Abstract
This is the second of two articles on how three Protestant nation states successively acted as “invisible sovereigns” of the Holy Land. The current conflict between Israel and Palestine cannot be understood without more than two centuries of Protestant institution building. My thesis is that Protestant secularization did not eliminate Christian sovereignty over the Holy Land but transformed it into forms, archaeology, diplomacy, international law, recognition itself, that no longer identify themselves as theological. Positioned against Schmitt, Agamben, Anidjar, Asad, and Foucault, it traces how Prussian, British, and American Protestantism each carried this grammar forward while believing themselves secular, why Catholic sovereignty could not achieve the same invisibility, and why the charge of conspiracy misreads a structural process for a coordinated plan. Its companion piece, “The Invisible Sovereign I,” supplies the documented historical sequence this theoretical argument depends on.
Introduction
Everyone has an explanation for the conflict over the Holy Land. Some reach first for nationalism — two peoples, one land, incompatible foundational stories. Others reach for religion in the narrower sense — Judaism and Islam as rival custodians of sacred space. Still others reach for colonialism, for security, for the machinery of international law, for the sheer accumulated weight of failed negotiations. Each of these explanations captures something real. None of them notices something stranger, sitting in plain sight.
For more than a thousand years, Christianity regarded Jerusalem as arguably the most important city on earth. It fought for the city, wrote for it, mapped it, prayed toward it, built empires around access to it, and organized entire theological traditions on the premise that its stones mattered more than any other stones in the world. The Crusades were fought in its name. Byzantine emperors staked imperial legitimacy on their custodianship of it. Latin kingdoms rose and fell over it. Pilgrimage to it was, for centuries, one of the central ritual acts of European Christian life. Missionary societies, biblical archaeologists, and European chancelleries treated it as a matter of the first geopolitical importance well into the twentieth century.
And then, in the accounts most of us now inherit, Christianity simply disappears from the story. The modern conflict is narrated as a dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, nationalism and nationalism — with Christianity relegated to a medieval prologue, a minority population caught in the crossfire, or an occasional footnote about American evangelicals. The principal claimant of a millennium is edited out of the story of the very territory it fought hardest and longest to hold.
This disappearance is not a natural consequence of secularization in general. It is the specific and traceable consequence of one branch of Christianity in particular, and it is the central argument of this article that the disappearance is itself the phenomenon most urgently in need of explanation — because it did not happen. Christianity did not vanish from the Holy Land. It changed its mode of sovereignty.
My thesis is: Protestant secularization did not eliminate theological authority over the Holy Land. It transformed explicit theological authority into apparently neutral forms: archaeology, cartography, diplomacy, international law, and the very act of political recognition. The Holy Land continues to be governed inside a Protestant grammar precisely because that grammar has ceased to recognize itself as Protestant. What looks like the absence of a Christian claimant is in fact the most successful form a Christian claim has ever taken: one so thoroughly naturalized into secular categories that it no longer needs to identify itself as a claim at all.
This is not, I want to stress at the outset and return to at length later, a conspiracy theory. It is a genealogy, an account of how a specific theological logic, formed in the sixteenth century for reasons that had nothing to do with Jerusalem, turned out three centuries later to be uniquely suited to a form of political power that no other Christian tradition could have produced. The article proceeds from that general theoretical puzzle to an increasingly concrete historical demonstration, tracing the same underlying grammar through three successive carriers — Prussia, Britain, and the United States — before returning, in its final sections, to the question of what this genealogy does and does not explain, and what it might make newly thinkable.
The Strange Disappearance of the Dominant Historical Actor
Walk through the historiography of the Holy Land as it is conventionally taught, and a pattern emerges that is easy to miss precisely because it feels so natural. Ancient Israel gives way to Rome, Rome to Byzantium, Byzantium contests with early Islam, the Crusades interrupt and are eventually reversed, the Ottomans settle in for four centuries, the British
Mandate arrives, and then Israel and Palestine take the stage as the story’s proper subjects. Somewhere in the passage from the Crusades to the Mandate, a change occurs that is rarely remarked upon: Christianity stops being named as an actor in its own right.
In its place, the historiography substitutes proper nouns that sound secular even when they are doing exactly the work “Christendom” used to do: “Britain.” “Europe.” “The international community.” “The West.” “International law.” These terms are not simply more accurate replacements for an outdated confessional vocabulary. They are performing a substitution — carrying forward much of the institutional weight, the assumed authority to arbitrate, the sense of standing outside and above the parties actually native to the land, that “Christendom” once carried explicitly.
The ordinary explanation for this shift is that Europe secularized, and secular states do not act in the name of religion. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not actually explain the specific shape of the disappearance. Secularization is a description of an outcome, not an account of the mechanism that produced it. It tells us that religious language receded from official self-description; it does not tell us where the authority that religious language used to carry went, or why it re-emerged wearing the particular disguises it did — archaeological survey, mandate administration, heritage law, diplomatic recognition — rather than simply evaporating. A satisfying account has to explain not just that Christianity stopped naming itself, but how it managed to keep acting, at scale, in a landscape where it is now almost never named.
That is the puzzle this article takes as its starting point: how did Christianity become “the international community”? How did theology become administration, without anyone along the way experiencing themselves as making that transition? The answer, I will argue, lies not in Christianity in general but in one specific and unusually well-suited branch of it.
