Tucker Carlson has called Christian Zionism “heresy.” He said he “hates Christian Zionists more than anybody” and accused them of suffering from a “brain virus” — remarks he made during a friendly October 2025 interview with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. More recently, on March 13, 2026, Carrie Prejean Boller — a former beauty queen turned professional Israel critic — repeated the claim to Tucker directly, calling Christian Zionists “heretics.”.

So is the charge true? Are Christian Zionists heretics?

What Christian Zionism Actually Is

First, a definition. Zionism is simply the belief that Jews have a right to live in their ancestral homeland. Christian Zionism builds on that: it holds that the return of Jewish sovereignty to Israel — which began in 1948 — represents the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That prophecy—that Jews will one day repossess the Land of Israel—is the most repeated promise in the Bible: 

• Ezekiel 36:24 — “For I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you to your land.”
• Isaiah 11:12 — “He will raise a banner for the nations and gather the exiles of Israel; He will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth.”
• Jeremiah 31:10 — “He who scattered Israel will gather them and will watch over his flock like a shepherd.”
• Deuteronomy 30:3–5 — “Then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where He scattered you… He will bring you to the land that belonged to your ancestors, and you will take possession of it.”

The question isn’t whether the prophecy exists. It plainly does. The question is whether it has been fulfilled, and what that means for Christian theology.

The Real Theological Dispute: Supersessionism

To understand why Tucker and Boller call Christian Zionism heresy, you need to understand what it replaced.

Since at least the 4th century — specifically since the enormously influential theologian Augustine of Hippo — the dominant Christian teaching on the Jewish people has been supersessionism, also called replacement theology. The doctrine holds that the Church replaced Israel in God’s covenant, that the Jewish people forfeited their special relationship with God by rejecting Jesus, and — critically — that Jews were destined to remain scattered and powerless in exile forever, as a kind of living testimony to the consequences of that rejection.

Augustine himself articulated this through the analogy of Cain: just as Cain killed his brother and was condemned to wander the earth, so too the Jewish people were destined for perpetual exile. This framework became the bedrock of Catholic theology and deeply influenced Protestant traditions as well.

It was so entrenched that Martin Luther confidently mocked the very idea that Jews would ever return to their land. He said that if Jews ever did repossess Israel, Christians would become Jews themselves. It was, to him, an impossibility so absurd it didn’t need to be taken seriously.

Then 1948 Happened

The theology ran into a hard wall of reality when, in 1948, after nearly two thousand years of exile, the Jewish people re-established sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. Jews returned from across the globe — from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the former Soviet Union, and beyond — fulfilling, in extraordinarily literal terms, the very prophecies that supersessionist theology had declared null and void.

As Rabbi Pesach Wolicki of Israel365 has noted, this creates a serious problem for anyone committed to the Augustinian framework. No other ancient nation that was exiled ever returned to reconstitute itself as a civilization in its original homeland. Many were scattered by conquering empires and simply ceased to exist as distinct peoples. The Jewish people are the singular exception — and the singular people for whom God explicitly said it would happen.

If Augustine were alive today, looking at a prosperous, sovereign Israel populated by Jews gathered from the four corners of the earth, he could not honestly make the same argument he made in the 4th century. The empirical facts have moved.

Christian Zionists Updated Their Theology

So what did Christian Zionists do? They looked at the historical evidence and adjusted their theology accordingly. They acknowledged that replacement theology’s central empirical claim — that the Jews would never return — had turned out to be wrong. They went back to the biblical text, found explicit prophecies of exactly what had occurred, and concluded that those prophecies had been fulfilled.

That is intellectual honesty, not heresy. 

The people calling it heresy are largely those still committed to supersessionism — a framework that now requires them to explain away one of the most historically remarkable events of the modern era. Their solution is not to embrace the prophecy but to claim that today’s Jews aren’t actually the Jews of the Bible.

The “Not Real Jews” Claim: Verdict — FALSE

This is where the argument made by Tucker Carlson, Carrie Prejean Boller, Candace Owens, and others in their orbit becomes historically indefensible.

Their position is that modern Jewish people have no legitimate connection to the ancient Israelites. They therefore have no claim to the land, and Zionism is illegitimate.

This claim is not supported by any credible historian. Jews possess an unbroken documentary chain: communal records, rabbinic literature, and writings from Jewish leaders spanning every generation from the Giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai to the present day. The historical continuity of Jewish identity is about as well-documented as any claim in ancient history.

Serious historians — including archaeologists, geneticists, and scholars of antiquity across the ideological spectrum — do not dispute the ancestral connection of contemporary Jewish people to the ancient land of Israel. The “not real Jews” argument is an ahistorical claim with no serious scholarly basis, one that happens to be extremely useful to those who want to delegitimize Israel’s existence.

Bottom Line

What Tucker and Boller are really attacking is the one theological tradition that took the historical record seriously, updated its assumptions accordingly, and arrived at a conclusion that inconveniences their singular obsession with delegitimizing Israel. Christian Zionists embrace Zionism because the evidence demands it. Tucker and Boller won’t — because for them, this was never about truth in the first place.

Sources

Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson, Jerusalem Post, Erin Molan, Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, Josephus, Yahadut, Pinchas Winston, Combined Jewish Philanthropies