“They’re very happy with the embassy move and are not going to give up on judges and policy they have long sought to enact [in the US] over annexation,” she said. “Honestly, I think most evangelicals don’t truly understand the annexation issue and were more wowed by something like the embassy move.”
Last month two pro-Israel evangelical leaders, Robert Jeffress and Joel Rosenberg, told The New York Times that evangelicals were indifferent to annexation and that they even might turn on Trump if he blesses annexation and it triggers regional turmoil.
“I don’t see any pickup among evangelical voters for this move, and there’s a risk that you could lose some evangelical votes, in the very states where you might be more vulnerable,” Rosenberg told the newspaper.
Notably, these figures might be heeding whispered counsel from the Israeli leaders with whom they are close who, despite their public statements, may be eager to avert a drastic step at a time that Israel is coping with a second wave of the coronavirus, and increased tensions with Iran.
But Rosenberg outlined in a detailed paper posted on his website that it was conversations with Palestinian and Arab leaders that had given him the most pause. He wrote that unilateral annexation would heighten instability in the country that evangelicals care so much about.
“Now would be a good time to be praying for the peace of Jerusalem and the region, and praying that Israeli and American leaders will have true wisdom at this critical moment,” Rosenberg wrote on his website. “Please pray for the Palestinian people who are feeling increasingly hopeless and left out of the process and seeing the US and Israel make decisions without them. And pray, too, for the leaders and peoples of the moderate Arab states who are increasingly in favor of peace with Israel and see extraordinary opportunity for enhanced prosperity for all sides if treaties can be signed and trade relationships opened… Strange times in the Epicenter these days.”
With both the United States and Israel facing a surge in coronavirus cases, annexation feels far less pressing than it did July 1, the first date that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could have formally proposed the move. An Israeli official said this week that issue is landing on the back burner because the United States was paying it little attention.
Still, Evans said his followers, too, would be praying — for annexation to move forward, aggrandizing the land under Israel’s control.
“These people are terrified right now, that God is not happy with America,” he said. “They’re looking at the riots, they’re looking at the plague of corona, and they’re worried, ‘Is God unhappy, is he cursing us?’ They’re not sure, and they want God to bless them.”