Palestinian evangelicals in Israel-Palestine often describe themselves as a “minority of a minority of a minority”—as Palestinians in a Jewish state, as Christians among a Muslim-majority co-ethnic population, and as evangelicals within older and more established Christian denominations, such as the Greek Orthodox Church or Greek Melkites. In numerical terms, they are certainly correct: about 6,000 members strong, Palestinian evangelicalism is a relatively recent addition to the religious landscape in Israel-Palestine. The mostly Baptist congregations were founded with the support of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, which remained their main financial backer until the 1990s. Yet, Palestinian evangelicals’ strategic mobilization of their status as Christian minority in the Middle East successfully taps into prevailing global evangelical narratives concerned with religious freedom, often securing political and social influence beyond their demographic size. However, their relationship with dominant evangelical frameworks is fraught and complex, particularly given the extensive theological, financial, and political investments of evangelicals worldwide — especially Christian Zionists in the United States, but increasingly elsewhere as well — in the state of Israel.
This paper explores how Palestinian evangelicals navigate competing notions of freedom—religious, political, and theological—within both the Israeli state and global evangelicalism. While they share core markers of evangelicalism, including biblical authority, the necessity of being “born again,” the imperative of proselytization, and the centrality of Christ’s crucifixion, they also challenge dominant evangelical narratives that often align with Israeli state policies and Christian Zionism. Their positioning varies depending on their political and geographic context: Palestinian evangelicals who are citizens of Israel experience different forms of opportunity and restriction compared to those living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and, until recently, Gaza. Their responses to these dynamics range from strategic engagement to resistance: some draw on Western evangelical support to advance civil rights within Israel, while others develop contextual theological alternatives, such as those articulated through the biennial “Christ at the Checkpoint” conferences at Bethlehem Bible College, in Bethlehem within the occupied Palestinian territories (cf. Isaac 2015, 2020, 2025), to challenge dominant evangelical perspectives.
Grounded in a year of immersive ethnographic fieldwork in Israel-Palestine, including participant observation and interviews, this paper draws on Talal Asad’s (1986) concept of Islam as a ‘discursive tradition,’ where power influences the formation of orthodoxy, to examine how similar dynamics operate within evangelicalism — a tradition often perceived as non-hierarchical. It explores how ‘evangelical orthodoxy’ regarding the Israeli state is contested and maintained. The paper argues that the complex and varied processes of Palestinian evangelical positioning both within global evangelicalism and in relation to the Israeli state acutely highlight how the powers of “evangelical orthodoxy” interact with the economic, social, and political powers of the modern state as it controls and disciplines its populations according to its desired national project, as well as the colonial and imperial powers – of the Israeli state, Western missions in Israel-Palestine, and hegemonic Christian cultural formations. These types of powers interact and reinforce each other in complex ways in the everyday lives of Palestinian evangelicals; they are also influenced, contested, and manipulated by Palestinian evangelicals in sometimes surprising ways.
By interrogating the ways in which religious freedom is invoked, restricted, and redefined in this context, this paper contributes to critical debates on the politics of religious freedom (Hurd 2015), which frequently frames Middle Eastern Christians as a persecuted minority in need of Western intervention (Bruner 2021; Bruner & Lukasik 2023; Hurd 2015; McAlister 2018) — an approach that ultimately reinforces the civilizational agendas of movements like Christian Zionism. Additionally, it contributes to the renewed theoretical attention to the positioning of Middle Eastern Christians within transnational religious and geopolitical networks (e.g., Lukasik 2021, 2025; Marteijn & Schouten 2022; Womack 2015, 2021).
At a moment of heightened global attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, particularly in light of the recent war in Gaza, Palestinian evangelicals stand at the fault lines of powerful geopolitical, national, and religious ideologies. Despite their small numbers, their experiences offer a unique perspective for understanding how Middle Eastern Christians engage with, challenge, and redefine the notion of freedom—both within their local contexts and in relation to global Christian discourses.
References
Asad, Talal (1986 [2009]). “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Qui Parle 17 (2): 1–30.
Bruner, Jason. 2021. Imagining Persecution. Why American Christians Believe There Is a Global War against Their Faith. Camden: Rutgers University Press.
Bruner, Jason, and Candace Lukasik. 2023. “Power Circuits: Asymmetries of Global Christianity.” Journal of American Academy of Religion.
Hurd, Elizabeth. 2015. Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Isaac, Munther. 2015. From Land to Lands, from Eden to the Renewed Earth: A Christ-Centred Biblical Theology of the Promised Land. Carlisle: Langham Monographs.
———. 2020. The Other Side of the Wall: A Palestinian Christian Narrative of Lament and Hope. Downers Grove: IVP.
———. 2025. Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Lukasik, Candace. 2021. “Economy of Blood: The Persecuted Church and the Racialization of American Copts.” American Anthropologist 123 (3): 565–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13602.
———. 2025. Martyrs and Migrants: Blood and the Politics of Persecution. New York: New York University Press.
Marteijn, Elizabeth S., and Lucy Schouten. 2022. “Editorial: Heritage and Identity. Exploring the Middle East within World Christianity.” Studies in World Christianity 28 (3): 255–66.
McAlister, Melani. 2018. The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals. New York: Oxford University Press.
Womack, Deanna. 2015. “Christian Communities in the Contemporary Middle East: An Introduction.” Exchange 49:189–213.
———. 2021. “Middle Eastern Christianity in the Context of World Christianity.” In The Rowman and Littlefield Handbook of Christianity in the Middle East, edited by Mitri Raheb and Mark Lamport, 548–58. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Palestinian evangelicals in Israel-Palestine describe themselves as a “minority of a minority of a minority”—Palestinians in a Jewish state, Christians among a Muslim-majority co-ethnic population, and evangelicals within older Christian traditions. Though small in number, they strategically mobilize their minority status to engage global evangelical narratives on religious freedom, often securing influence beyond their demographic size. Yet, their relationship with dominant evangelical frameworks—especially Christian Zionism— as well as the Israeli state is complex and fraught.
This paper explores how Palestinian evangelicals navigate competing notions of freedom—religious, political, and theological—within both the Israeli state and global evangelicalism. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel-Palestine, it contributes to critical debates on the politics of religious liberty and highlights the intersection of religion, power, and geopolitics in Israel-Palestine.