Following the money

Why this matters

ChurchDivest’s premise is that faith communities are moral actors who are — knowingly or not — materially invested in a system of dispossession, and that withdrawing that investment is both a moral act and a meaningful lever. To make that case credibly, we have to answer a factual question first: does the American church actually fund Israel in ways large enough that divestment would matter?

The answer is yes — and the shape of the funding shows exactly where. What follows names the channels, sizes each one, names the major actors, and shows where divestment pressure bites. This is not finger-pointing at any one congregation; it is an account of a system the wider church has been quietly woven into — and a map of where conscience can act.

The engine: Christian Zionism

The financial flows don’t come from American Christianity as a whole. They come from a specific theological current — Christian Zionism^{[31, 32]} — concentrated in white evangelical, non-denominational, Baptist, Pentecostal, and “Bible church” communities. The defining belief is that the modern State of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and that Christians are commanded to “bless” Israel materially. The polling shows how deep this runs — and where it is beginning to shift:

• 82% of white evangelicals told Pew that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God — more than double the 40% of American Jews who say the same.^[34]
• Roughly seven in ten white evangelical Protestants held a favorable view of Israel in Pew’s 2025 survey, and a 2022 Pew survey found them more favorable toward the Israeli government than any other Christian group.^{[13, 15]} By 2026, amid the Gaza war, evangelical favorability had slipped to 65%, tracking a broad national decline.^[14]
• A 2017 LifeWay Research study found 76% of evangelicals believe Christians should support the Jewish people’s right to live in sovereign Israel, and 80% agreed Israel’s 1948 rebirth was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy — with 63% saying they support Israel because “God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people.”^[16] (That study was sponsored by Chosen People Ministries and author Joel C. Rosenberg — disclosed here for transparency.)
• A 2021 Grey Matter Research / Infinity Concepts study found 51% of evangelicals believe Jews are still God’s chosen people, but only 29% rate support for Israel as a very high charitable priority — and committed “Israel loyalists” are just 20%.^[17]

Support is broad but shallow, with a deep committed core — and that core is generationally fragile. A 2021 study by researchers at UNC Pembroke and Boston University found only 33.6% of young evangelicals (18–29) sided with Israel, down from 69% in 2018.^[32] LifeWay similarly found support among 18–34-year-olds (58%) well below the 65-and-older cohort (77%).^[16] The funding base is aging.

The nine channels

We rank these by a combination of dollar volume and strategic exposure — how quickly an organized church response would be felt.

1. Holy Land tourism and pilgrimage

This is the biggest and most concrete way ordinary churchgoers move money into Israel’s economy. Israel hosted a record ~4.55 million arrivals in 2019(4.9  million entries, by the Central Bureau of Statistics count), and Christians were 61% of tourists the year before, per the Tourism Ministry.^{[11, 12, 41]} The model is church-organized: tour operators market directly to congregations, and the pastor-led trip is a deliberate recruitment funnel — in December 2025, Israel’s government paid to fly more than 1,000 U.S. pastors and Christian influencers to Jerusalem to be trained as “unofficial ambassadors” for Israel back home. The pastor returns as an advocate and brings the congregation next time.^{[10, 39]}

Because tourism is the single biggest number in this story — and Christians are the majority of that pipeline — a coordinated “don’t tour while there’s a genocide” witness is the most accessible, and most immediately felt, ask a congregation can take up.

2. The “bridge” and “Friends of” organizations

These nonprofits exist to convert evangelical conviction into transfers to Israel, and one player is in a class by itself. IFCJ raised $271 million in 2023 (up from $228M in 2022 and $158M in 2020), most of it from evangelical donors, and has raised more than $1.5 billion since 1983 — much of it deployed inside Israel.^{[3, 4, 5, 6]} Beyond it, hundreds of smaller “American Friends of …” charities channel money to specific hospitals, universities, and institutions; one academic study counted 349 such funders moving $752 million in a single year — a machine the church’s own “Friends of” giving plugs directly into.^[1]

3. Direct aid, relief, and military-adjacent giving

This channel spikes during war. Christians United for Israel (CUFI), led by Pastor John Hagee, claims 10+ million members and sent more than $3 millionto Israeli first responders, healthcare workers, and survivors in the months after October 7, 2023.^{[2, 7]} The Joshua Fund collected $685,000+ in the same weeks^[8]; Send Relief, the Southern Baptist Convention’s relief arm, funded $700,000+ in Israel-area aid — tying America’s largest Protestant denomination directly into the flow.^{[8, 9]} Christianity Today’s own summary that month: Christians gave “at record levels,” and around half of U.S. evangelicals consider support for Israel an important charitable priority.^[8]

