Bewitched: Interpreting Zionism Through the Lens of Demonic Influence
What happened to our friends, and how did the become misled? Paul wondered the same thing.
Paul’s letter to the Galatians contains a strange phrase when he asks who had “bewitched” the people he loves. The Greek word he uses is baskainō, or “the evil eye,” an ancient term for a malevolent spiritual force that operates below the threshold of reason. It’s worth noting that the nation casting a spell on American evangelicals sells the pagan hamsa (evil eye) amulet on every street corner, in every tourist market, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and hangs from the stoop of nearly every Israeli home. Its imagery comes from the same ancient religion Paul references in Galatians. That’s a heck of a coincidence.
In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, you can almost hear the moment his pen stopped scratching. He had been building his argument with the precision of a trained rabbi and the urgency of a man who has just received catastrophically bad news, and then he pivots, and you can feel the shift in his chest before you feel it in the text.
“O foolish Galatians,” he writes, “who has bewitched you?”
That’s not creative rhetoric or a literary device from Paul. It is the sound of a man who genuinely cannot explain what he is looking at, a man staring at people he knows to be doctrinally serious, spiritually awake, and possessed of functioning minds, watching them behave as though none of those things were true anymore, and reaching for the only category of explanation that fits.
Something got to them. Something that does not show up in a theological argument, something that cannot be debated away, something that reached past their intellect and their training and their discernment and rearranged the furniture of their souls. Paul is not calling them stupid. He is calling them bewitched, and he means it with every ounce of the word’s ancient and terrifying weight.
The Greek is baskainō. To be baskainō’d is to fall under the evil eye, to be seized by a fascination that operates below the threshold of reason, to come under the influence of a malevolent spiritual force that uses plausible-sounding human instruments to accomplish its agenda. Paul is a sophisticated man. He has studied under Gamaliel. He knows how to parse an argument. He is perfectly capable of pointing out where the Judaizers went wrong theologically, and he does that at considerable length, with the kind of controlled fury that only a man who was once one of the Judaizers can produce. But before he gets to the theology, he names the source. Before he untangles the argument, he identifies the enchantment. He understands that you cannot reason a man out of a position that reason did not put him in.
I have been thinking about this for a long time because I keep watching it happen to people I know, and to people I love dearly as friends. And I’ve wondered what is bewitching them?
COINCIDENCE?
The hamsa hangs from porches and storefronts all over modern Israel, a hand-shaped amulet with a blue eye at its center, sold in every tourist market from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem alongside menorahs and mezuzot. It is called the ayin hara charm, a protection against the evil eye, and it is older than Judaism itself, a pagan apotropaic talisman absorbed from ancient Mesopotamia and Phoenicia into Jewish folk religion and never fully expelled. It’s similar to the Star of David, which, in Kabbalah, was originally said to ward off demons. One wonders if both perhaps attract them, rather than expel them. That’s the type of Satanic trickery Satan loves.
The theologians may have moved on from the Hamsa, considering it just a harmless ancient artifact, but the street vendors have not, and it’s a heck of a coincidence that the very culture whose mystical connection to God is being used to bewitch American evangelicals has never stopped hedging against the baskainō on its own front porch. The enchantment is not an abstraction to them. It is a product category. It’s everywhere. Maybe it’s a sign. A literal one. Perhaps it’s a giant freaking warning to Christians that there’s something evil among these people, that casts spells upon God’s people and makes them lose their common and spiritual sense.
O FOOLISH EVANGELICALS
Rod Martin is one of the sharpest political minds in the conservative movement. I have watched him work. I have benefited from his thinking, and I do not say that as throat-clearing before a polite criticism. I mean it the way you mean it about a man whose judgment you have tested against hard problems and found reliable. I’ve also known Steve Deace, who built an audience the hard way, with discipline and genuine theological seriousness - at least, as much as one can hope in the mainstream - in an era when most people in his lane were building audiences with performance and noise. My first interaction was a fiery email after seeing a Rick Warren book (or Joel Osteen, I forget) behind his desk, not knowing he meant it as a joke. That’s when I knew I’d like him, and I grew to love him, and soon spoke along beside him when slaying the beast of Marxism in the church. These are not credulous men. They are not men who arrived at their positions without reading the texts. They are not men who can be easily taken in.
