christians and their support for the nation state of Israel.

But I think this is an important topic for this reason, mostly.

This is why I'm doing it at least.

I think there's been a lot of really, really bad takes going out there online.

And I think if we're going to be involved in this, which we are,

and it's hard to entangle ourselves as far as foreign policy is concerned from the situation in the Middle East, specifically Israel and her enemies, we do need to understand a little more about what actually is taking place there.

And also, I think historically, how Christians have viewed that particular real estate,

that piece of land. And I think this is for me something that I am more interested in in a historical

way. Of course, I am interested in the theological angle to this, which we'll talk about a little bit.

But the history of ideas angle is,

I think, something that's being ignored. And because of that, there's a lot of things you'll hear

online. For example, you'll hear things like dispensationalism is the forerunner of Zionism or

inspired Zionism or lay the groundwork for Zionism or is the same thing as Zionism.

Oftentimes you'll see these two things conflated.

And that is probably one of the worst, in my opinion, critiques I've ever heard.

It's just ignorant historically, but you hear it so often.

And because of that, let me just use that

one example. If you're going to critique Zionism and you enter the discussion with that kind

of an error, then what you end up doing is there's a lot of Christians, in fact, the majority

in the United States that are not going to be quite

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