Adherents argue that many biblical promises and prophecies concerning Israel do not apply to modern Jews, but rather to nations such as Britain and, by extension, the United States. Emerging in the 19th century, the doctrine provided a theological justification for British and American imperialism, portraying global dominance as divinely ordained and reinforcing racial and cultural narratives of Anglo-Protestant superiority.
Anglo-Israelism gained significant traction in Britain and eventually spread to the United States, where it fractured into multiple ideological strands. One branch took an explicitly antisemitic turn, claiming that Jews were impostors and that Anglo-Saxons were the true Israelites. This reinterpretation helped give rise to the Christian Identity movement, which fused Anglo-Israelite theology with white supremacist ideology, reframing Christianity as an ethnonationalist covenant. Paradoxically, the same mythos also informed a kind of philo-Jewish mimicry within segments of the Christian Right, where some Evangelicals adopted Jewish imagery, rituals, and aesthetics.
A striking inversion of the doctrine appeared in the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which emerged among African Americans and argued that Black people—not whites—were the true descendants of biblical Israel. This reappropriation reversed the racial logic of the original belief and reimagined the covenantal promise as a source of historical empowerment and liberation.
Other variants of Anglo-Israelism took a more openly philo-Semitic stance, portraying Jews and Anglo-Saxons as spiritual cousins. This interpretation laid the groundwork for British Christian Zionism, later institutionalized through the Balfour Declaration, in which Britain assumed the role of protector of the Zionist state. That protective logic would eventually migrate to the American Christian Right, where it evolved into the belief that the U.S. has a divine obligation to defend Israel—a theology often infused with apocalyptic expectations that the return of Jews to the Holy Land will trigger the End Times.
