Inside a Navy Yard WeWork on M Street, Todd Deatherage spends his days trying to bring peace to the Middle East. That’s his home base when he’s not jetting off to the Holy Land, where he has made more than 50 trips over the last decade. The former Capitol Hill and George W. Bush State Department staffer is the co-founder of Telos Group, a D.C.-based nonprofit trying to change how a new generation of American leaders and evangelicals—historically a key pro-Israel bloc based on their reading of the Bible—see the geopolitical quagmire.

All told, Deatherage and a team of seven people have led more than 1,500 influential American leaders, millennial evangelicals and megachurch attendees on tours of both sides of the Green Line about six times a year since 2009. Telos declined to share itineraries of a recent trip, citing its proprietary nature and out of deference to the privacy of those Israelis and Palestinians with whom they meet. But the tour groups meet with people around sites on both sides of the conflict, including Jews, Christians, Muslims, settlers, refugees, security experts, business leaders and activists. They also meet with parents who have lost children to the conflict. In turn, those who have taken Telos trips stateside to reshape attitudes back home, including those of tens of thousands of fellow parishioners in some of the nation’s largest megachurches such as Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago, with its 20,000 attendees.

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Telos officials have met with mid-level staffers in Trump’s State Department, and progressive evangelical policy officials such at Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy adviser, when he was at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. The group made inroads in through the Office of Public Liaison in the Obama administration, getting a briefing on their peace initiative.

Deatherage, a Republican Christian reared in the Bible Belt with an apocalyptic understanding of the conflict, partners with Greg Khalil, a lawyer of Palestinian descent born in San Diego who helped Palestinian leaders negotiate with Israel in the West Bank throughout the mid-2000s. Fresh out of the George W. Bush State Department, Deatherage and Khalil founded Telos in 2009. They have a $1.3 million budget, of which 58 percent comes from their travel program, 25 percent comes from foundations, 14 percent comes from individual donors and five percent comes from churches. “Pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, pro-Peace” is how the improbable duo describe their approach — one that has earned Telos its fair amount of criticism from pro-Israel groups and conservative Christian Zionists who accuse them of being anti-Israel. But their tactics have also earned them a measure of grudging respect on the right. “This is not your parents’ anti-Israel group,” David Brog, the former director of Christians United for Israel, once told Glenn Beck. “These guys are savvy, these guys are smart.”

Last summer, after two years of correspondence and off-the-record phone calls, I finally convinced Deatherage, 53, to sit for an interview. He feared press exposure would result in a backlash; after then-Buzzfeed journalist McKay Coppins published an article about the group in 2014, bloggers and Glenn Beck had hammered them for days. “We’re not ashamed of what we’re doing, but we know how sensitive this issue is, and so we’re trying to create more understanding without creating more polarization,” Deatherage told me, explaining his reluctance to talk. “One of the things were trying to do at Telos is shed more light with less heat.”

Evangelicals—Bible-believing, church-attending protestant Christians who make up 25.4 percent of the electorate, according to Pew Research—have taken a special interest in the conflict for decades. But, long before a debate raged in Washington over the influence of groups such as American Israel Public Affairs Committee, younger evangelicals had begun questioning their community’s historically one-dimensional view of the conflict.

It’s perhaps best personified by the case of father-and-son Christian magazine publishers Steve and Cameron Strang. Steve, the father who has met personally with Trump, publishes Charisma magazine, a publication read by Pentecostal and charismatic Christians in churches that are so pro-Israel that their stages are often marked with the flag of Israel alongside the Christian flag. Cameron, the more progressive son who publishes the magazine Relevant, ran a cover story about his Telos trip in 2014. “It was a pretty significant game-changing decision,” Michael Wear, who served in Obama’s White House and directed faith outreach for his 2012 campaign, said of Cameron’s article. “It’s the perfect picture of the transformation that’s happening among younger evangelicals.”

The numbers reinforce Wear’s point. Among evangelicals over 65, 76 percent have positive views of Israel, according to a December 2017 poll by Lifeway Research, a polling firm staffed by evangelicals and focused on providing data to church leaders. Yet among evangelicals 18 to 34, that portion declines to 58 percent. The poll didn’t explore why, but it did find evangelical Christians who attend services one to three times a month are more likely to agree that “Israel is the historic Jewish homeland” (13 percent) than those whose attendance is more infrequent (8 percent).

