Last Friday, a Tucker Carlson interview with the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, premiered on YouTube: Tucker Confronts Mike Huckabee on America’s Toxic Relationship With Israel. It is long, about two and a half hours, with an eleven-minute introduction by Carlson detailing some of the bizarre events surrounding the interview. In four days, the YouTube version alone garnered three and a half million views, with the X version getting almost as many — and these are not the only platforms on which it appeared.

Since the interview debuted, numerous online commentators have helped us to “break down” what really happened in the interview from various points of view, and numerous excerpted clips of the video have circulated social media, stirring up many online slug-fests. Organizations have released statements on the interview, and there was even an international diplomatic row that ensued when more than a dozen governments objected to Huckabee saying that “It would be fine” if territory in a large swath of the Middle East were seized by Israel so that the modern secular Jewish state could assume the exact borders of the territory promised to Abraham (known as “Greater Israel”).

The wide-ranging nature of the interview can be seen by going to either of those platforms and looking at the list of twenty different topics that were covered. What interests me here is the theological aspect of the interview, namely, its discussion of Christian Zionism.

Early on in the interview, Tucker asked what Christian Zionism is. Huckabee responded,

A Zionist [is] a person who believes that the Jewish people have a right to have a homeland where they have security and safety… that the Jews have a right to live in Israel.

He defended the Jewish state’s “right to exist” principally from the Bible, but secondarily from various historical and legal arguments, including the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations’ “Mandate for Palestine,” and the United Nations’ recognition of the modern State of Israel. These latter developments, while of great historical interest, do not concern me here — excepting Lord Balfour and his Declaration in its theological connection. The Ambassador’s biblical argument is what I wish to address.

Darby’s New Heresy

Mike Huckabee made reference to Genesis 12 in connection with Israel’s “right to exist.” Here are the relevant verses (1-7) of that chapter:

And the Lord said to Abram: Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father’s house, and come into the land which I shall shew thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and magnify thy name, and thou shalt be blessed. I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee, and IN THEE shall all the kindred of the earth be blessed: So Abram went out as the Lord had commanded him, and Lot went with him: Abram was seventy-five years old when he went forth from Haran. And he took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all the substance which they had gathered, and the souls which they had gotten in Haran: and they went out to go into the land of Chanaan. And when they were come into it, Abram passed through the country into the place of Sichem, as far as the noble vale: now the Chanaanite was at that time in the land. And the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him: To thy seed will I give this land. And he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

Verse three of this passage, regarding those who bless or curse Abram, is a central Christian Zionist proof text, and it was gravely misinterpreted by the patriarch of that heresy, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), who read it in a sense that none of the Christian Fathers of East or West, none of the Doctors of the Church, and not even any of the Protestant so-called “Reformers” read it. Christian Zionists in the nineteenth Century cultivated the strange novelty that modern-day Jews, who reject Jesus Christ as the promised Messiah, should return to the biblical land of promise, and that the Christians who help them to do so will thus receive a blessing in Abraham. Darby was a member of a fairly obscure British Evangelical sect, the Plymouth Brethren, but his ideas spread well beyond that denomination (which actually fractured in his lifetime) to more mainstream Evangelical groups. British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur James Balfour, were both brought up in Evangelical families whose clergy were influenced by Darby’s teaching (more on which later). Lord Arthur James Balfour is the signatory of the eponymous Balfour Declaration mentioned above (a letter to Baron de Rothschild). As this article points out, at the time of the Declaration (1917), Palestine was still a part of the Ottoman Empire. It was not until after that empire’s defeat in World War I that the British Mandate gave His Majesty’s Government control of Palestine.

Scofield Spreads the Heresy

Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, was also personally influenced by Darby’s thinking, and not just a little. The massively popular Scofield Reference Bible — named after the lying charlatan, Cyrus I. Scofield — helped to popularize Darby’s misreading of Genesis all across the Anglosphere, making Christian Zionists out of most of those who call themselves Evangelical Christians today.

