The religious right is breaking up over Israel and Iran

Nearly a month into the joint US-Israeli war on Iran, there’s a good chance you’ve heard something about the apparent civil war on the right over the conflict. Though polling shows steady support for President Donald Trump from his MAGA base, the war has been tearing apart the MAGAsphere, pitting disenchanted MAGA influencers against fervent pro-Trump and pro-Israel loyalists.

The seeds of this split were apparent even before the US and Israel launched their first strikes, when Tucker Carlson, of the America First, Israel-skeptical, anti-interventionist wing of the party, interviewed Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel and fervent pro-Israel activist, on Carlson’s podcast last month. Huckabee argued that, as a Christian Zionist, he believed the Bible showed that God had promised not just Israel, but large portions of the Middle East, to the Jewish people. Carlson argued it wasn’t a valid basis for a modern state, and accused Israel of dragging the US into war with Iran.

As their conversation suggested, there’s a religious dimension to this emerging rift on the right: 

Huckabee is an evangelical Christian, a group that is overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Carlson, like many of the biggest critics of both the US relationship with Israel and the Iran war, is not. 

Since their interview, this divide has exploded into public view as a political, theological, and policy argument across multiple fronts that’s drawn in everyone from likely 2028 presidential candidates, to popular influencers, to top religious leaders. The most explosive fights have centered on the relationship between conservative Catholics and the GOP’s dominant evangelical base.

How these play out will have implications not just for inter-religious understanding in the US, but for the future of the Republican Party, and by extension American politics. 

An emerging rift in the Trump political coalition

Until recently, the story of the religious right had largely been about increasing cooperation to defend traditional values in a secularizing world. This political effort created interdenominational alliances within the Republican Party: evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews found each other allied on issues like gay marriage, abortion, education, and protections for religious dissenters. In the Bush years, almost the entire GOP was united around confronting Islamic terrorism, an issue where Israel was seen as a leading ally. 

But in recent years, this relationship has come into question. Trump’s hedonistic personal style expanded the party tent to more secular voters with their own divergent interests. His criticism of the Iraq War and embrace of an “America First” message helped build up voices on the right who were openly critical of US entanglements abroad, including support for Israel. And his removal of guardrails around extremist speech on the right helped pave the way for more openly antisemitic figures, which has created new tensions within the coalition. 

All of these issues have been coming to a head in recent weeks, and the Iran war is likely to be a catalyst for even more tough discussions. 

Emblematic of this crack-up is the case of Carrie Prejean Boller, a former model and beauty pageant contestant who converted to Catholicism last year. She sat on the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission until a few weeks ago, when, she claims, she was booted for criticizing the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, for not being supportive enough of Israel, and for defending her “deeply held” Catholic beliefs that Israel is not a unique nation that fulfills Biblical prophecies.

Prejean Boller’s ouster ended up an inciting event that blew open underlying tensions among right-wing Christian thinkers and influencers — many of whom already are critical of Israel and involved in feuds with other conservative commentators and influencers.

In an open letter to Trump, Prejean Boller argued that Trump, in advancing this war and removing her from the commission, was betraying Catholics who joined his political coalition and believed in his America First pledges. “Most Catholics who voted for you feel the exact same way. Why have you betrayed us?” she wrote.

Those anti-Israel views, which Prejean Boller shared at commission meetings and online, sparked condemnation from many familiar voices within the right: the commentator Mark Levin, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who chairs the commission, the writer Seth Dillon of the Christian satirical outlet Babylon Bee, and commentators aligned with Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire network. Many of her critics argued she had crossed the line into antisemitism, which she denied, by making comments focusing on Jews’ role in crucifying Jesus and defending Candace Owens, a popular influencer who has increasingly denigrated Jews in conspiratorial terms. 

But she also drew support from an emerging set of influential, self-described Catholic voices: controversial figures like Owens, Megyn Kelly, and antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes; as well as Israel-critical, conservative Catholic bloggers and writers. Carlson, who was raised Episcopalian, brought Prejean Boller onto his show to talk about her removal from the religious liberty commission.

