THEY JUST DON'T HATE THE PALESTINIANS ENOUGH:

While evangelicals overall remain supportive of Israel, the last few years have apparently seen a significant loss of support for the Jewish state among younger evangelicals. Two University of North Carolina at Pembroke professors--Mordechai (Motti) Inbari and Kirill Bumin--conducted a poll of evangelicals of all ages in 2018 and another poll in 2021 focusing specifically on evangelicals age 18-29. According to their data, support for Israel among young evangelicals dropped from 69 percent to 34 percent during that three year period.

While commentators have suggested that some of the apparent shift among young evangelicals between the two polls can be explained by differences in the methodology, variations in the wording of the two polls' questions, and news headlines at the time the polls were taken, it is worth noting that other surveys show similar trends. Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor and Brookings Institution senior fellow, told Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) that two polls he conducted between 2015 and 2018 also showed a widening gap between older and younger evangelicals. For example, in the earlier survey, 40 percent of young evangelicals said the United States should lean towards Israel; in 2018, only 21 percent did.

"A generation ago, support for Israel was automatic among most evangelicals in America," said Robert Stearns in a 2018 interview. Stearns, a Pentecostal bishop and the founder and executive director of Eagles' Wings Ministries, a pro-Israeli group, continued:

You pretty much couldn't be an evangelical without supporting Israel. Millennials don't accept that. They're suspicious of the demand to be automatically supportive of the country. They don't want this pushed down their throat. Instead, they are asking questions. They want to know--why should we support Israel?

Stearns said that starting a few years earlier, he noticed that at pro-Israel Christian gatherings "there were usually very few young people. It was increasingly an older and older crowd attending these gatherings, despite the fact that there is a lot of young Christian activism in our country."

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