How the Empire Weaponized the “Judeo-Christian Alliance”

Once faith becomes a servant of power, it becomes geopolitics in sacred dress.

When I watched the footage of an Israeli soldier desecrating a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon, it forced me toward more uncomfortable questions: what exactly the so-called Judeo-Christian alliance means in practice, how religion is being instrumentalized inside geopolitical projects, and whether what many Western Christians have been taught to see as a sacred alignment is, in reality, a political arrangement that survives only by asking them to ignore what is right in front of their eyes.

I want to begin from somewhere personal, because in a discussion like this, I think biography matters. I was born and raised in Aleppo, in an Armenian Christian family. My parents come from the Orthodox Armenian Church, and I received a Christian upbringing from childhood, not only through the church but through school, books, stories, and the moral world that surrounded us. I remember very clearly that there was a shop just below our apartment called Al-Kitab al-Muqaddas—The Holy Book—and I used to buy Christian books there as a child with the money my mother gave me every week. So when I say what I am about to say, I am not speaking as an outsider to Christianity, nor as someone hostile to faith, but as someone shaped by it from early life. And I can tell you with complete honesty that at no point in my childhood, at no point in church, at no point in school, and at no point in the Christian books I read, was I ever taught that I had a religious obligation to bless a modern political state called Israel regardless of its conduct, its crimes, or its territorial ambitions. That idea did not come from my Christianity. It came from somewhere else.

This is where the first problem appears, and it is not a small one. Because once you tell people that scripture can override international law, once you tell them that a state formed in modern history possesses eternal rights over land because of a sacred text interpreted in a certain way, then you are opening the door to civilizational chaos. If one group can point to scripture and say this land is ours, this river is ours, this city is ours, this mountain is ours, then every group can do the same. Every religion. Every sect. Every school of thought. And if those claims are treated as superior to the legal order that humanity supposedly built after the catastrophes of the twentieth century, then what is left of international law except theater? At that point, we are not living in a rules-based order at all. We are living in a world where myth becomes title deed, and force becomes exegesis.

So the question becomes: how did this idea become so powerful, especially in the United States? In my view, the answer is not theological in the serious sense; it is political. If you want to establish and sustain a project like Israel—not merely as a state, but as an expansionist military power with permanent access to American finance, weapons, and diplomatic protection—you need allies stronger than yourself. You need a patron empire. And if that patron empire is the United States, then at some point you have to persuade not only its institutions but its public that this relationship is natural, righteous, and somehow above ordinary politics. This is where the evangelical church becomes central. Because if you can persuade millions of American Christians that support for Israel is not a strategic preference but a religious duty, then you have achieved something extraordinary: you have moved the relationship out of the realm of debate and into the realm of devotion. You no longer need to win every argument politically if you have already secured the emotional and spiritual reflex.

That, to me, is why Christian Zionism matters so much, and also why I think it is false. It is false not because Christians cannot care about Jews, or because biblical interpretation is irrelevant to believers, but because it takes a modern political project and retrofits it as divine necessity. It teaches Christians that they must support Israel regardless of whether Israel acts justly or unjustly, regardless of whether it wages war or makes peace, regardless of whether it demolishes homes, occupies land, bombs civilians, or desecrates the very symbols Christianity holds sacred. And once you arrive at that point, faith has already been hollowed out and repurposed. You are no longer dealing with Christianity as a moral tradition rooted in justice, humility, sacrifice, and the dignity of the oppressed. You are dealing with a political cult that has attached itself to Christian language while demanding loyalty to a state.

I have seen this transformation with my own eyes in another sense as well. We have family in the United States, like many Armenians from Syria and Lebanon who later settled in places like California, and I noticed something over the years that I think is deeply revealing: some family members who never spoke in these terms while living in Syria or Lebanon began speaking the language of Christian Zionism after moving to the United States and becoming integrated into church networks there. That matters because it suggests something very specific. It suggests that this is not some natural flowering of Christianity itself, but a geography-specific political indoctrination. It is a system of messaging, preaching, and social reinforcement that trains believers to experience support for Israel as proof of faithfulness. The same pattern has spread in Latin America as well, in places like Brazil and Argentina, where politicians and religious figures have fused conservative Christianity with Zionist symbolism until the whole thing begins to resemble not a theology, but a transnational apparatus of mobilization.

Now bring that apparatus back to Lebanon, and the contradictions become impossible to hide. Because if there really is a Judeo-Christian alliance in the meaningful sense its advocates describe, then what exactly are Christians in Lebanon supposed to make of an Israeli soldier smashing a statue of Jesus Christ? What are they supposed to make of churches damaged, priests killed, Christian villages bombed, and sacred symbols desecrated? Are these unfortunate misunderstandings inside the alliance? Are they regrettable exceptions? Or are they glimpses of the truth that the alliance was never really about Christianity at all, but about using Christians—especially Western Christians—as political cover for a state whose actual operating logic is ethno-religious supremacy?

