Maybe we should believe these people when they tell us what they believe
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Arab and Muslim governments have condemned remarks made by the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who suggested Israel would be justified in taking over a vast stretch of the Middle East on Biblical grounds.
In an interview with conservative US commentator Tucker Carlson, Huckabee was asked whether Israel had a right to an area which the host said was, according to the Bible, “essentially the entire Middle East”.
The ambassador said “it would be fine if it took it all”. But he added Israel was not seeking to do so, rather it is “asking to at least take the land that they now occupy” and protect its people.
In a joint statement, more than a dozen governments including Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates called the comments “dangerous and inflammatory”, and a threat to efforts to end the war in Gaza.
In the interview, released on Friday, Carlson pressed the ambassador on his interpretation of a Bible verse which the host claimed suggested Israel had a right to the land between the River Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates in Syria and Iraq.
Huckabee said “it would be a big piece of land” but stressed that “I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today”.
He later added: “They’re not asking to go back to take all of that, but they are asking to at least take the land that they now occupy, they now live in, they now own legitimately, and it is a safe haven for them.”
He also said his earlier remark that Israel could take it “all” had been somewhat “hyperbolic”.
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The attraction of Donald Trump’s political message – that the mere act of accepting him as the savior of the nation is guaranteed to solve all of America’s most apparently intractable problems – to people who think of themselves as born again Christians should be fairly apparent.
Evangelical Christian theology, especially in the form in which it is preached in megachurches, primes people to find Trump’s claims plausible and attractive, rather than outrageous and disgusting. To such people, it seems eminently believable that one weird trick can save the soul of the nation, just as a simple commitment to Jesus can save the soul of the individual believer.
Meanwhile the very fact that all this sounds frankly insane to non-believers is just further proof of the message’s essential righteousness. After all, ancient Christianity was among other things a massive trolling of the intellectual traditions of the Roman and Greek worlds (“I preach Christ crucified, folly to the Greeks.” 1 Corinthians 1:23).
And opponents of Trumpism who think this kind of essentially cult-like thinking is confined to emotionally overheated theatrics in suburban megachurches are kidding themselves. Here’s ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in June of 2025, begging his dear leader to hasten the coming of the biblically predicted apocalypse, as full-fledged war was on the verge of breaking out between Israel and Iran:
Mr. President, God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential president in a century – maybe ever. The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else. You have many voices speaking to you, Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice. I am your appointed servant, and I am available to you, but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945 [Harry Truman had to decide whether to drop nuclear weapons on Japan]. I don’t reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you. I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s. . .
Those people that a generation ago the New Right referred to derisively as “secular liberals” often have an overwhelming desire to assume that people like Huckabee are simply grifting the rubes when they engage in this kind of thing. Indeed, a pervasive problem on the liberal-left has been that many of its members simply failed to consider the possibility that Huckabee and his ilk – that is, people in positions of real power and influence in contemporary America – actually do believe exactly what they claim to believe, since what they claim to believe seems flagrantly deranged. This kind of denial is probably a protective psychological defense, born of the more general tendency of liberals and leftists to engage in whig history and other forms of wishful thinking.
But the people who claim to believe in the perfect efficacy of one weird trick, whether in politics or religion, often really do believe what they say they believe. We would do well, when we consider the intersection of born again megachurch Christianity and the broader world of Trumpism, to recall Voltaire’s admonition that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
From the chapter “Donald Trump, Megachurch Christianity, and One Weird Trick” in The Triumph of Stupidity