(JNS) Evangelical and Jewish leaders from across the United States and Israel gathered in Nashville on Monday and Tuesday to reaffirm their commitment to the Jewish state and sound the alarm about threats to Israel and the West.
Concerns about anti-Israel influences from the left, right and overseas loomed large at the first Judeo Christian Zionist Congress (JCZC), even as organizers and attendees expressed confidence that evangelicals remain uncompromising advocates for Jews and Israel.
Rev. Johnnie Moore, president of the Congress of Christian Leaders and a speaker at the event, told JNS that the criticism of Christian Zionism from some conservative commentators and podcasters, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, was an attack on and not a reflection of the views of evangelicals.
“Evangelicals are the load-bearing wall of the Republican Party, and to have a so-called conservative declare war on evangelicals is either politically stupid or sabotage,” said Moore, who previously ran the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
“It’s not to say it isn’t affecting the community,” he said. “We’re mobilizing to address it.”
Moore said that he recently addressed 1,000 evangelical pastors in Jerusalem to declare a “spiritual war on antisemitism.”
“I said, ‘You might as well leave your pulpit if you’re not willing to speak the truth about all these things.’ We are on it,” Moore told JNS.
Moore said opposition to Zionism on the Christian right is a bigger issue among conservative Catholics and some mainline Protestants. Carlson is Episcopalian, and Owens converted from an evangelical denomination to Catholicism in 2024.
“It’s real. It’s serious, but thank God, it’s not really an evangelical problem,” Moore added.
Calev Myers, one of the event’s organizers and chairman of the Alliance to Reinforce Israel’s Security and Economy, which hosted the congress, seemed to embody the unity between the United States and Israel and between Jews and Christians that the conference sought to achieve.
Shimon Myers (left), CEO of the Alliance to Reinforce Israel’s Security and Economy, and Calev Myers, chairman of the alliance, at the Judeo Christian Zionist Congress in Nashville, Tenn., Feb. 16, 2026. Credit: Judeo Christian Zionist Congress.
A dual US-Israeli national, Myers made aliyah 34 years ago after growing up in the United States in a mixed Christian-Jewish family. He lives in the Judean Hills between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where, as a Christian, he attends church services in Hebrew and practices law for a firm that represents “the vast majority of non-Jewish Zionists active in Israel.”
Myers told JNS that after years of working with nonprofits to strengthen ties between the United States and Israel, the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks showed that there was no Zionist counter to the groups that aligned to use Israel to create divides in the broader West.
“It became very apparent to us that there is a state-backed, well-funded, highly-motivated, well-organized campaign that’s much bigger than Israel,” he said. “It’s a campaign to destroy the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization and, by extension, Israel. That’s what we’re facing.”
“We came up with the idea of this congress because we thought back to the first Zionist Congress of Theodor Herzl,” Myers said. “Ten out of the 208 delegates at Herzl’s congress were Christian, and we thought, well, at that time, 95% of Zionists in the world were Jewish—not a big surprise.”
Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) speaks at the Judeo Christian Zionist Congress in Nashville, Tenn., Feb. 16, 2026. Credit: Judeo Christian Zionist Congress.
Myers said that today those demographics have flipped, and that the vast majority of self-proclaimed Zionists around the world are non-Jewish, including hundreds of millions of evangelicals.
“If 99.9% of Zionists in the world today are not Jewish, where’s their Congress?” Myers said. “Where’s their platform? Who’s creating the collaboration between them to make sure that there’s a message and everybody’s on message?”
Other organizations exist to promote Christian Zionism, like Christians United for Israel, or to promote the US-Israel alliance, like AIPAC, Myers told JNS. One of the goals of the Judeo Christian Zionist Congress is to make connections between Israelis and evangelicals, he said.
“We did a broad poll within the Israeli public. The vast majority of Israelis have no idea who an evangelical Christian is, or that they even exist, or that they could be beneficial for the State of Israel. They just don’t know,” Myers told JNS. “If you’re outside of the English-speaking international media bubble—complete ignorance.”
“There’s an education gap. This is rarely talked about in the Hebrew media,” he said. “This is the reason that we brought all these Israeli influencers and mainstream journalists over here, because we want them to see. We want them to experience. We want them to know that this is the reality that exists out there.”
Rev. Johnnie Moore, president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, speaks at the Judeo Christian Zionist Congress in Nashville, Tenn., Feb. 16, 2026. Credit: Judeo Christian Zionist Congress.
With titles like “battle in our pews and pulpits” and “battle in our halls of power,” each discussion at the conference, which drew about 400 attendees at the W Hotel in downtown Nashville, was framed around what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has termed the “eighth front” war for information and influence alongside Israel’s geographical warfronts in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere.
The event brought together evangelical pastors and figures from popular culture, like former Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl, Five for Fighting’s John Odrasnik and Israeli standup comedian Matam Peretz, as well as elected Republican officials, including Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.).
Susan Michael, president of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, told JNS that that combination was new.
“We don’t usually have speakers from sports and entertainment,” Michael said.
Many of the speakers described a generation gap in America, including among religious conservatives, and the challenges of reaching younger audiences about Israel.
“How do you educate a generation that gets their news from TikTok? How do you educate people in 30-second soundbites on things that go back hundreds of years?” Michael said. “That’s the frustration, and that’s what we have to learn how to do.”
Despite the popularity of some anti-Israel influencers and politicians on the right, polling suggests that evangelicals stand alongside Jews as among the demographic groups in the United States that remain most strongly supportive of Israel.
Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project, described the issue of support for Israel on the right as an “optics problem,” not a “numbers problem.”
“I’ve now done five tours of very conservative leaders to Israel, people who are kind of in Tucker’s orbit, and the thing that changes them is two things: the Mechina in Eli, where they see a bunch of dudes with guns who are reading the Bible and praying all day, and the big families at Shabbat dinner,” Moon said on a panel. (The Eli program combines religious study and army service.)
“We’re not selling victims. We’re selling success,” Moon said. “We’re selling, ‘we are proud and strong. We’re Zionists. We’re not going down without a fight.’”
Attendees of the Judeo Christian Zionist Congress in Nashville, including the actress Patricia Heaton (clapping, in black top), on Feb. 16, 2026. Credit: Judeo Christian Zionist Congress.
Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told JNS that Christians and Jews publicly discussing America, Israel and faith together as an “ideational anchor” could be a fruitful path for supporters of the Jewish State.
“I would call it ‘applied Zionism,’” Diker said. “Like we have applied mathematics—it’s applied or extended, and people are making those representations at this congress in an unabashed way, with great pride and sensitivity.”
Myers told JNS that he and other organizers of the event chose Nashville as the first site of what they hope will become an annual event because it is home to evangelical organizations like the Southern Baptist Convention and Samaritan’s Purse.
They might host next year’s event elsewhere and are looking to hold other gatherings in the United States and Israel over the coming year, he said.
“We’re really solidifying a movement of organizations that are out there fighting for Western civilization,” Myers told JNS. “Let’s put our organizational egos aside and be willing to work together.”
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