Friends of the Israel Defense Forces is not a Christian organization — it describes itself as the official U.S. charity for the Israeli military, a claim of exclusivity that 2025 reporting found the IDF would not confirm. But Christian Zionist money flows into it: IFCJ’s founder gave FIDF $6 million in 2016, and Hagee has headlined its events. FIDF reported $281.96 million in 2023 revenue and raised $50 million+in the weeks after October 7; a single 2018 Beverly Hills gala brought in a record $60 million. FIDF’s donor base reaches far beyond the church — which makes the Christian money inside it a choice, not an accident.^{[21, 22]}

4. Settlement and “frontier” funding

This is where Christian money is most directly implicated in dispossession, and where marginal dollars matter most. An analysis of evangelical giving (2008–2016), built on Haaretz’s reporting, identified 11 organizations moving an estimated $50–65 million toward settlement-linked causes^{[1, 19]}; more broadly, a Pulitzer Center–backed Haaretz investigation found U.S. donors sent settlements $220 million+ in tax-exempt funds over five years.^[35]HaYovel, a Tennessee-based group, recruits evangelical volunteers to labor on West Bank settlement farms and, after October 7, launched a fund for “defense equipment” — raising ~$3.7 milliontoward a $29  million goal as of May 2024.^{[2, 20]} The legal hook: the tax breaks on these donations remain, as the New York Times investigation put it, “largely unchallenged, and unexamined by the American government” — meaning the U.S. Treasury effectively subsidizes them.^[18]

5. Immigration (aliyah) funding

IFCJ’s flagship “On Wings of Eagles” program funds Jewish immigration to Israel — a program that has brought hundreds of thousands of Jews to Israel since its first flights in 1992; more than 750,000, by IFCJ’s own count.^{[6, 40]}

6. Israel Bonds and financial instruments

Israel Bonds — debt issued by the State of Israel — can be bought by individuals, churches, and even municipal and pension funds. When 32 pastors in Northwest Central Ohio publicly pledged to buy them, it was part of a wave that added $15.6 million in new county investments in a single month — atop the State of Ohio’s $220 million in Israel-bond holdings.^{[23, 24]} Unlike a donation, a bond purchase is a direct loan to the Israeli treasury — which makes “Break the Bonds”-style divestment directly applicable to congregational and denominational endowments.

7. Land and afforestation

JNF-USA has raised American money to plant 250 million trees in Israel since 1901, marketed as memorial gifts.^[25] Scholars and journalists document that this afforestation has been used to displace Bedouin communities and overwrite destroyed Palestinian villages — making the cheerful “plant a tree in Israel” church-bulletin appeal a direct contribution to land control.^[26]

8. Political legitimacy and lobbying

This isn’t a “donation” channel, but it may be where church support has the highest return for Israel. CUFI functions as a political machine — “Nights to Honor Israel,” congressional lobbying, a self-described 10-million-name list — and denominational bodies have put themselves on record in support of Israel as well.^{[7, 27, 28]} Together they help sustain the domestic coalition that protects roughly $3.8 billion a year in U.S. military aid.^[36] The clearest sign of how much Israel values this: facing softening young-evangelical support, the Israeli government has paid for U.S. Christian outreach — a documented contract of up to $4.1 million targeting Christians in the western U.S., billed by its contractor as the “largest Christian Church Geofencing Campaign in U.S. history,” inside a global public-diplomacy budget of roughly $150 million that Israel’s cabinet has voted to grow to as much as $630–730 million for 2026.^{[29, 30]}

9. In-kind labor and consumer purchasing

Groups like HaYovel, the Philos Project, and CFOIC bring hundredsof American volunteers annually to work farms in Israel and the West Bank settlements — especially after October 7, when Palestinian workers were barred and foreign farmworkers fled. That is an unpriced economic subsidy.^{[2, 9]} Christian Zionist consumers also buy Israeli-made goods, including settlement wines. No one has rigorously tallied that purchasing — but it is the one channel that runs through every believer’s wallet, and the place for the ordinary believer to “check the label.”

Where the leverage lives

Four dynamics turn these channels into leverage a congregation can actually pull:

• Tourism is the big number.The ~$3 billion-a-year Christian-tourism estimate makes the pilgrim economy the single biggest lever — and Christians are the majority of that pipeline.
• Marginal dollars at the frontier punch above their weight. A few million for settlement “security” buys real facts on the ground where the international community has drawn its brightest red line.
• The aid is downstream of the constituency.The $3.8 billion survives because a mobilized Christian voting bloc protects it — which is why Israel pays to defend that support.
• Concentration is leverage. Because the money comes from a committed minority and flows through a few named channels, conscience has clear, finite places to act.

The church’s support is the support most within reach of conscience — and its channels are concrete enough to actually withdraw from.