Here is a helpful excerpt from a not-so-flattering review of that reference Bible by a Protestant clergyman:

Cyrus Ingerson Scofield was a civil war veteran who came to Christian faith as an adult, later pastoring churches in Dallas and Massachusetts. Affiliated with D.L. Moody, Scofield later began work on his reference Bible, through which he popularized a new system of theological interpretation called “Dispensationalism,” developed by an Anglo-Irish man named John Nelson Darby. When Scofield’s Bible was published in 1909, at a time of great expectation about the end of the world, his interpretive matrix took fundamentalism by storm, quickly becoming one of the best selling Bibles in history. This is the Bible that created “The Thief in the Night,” Hal Lindsay, Christian Zionism, and Left Behind. In other words, it is the Bible which has dominated a very visible portion of the Christian imagination for the last 100 years.

For more on Scofield, his heresy-laden commentary on Holy Writ, and its influence on modern Christian Zionists, see “The Scofield Bible—The Book That Made Zionists of America’s Evangelical Christians,” by Maidhc Ó Cathail.

Ambassador Huckabee Lives the Heresy

To measure the extent of the Darby-Scofield influence on American religion and foreign policy, consider what Mike Huckabee said — speaking in his official capacity as the United States’ Ambassador to Israel — in a speech on September 15, 2025:

…God said to Abraham, this [land] is yours, take good care of it, and you’ll be a blessing to the people around the earth and even to those of us who aren’t even Jewish. He says, “Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.” And I come here tonight because I’d rather have a blessing than a curse. [Emphasis mine.]

Note that the Baptist minister misquotes Genesis — and I am not referencing the part he paraphrased, but the part that is quoted; the quotation marks are on the official transcript on Embassy’s website: “Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.” The name “Israel” was given to Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, many years after the events of Genesis twelve. Israel is first mentioned in Genesis 32:28. The part that Huckabee paraphrased about the blessings and curses was a promise made to Abraham that Darby, via Scofield, via Huckabee has applied to modern unbelieving Jews and their secular state — the very state to which Huckabee is the US Ambassador. Mike Huckabee, the committed Christian Zionist, wants a blessing, so — by golly! — US foreign policy is going to give him one! Sadly, he is not alone; this is the heresy embraced by all who call themselves Christian Zionists. And, it is this heresy that helped get us into two useless wars in Iraq (which reduced that nation’s Christian population to less than half its former size), and now its adherents are ginning up a repeat performance in Iran.

Even worse, from the theological perspective, when the Ambassador has God saying to Abraham, “you’ll be a blessing to the people around the earth and even to those of us who aren’t even Jewish,” he neglects to mention that this was a Messianic promise that was fulfilled in Jesus Christ: “IN THEE shall all the kindred of the earth be blessed.” This omission, along with his application of the blessings and curses to a secular state for unbelievers founded in 1948, neglects such New-Testament passages as Romans 9:6-8 and Galatians 3:26-29, where we learn that the “children of the flesh” are not to be confused with the “children of promise” and that those who believe and have been baptized into Christ are “the seed of Abraham, heirs according to the promise.” Huckabee is reading Genesis in terms of natural genetics, not in terms of spiritual descent from Abraham.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. What he says is worse. Getting back to the interview, at one point the Ambassador tells Carlson that those who have the “right of return” to Israel (“making Aliyah”) include not only Abraham’s physical descendants, but also, “People who have converted to Judaism… they are the spiritual descendants of Abraham” (emphasis mine). Now, in saying this, Huckabee is implicitly denying what Saint Paul wrote in Galatians 3:26-29. We who are in Christ are the seed of Abraham. The implications of Huckabee’s statement are frightening: In Israeli law, if a Christian apostatizes and becomes Jewish, he can legally make Aliyah as a Jew. This would exactly reverse what Saint Paul says in the passages from Romans and Galatians I’ve cited here. So much for being “biblical”!

The Catholic Alternative to the Heresy

There is an alternative to this heresy. As I wrote in The Catholic Church Is the True Israel,

In debunking Christian Zionism, we want to advance the orthodox Christian alternative to heresy, and that alternative is the Catholic notion of the Continuity of Religion — the idea that there has been, for all history, only one true religion. The Old Testament was a preparation for the New, and the Kingdom of Israel was a preparation for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, which is the Catholic Church, whose mystical Head is the Son of the Most High, who is seated on the throne of David His father, and who reigns in the house of Jacob forever (cf. Luke 1:32). There is here not a “replacement,” but a continuity and a fulfillment.

The Man, Christ Jesus (cf. 1 Tim. 2:5), is the apex of creation. All that has been made was created for Him. An eternal Person, He came down to Earth to be what He was predestined to be — the Supreme Glorifier of the Blessed Trinity — and the glory of God is the very purpose of creation. All who are predestined to eternal beatitude are predestined in Him and, therefore, in His Mystical Body, the Catholic Church (Rom. 8:29-30). All of revelation centers on Him: the Old Testament is Christ in type and prophecy; the New, Christ in reality and fulfillment. “All things were created by him and in him. And he is before all, and by him all things consist” (Col. 1:16-17).

Carrie Prejean Boller summarized much of the above very tersely on X, and I applaud her very public profession of faith:

As [a] Catholic I do not believe the modern political atheist movement called “Zionism” should be treated as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. The Church teaches that God’s Covenant is fulfilled in Christ and extended to all through His Church. For 2,000 years, this has been the consistent teaching of the Church, regardless of new theological heresies such as dispensationalism that emerged in the 19th century through John Nelson Darby and were later popularized in the U.S by the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909.

There was much discussion in the Carlson-Huckabee interview about who has a “right” to live in the Holy Land (and in Ireland, which was a clever maneuver on Carlson’s part — see the transcript). For a sola scriptura Protestant who rejects Apostolic Tradition and the authority of the Catholic Magisterium, the Old-Testament promises to Abraham and his descendants can easily be read in a Zionist way. Huckabee, being one of those, assumes that European Jews had a right to colonize Palestine in 1948 based upon those promises (with dreadful results to Christians), and he does not seem to mind the continued illegal expansion of the nation-state outside of those borders since then.

Carlson pressed Huckabee on his claim that “the Jews have a right to live in Israel.” In reply to a question on whether the Jews have a right to all the land promised to Abraham (of which the modern Israel occupies only a fraction), the Ambassador said, in an unguarded moment, “It would be fine if they took it all.” That territory includes all of Lebanon and Jordan, large swaths of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and small parts of Turkey and tiny Kuwait — which explains the international brouhaha.

What is the Catholic understanding of the supposed “biblical right” of modern Jews to this land? Pope Saint Pius X rejected the claim (see here and here). The Holy See did not give diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel for some forty-six years, which changed on December 30, 1993. From that time on, the Holy See has advocated for a two-state solution, with the Palestinians having a state of their own. At no point has the Church ever recognized the Jewish “right of return” to the Holy Land as a fulfillment of biblical promises made to Abraham. Why? Because this would fly in the face of the bimillennial reading of the promises to Abraham being fulfilled in Jesus Christ. (This does not, by the way, deny the existence of the so-called Mizrahi Jews who have deep roots in the Holy Land and across the Levant and Maghreb.)

A brief commentary on Genesis 13:15 in the Haydock Bible shows that the modern popes are following an older tradition:

This is by way of explanation to the former words: (Haydock) for Abram never possessed a foot of this land by inheritance, Acts vii. 5. Even his posterity never enjoyed it, at least, for any long time. St. Augustine gives the reason; because the promise was conditional, and the Jews did not fulfil their part by obedience and fidelity. (q. 31. in Gen.) It is better, however, to understand these promises of another land, which the people, who imitate the faith of Abram, shall enjoy in the world to come. (Calmet) (Romans iv. 16.)

The Catholic reading of these promises is both allegorical — being fulfilled in the New Testament in Christ and His Church — and anagogical, where “the land” is that heavenly homeland promised to the mystical members of Christ (the second Beatitude promises is specifically to the meek).

Catholics Must Evangelize the World!

Theologically, the Hon. Mike Huckabee is dead wrong — and, I might add, deadly wrong, and in more than one sense. Happily, we have the answer to the problem of the Mega-Heresy of Christian Zionism. It is simple: Catholic unity. That, and expanding that unity by evangelism, including the “evangelism of the baptized” who are in error on this or any other point of Christian doctrine.

When we finally wake up to the fact that interreligious dialogue with Jews and ecumenical dialogue with non-Catholic Christians must give way to “the foolishness of our preaching” (1 Cor. 1:21), we will be on the right track.

Please join me in praying for the conversion of the Baptist preacher, Mike Huckabee and the Episcopalian journalist, Tucker Carlson. If the evident energy they both have for things that are important to them were perseveringly directed — in faith, hope, and charity — to the building up of the one, true Church, much good could happen, and they will save their souls.

Remember: extra ecclesiam nulla salus.