Misreading the room

Walter Russell Mead on the "ingathering of the exiles"

Last year, Walter Russell Mead published his most recent book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.

Part of Mead’s book tour included a Twitter chat with Yair Rosenberg of The Atlantic. I joined the chat, and asked the author this question:

Here’s the most relevant part of Mead’s response:

Hmmm. This seemed a bit… off.

So I did a bit of research. First, a quick definition:

To check if Mead is correct — that most Christians don’t believe they can either speed up or slow down G*d’s Big Plan to redeem the world — I did a few simple searches, which turned up stuff like this:

And this:

And this (from Haaretz, March 8, 2021):

And this (from Ministry to Israel):

There’s clearly a hunger out there — and real activism among Christians — for Jews (most Jews? all Jews?) to leave our current homes and return to our ancestral one.

Which makes me wonder: How and why did Mead miss this? Or why does he minimize it? Best I can tell, this yearning for an “ingathering of the exiles” is no small thing.

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Postscript

- from “For Many Christian Zionists, Israeli Protesters Are a Threat to God’s Plan,” by Aidan Orly, Religion Dispatches, April 4, 2023.