From declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel to rejecting the illegality of West Bank settlements, the Donald Trump administration has broken dramatically with long-standing tenets of U.S. Middle East policy. Observers have noted the primacy of the president’s evangelical base in driving this series of radical departures from the diplomatic status quo. Covenant Brothers, a new history of Christian Zionism by Daniel G. Hummel, locates the origins of current evangelical politics in a messy process of conflict, negotiation, and rapprochement between “bible-believing Christians,” American Jewish organizations, and the State of Israel since 1948.

Covenant Brothers joins a growing body of scholarly and journalistic literature on Christian Zionism, much of it surveying centuries of Protestant theological debate in search of the intellectual roots of Christian Zionist politics. While Hummel does not deny such lineages, he emphasizes a more recent set of catalysts responsible for transforming nascent tendencies into organized political activism during the second half of the twentieth century. Rich in detail mined from a range of archives, this meso-level account of evangelical reckoning with Jewish statehood offers valuable insights into a globalizing political force that toda