There is a theological component to this dispute. The predominant view on the right, of evangelical Protestants like Huckabee and some nondenominational churches, is a form of “Christian Zionism” rooted in “dispensationalism”: the belief in supporting the modern state of Israel as the biblically prophesied “Israel,” and a prerequisite for the final period of human history in which Jesus Christ returns and the Rapture happens.

Carlson, Prejean Boller, and other Israel-critical MAGA Catholics and Protestant Christians do not believe this, and hold views that distinguish between the modern state of Israel and the spiritual “Israel” of the Bible. Some traditionalist and MAGA Catholics have also pushed a more radical, though historic, interpretation of Christians being the “new Israel,” of God forming a new covenant with a new chosen people that “supercedes” or replaces God’s relationship with the Jewish people from the Old Testament. 

In theological terms, this view is called “supersessionism” — and though it was the common view of Catholics up until the 20th century, it has also been blamed for contributing to antisemitism and worsening relationships between Jewish and Christian peoples. Notably, supersessionism is not the view of the modern Church. The Second Vatican Council clarified that the Church does not blame Jewish people for the death of Christ, condemned antisemitism as a sin, and settled that the Jewish people do have a unique relationship with God, separate from the Catholic Church’s role.

But there’s also a raw politics element to the fight — especially surrounding the next presidential election and which figures will lead the party after Trump. Which is how the Prejean Boller story entered political overdrive when a leading potential contender weighed in. 

The GOP’s religious fights are also a proxy war for power 

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Southern Baptist whose father is an evangelical preacher, has been picking fights for months with the emerging wing of Israel critics on the right — including Carlson — and delivering speeches warning Republican donors and leaders to step in. 

So naturally, he wanted to take a stance on the Prejean Boller dispute. In this case, he did it by sharing an essay from an anonymous MAGA influencer who goes by “Insurrection Barbie” on X. “READ every word of this. It’s the best & most comprehensive explanation of what we’re fighting,” Cruz wrote.

The author, like Cruz, complained that the new right was attacking the evangelical pro-Israel consensus. But the deeper fear it raised was “who controls the ideological and theological DNA of the Republican Party’s base.” “Insurrection Barbie” warned of a conspiracy by a small number of elite “Catholic integralists” and traditionalist Catholics to take over the party by gaining control of its institutions, undermining evangelical theology, and convincing rank-and-file Trump voters to follow along. If nothing was done, the author warned, the party’s activist base would soon become “a coalition dominated by ethnically and religiously defined Catholic and Orthodox nationalism,” with evangelicals relegated to junior status. 

Among the accused: Fuentes, Owens, MAGA icon Steve Bannon (“He controls the media infrastructure”), and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts (a “Cowboy Catholic”). But the most important name, who he called “the wild card in this drama” was JD Vance, a conservative Catholic with close ties to the anti-Israel right who has tried to bridge the gap between the party’s warring factions. The author was still hopeful Vance might side with the pro-Israel evangelicals.

Cruz’s decision to share the post sparked immediate backlash from conservative and MAGA Catholic commentators and activists who called it an “anti-Catholic screed,” and “ugly, archaic anti-Catholic resentment” that “risks burning the Trump coalition down.” 

But it also spoke to the power battles looming over the party in the immediate post-Trump era. Cruz, Carlson, and Vance have all widely been discussed as presidential candidates in 2028 or beyond. Bannon has also been reportedly weighing a run. Another major potential contender not mentioned in the essay, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is a Catholic pro-Israel hawk with a mixed religious background.

“There’s no doubt that Ted Cruz and the author are using that article to try and subtly discredit the vice president, a notable Catholic, who Cruz probably wants to challenge for the 2028 Presidential nomination,” Gabe Guidarini, the chair of the Ohio College Republican Federation and a former president of the College Republicans of America, told me. “Cruz knows Trump’s victory over him in 2016 was driven by Catholics, and he probably holds some resentment over it.”

Guidarini was among those critical of Cruz’s post. But he also emphasized that, for now, these seem to be elite-level and online feuds not materializing on the ground as they are on social media. “You get some key online players who align a certain way based on niche perceptions of group interest,” Guidarini said. “But it bubbles to the surface sometimes in election [years].”

The specter of antisemitism, as Catholic influencers squabble

But the Republican Party isn’t the only institution grappling with this issue. These differing views over what “Israel” means in theological terms have now, in turn, sparked an internal Catholic debate, centered on how to handle rising antisemitism in the US while being critical of Israel.

Since Prejean Boller came to my attention in early February, I’ve been fascinated by her willingness to speak for all Catholics (again, she converted last year), to speak authoritatively about what the Catholic Church teaches, and, more recently, to confront leading conservative Catholic prelates for not supporting her in her fight against the White House commission, and its evangelical leaders. The Catholic Church is politically diverse, and even among its right-leaning adherents there is a wide mix of perspectives, including plenty of Catholic Republicans with strong pro-Israel views, or who support confronting Iran. 

In the long run, these tensions will likely escalate if the war drags out and ends up hurting the Republican coalition in midterm elections. 

Nor has her claim to represent Catholics writ large gone unnoticed. What has been most surprising, to me and to Catholic thinkers I’ve spoken with, is how much turmoil her spat, and some MAGA Catholics’ pushing of supersessionism, is beginning to cause within the Catholic Church.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the leadership body of the church in the US, weighed in this month, with a video message condemning antisemitism and reasserting the Church’s teachings on religious liberty. Notably, it was delivered by a leading traditionalist voice in the American clergy — the Archbishop of Portland, Oregon, Alexander Sample. His message was echoed, along with more pointed rebukes of Prejean Boller and her wing of conservative Catholics, by two other highly respected Catholic leaders online: Bishop Robert Barron and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, themselves no political progressives.

Prejean Boller, some traditionalist Catholics (unhappy with the Church’s more progressive tilt since Vatican II), and zealous young converts are forcing American church leaders to reckon with this challenge, the Catholic theologian and author Massimo Faggioli, a professor in ecclesiology at the Loyola Institute at Trinity College Dublin, told me. 

“Both those who are supporting the alliance between Trump and Israel, and those who say, ‘I’m a Catholic, and therefore I have to be against Zionism’ are [pushing] very dangerously formulated frameworks,” he told me. “These people are being really clumsy…it’s incredibly inflammatory and it ignores the incredible care with which the Catholic Church has talked about these issues so far.”

In addition to the theological debate, this conversation also touches on some painful history that may be encouraging leaders to step in more aggressively. The Church has a long and unfortunate relationship with antisemitism that took decades to repair through the help of a generation of converts beginning in the 1930s. That quest to vanquish antisemitism reached its zenith after Vatican II in 1965 with the publication of Nostra Aetate, a church document that rejected the view of Jewish people as “rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”

Faggioli told me that, in turn, these rifts on the American right are reopening old wounds and forcing the Church to confront the ambiguity with which it has approached its relationship with modern Israel, where successive popes have called for a two-state solution, hold to an anti-war doctrine, and have pursued a middle way between dispensationalism and supersessionism, but try not to make too news. 

“There’s something new happening now. I’m terrified by the risk that this is bringing back the monster of anti-Judaism on which the Catholic Church tried very hard to liberate itself from,” Faggioli told me. “These so-called heroes that are challenging the Zionist orthodoxy of American conservatives — they might look like those who want to help the victims of certain policies in the Middle East, but at the real risk of bringing back one of the worst things that we thought we had defeated.”

What comes immediately next may depend on how this war proceeds. But in the long run, these tensions will likely escalate if the war drags out and ends up hurting the Republican coalition in midterm elections. For now, it’s unclear how much of this remains an elite intellectual debate and how much it may filter its way down to the faithful. 

But we may also only be seeing an initial preview right now of factional fights that will end up playing out in the 2028 presidential primaries, with religion and belief as a point of conflict. The field of likely contenders is religious and politically at the center of these fights.  And the pro-Israel consensus on the right looks more fragile than ever.