“We sort of imported this conflict into our own culture, and into our churches, into our own politics,” Deatherage told me, as two WeWorkers played table tennis nearby. “We’ve created these ways of engaging it that are very one sided—they’re zero sum. So if I’m pro-Israeli, I’m by default anti-Palestinian. If I’m pro-Palestinian I’m, by default, anti-Israeli. That’s the kind of space for engaging it right now. So we’ve come around and suggested that maybe there’s a third way.” He’s also trying to reach a pro-Palestine constituency that demonizes Israel. He argues that a good future for Israelis requires a good future for the Palestinians.

The conflict, he says, has become a domestic issue in American politics, especially among evangelicals raised with a pro-Israel narrative. “It’s the software that’s pre-loaded into us in certain segments of the evangelical church that we just kinda grow up thinking that whatever happened in the Middle East in contemporary affairs is definitely God working something out there,” Deatherage said. “And that we gotta bless Israel. We gotta stand with Israel. We gotta be with Israel because they’re God’s people, and God’s project, right?”

A proxy war over how this demographic approaches the Middle East is playing out between various groups. Passages, a similar program to Telos with a more pro-Israel sensibility, is backed by the Green family, the Hobby Lobby and Museum of the Bible funders, as well as and Republican billionaire Paul Singer. “There is a larger ongoing question about how do we as Christians relate to these Jews,” said Robert Nicholson, executive director of The Philos Project and co-publisher of Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy. “Christians are kind of forced to deal with this question on various levels: theologically, policy-wise. A lot of the things we took for granted have changed. It’s not 1967 anymore. We have to figure out what place Israel has in the Middle East. (In its frequently asked questions, Passages officials address whether they offer a “fair and balanced” approach to the conflict: “Passages believes Israel is a force for good in the region and in the world,” it reads. “That being said, we do not claim that Israel is perfect.”)

Christians United For Israel, the John Hagee-backed Zionist organization, isn’t a fan of Telos’ work. Shari Dollinger, CUFI’s co-executive director, told me in an email that CUFI does “not comment on the efforts of small anti-Israel groups,” though she nevertheless sent along several blog posts that accused Telos of promoting “Palestinian Propaganda.” CUFI has nearly seven times the budget of Telos, about $7 million in 2014, according to Forward, the Jewish media outlet. CUFI declined to confirm that amount.

When the White House invited evangelicals to a briefing on their Middle East peace initiative Thursday with U.S. envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt, Telos wasn’t there; Hagee was an invited guest along with Joel C. Rosenberg, the dual-U.S.-Israeli citizen and evangelical who funded the The LifeWay poll.

So if it’s a proxy war, it’s an asymmetric one. Making matters more difficult, Telos, with a comparatively paltry million-dollar budget, receives some of its funding from the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations. “In this town, nothing else that I say can be heard once that’s part of the story,” Deatherage told me, alluding to how Soros has been portrayed as a liberal villain on the right. “We’re not bought and owned by anyone.” Later, when I explained this fact would be in the story, he added: “We’re building a community of Americans across a number of our divides, left-right, religious-secular, and others, and we welcome support from across that spectrum.”

Still, Telos isn’t looking for transformation so much as incremental change. Even if evangelicals’ support for Israel wanes just a little, Wear says, it could eventually reshape America’s approach to the conflict. “If even an additional 10 percent of the evangelical community becomes more nuanced on these issues, that drastically changes the political calculations for how beholden politicians feel to holding a certain line because their constituency will be giving them more flexibility,” Wear said.

So, as evangelicals assess how to engage the region in a uniquely charged moment, Deatherage is trying to reframe the debate. “I came at this from a position of trying to figure out what it really meant to be pro-Israel because what I was seeing in my work, and in my experiences, and my relationships with Israelis and Palestinians was that what gets described as pro-Israel, actually is often not Israel’s best interest because to me, the only way to truly be in support of Israel is to be supportive of their any effort to end the conflict with Palestinians,” Deatherage said. “And the only way to be pro-Palestinian is to help them find a way for self-determination and freedom, and that they can take what they want in relation to Israel’s interest. It can’t be one over the other.”

***

Pro-Israel evangelicals are enjoying outsized influence in the Trump administration. In July 2017, Vice President Mike Pence became the first sitting vice president to address CUFI, founded in 2006 by Hagee, whose apocalyptic rhetoric kept other administrations at a distance. Hagee often uses vivid charts at his Cornerstone Church in San Antonio to show how events in the Middle East—and around the world—were foretold in the Bible. Hagee and like-minded Christian conservatives point to Genesis 12:3, in which God tells Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.” (In 2008, John McCain refused Hagee’s backing when audio surfaced of a sermon in which Hagee claimed God used Hitler and the Holocaust to get the Jews to move back to Israel.)

In his speech to CUFI, Pence cast himself as a kindred spirit. “To look at Israel is to see that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob keeps his promises,” he said. “Like all of you, my passion for Israel springs from my Christian faith.”

Last year, when the Trump administration moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — fulfilling a promise several American presidents had failed to keep for fear of how the Arab world might react — Hagee was on hand as an invited guest of the White House. “Can we all shout ‘Hallelujah?’” Hagee said at the end of a benediction at the opening of the embassy. “Amen.”

Pence’s cultivation of evangelicals like Hagee springs not just from raw political calculation, but also a shared view that Israel’s rise is somehow God’s plan. In the LifeWay survey, the most recent of its kind, 80 percent of evangelicals said that “the rebirth of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.”

AIPAC declined an interview for this story, directing me to CUFI. But AIPAC has made outreach to Christians a priority of its advocacy work, a reflection of the growing role evangelicals are playing in shaping the U.S. approach to Israel. According to the group’s website, “AIPAC seeks to identify pro-Israel Christian leaders in districts with large evangelical populations, encourage their involvement in pro-Israel advocacy among their communities.”

That has proved a fertile ground: A March 2013 Pew survey found that 72 percent of white evangelicals supported Israel in the conflict, with only 4 percent siding with Palestinians. And a majority of white evangelicals—82 percent—say God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, while only 40 percent of American Jews share that view, according to Pew.

When it comes to resolving the Middle Eastern conflict, the LifeWay poll found a schism: 23 percent of evangelicals suggest that Israel “should sign a treaty allowing Palestinians to have a sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza,” while 31 percent disagree and 46 percent are unsure. There’s a generational divide, too, on caring for Palestinians. Two-thirds of younger evangelicals says Christians have a responsibility to do more. But only 54 percent of those 65 and older agree.

In my reporting, I found disagreement on what these numbers mean. “Millennials don’t really seem as interested in Zionism,” said Ken Schenck, dean of the school of theology & ministry at the evangelical Indiana Wesleyan University. “Millennials for the most part don’t have as strong an investment in the nation of Israel as their parents’ generation did.” But Johnnie Moore, a 35-year-old California pastor close to the White House and a former spokesman for an evangelical council during Trump’s campaign, held a different view. “I don’t buy the opinion that young evangelicals will in the end be less friendly with Israel than the previous generation,” Moore said. “Young evangelicals don’t want to pick sides on anything — Republican or Democrat, whatever the social policy is, they kind of want it all. When it comes to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, I don’t think that they are against Israel, I just think they don’t want to have to pick.”

Whatever the explanation, there’s no question a generational shift is underway. The LifeWay poll found that 59 percent of Christians think they “should do more to love and care for Palestinian people.” Among millennials 18-34, 66 percent agree with that sentiment; among those 50 to 64, that declines to 57 percent, and among the 65 and older demographic, it drops to 54 percent.

Changing interpretations of scripture could be playing a role in the shift. Younger Christians tend to allow verses in the New Testament to guide their understanding of engaging with the conflict, such as Matthew 5:9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,” Jesus says in the Beatitudes. “Where a lot of previous evangelical pro-Israel support emanated from a Left Behind, end-times theology kind of lens, younger Evangelicals are looking through a theological lens of justice,” Wear said. “Even predominately pro-Israel younger evangelicals will talk about it through a pro-justice lens — not a God’s-chosen-people lens that was popular for a certain time.”

Moore told me the shift is because the humanitarian narrative advanced by Palestinians resonates with today’s young people more than Israel’s narrative of the plucky Jewish state surrounded by enemies — a relic of the days when Arab countries regularly menaced the relatively new country just 9.3 miles wide at its narrowest point. “On pure numbers and pure data, Israel has the argument, they just haven’t done a good job of presenting that argument outside of a security narrative,” he said.

Deatherage worries about some Christians who have “absolute certainty about being able to clearly see God’s will in current events coupled with the fatalism or even enthusiasm about war and violence in the Middle East,” he told me. “And years later when I revisited the issue I began to wonder what would it look like to take seriously what Jesus said about ‘blessed are the peacemakers.”

***

Deatherage grew up hearing the old narrative about Israel in Fifty-Six, Ark., population 177. His childhood was filled with Baptist sermons and summer tent revival meetings. In 1975, the summer before his 10th birthday, he sat on a wooden pew in the Shady Grove Baptist Church. There, he heard his first sermon about the last days from a deputy sheriff who moonlighted as a preacher. The sheriff-preacher traced recent history in the Middle East, from the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 through the Six-Day War 1967. God did something important in history every 2,000 years, he told the congregation, and Jesus would return in 2000. Deatherage remembers leaving “convinced” and “terrified.” A few years later, he heard a sermon about the end times from Dr. W.O. Vaught, pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock and a spiritual mentor to Bill Clinton, who as governor could sometimes be seen singing in the choir behind Vaught on the local Channel 4.

In the sermon, Vaught outlined dispensationalism, a theological theory of how history unfolds in “dispensations” or ages, leading up to the rapture of all Christians, the dispensationalist precept that God will rescue Christians from the world before wreaking havoc on an unrepentant world. In this theological theory, Israel as a nation-state fulfills biblical prophecy that Jews would return to their homeland, paving the way for Jesus’ second coming.

Advanced by the 19th Century preacher John Nelson Darby, dispensationalism was absent from the first 1800 years of Christian thought—and it’s come roaring back in recent decades as Hagee and his acolytes have gained more influence. This, despite the fact that it’s no longer taught in almost any mainstream seminary across the U.S. Deatherage told me he believes that the “residue” of dispensationalism still influences American foreign policy today.

Dispensationalism became fashionable again in some circles in the 1970s and again in the 2000s, thanks initially to books like Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth,” which predicted the end of the world sometime in the 1980s, and the bestselling “Left Behind” series, which imagined that the leader of a global government would become the antichrist and was resurrected by Satan from a gunshot wound before creating a One World Unity Army that battled with Jesus Christ in the valley of Armageddon. The theology was embraced by Christian fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and the books themselves influenced tens of millions: “The Late Great Planet Earth” was a bestseller in the 1970s, and the Left Behind series churned sold 80 million copies.

Transfixed, Deatherage ordered Vaught’s cassette tapes. He did the math and realized he had until he was 35 until the end of the world. “As a 10-year-old I’m thinking these questions like, ‘What should I do with my life? It’s all about to end.” Recently, reflecting on how that line of thinking shaped his early beliefs and those of other evangelicals who subscribed to this theology, he would write in a book manuscript he’s working on: “If the world was going to end in violent destruction in my lifetime; if an unprecedented global war, centered in the Middle East, was not only inevitable and necessary but a welcome catalyst for the return of Jesus; if history was spiraling ever downward until its ultimate nadir with no hope of redemption until the bloody victory at Armageddon—if all these things were true, then what did either the present or even the future really matter. Why bother with protecting the environment or stewardship of resources; why engage in Middle East peacemaking; why dedicate myself to anything constructive or redemptive in a world destined to burn (and soon)?”

But Deatherage eventually did go to college. He graduated from the University of Arkansas and worked as a teacher until he got into politics. But he didn’t think much about Israeli-Palestinian relations until he began working for Tim Hutchinson, who was elected to Congress from in 1992, and later to the Senate in 1996.

For Deatherage, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict functioned more like a domestic political issue. “We had constituents who cared deeply about this issue and, unlike most foreign policy challenges, a candidate for the U.S. Congress was expected to take a position on it,” he says. “Usually that looked like this: Israel is our friend, the only democracy in the Middle East, and lives in amidst a sea of Muslim hostility. The Palestinians are the friends of Saddam Hussein, they reject Israel’s right to exist, and are prone to terrorism and violence.”

In 2002, Hutchinson lost re-election. The following March, Deatherage joined the Bush State Department under then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. Serving in the Office of International Religious Freedom in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, he first visited Jerusalem during the second Intifada, a violent Palestinian uprising against Israeli military occupation. “Everyone I met had a story to tell, each with varying degrees of anger, sadness, fear, and resolve,” Deatherage said. He also met with Israelis on this trip who were traumatized by the Second Intifada, and received a briefing on the security barrier Israel was building around Jerusalem by the IDF colonel in charge. He didn’t visit the West Bank, but met with Palestinians in Jerusalem, and heard firsthand accounts of life there. He saw how the 24-foot-high concrete wall snakes its way through Palestinian neighborhoods in ways that separate families and cut off communities from jobs, health care, access to churches and mosques. The problem with his formerly apocalyptic understanding of the conflict was not the support it gave for the modern nation of Israel. “The problem was the absolute certainty about being able to clearly see God’s will in current events coupled with the fatalism or even enthusiasm about war and violence in the Middle East,” he says. “And years later when I revisited the issue I began to wonder what would it look like to take seriously what Jesus said about ‘blessed are the peacemakers.’”

He returned home with a more nuanced view of the conflict, convinced that “American interests were entirely on the side of diplomacy and peacemaking—that the perpetuation of the conflict, and even the perception of our complicity in Palestinian suffering, had a negative impact on U.S. national security,” he later wrote. “In many ways both result in enrolling more people in the conflict and make it harder for the Israeli and Palestinian people to resolve their differences,” Deatherage says. “It seemed there had to be a third way.”

***

In 2009, then-Kentucky Rep. Geoff Davis, a Republican who performed a peacekeeping role as a commander in the 82nd Airborne Division in Israel and Egypt, met with Deatherage. He eventually took his first Telos trip in 2011. “Telos trips can be transformative for many because it connects Americans to real Israelis and Palestinians, and many different faith perspectives and political viewpoints within these groups,” Davis told me. “Telos does not take a position and ‘tell’ their visitors what to believe.”

Telos is focused on what the group calls “American leaders.” Along with pastors of prominent megachurches, attendees of the tours have included Mumford and Sons’ Marcus Mumford, the New York City-based worship pastor David Gungor, writer Lysa TerKeurst and Washington Post religion reporter Sarah Pulliam Bailey.

Since Deatherage and Khalil founded Telos, the terrain of U.S. support for Israel has shifted beneath them. Support for Israel and Christian Zionism among administration officials such as Pence is at a historically high watermark. “The religious right and their support for Israel is now “center to what it means to be a member of the Republican Party,” Deatherage says of the Trump era. “He’s given new life to this segment of American Christianity that was really kind of on its heels. They have asked the president for very specific things and he’s been helpful.”

Meanwhile, on the left, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement has gained steam. In January, Democrats such as Rashida Tlaib came out against anti-boycott legislation. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s criticism of the Jewish lobby has raised questions about their influence in Washington and beyond—along with plenty of blowback from centrist Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Deatherage says Telos has no position on the BDS movement or Ilhan Omar, but the changing dynamics of Israel have certainly made his mission more difficult. Deatherage and Telos are content to play the long game through their trips to the region, estimating they won’t see the fruit of their efforts among evangelical voters for a while. “It’ll take a longer time to see how this reshapes politics,” he told me, estimating that it could the 2024 or 2028 election before there’s any real change.

***

In the meantime, Telos is having a quiet impact, one person at a time. Like Deatherage before he visited Israel, Michelle Graham felt ignorant about the Middle Eastern conflict. A professional ministry worker and political independent in Bartlett, Ill., Graham took her first Telos trip in 2015. “My entire worldview about that was, ‘Aren’t we supposed to be for the Jews?’ That was it. That was all I knew,” Graham told me. “There’s so much to learn. I didn’t know anything about a wall or a Green Line or why they were fighting, or anything. I was your typical American who knew nothing.”

Since then, Graham has taken three Telos trips, helping lead them, and is taking another one this fall. “Todd walks you through a narrative arc that’s helpful, introducing you to voices on all sides: Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem: A retired Israeli general. Israeli settlements,” she told me. When she hears Trump or Pence or 2020 candidates talk about the conflict, she says she now listens for signs of nuance in their messages. “I want to hear that they understand there are complexities—that they have a listening or learning posture,” she says. “Regardless of party, a candidate can’t get elected unless they are pro-Israel. It creates an atmosphere where there’s no learning to do. I don’t hear that from Washington.”

Deatherage and Telos officials have paid close attention to the Trump administration’s efforts to broker a peace deal. Early on, Deatherage said he was impressed by Greenblatt’s early stops in Israel, which mirrored some of Telos’ itineraries. “He visited very unlikely places and seemed to really be going in a spirit of trying to listen and understand,” Deatherage said. “He was in Bethlehem. He met, I think he met with some students from Gaza. He didn’t just meet with political leaders, or to the House, or the authority, or this sort of that sort of crowd that you normally would meet with. He actually met with real people. And that was an important gesture. But, it seemed like he was actually trying to listen and understand.”

His theory of the case is that politics is downstream of culture, and if he can reach American leaders and influencers, public policy will follow. “Washington, D.C., is a lagging indicator,” Deatherage says. He and Telos are making a calculation that a new generation of evangelicals, influenced by a more nuanced understanding of the conflict from their Telos-led trips to the region, will eventually shift debate around the issue. “We’re just operating in an environment in which younger evangelicals for a number of years now have not really liked the bargain that my generation made with Republican politics,” Deatherage said. “They haven’t all turned into progressives, but they have been trying to find different ways to engage the world that’s connected to their faith.”