Older Than the Word Zionism

Christian Zionism names Christian theological and political support for Jewish return to the Land of Israel, a current that historians trace back before the Jewish Zionist movement itself and before the word Zionism existed, to English Protestant restorationism from the seventeenth century onward, which read biblical prophecy as anticipating a future Jewish return to the land as part of God's unfolding plan for history.

Robert O. Smith's historical study of the movement's roots documents this restorationist current running through English and later American Protestant biblical interpretation for two centuries before Herzl's political organizing began, meaning Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism, while later intersecting and at times cooperating politically, have historically distinct origins and were not initially the same movement responding to the same immediate causes. The current most associated with contemporary Christian Zionism, dispensationalist premillennialism, developed in the nineteenth century through the biblical interpretation of John Nelson Darby and was popularized in the United States particularly through the Scofield Reference Bible, a framework that reads a future, national Jewish return to the land as a specific and necessary stage within its larger scheme of biblical prophecy and the end of history.