Gateway Church pastor interviews former PM Netanyahu, days before Israeli elections
The pastor of a Dallas-Fort Worth megachurch last weekend plugged an interview that he conducted with former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is seeking to regain power in Israel’s national election Tuesday.
Pastor Robert Morris of Gateway Church talked with Netanyahu over video call and discussed his recently published memoir. Gateway Church, which Morris founded in Southlake more than 20 years ago, now has campuses across the metroplex; the church’s average attendance tops 20,000 people, according to a Hartford Seminary megachurch database.
Gateway posted the conversation between Morris and Netanyahu on Oct. 22. At the beginning of the 30-minute video, Morris welcomes the former prime minister and compliments his storytelling in his memoir, which was published in mid-October by Simon & Schuster.
“Here in America, we love you, we have prayed for you for many, many years,” Morris said to Netanyahu. “I almost felt like, reading from your book, that I was reading from the Scriptures.”
He said he made that comparison because of the “miracles” contained in the memoir.
A spokesperson for Gateway Church said that Morris was not available for interviews, and instead sent an email statement that underscored that the church does not endorse political candidates or parties.
The pastor and the former prime minister talked extensively about Netanyahu’s life, verging at times into Middle Eastern politics and Netanyahu’s self-proclaimed role “to protect the Jewish people and Jewish state.”
The former prime minister referenced Palestine numerous times; he did not go into specifics of recent conflicts, including the May 2021 fighting in which Israeli forces killed well over 100 civilians in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian armed groups that killed a dozen civilians in Israel. In the past week, Amnesty International called for an investigation into Israel’s August 2022 attacks in the Gaza Strip.
Throughout the interview, there was also no real discussion of the former prime minister’s upcoming election, aside from Morris saying that the church wanted “to pray for you, pray for upcoming elections, to pray for the state of Israel, to pray for the Jewish people.” Netanyahu was Israel’s longest-serving prime minister until he was ousted last year, amid an ongoing corruption case that accuses him of bribery and fraud.
With that case still ongoing, Netanyahu is running for reelection to the prime minister seat, hoping to take back the reins.
But his interview with Morris seemed less like a political campaign moment and more like a standard book tour. As the two men talked, Morris held up a physical copy of Netanyahu’s memoir three times, pointing repeatedly to the title, “Bibi,” which is Netanyahu’s nickname.
Morris encouraged everyone listening to buy the book — an encouragement that he repeated again during his Sunday sermon, when he played a several-minute clip of the video conversation.
Morris’ support for Netanyahu, and more broadly for the state of Israel, may have been particularly on display during his conversation with the former prime minister. But it’s not at all a new concept among American Christians.
Walker Robins is a historian who specializes in evangelicals and Israel-Palestine and also a lecturer at Merrimack College in Massachusetts. He pointed to Pastor J. Frank Norris, who led the large First Baptist Church of Fort Worth from the early 1900s through the early 1950s, as an early leader of the modern Christian Zionist movement.
And in the past few decades, Netanyahu has courted American evangelical Christians. That support has been useful for the former prime minister, Robins said, and has helped him direct American public opinion to favor his party’s right-wing policies.
Recent polling from Pew Research Center shows that 68% of white evangelicals in the U.S. have favorable views of the Israeli government — which is a higher percentage than any other religious group. The same polling showed that 70% of white evangelicals in the U.S. believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, and that 86% of white evangelicals have favorable views of the Israeli people, compared to 37% who have favorable views of the Palestinian people.
“This relationship has paid off for him politically and personally for a long time now,” Robins said, pointing especially to policies enacted and supported by the Trump presidency.
The Gateway Church pastor’s likening of Netanyahu’s book to the Bible seemed unusual to David Brockman, a religion researcher who lives in the Fort Worth area and is a non-resident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
The line “seemed a little sacrilegious,” Brockman said. But as the conversation between Morris and Netanyahu continued, and as Netanyahu told story after story from his life, Brockman said he wondered if Morris may have been pointing more to the former prime minister’s storytelling capability than anything else.
Netanyahu is “telling stories. And it could be that Pastor Morris is just thinking about stories like the story of Sampson or David or Abraham ... where you do have amazing things happen to people,” Brockman said.
Thomas Marshall, a political science professor at UT Arlington, said the Netanyahu’s book-heavy interview is unlikely to impact his reelection chances, because it was geared toward an American audience as opposed to an Israeli audience. And it’s also unlikely, Marshall said, to factor into the upcoming U.S. midterm elections.
But Netanyahu’s interview with Morris could represent, in some ways, a conversation with his most likely supporters in the U.S. — or at least the most likely supporters of the state of Israel.
As Netanyahu told Morris, “Israel’s greatest allies in the world are evangelical Christians.”
Or maybe it’s just a chance for him to sell more books.
“He’s got, obviously, some political interest with the elections that are coming up next week,” Robins said. “But it does seem to me like this really is a part of a campaign to sell books to this constituency that he’s cultivated for political reasons over the last few decades.”
This story was originally published October 28, 2022 at 4:26 PM.