And yet here we are. Watching men of that caliber defend the modern State of Israel with a fervor that no honest reading of the New Testament can sustain, absorbing and repeating Israeli government talking points with less critical scrutiny than they would apply to a Pfizer press release, papering over what should be obvious theological contradictions with a cheerfulness that does not resemble anything you would expect from men who once applied their minds seriously to hard questions. Something reached them. Something got past the defenses that good doctrine and clear thinking are supposed to provide, and whatever it was, it did not announce itself. It never does.
That is the nature of the bewitching. That is what makes it so disorienting to watch, and so difficult to fight, and so recognizable to anyone who has read Galatians lately with eyes open. Paul was not writing about foolish people. He was writing about the Galatians, people he had personally taught, people who had received the Gospel with joy, people who had seen the Spirit move among them with enough power that Paul could appeal to their direct experience as evidence (3:2-5). These were not theological novices who had never thought carefully about grace and covenant and the sufficiency of Christ. They were exactly the kind of people you would expect to be immune to the particular swindle being run on them. And they were not immune. They went down like everyone else.
That is what bewilderment actually feels like from the inside. It is not the mild surprise of watching someone make an uncharacteristic mistake. It is the vertigo of watching someone you trusted with your theological life fail to notice something that seems to you impossibly obvious, fail to notice it with a breezy confidence that suggests they are not even aware there is anything to notice. You look at them, and you look at the text, and you look at them again, and the gap between the two refuses to close, and you begin to wonder whether you are the one who has lost his mind.
You have not. Paul had not either. The explanation is older, darker, and more theologically serious than most people in our circles want to admit.
THE ANCIENT CRAFT
What Paul names in Galatians 3:1 is not a metaphor. The evil eye, the baskainō, was understood throughout the ancient world as a genuine spiritual mechanism, a force that could be directed against individuals or communities by those who wielded it, whether consciously or as instruments of something larger, older, and more purposeful than themselves. In both Jewish and Greco-Roman intellectual culture, enchantment was not a superstition for the uneducated. It was a serious category of spiritual reality that was widely recognized as real.
What the New Testament makes clear, and what we have domesticated almost to the point of uselessness in contemporary evangelical culture, is that the war in which the church is engaged is not primarily a war of ideas. Paul tells the Corinthians that the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4). He tells the Ephesians that the powers and principalities operate in the heavenly realms and produce their effects in human behavior (Ephesians 6:12). He tells Timothy that in the last times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons (1 Timothy 4:1). The machinery behind false doctrine is not merely human. The persuasiveness of a lie that should not persuade anyone is not adequately explained by the stupidity of the people who believe it. Something is working. Something ancient and intelligent and deeply committed to the project of corrupting the church’s understanding of the covenant is in the room, and it has been here before.
The specific demonic operation Paul identifies in Galatians is worth examining carefully, because its contemporary version is built on the same blueprint. The Judaizers were not pagans. They were not outsiders. They were professing Christians, men who had absorbed enough of the Gospel vocabulary to move freely inside the church, who carried the prestige of a connection to Jerusalem and to the old covenant apparatus, and who were insisting that Gentile believers needed to supplement their faith in Christ with the observances and categories of ethnic Jewish religion. They were running a Gospel-Plus scheme, and the plus was doing all the spiritual damage while the Gospel vocabulary provided the cover.
The demonic genius of this strategy lies in its plausibility. A message that flatly contradicts the Gospel is easy to reject. A message that accepts the Gospel and then asks whether it is quite sufficient on its own, whether there might not be something more, something older, something with deeper roots in the purposes of God, is considerably harder to resist. The serpent in the garden did not tell Eve that God was lying. He asked whether God had really said what she thought He said, and whether the interpretation she had been operating under might be missing something. The Judaizers were running the same play with better credentials and a more sophisticated argument, and the demonic intelligence behind them understood perfectly well that the most effective corruptions are the ones that look like refinements.
Paul calls some of these men “false brothers, secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy out the freedom that we have in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 2:4). That is not the language of honest theological disagreement. That is the language of an infiltration operation, of agents inserted into a community to surveil and undermine it. Some of the people running this enchantment knew exactly what they were doing. Others were themselves bewitched, sincere instruments of a deception they had fully internalized, which is, if anything, a more effective mode of operation than conscious bad faith. A man who believes his own lie is a far more convincing liar than one who knows he is lying.
