President-elect Donald Trump named Mike Huckabee as his choice to be the United States ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, of course, was a Southern Baptist minister before getting involved in rightwing media and politics. His faith has been a central feature of his political career and Israel a central feature of that faith.
Huckabee has led dozens of Holy Land tours since the 1980s (more than 100, by his count) and for decades has been an outspoken Christian Zionist, preaching that the Land of Israel was given by God to the Jewish people.
Such views have not been uncommon among Huckabee’s fellow Southern Baptists. Prominent Southern Baptists like W.A. Criswell and Ed McAteer played leading roles in organizing American Christian Zionism as a movement. The Southern Baptist Convention repeatedly has passed pro-Israel resolutions in recent decades.
During Trump’s first administration, Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas was tapped to lead a prayer at the opening of the U.S. Embassy at Jerusalem in 2018. When people think of Southern Baptists and Israel, they quite reasonably think of Christian Zionism.
History of SBC relations with Israel
However, Christian Zionism has not always had such a hold on Southern Baptists. And looking into the history of the SBC’s connections to Israel/Palestine reveals a perhaps surprising truth: that the SBC’s oldest, most direct ties to the Holy Land were established by a Palestinian Arab.
His name was Shukri Mosa. He had been born to a Greek Catholic family in Safed and made a living working for the postal service in Ottoman Palestine. In 1908, though, he came to the United States, hoping to find riches he could take back to his wife, Munira, and their children. Instead, he found influential Southern Baptists George Truett and L.R. Scarborough while peddling Holy Land souvenirs in Texas. The two guided Mosa to accept baptism as a Baptist. He soon resolved on building a mission in his home country.
Mosa returned to Ottoman Palestine in 1910. Within months, he guided Munira, who was herself from a prominent Arab Protestant family, and their nephew, Louis Hanna, to conversion. The next year, he established a mission at Nazareth — “the Lord’s home city,” as his letterhead would proclaim — and sent Hanna to train under Scarborough at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas (the same seminary Mike Huckabee would attend decades later).