Over the past decade, American Christian fascination with, and support of, the modern State of Israel has gained the attention of journalists, religious and political leaders, and scholars alike. Whatever one makes of Christian support for Israel, there is little doubt that, in the context of the contemporary American political climate, proclaiming one's support for and affinity with Israel is a significant item of discourse. One need look no further than the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, where candidates vying for their party's nomination worked hard to convince voters of their long-standing support for Israel (while simultaneously casting Barack Obama as the most anti-Israel President in American history) to see one way in which discourse on Israel functions in the cultural milieu of domestic American politics.

Into this fray comes Robert O. Smith's More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism. Smith's book is an historical examination of the way in which it became a cultural consensus for “[m]illions of American Christians [to] see U.S. support for Israel as a God-ordained responsibility.” In the context of previous work on Christian Zionism, Smith correctly points out that much of this scholarship identifies “theological, political, and nationalist movements of the nineteenth century” as the “sources of both popular American Christian support for the State of Israel and contemporary Christian Zionism” (3). Thus, Smith seeks to broaden this foreshortened historical horizon to examine many earlier expressions of what he calls “Judeo-centric” prophecy interpretation, and what he sees as its ongoing influence on the social formation we today call Christian Zionism. In Chapter One, Smith introduces readers to what he describes as the “Traits of Contemporary Christian Zionism.” This is done by examining the work and public persona of John Hagee, the founder of the Christian Zionist lobby group, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), as well as the contemporary emphasis on “blessing the Jew” that has become a significant, if not ambiguous, refrain among contemporary Christian Zionists. Chapter Two continues to set the stage by analyzing statistical data on American attitudes toward Jews and the State of Israel. Based on his analysis of this data, Smith urges “scholars and popular commentators” to understand that “contemporary Christian Zionism draws from cultural themes informing the ‘common sense’ of many Americans to the point that reinforcing the cultural foundations of support for the State of Israel is a noncontroversial activity” (45).

The remaining six chapters then turn to history, as Smith attempts to discern the historical roots of these cultural themes, beginning with what he sees as the “Reformation foundations of Judeo-centric prophecy interpretation” (Chapter Three). Throughout these chapters, Smith identifies the varying ways in which “Judeo-centric” prophecy interpretation was “characterized primarily by its constructions of friends and enemies according to its own eschatological expectations and apocalyptic hopes,” and the way Jews were brought into these narratives (24). Throughout these chapters Smith also emphasizes moments where he argues that the “Judeo-centric” tradition of prophecy interpretation was transformed into more conventional political activities. In particular, he highlights the Cartwright petition in 1649, which sought to repeal the act of parliament that had banned Jews from England (Chapter Five); the Blackstone Memorial of 1891, which petitioned the U.S. Government to help establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine (Chapter Eight); and the lobbying efforts of John Hagee's CUFI that began in 2006, as three distinctive moments that exemplify Smith's own definition of Christian Zionism: “political action, informed by specifically Christian commitments, to promote or preserve Jewish control over the geographic area now comprising Israel and Palestine” (187).

Within the context of contemporary American politics, Smith's work is a useful contribution and reminder to readers that American affinity for the State of Israel does not stem from external “manipulation of American interests” (although what those interests are, undoubtedly remains contested) but rather “draws from the taproot of Puritan apocalyptic hope embedded within national identity and national vocation from the prerevolutionary period to the present” (2). In the process, Smith provides a subtle but useful critique of previous work (including his own) that identifies the source of Christian support for Israel purely within the realm of idiosyncratic interpretations of prophetic books. This is a particularly important corrective to make for non-specialist readers, who are likely to learn a great deal from Smith's historical treatment of Christian discourse on Jews and Israel.

Yet as interesting as the historical depth of Smith's work is, this book may be less satisfactory to a specialist audience skeptical of the notion of coherent traditions that span time and space — it may be that while Smith traces the “tradition” of Christian Zionism back to the Cartwright petition, for example, he is not simply documenting it, but constituting it. While Smith provides us with a great deal of primary source material concerning the common threads and ideas developed by English and American Protestants in terms of their views of Jews, Catholics, and Muslims, an overarching emphasis on religious beliefs as the primary motivating source of these acts left less space for him to examine the social and historical contexts in which these beliefs were invoked and for what purposes. For, as Rodney Needham (Belief, Language, and Experience) has demonstrated, beliefs are not causal agents in and of themselves that exist prior to social situations, nor do they function in the same way over disparate periods of time and place. Smith's identification of particular social contexts is certainly not absent, and his examination of Judeo-centric thought and its relationship to British imperial identity and, later, its place in expressions of American covenantal vocation are among the book's highlights. However, a more sustained analysis of the relationship between assertions of belief and the construction of identity would have made for a more nuanced argument. It would have also made the work more broadly applicable for thinking about a wide range of issues as they relate to the contested categories of religion and politics generally, and Americans' affinity with Israel more specifically.

Despite these theoretical and methodological quibbles, More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation provides an interesting addition to, and another historical angle on, some early expressions of what remains the ongoing American fascination with and affinity for the State of Israel.