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THE CONTEMPORARY SPELL
The spell through which the modern version of this enchantment operates is now reasonably well documented for anyone willing to look at the FARA filings, follow the money, and trace the conference invitations, curated trips, and funded media relationships. The Israeli government and its aligned organizations have spent decades and considerable treasure building a network of influence that runs directly into American evangelical institutions, because American evangelical support is a geopolitical asset of extraordinary value, and the people who understand this have been systematic about cultivating it.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented lobbying and influence operation that has been baptized in the language of prophecy and covenant and Biblical mandate, which is what makes it so extraordinarily effective inside the church, specifically. A secular lobbying operation can be evaluated on its merits. A lobbying operation that presents itself as the fulfillment of divine promise and wraps its targets in the language of blessing and cursing and end-times significance is operating on a different frequency entirely, one that bypasses the critical faculties and speaks directly to the soul’s desire to be on the right side of history and the right side of God.
The men who move through this network, hosting Israeli officials, traveling on Israeli government-connected trips, appearing at conferences organized by entities with undisclosed governmental relationships, are not necessarily conscious agents of anything. Most of them are, in the Galatian sense, the bewitched rather than the bewitchers. They have been worked on by something that understood their particular vulnerabilities, that knew which theological buttons to push and which relational loyalties to engage and which social costs to make visible, and they went down the way Peter went down in Galatians 2 when the men from Jerusalem showed up and suddenly eating with Gentiles felt like a liability.
Paul does not let Peter off the hook for that, but he does not treat him as a villain either. He treats him as a man who flinched under social pressure from people whose approval he valued, which is a different category of failure than deliberate betrayal, and which is recoverable in a way that deliberate betrayal may not be. The distinction matters enormously for how we think about the men we watch making this particular error today, and it shapes what we owe them in response.
THE SPELL AND THE SPELLCASTERS
Paul’s anger in Galatians is not evenly distributed, and the distribution is theologically instructive. The rank-and-file Galatians who got swept up in the Judaizing movement because credentialed men with Jerusalem connections told them this was the right and faithful position receive his grief, his perplexity, and his pastoral urgency. The operators who engineered the operation receive something considerably warmer. “I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves,” he writes in chapter five (5:12), which is not the language of a man who believes everyone in the room shares the same degree of culpability.
Paul knows the difference between the spell and the spellcasters, and he insists we keep that distinction alive even when the bewitched are frustrating us beyond our capacity to remain entirely charitable. The men behind the contemporary enchantment, the ones who built the infrastructure and designed the influence operations and understood what they were doing, are not the same category of problem as the respected evangelical voices who got captured by that infrastructure and now repeat its conclusions as though they had arrived at them through independent theological reflection. Both are problems. They are not the same problem, and collapsing the distinction does a disservice to everyone, including the bewitched.
This distinction also illuminates why the enchantment is so difficult to break by argument alone. The bewitched evangelical leader who defends Israeli state conduct with uncharacteristic abandon is not, in most cases, doing so because he has worked through the relevant covenant theology and reached a different exegetical conclusion. He is doing so because he is embedded in a relational, institutional, and financial web that makes the alternative conclusion functionally unthinkable, and because something has been working on him spiritually for long enough that the conclusion feels like his own. Arguing with him about the exegesis is like arguing with a man about whether his house is on fire while it’s actively burning down. The argument is not wrong. It is just insufficient for the actual situation.
THE GOSPEL PLUS PROBLEM
Here is the theological heart of all this:
“You are severed from Christ,” he writes in Galatians 5:4, “you who would be justified by the law.” The Judaizers were not preaching a different savior. They were adding to the one they had, layering Jesus plus Torah observance, Grace plus ethnic covenant, the cross plus the calendar, one on top of another, until the plus items had done what plus items always do to the sufficiency of Christ, which is to quietly displace it while maintaining the vocabulary. Paul’s argument is that the addition is not a supplement but a substitution. You cannot hold Christ as sufficient and simultaneously insist that God maintains a parallel redemptive track running through ethnic and national Israel. The structures are mutually exclusive at the root, not because Christians are hostile to Jewish people, but because the New Covenant makes exclusive claims that the old covenant apparatus cannot be retrofitted to accommodate.
Christian Zionism is the contemporary form of that addition. It is Jesus plus the Land, Jesus plus the modern State as a prophetic actor carrying covenantal significance independent of its relationship to the Son, Jesus plus a special moral framework that exempts Israeli state conduct from the ethical standards the Gospel applies everywhere else. The Plus is the poison, and it is the same poison Paul was fighting in Galatia, wearing different clothes and running on different infrastructure, but accomplishing the same spiritual damage by the same spiritual mechanism.
What gives this particular Plus its staying power inside the church is the Dispensationalist theological framework introduced into American evangelicalism largely through the Scofield Reference Bible, then through Dallas Theological Seminary, then through the prophecy conference circuit, then through the Left Behind industrial complex, over roughly the last century and a half. That framework trains its adherents to read the promises made to ethnic Israel in the Hebrew scriptures as permanently and unconditionally attached to ethnic Israel, regardless of their relationship to the Messiah, thereby giving the modern secular State of Israel a theological status that the New Testament explicitly assigns to the church. Once that framework is installed, the spell has something to work with. It does not need to introduce a foreign idea. It only needs to activate one already there, already functioning, already producing the instinct that the Jewish people and the Jewish state occupy a category that ordinary Biblical ethics knows nothing about.
WHAT PAUL DOES NOT DO
Paul does not write the Galatians off. He could have. The error was serious. The false brothers who engineered the crisis were, by his own description, operating as instruments of spiritual deception. He had every reason to declare the Galatian churches a lost cause and move on to communities more receptive to the truth. Instead he writes them the most personally anguished letter in the Pauline corpus, telling them about his own weakness when he first came to them (4:13-14), reminding them of how they had received him then as though he were an angel of God (4:14), asking whether he has become their enemy by telling them the truth now (4:16). “My little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you,” he writes (4:19), and you can hear in that sentence a love that has not been extinguished by the bewilderment, a pastoral commitment that has not been dissolved by the frustration, a hope for the bewitched that the bewitching has not yet succeeded in killing.
The Paul who wrote “who has bewitched you” had himself been one of the bewitchers. He had breathed out threats against the church. He had held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen. He had been convinced by every social pressure and institutional credential and theological tradition available to him that he was on the right side, defending the right things, and he had been catastrophically wrong. He understood the machinery of enchantment from the inside. He knew what it felt like to be absolutely certain and absolutely mistaken simultaneously, which is probably why he could look at the Galatians with sorrow instead of contempt, and why he wrote the letter at all instead of writing them off.
There is a generation of believers right now watching how men like Rod Martin and Steve Deace handle this question. Young men, mostly, working their theology out without the institutional framing that shaped their fathers, with the primary sources at their fingertips and no particular loyalty to the evangelical establishment’s longstanding arrangement with the Israeli government lobby. They are reading Galatians 3, 4, and 5 with fresh eyes. They can see Paul mapping the present earthly Jerusalem to Hagar and bondage (4:25) and the Jerusalem above to Sarah and freedom (4:26). They can watch in real time whether credentialed men will follow the text where it leads or protect the relationships and institutions that make following it expensive. They are drawing conclusions, and those conclusions will shape the next generation of the church in ways that the current generation of evangelical leadership does not yet fully appreciate.
I have watched men break free of this enchantment. It happens. It happens slowly and usually quietly and often at considerable personal cost, but it happens, because the text is still there and it will not stop saying what it says, and because events on the ground have a way of becoming impossible to square with the theological framework that was built to explain them, and because a man with a genuine conscience and a genuine commitment to the Word of God will eventually find, if he struggles with the questions long enough, that he would rather lose the table than keep lying at it.
The enchantment is old. The spell has been cast before, in different forms, against different communities, using different instruments, but the same spiritual spell. Paul named it. He fought it. He believed it could be broken, because he knew from the inside that God could break it, that the same grace that interrupted him on the road to Damascus could interrupt a man whose enchantment was proceeding in a more ordinary, institutional, and socially comfortable direction. The letter exists because Paul had not given up. I am writing this one for the same reason, and for the men who are watching, waiting, and wondering whether the people they respected will come back.
Some of them will. The Text is still there. The Spirit is still moving. And the evil eye, for all its ancient power, has never once succeeded in being stronger than the One who opened the eyes of the blind.
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