This is why I think the image of that desecrated statue caused such panic. Not because Israeli officials were morally shocked by it in the deep sense. Remember, they were not morally shocked enough by the gang rape of prisoners, by the killing of children, by the destruction of entire civilian neighborhoods, or by the countless other crimes that have already passed without serious accountability. No, the reason that image triggered alarm is simpler and more strategic: they understood instantly how it would be received by the American Christian conservative base, which remains one of Israel’s most important support constituencies in the United States. The liberal left was always more skeptical of colonial violence; that is not where the real danger lies for Israel. The danger lies in the erosion of support on the Christian right, in the possibility that the people who were taught for decades to see Israel as biblically untouchable might begin to ask what exactly they are defending when they see Jesus mocked, Christian symbols destroyed, and Trump himself increasingly wrapped in false messianic spectacle.

And here, another layer appears. Because this entire ideological system has become so degraded that it now asks Christians to accept things that should be spiritually intolerable. Donald Trump depicts himself in imagery clearly echoing Christ, evangelical figures speak around him in language that approaches blasphemy, and when religious leaders like the Pope make even restrained moral criticism of war and injustice, they are treated as enemies. What does that tell you? It tells you that politics has become so dominant that Christianity is no longer being used as a moral check on power; it is being refashioned as a ritual of power. The faith is not disciplining the ruler. The ruler is colonizing the faith.

This matters especially in our region because Christians here know, or should know, what actually destroyed Eastern Christian communities over the last decades, and it was not some simplistic story of coexistence with Muslims failing on its own. The catastrophe came through war, state collapse, foreign intervention, sectarian mobilization, and the export of extremist ideologies that were very often cultivated, financed, or weaponized by the same Western and Gulf structures that now speak to us about values and civilization. Look at Iraq: more than two million Christians before 2003, a tiny fraction of that now. Look at Syria: one of the largest Christian populations in the region, shattered by a war in which CIA, MI6, Gulf money, Salafi militancy, Wahhabi indoctrination, and regime-change logic all converged. So when someone speaks to me about Judeo-Christian values in the abstract, while the practical allies of that order helped unleash the forces that uprooted Christians across the Levant, all I hear is geopolitical branding.

That is why I think the so-called Judeo-Christian alliance is not merely false but dangerous for Eastern Christians. Because if Christians in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, or Palestine are persuaded to identify themselves politically with Israel against the Muslim majority societies around them, then they are being invited into a suicidal arrangement. They are being positioned as the local social face of an external supremacist project, and that ends in isolation, backlash, and the destruction of the very coexistence that allowed ancient Christian communities to survive for centuries. We saw versions of this already in Lebanon, where certain Christian political currents aligned themselves with Israel against their own countrymen, and the result was not Christian flourishing but civil war and long-term poisoning of the national body.

And this brings me to what I think is the deepest point. States built on ethno-religious supremacy do not tolerate the enduring presence of others comfortably, even when they perform coexistence for foreign audiences. This is not unique to one religion. When a state defines itself in supremacist terms and seeks to expand, the first thing it tries to erase is the visible presence of others: their history, their culture, their monuments, their symbols, their proof of belonging. That is why Christian statues are smashed. That is why churches are hit. That is why cemeteries, crosses, homes, and communal memory itself become targets. Because the expansion of a supremacist order always requires amnesia for everyone else. It needs empty space where other people’s continuity once stood.

So when I look at the image of an Israeli soldier desecrating Jesus in southern Lebanon, I do not see an isolated act of vandalism. I see a moment in which the underlying logic becomes briefly visible. I see the gap between rhetoric and reality opening so wide that even those who have spent years defending the alliance are forced, however briefly, to confront it. And I think that is why the story matters. Not because it is emotionally shocking, though it is, and not because it will suddenly awaken everyone, because many will still refuse to learn, but because it strips the arrangement of its theological camouflage. It shows us what happens when faith is subordinated to empire, when Christianity is converted from a moral tradition into a delivery system for geopolitical loyalty, and when those asked to believe most deeply are also asked to see least clearly.

The real question, then, is not whether Christians should care about the Holy Land, or about Jews, or about the fate of people in this region. Of course they should. The real question is whether they are prepared to distinguish between faith and manipulation, between solidarity and idolatry, between scripture and strategy. Because once faith becomes a servant of power, it no longer saves power from corruption. It sanctifies corruption instead.

And that is when religion stops being a path to truth.

It becomes geopolitics in sacred dress.

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—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis.