The “Christianity without Zionism: Mapping and Combating Christian Zionism in Asia and Africa” conference convened 66 theologians, church leaders, and activists from 34 countries in Istanbul to address the growing influence of Christian Zionism across the Global South. The conference took place 1 – 6 September 2026. Hosted by Dar al-Kalima University and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in partnership with the World Communion of Reformed Churches, the Council for World Mission, the All Africa Conference of Churches, and the World Student Christian Federation.
No Gentle Ideology
Rev. Philip Vinod Peacock, general secretary of the WCRC, opened the conference with a theological critique that challenged the foundations of Christian Zionism. Peacock defined Zionism, “Zionism fuses one land, one blood, one faith, and the power of the state into a single, totalising claim. Christian Zionism makes that claim theological. Scripture becomes a title deed. Election becomes ethnic privilege. Land becomes possession. And the divine becomes the guarantor of a political project.”
Peacock said, “You cannot ask an ideology shaped like this one to be gentle. It was not built for gentleness. The logical conclusion of Zionism, good or bad, will not be gentle but will be genocide.” He drew a parallel with his own Indian context, observing how the same grammar moves through Hindutva—”one land, one people, one civilisation.” He challenged the irony of Christians who oppose Hindu nationalism in India while supporting Christian nationalism in the United States or Jewish exclusivism in Israel. “We recognise ethnonationalism with remarkable ease when we are its victims,” Peacock observed. “Decolonisation requires us to recognise it when our theology makes us its beneficiaries.”
The Cost of Comfort
Muna Nassar, WCRC executive secretary for mission and advocacy, grounded her presentation in the prophetic witness of James Baldwin. She warned that “comfort and truth are usually in competition, and that institutions will choose comfort unless something forces the choice into the open.”
Nassar named what the conference had documented, Christian Zionism is not a slower echo of the Global North pattern arriving decades later in Asia and Africa. She said, “It is a targeted, current expansion.” Nassar noted that researchers call this the passive form, not organised lobbying, but a steady, material, path-dependent pull that disengages people from solidarity with Palestinians long before any doctrine is argued.
Nassar named the reality, “The Global South is not one thing. A history of colonisation does not automatically produce an anti-colonial position in the present.” She noted that formerly colonised nations and churches are aligning themselves with “the very logic that colonised them, here applied to Palestinians.”
This recognition did not lead to despair but to renewed commitment. “When we describe ourselves as natural allies of Palestine because of where we come from, that has to be a claim we keep making the case for and organising around—not a status we assume we already hold.”
The Way Forward
The conference concluded by adopting a set of commitments that reflected the urgency of Peacock’s theological analysis and Nassar’s vision. Participants used statements from the Korean Student Christian Federation as a sentence to carry home, “Peace is not a declaration. Peace is a discipline. Solidarity is not a sentiment. Solidarity is a practice.”
The communique from the event stated, “A call on churches to confront the misuse of Christian theology to justify militarism, occupation, dispossession, and national exceptionalism, and to pursue shared security where no people’s safety and flourishing depend on another’s fear, subjugation, or suffering.”
The conference closed with a vision of the Kingdom not as a territory to be possessed but as a divine banquet, following the scripture from Micah 4:4: “They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.”