Situating the Argument: Political Theology After Schmitt
The claim that modern secular authority carries forward theological structure is not new. It is worth being precise about what existing accounts already establish, and where this argument needs to extend them, because the novelty of the claim made here is easy to overstate if it is not placed carefully against its nearest predecessors.
Carl Schmitt’s founding formula in Political Theology — that all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, sovereignty itself being the juristic transposition of the theological miracle — supplies the deepest premise this argument relies on. But Schmitt’s framework operates at a high level of abstraction. It treats “theology” as a single undifferentiated donor to “the state,” interested in the formal structure of the transfer (omnipotence becomes sovereignty, the miracle becomes the exception) rather than in which specific theological tradition, among several competing ones, actually accomplished the transfer in any given case. Schmitt’s account explains why we should expect secular sovereignty to carry theological shape. It does not explain why, in the specific case of the Holy Land, it is Protestant rather than Catholic or Orthodox theology that ends up doing the governing.
Giorgio Agamben’s extension of Schmitt — the sovereign as the figure who decides the exception, the camp and the border as spaces of suspended ordinary law — deepens the formal analysis without resolving this confessional gap. Agamben’s genealogy runs through Roman law and a generalized Christian-imperial legal theology; it is not built to distinguish a Reformation-specific mechanism from a broader post-Constantinian one.
Gil Anidjar’s The Jew, the Arab comes closer to the specific terrain of this article, and is worth engaging directly rather than in passing. Anidjar argues that Europe — which he treats, deliberately, as coextensive with Christianity — produces “the Jew” and “the Arab” as a co-constituted pair, the theological enemy internal to Europe and the political enemy external to it, and that European identity has never actually achieved the secular distance from this pairing that it claims. This argument shares real terrain with the one advanced here: both insist that the categories through which the conflict is understood are not neutral inheritances but products of a Christian genealogy that has gone unmarked. But Anidjar’s argument operates primarily at the level of category formation — how “Jew” and “Arab” come to mean what they mean in European thought. It does not descend to the level of governance mechanism: how, concretely, administrative recognition gets allocated, which claims become legible to a mandate authority or an international body and which do not, and why. Nor does it isolate Protestantism specifically as the operative tradition, treating “Christian Europe” as a working unit. This article’s contribution, relative to Anidjar, is to move from the production of categories to the production of a grammar of recognition — an operative, confession-specific mechanism that explains why particular claims get heard as legible sovereignty claims and others get translated downward into demography and nationalism.
Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular supplies the third essential premise: that secularism is not the neutral absence of religion it presents itself as, but a specific, historically particular arrangement of power — one that in practice draws heavily on Protestant assumptions about the proper relationship between belief, institution, and public life, even as it universalizes those assumptions as simply “the secular” available to anyone. Asad’s argument is the closest in spirit to the claim made here, and this article can be read as an attempt to apply Asad’s insight with much greater granularity to a single, sustained case, tracing the specific national carriers — Prussia, Britain, the United States — through which a Protestant-shaped secularism actually did its governing work in one place over two centuries.
A fourth reference point is worth adding, because it supplies a mechanism where Schmitt, Asad, and Anidjar mostly supply a diagnosis. Michel Foucault’s account of pastoral power — the mode of authority, developed within the Christian pastorate, that governs individuals not through law imposed from above but through the individualizing, conscience-directed guidance of souls, a mode Foucault argues migrates in the modern period into the governmentality of the state itself — describes something close to the transmission mechanism this article needs. Foucault’s genealogy of pastoral power, like Schmitt’s, treats Christianity as a relatively undifferentiated donor tradition; it does not ask why one confessional lineage rather than another proved best suited to carrying pastoral, conscience-directed governance into secular statecraft. But the shape of his argument — governance techniques migrating from ecclesiastical to state contexts while retaining their individualizing, conscience-oriented logic — is precisely the kind of mechanism that explains how a Protestant emphasis on direct, unmediated conscience could migrate so cleanly into modern administrative categories that address populations as collections of individually legible claims and interests, rather than as corporately represented bodies requiring institutional intermediaries. Catholic and Orthodox sovereignty, retaining as they do a strong doctrine of corporate, hierarchically mediated representation, resist this particular migration in a way Protestant sovereignty does not.
Taken together, Schmitt supplies the formal claim that secular sovereignty is theological in structure; Asad supplies the claim that the secular arrangement doing the structuring is not neutral but particular, and typically Protestant-inflected; Anidjar supplies the case-specific insight that the categories organizing the Holy Land conflict are Christian products rather than neutral descriptions; and Foucault supplies a plausible transmission mechanism for how conscience-directed, individualizing religious governance becomes consciencedirected, individualizing state governance. What none of the four isolates, and what this article attempts to supply, is the confession-specific claim: that it is Protestant
disintermediation in particular, among the available Christian traditions, that was structurally suited to becoming invisible in the specific way traced here, and that the Holy Land — where scripture and territory correspond with unusual density — is the case in which that structural suitability becomes historically visible as an actual, traceable sequence of governance. That mechanism is the subject of the next section.
Protestantism Invents Invisible Sovereignty
The Reformation’s founding theological move was an act of removal. The priest as necessary mediator between believer and God was removed. The intercession of saints was removed. The elaborate architecture of sacramental mediation — confession absolved by an ordained hierarchy, the Eucharist transformed by a consecrated intermediary, merit accumulated through indulgence and pilgrimage — was, across the various Protestant traditions, stripped back or eliminated outright. In its place stood scripture, read directly, and individual conscience, answerable directly to God without an institutional intermediary standing necessarily between the two.
This is usually discussed as a matter of doctrine — sola scriptura, the priesthood of all believers — and rightly so. But the doctrinal shift carries an institutional consequence that is less often drawn out, and it is the consequence that matters for this argument: because Protestant religious authority no longer depends on a visible chain of institutional mediation, Protestant religious authority becomes structurally capable of becoming politically invisible in a way its rivals are not.
The contrast is worth making concrete, because it is where the real analytical weight of this section lies. Catholic sovereignty over sacred space requires, and has always required, a visible institutional apparatus. It requires a papacy that can be asked, and does periodically answer, what its position is on a given holy site. It requires an unbroken claim to apostolic hierarchy. It requires canonically constituted religious orders with specific, documented custodial roles — the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, formally established in the fourteenth century, has maintained continuous physical custodianship of a defined set of Christian sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth for seven hundred years, a fact that can be looked up, verified, and pointed to. Catholic authority over sacred space is legible because it is embodied: there is always, in principle, someone to ask.
Orthodox sovereignty works on the same logic. It requires patriarchates — Jerusalem, Constantinople, Moscow — with continuous institutional identity and a documented ethnarchic structure tying religious authority to specific national churches. It requires ongoing monastic and liturgical presence: the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s custodianship of major portions of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the continuous monastic life of a community like Mar Saba in the Judean desert, are facts of institutional record, not matters of interpretation. However secularized the surrounding states become — Greece, Russia, Cyprus — the Orthodox claim on Jerusalem remains traceable to an identifiable, ongoing institutional actor. One can still meaningfully ask, “What is the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s position on the status of the holy sites?” and expect a coherent, attributable answer, because the Patriarchate has never stopped being a visible party.
Protestant sovereignty cannot work this way, and the reason is not incidental but definitional. The Reformation’s founding act was to dissolve exactly the kind of hierarchical, visible, institutionally embodied mediation that Catholicism and Orthodoxy retained and that made their sovereignty legible in the first place. There is no Protestant Vatican. There is no single body one can ask, “What is the Protestant position on Jerusalem?” and expect a coherent institutional answer, because Protestant authority was never constituted as the kind of thing that could hold or issue such an answer. Authority devolves instead onto scripture, read directly by individual believers and, by extension, by individual nations understanding themselves as collective bodies of believers.
This is not the absence of a sovereignty claim. It is a change in the claim’s form, and the change has a specific structural consequence: because Protestant religious authority does not require an identifiable visible custodian to remain operative, it becomes free to migrate into forms that no longer look like religious authority at all — into maps, into historical scholarship, into archaeological method, into educational curricula, and eventually into the vocabulary of international law and “civilization” — without ever crossing a visible threshold that would let an observer say, straightforwardly, “look, here is the church making a political claim.” There is no church left standing in the frame to point to.
A careful reader will object that “Protestantism” is not a single thing — that Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican traditions differ substantially from one another, including on questions of visible church order, and that Anglicanism in particular retained an episcopal hierarchy that looks, on its face, considerably closer to the Catholic model than to a fully disintermediated congregationalism. The objection is fair and worth answering directly, because it sharpens rather than weakens the claim. What unites the traditions this article treats as carriers of the relevant grammar is not uniformity of church polity — Lutheran territorial churches, Anglican episcopacy, and Reformed presbyterianism differ considerably on that score — but a shared and more fundamental commitment to scripture as directly and individually authoritative, requiring no institutional act of interpretation to become binding on the believer’s conscience. Even where a Protestant tradition retained bishops, as Anglicanism did, it did not retain the claim that those bishops possessed unique, sacramentally transmitted interpretive authority over scripture’s meaning of the kind Catholic magisterial teaching claims for itself. It is this narrower, shared hermeneutic commitment — not church governance as such — that does the structural work this article traces, and it is why Anglican Britain, despite its bishops, belongs on the same side of the ledger as Lutheran Prussia and dispensationalist America, rather than on the side of Catholic or Orthodox sacramental mediation.
Invisibility, in other words, is not a side effect that happened to befall Protestant political theology as European states secularized. It is closer to a structural entailment of the Reformation’s own founding logic, latent from the sixteenth century onward, waiting for the moment when Protestant states acquired the imperial reach necessary to project it onto an actual territory. That moment arrives, for the Holy Land specifically, in the nineteenth century — first through Prussia, as the following sections trace.
Why the Holy Land Becomes the Perfect Protestant Object
Not every territory is equally suited to becoming the object of this kind of invisible sovereignty. The Holy Land is close to uniquely suited to it, and the reason lies in the specific relationship between Protestant hermeneutics and the geography of scripture itself.
Nowhere else on earth does a sacred text map onto physical geography with the density and specificity that the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels map onto Palestine. Nearly every significant hill, valley, spring, and town named in scripture corresponds, or was believed by nineteenth-century scholars to correspond, to an identifiable place on the ground. For a hermeneutic tradition built on the premise of direct, unmediated textual access — no priest required to explain what the text means — this correspondence is extraordinarily potent. The land itself becomes readable as a kind of second scripture, available to any literate believer with a Bible and a map, requiring no institutional authority to certify the connection between text and territory.
This produces a fusion that has no real equivalent in Catholic or Orthodox sacred geography. Catholic holy sites are typically anchored in events subsequent to and validated by ecclesiastical authority — a miracle attested and approved, a relic authenticated by the Church, an apparition formally recognized. The site’s sanctity depends on an institutional act of certification. Protestant sacred geography, by contrast, is in principle autoauthorizing: the correspondence between text and place does not require anyone’s certification, only scripture and a map, which makes it simultaneously more democratic in form and more totalizing in reach, since it does not depend on any specific institution’s continued existence to remain valid.
Under this logic, the Bible becomes simultaneously a work of history, a work of cartography, a political document, and a source of territorial legitimacy, all at once and without internal contradiction, in a way that would not make sense within Catholic or Orthodox sacred geography’s more institutionally anchored logic. Mapping the land becomes an act with devotional weight. Establishing the chronology of settlement becomes an act with theological stakes. Scholarship — survey, excavation, philology — becomes almost governmental in its implications, because it is doing, in a scientific register, exactly the work that scripture itself claims to do in a devotional one: fixing the correspondence between text and territory.
This is why the discipline of biblical archaeology emerges overwhelmingly from Protestant Europe rather than from Catholic or Orthodox institutions — not because Protestants were more scientifically minded in some general sense, but because biblical archaeology as a discipline is, in its origins, doing theological work that only Protestant hermeneutics needed done in that particular way. It is the natural next step of a tradition that had already dispensed with institutional mediation and needed some other means of verifying the sacred status of the land it cared about.
Prussia: When Hermeneutics Become Geopolitics
The first carrier of this grammar, and the most consistently neglected in accounts of the conflict’s origins, is Prussia. The chapter begins not with statecraft but with a theological and cultural movement: the Erweckungsbewegung, the nineteenth-century German Protestant awakening that fused personal piety, romantic nationalism, and a renewed emphasis on scripture read as living history rather than dogma. Within this movement, figures like the Berlin theologian August Neander articulated a vision in which Protestant German culture stood as the double heir of both Hebrew antiquity and primitive apostolic Christianity — a genealogy that placed Prussia, rather than Rome or Constantinople, at the theological center of the story scripture told about itself. King Frederick William IV, himself steeped in this romantic-theological climate, treated the Holy Land less as a distant mission field than as part of Germany’s own biblical inheritance, a land whose meaning belonged as legitimately to Berlin as to anyone else.
The institutional expression of this hermeneutic arrives in 1841, with the establishment of a joint Anglican-Prussian bishopric in Jerusalem — an arrangement often treated, misleadingly, as the origin point of Protestant political interest in the Holy Land. It is better understood as the institutional crystallization of a hermeneutic that already existed in fully formed shape within Prussian theological culture; the bishopric did not create the interest, it gave an interest that already had decades of theological momentum a formal diplomatic vehicle.
What follows is characteristic of the pattern this article traces throughout: scientific survey work, biblical cartography, and chronological scholarship, all conducted under the banner of objective inquiry, each simultaneously and without contradiction reproducing Protestant sacred geography. A German scholar mapping the topography of ancient Judea in the 1840s or 1850s could understand himself, sincerely, as doing empirical historical geography — and he would, by the standards of the discipline as it then existed, be entirely correct to describe his work that way. He would also, without any need for insincerity or concealment, be confirming and reinforcing a specifically Protestant sacred geography as historical fact.
This is the first appearance of the invisible sovereign in the Holy Land: a form of political interest exercised entirely through hermeneutics and scholarship, carrying no formal territorial claim, requiring no army, and leaving behind an archive of maps, chronologies, and surveys that would shape how every subsequent power — including powers with no interest in Protestant theology whatsoever — would come to understand what the land contained and what mattered about it.
Britain: Protestant Grammar Becomes International Administration
The grammar Prussia established passes, over the following decades, to Britain, where it acquires for the first time genuine administrative and legal force. It is worth differentiating two distinct strands within British Protestantism that converge on the Holy Land from different theological directions. Evangelical restorationism — associated with figures like the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury — held that the return of the Jewish people to the land was a matter of prophetic significance, an event to be actively supported as part of God’s unfolding plan for history. Liberal Anglican providentialism, by contrast, was considerably less invested in prophecy and considerably more invested in a broader civilizational narrative: Britain as the rightful inheritor and steward of biblical and classical civilization, entrusted with a mission of stewardship over humanity’s most significant historical sites.
These two grammars differ substantially in theological content — one is eschatological and urgent, the other is civilizational and custodial — and yet they converge, in practice, on remarkably similar policy conclusions. This convergence is a large part of what makes the Balfour Declaration of 1917 politically legible within British public life in the way that it was: restorationists could read it as prophetic fulfillment, and providentialist liberals could read it as an act of civilizational stewardship, and both readings, despite their theological distance from one another, supported the same declaration.
The Mandate that follows institutionalizes this convergence at scale. The Status Quo arrangements governing the Christian Holy Places, inherited in modified form from Ottoman practice, are administered through a vocabulary of neutral trusteeship — Britain as the impartial custodian holding the ring between competing local claims, rather than as a party with theological interests of its own. This self-description matters enormously, because it is precisely what allows the underlying administrative architecture to reproduce theological distinctions without anyone involved needing to register the reproduction as such. Britain does not simply administer Palestine as a disinterested colonial power managing an inherited multi-confessional inheritance. It governs through categories — which historical claims are treated as self-evidently legible, which communities are recognized as coherent political actors requiring representation, which sites are classified as significant and which as merely local — that had already been substantially shaped by a century of Protestant biblical scholarship and hermeneutic assumption, while genuinely, and for the most part sincerely, believing itself to be operating as a secular and impartial administrator.
The state no longer appears theological, to itself or to the world. And yet its administrative architecture — its maps, its census categories, its determinations of which claims counted as ancient and which as merely contemporary — continues to reproduce distinctions that a Protestant hermeneutic, and no other available grammar, had spent a century establishing as simply how the land’s history worked.
Recognition Is Never Neutral
This is the theoretical center of the argument, and it is worth stating with some precision, because the claim is easy to soften into something weaker than intended. Recognition — the diplomatic, legal, and administrative act of acknowledging a claim as legitimate — is not a passive registration of facts that exist independently of the act of recognizing them. Recognition is constitutive. It determines, in advance of any individual case, which kinds of claims are even intelligible as claims in the first place.
Ask what happens when a Jewish claim to the land encounters this grammar. It fits — not because Protestant theology invented Jewish attachment to the land, which long predates the Reformation and rests on entirely independent grounds of continuous liturgical memory, historical presence, and political mobilization that owe nothing to Christian theology for their validity — but because the Protestant grammar arriving to receive the claim already contains a fully developed vocabulary suited to recognizing it: covenant, promised land, prophetic return, chosen people, exile and restoration. The claim does not need to be translated into unfamiliar terms to be heard; the terms are already there, waiting, because Protestant hermeneutics had spent centuries developing exactly this vocabulary for its own theological purposes, long before it had any occasion to apply it diplomatically.
Now ask what happens to an Islamic claim to the same land encountering the same grammar. There is no equivalent slot. Islamic custodianship of Jerusalem — through the Umayyad, Abbasid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods, and through the continuous religious significance of the Haram al-Sharif — has its own deep and independently coherent theological grammar, but that grammar does not correspond to any category the Protestant hermeneutic developed for its own use, because it was never Protestantism’s business to develop one. The claim does not disappear, but it gets translated downward into the categories the receiving grammar does recognize: demography, territorial presence, national self-determination. These are, notably, categories available in principle to any population anywhere in the world claiming any territory — generic categories of modern nationalism — rather than categories of sacred custodianship specific to this land, of the kind the Jewish claim gets to retain.
This asymmetry does not require anyone administering the system to hold a conscious prejudice. It is built into the available vocabulary itself — into which words are already sitting on the shelf, ready to be reached for, when a claim needs to be assessed. An administrator, a diplomat, or an international lawyer operating entirely in good faith, genuinely attempting evenhandedness, will still reproduce the asymmetry, because the grammar they are using to think with was never symmetrical to begin with.
It is worth pausing on how thoroughly this asymmetry can coexist with genuine goodwill on the part of individual administrators, because that coexistence is exactly what makes the mechanism structural rather than attitudinal. A Mandate official personally sympathetic to Arab claims, or a contemporary diplomat personally committed to evenhandedness, does not escape the asymmetry by being well-intentioned, because the asymmetry is not located in anyone’s intentions. It is located in the prior question of which vocabulary is available before either official ever sits down to weigh a specific case. A claim framed in the language of covenant and prophetic return arrives at the negotiating table already speaking the receiving grammar’s native dialect; a claim framed in the language of continuous habitation and communal self-determination arrives needing to be translated, and translation, however sympathetically performed, is never a neutral operation — something is always lost, and what is lost is disproportionately the specifically sacred, rather than generically national, character of the claim being translated. Compare this with how the same grammar treats Christian custodial claims, discussed at greater length in the following section: because those claims are carried by visible institutions with an old and continuous diplomatic standing of their own, they are heard as a third party’s interest to be balanced, rather than translated into unfamiliar terms or absorbed into the background architecture altogether. Islamic claims to the land have neither the grammar’s native vocabulary nor an institutional standing equivalent to the Holy See’s; they are, structurally, the party doubly disadvantaged by this arrangement.
The insight extends further, and this is the part most often missed. Recognition does not only select among existing claims; it reshapes the claims themselves over time. Political actors operating under sustained pressure to be legible to an internationally dominant grammar tend, gradually and often without deliberate strategy, to adapt their own selfpresentation toward the vocabulary that grammar rewards. This is visible, for instance, in the increasing prominence of explicitly covenantal and biblical language within some strands of contemporary Israeli political discourse — not because such language was previously absent from Jewish political thought, where it has ancient roots entirely independent of Protestant influence, but because it is precisely the register most legible to, and most consistently rewarded by, the grammar doing the recognizing on the international stage. The sovereign does not merely judge which claims count. Over time, it teaches claimants what a winning claim sounds like — and claimants, entirely reasonably, learn.
America: The Invisible Sovereign Without Self-Knowledge
The grammar’s third and, in certain respects, most complete carrier is the United States. Its vehicle is dispensationalist theology — the framework, developed by John Nelson Darby in the nineteenth century and popularized enormously through the Scofield Reference Bible, that reads contemporary and future events as the unfolding of a specific prophetic sequence, within which the return of the Jewish people to the land occupies a structurally central position. Over the twentieth century this theological current fed into a broad and politically consequential current of American Christian Zionism, shaping public sympathy and, at various moments, direct political pressure on US Middle East policy.
What is genuinely remarkable about the American case, relative to Prussia and Britain, is how thoroughly the theological content has receded from its own public vocabulary even as its political effects have, if anything, intensified. Almost no one involved in mainstream American political discourse about the region — including many of its most fervent and theologically committed participants — describes the position in explicitly Protestant theological terms. The vocabulary instead is “shared values,” “the only democracy in the Middle East,” “security,” “Western civilization.” The theological grammar has become so completely naturalized within American public discourse that it now governs while remaining unrecognizable even to the actors who are its most active carriers.
This is the most paradoxical and, in a sense, the most complete form the invisible sovereign has yet taken. In Prussia, the theology was explicit even as it dressed itself as scholarship. In Britain, two identifiable theological currents converged on policy while genuinely believing themselves engaged in secular civilizational stewardship. In America, the theology speaks constantly, publicly, and with considerable political force, and is nonetheless not heard — by supporters, by critics, or often by its own exponents — as theology at all. The sovereign has become invisible not merely to the outside observer or to the parties whose claims it is busy sorting into legible and illegible categories, but to itself. Concealment here is achieved not through silence or secrecy but through total normalization: the grammar has become so much the water in which American public discourse about the region swims that pointing to it can feel, to those inside it, like pointing at nothing at all.
The Catholic Exception: What Visibility Costs
If the argument advanced so far is correct, it should make a testable prediction: a Christian tradition that retained visible institutional mediation, rather than dissolving it, should not have been able to achieve the same invisible sovereignty over the Holy Land — even if it wanted to, and even where its historical interest in the territory was, at various points, at least as intense as any Protestant power’s. The Catholic Church supplies exactly this case, and it functions, in effect, as a natural control on the argument.
The Vatican’s interest in the Holy Land has never disappeared and has never needed to be rediscovered by historians, because it was never allowed to become invisible in the first place. The Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land has maintained continuous, documented physical custodianship of a defined set of sites since the fourteenth century. The Holy See has issued explicit, attributable statements on the status of Jerusalem across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — including sustained advocacy, particularly around 1947 to 1949, for some form of international or special statute for the city, a position that was openly theological in motivation and openly acknowledged as such, and that failed to become the operative international framework. Popes visiting Jerusalem do so as popes, in a capacity nobody mistakes for secular diplomacy, however diplomatically framed the visit’s language may be.
This visibility is not incidental to Catholic sovereignty; it is what Catholic sovereignty is made of, for the same structural reason traced in section III. Because Catholic authority requires an identifiable institutional hierarchy to remain operative at all, it cannot migrate into anonymous administrative categories the way Protestant authority can, because there is always a specific, nameable body — the Holy See — that other actors can, and routinely do, distinguish from “the international community” or “international law” as such. The
Vatican’s continuing claim on Jerusalem is real, consequential, and completely unable to disappear into the diplomatic architecture the way the Protestant grammar traced in this article does, precisely because Catholic ecclesiology never dissolved the visible mediating structure that makes a claim attributable to a specific claimant rather than diffusing into the vocabulary everyone shares.
The cost of this visibility, from a purely structural point of view, is influence. Because the
Catholic claim remains attributable, it also remains contestable, negotiable, and ultimately limitable in a way the Protestant grammar, precisely by virtue of no longer being attributable to any specific institutional claimant, is not. The Holy See’s repeated advocacy for an internationalized Jerusalem was heard, debated, and set aside by other powers as one interested party’s proposal among several. The Protestant grammar traced throughout this article was never heard as a proposal at all, because it was never legible as belonging to a claimant in the first place — it presented itself, and was received, as simply the shape of the neutral field within which everyone else’s proposals were being evaluated. Visibility, in other words, is not merely a difference in style between Catholic and Protestant modes of sovereignty. It marks the exact threshold between having a claim and being the grammar within which claims are adjudicated — and it is a threshold that Catholic ecclesiology, by its own constitution, cannot cross.
Is This a Conspiracy? On Structure, Intention, and Explanation
An argument of this kind invites, almost immediately, a specific and serious misreading: that it posits a hidden Christian actor — a shadowy, continuous will — secretly directing the geopolitics of the Holy Land for two centuries. This misreading deserves to be taken apart carefully rather than waved off, because the difference between a conspiratorial explanation and a genealogical one is not a matter of tone or emphasis. The two work through fundamentally different causal logics, and the argument of this article depends entirely on the genealogical one.
A conspiratorial explanation requires identifiable agents who share a coordinated intention, deliberate concealment as a chosen strategy, and some ongoing mechanism — a plan, a continuous organization, a transmitted secret — that keeps the intention alive across time and across the many different actors who would need to be in on it. Nothing in the account offered here requires any of this, and it is worth being explicit about why.
No one sat in a room in Berlin in 1841, or in London in 1917, or in Washington at any point in the twentieth or twenty-first century, and said: let us disguise Protestant theological sovereignty as neutral scholarship and impartial administration so that it can operate more effectively while escaping scrutiny. Prussian theologians conducting biblical survey work believed, by every available indication, that they were doing objective historical geography, and by the scholarly standards of their moment they largely were. British Mandate officials drafting Status Quo regulations for the Holy Places were, for the most part, sincerely attempting to manage an inherited, genuinely difficult multi-confessional situation as impartially as their categories allowed them to. American public figures invoking “shared democratic values” in discussing the region are not, in the overwhelming majority of cases, performing a cover story for a theological commitment they secretly hold and consciously conceal; they generally mean exactly what they say, in exactly the terms they say it.
The mechanism this article identifies is closer to something well understood in the sociology and historiography of secularization more broadly: the way concepts migrate across institutional domains and lose their marked status as they travel, continuing to do recognizably similar work in a new context without carrying an explicit label announcing their origin. Historians of political economy have traced exactly this pattern in concepts like “vocation,” “the sanctity of contract,” or “charity” — terms that carry substantial theological freight and continue to organize ostensibly secular economic and legal reasoning, without any user of the terms needing, or typically having, an intention to smuggle theology into secular discourse. A structural explanation of this kind does not require intention at any point along the chain. It requires only that a category, once formed within one institutional context for that context’s own purposes, retains enough of its original shape to keep doing structurally similar work after it migrates into an apparently unrelated context — and that no individual actor along the way has particular reason to notice the migration, because each actor experiences their own use of the category simply as reaching for the obvious, common-sense term available to them at that moment.
This distinction also explains why the invisibility this article describes is genuinely structural, rather than merely a matter of information being deliberately withheld. A conspiracy is, in principle, exposable: find the right memo, the right meeting minutes, the right confession, and the plan is laid bare. A structural grammar of the kind described here cannot be dissolved by disclosure in the same way, because there is no hidden plan to disclose. The people operating inside the grammar are not concealing anything, because they do not experience themselves as operating inside a Protestant grammar at all — the grammar is simply, to them, what governing looks like. Naming it, which is what this article attempts to do, does not function like exposing a conspiracy’s secret intentions. It functions more like pointing out to a fish that it is in water: true, potentially useful, in some circumstances even necessary as a precondition for change — but not an accusation against the fish, and not something the fish could simply have chosen to stop doing.
None of this is to suggest that individual actors bore no responsibility for their choices, or that material interest, strategic calculation, nationalist mobilization, and straightforward colonial violence played no independent role in producing the outcomes this article describes — they plainly did, extensively and often decisively, and no serious account of the conflict could omit them. The genealogy offered here is not a rival explanation competing with these factors for causal credit. It sits underneath them, shaping which strategic calculations felt available to begin with, which administrative categories felt like the natural, common-sense ones to reach for, and which compromises came to feel, within the inherited framework, literally unthinkable rather than merely difficult. It is a condition of possibility, not a hand on the lever.
Jerusalem Cannot Become an Ordinary City
The clearest and most consequential practical implication of this entire argument concerns not the conflict in general but Jerusalem specifically, and it is worth drawing out in full, because it is where the genealogy offered here yields a genuinely different diagnostic question than the ones ordinarily asked.
Every serious negotiation over the conflict’s final status has, at some point, deferred the question of Jerusalem rather than resolved it. The Oslo framework explicitly bracketed Jerusalem’s status for a later “permanent status” stage of negotiations that never concluded. Subsequent rounds of diplomacy have, with remarkable consistency, repeated the pattern regardless of which governments, which negotiators, or which broader regional circumstances were in play at the time. Every international legal and diplomatic regime treats Jerusalem as an exceptional case rather than an ordinary matter of municipal sovereignty: for decades, most states maintained their embassies in Tel Aviv rather than in Jerusalem specifically because of the city’s unresolved status, a diplomatic workaround with no real equivalent for any other national capital in the world. UNESCO has repeatedly passed, and repeatedly seen contested, resolutions concerning the status and naming of the city’s holy sites, in a pattern of recurring controversy that has no real parallel for any other heritage site on earth, however contested its underlying history.
Why does this keep happening, across such different political actors and circumstances, with such remarkable consistency? The genealogy traced in this article suggests an answer that is more structural, and more specific, than “the parties feel very strongly about it,” which is true but explanatorily thin. Protestant governance, on this account, was never actually built to govern a city. It was built, from its origins in Prussian hermeneutics through its British administrative form to its American theological afterlife, to secure textual and interpretive access to a sacred landscape — to keep the correspondence between scripture and territory legible and available. Jerusalem, inside this grammar, persists as heritage, as symbol, as scripture made physical, as an eschatological placeholder awaiting a future the grammar itself anticipates. It has never, within this governing logic, been treated as simply streets, schools, housing stock, sanitation infrastructure, and municipal budgets — the unglamorous, ordinary furniture of civic life that any city of comparable size and complexity possesses without controversy, and that residents of genuinely difficult, genuinely contested cities elsewhere have nonetheless managed to secure for themselves.
The pattern is worth tracing concretely rather than left as a general observation, because its consistency across otherwise very different diplomatic moments is itself part of the evidence. The 1993 Oslo Accords explicitly excluded Jerusalem from the issues to be settled in the interim period, deferring it by name to a “permanent status” negotiation. The 2000 Camp David summit, seven years later, foundered substantially on the question of sovereignty over the Old City and the Haram al-Sharif / Temple Mount compound specifically, with proposals for functional, vertical, and shared-sovereignty arrangements all failing to produce agreement even as other, in principle harder, territorial and refugee questions moved closer to resolution. The Clinton Parameters offered at the very end of that process again singled out Jerusalem for a bespoke arrangement distinct from the general territorial framework applied elsewhere. Two decades later, the 2018 relocation of the United States embassy to Jerusalem was treated, correctly, by every party involved as a uniquely significant and uniquely destabilizing act in a way that embassy relocations for other capitals never are — because moving an embassy to Jerusalem is never received as a routine diplomatic administrative matter, precisely because Jerusalem has never been allowed to occupy the category “routine national capital” in the first place. Across three decades, several changes of government on every side, and dramatically different regional circumstances, the same specific city functions as the point at which otherwise-progressing negotiations stall or fracture. A causal story built entirely from the particular politics of each moment struggles to explain why the same feature recurs so reliably across such different moments; a causal story built from the underlying grammar governing how the city can be thought about at all does not have that difficulty.
The contrast is instructive. Other cities carrying deep and genuinely contested religious stakes have, over time, acquired a settled civic register that coexists alongside their sacred one — Rome, however imperfectly and belatedly, achieved something like this through the Lateran arrangements, allowing the city to function as an ordinary national capital with an extraordinary religious institution inside it, rather than as an extraordinary religious site that happened to have ordinary people living in it. Jerusalem’s civic register keeps being crowded out by its sacred one, on this account, not because its underlying religious stakes are uniquely high — plenty of contested holy cities exist — but because the specific governing grammar inherited from Protestant political theology treats civic ordinariness itself as something close to a category error. Letting Jerusalem become simply a city, governed by and primarily for the people who actually live in it, would register within this grammar not as a political achievement but as a kind of theological loss — a relinquishing of the text’s claim on the territory.
This yields a diagnostic question genuinely different from the ones the conflict is ordinarily asked to answer. Not “which side has the stronger claim to Jerusalem,” a question the grammar itself is already structurally rigged to answer in a particular way before any evidence is even weighed. Instead: what would it take to govern Jerusalem in a register that is not fundamentally scriptural at all — and is that even conceivable from inside a grammar that has never, in two centuries of successive carriers, had occasion to conceive of it? That is a considerably harder question than the one usually asked, and it is a large part of why every easier answer offered so far has failed.
Conclusion: Naming the Invisible Sovereign
Return, finally, to the puzzle with which this article began. Christianity did not disappear from the story of the Holy Land. It transformed — and more precisely than that, it was Protestantism specifically, not Christianity taken as an undifferentiated whole, that produced a form of sovereignty structurally capable of denying its own theological character, because its founding theological move was already, from the sixteenth century onward, a move against exactly the kind of visible institutional mediation that would have made a later Christian claim to Jerusalem legible as a claim.
That transformation produced, across three successive national carriers, the entire apparatus this article has traced: biblical archaeology as a discipline, the administrative categories underlying Mandate governance, the Status Quo regime and its descendants, the modern vocabulary of heritage, recognition, and neutral administration, and a distinctly American mode of political theology so thoroughly naturalized that it no longer requires, or receives, recognition as theology even from its own most committed carriers. The conflict over Israel and Palestine therefore unfolds inside a grammar inherited from a specific, traceable, and confessionally particular history, rather than on the neutral diplomatic and legal ground it is almost universally assumed to occupy.
This article does not claim, and should not be read as claiming, to explain the conflict in full, and it is not offered as a rival to the other causal factors — nationalism, colonialism, security, demography, material interest, the specific choices of specific political actors — that any serious account of the conflict must include and that this genealogy does not compete with so much as sit underneath. Its contribution is narrower, and, I want to suggest, considerably more durable for being narrower: it identifies one of the conflict’s deepest and most consistently unacknowledged conditions of possibility, one that has shaped which settlements have felt available, which compromises have felt unthinkable, and why Jerusalem in particular has resisted, across radically different political circumstances and radically different negotiating parties, every attempt to render it an ordinary city.
It is worth being honest, in closing, about what this kind of genealogical naming can and cannot be expected to accomplish, since overclaiming for it would undermine the very carefulness the argument has tried to maintain throughout. Structural conditions of the kind traced here are not lifted by being correctly described, any more than a fish’s situation changes the moment someone succeeds in explaining water to it. The material interests, security anxieties, competing national narratives, and histories of violence and displacement that any adequate account of the conflict must reckon with will still be exactly as pressing after this argument is accepted as they were before it. What changes, if the argument holds, is narrower but not therefore trivial: certain moves that have felt, across decades of failed negotiation, like the only available or the most obviously reasonable options — Jerusalem’s perpetual deferral, the asymmetric grammar in which one party’s claims arrive pretranslated into the language the process already speaks and the other’s must be translated at a cost, the treatment of the entire arrangement as neutral background rather than as one historically specific inheritance among others that could have been imagined differently — become visible as choices embedded in a particular grammar, rather than as the neutral shape of reality itself. That shift, from inevitability to contingency, is not a solution. But it is very often the precondition without which a solution cannot even be searched for, because a problem that is misdescribed as natural and inevitable cannot be redesigned, only endured.
Naming this grammar does not dissolve it. The condition it describes is too deep, and too widely distributed across too many sincere and independent actors, to be lifted by analysis alone. But naming it does something that is nevertheless necessary and genuinely prior to any political movement that would hope to do more: it makes the grammar visible as a grammar — one historically specific and contingent way of allocating sacred legitimacy, among several that could in principle have been imagined, rather than the neutral and inevitable background against which the real conflict is assumed to take place. Only once that grammar becomes visible as one grammar among possible others does it become possible to ask a question the grammar itself has never, in two centuries of operation, had occasion to permit: whether a different grammar of recognition, and of coexistence, might yet be built in its place.