Less than one month after Israeli strikes targeted Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington D.C. for a high-stakes private meeting with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson in his Capitol Hill office. What has remained unreported until now, however, is the controversial materials Johnson shared with Netanyahu during their discussion: a two-part Bible study pamphlet produced by Capitol Ministries that repeats the ancient, widely discredited antisemitic blood libel of deicide — the false claim that all Jewish people bear collective responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
While the materials frame themselves as pro-Israel advocacy urging U.S. politicians to align with the Israeli government, they reiterate a deicide charge that has been rejected as baseless by all major world religious bodies for decades. The study, which was recycled from content first produced years earlier, was reposted in mid-June 2025 to build congressional and White House support for U.S. military intervention alongside Israel following Israel’s offensive against Iran.
Capitol Ministries, the organization that produces Bible study groups for members of the House, Senate, White House and U.S. governors, regularly repurposes older lessons to match current political events. The 2025 materials draw on text that dates as far back as 2011, when the guide first began warning about Iran’s nuclear program. Phrasing framing the study as a timely biblical primer for U.S. support for Israel has appeared in the document since at least October 2021, meaning the content was not newly written for the 2025 escalation. A 2011 note about Iran’s “nearly-enriched nuclear threat” also remained untouched in the revised pamphlet.
Over more than a decade, this recycled content has circulated among dozens of high-profile Republican leaders across the Trump administration and GOP-led Congress. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has been closely affiliated with Capitol Ministries and its founders Ralph and Danielle Drollinger for more than a decade, describing the group in 2015 as a guiding force that encourages elected officials to align their governance and personal conduct with Christian theology. Current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also regularly participates in the group’s White House Bible study, the Pentagon confirmed in 2025.
Weeks after the study materials were circulated, then-President Donald Trump ordered three separate military strikes on Iranian nuclear targets in late June 2025. Netanyahu’s meeting with Johnson on Capitol Hill preceded his scheduled White House talks with Trump. Following their discussion, Netanyahu noted publicly that “First comes strength, then comes peace,” while Johnson released only a brief general statement about the meeting. Full details of the exchange only emerged in Capitol Ministries’ 2025 annual report, where Johnson acknowledged sharing the two-part Drollinger study titled “The Biblical Case for Defending Israel” with Netanyahu, and that the pair discussed the content at length before Netanyahu departed with a copy. Johnson called Capitol Ministries “an invaluable resource” that provides timely biblical insight that shapes both personal conduct and legislative decision-making for hundreds of members of Congress.
The first of Drollinger’s two study guides explicitly repeats the deicide claim, arguing that the Abrahamic Covenant only applies to the Christian Church “for a time” because of Israel’s “present apostasy, having executed the Messiah.” In a companion video for the second lesson, Drollinger doubles down on the claim, stating that Jews were “sidetracked” by God “because they crucified their messiah.” Johnson is listed alongside dozens of other Republican politicians as an official sponsor of the study materials.
Neither Johnson’s congressional office nor the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. responded to requests for comment or confirmation of the exchange. This revelation marks not the first controversy tied to Drollinger, who has previously made headlines for derogatory public remarks targeting women, Catholics and LGBTQ+ people. Nor is it Johnson’s first unreported act of faith-based diplomacy with major national security implications: his previously undisclosed meetings with a Ukrainian evangelical advocacy leader ultimately led him to support U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
The incident also shines a light on a long-running debate over antisemitic rhetoric in Congress surrounding deicide claims. In 2024, then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was advancing the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify a legal definition of antisemitism that included labeling the collective deicide charge as antisemitic. Schumer warned that an unidentified Republican senator planned to introduce an amendment that would explicitly exempt deicide claims from the legal definition of antisemitism — meaning calling Jews “Christ-killers” would not be classified as a form of religious bigotry under federal policy.
Schumer approached Johnson, who had already shepherded the bill through the House, to ask for help attaching the antisemitism legislation to a must-pass military spending bill. This procedural move would have blocked the divisive deicide amendment from reaching a floor vote, which Schumer argued would embolden antisemitism across the United States. Johnson rejected Schumer’s request. In April 2025, reporting from The Forward identified Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana and a Capitol Ministries sponsor since 2013, as the lawmaker planning to introduce the amendment. Representative Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma ultimately voted against the Antisemitism Awareness Act over its inclusion of deicide as an antisemitic claim, arguing that blaming Jews for the crucifixion is a “biblical and historical fact” and that the bill mischaracterized biblical text as bigotry. The bill collapsed after a flood of bipartisan amendments cost it the needed majority support.
Johnson only became an official sponsor of Drollinger’s House Bible study in May 2025, one month before he shared the Israel-focused study with Netanyahu. Just months earlier, senior leaders in the second Trump administration had revived the weekly White House cabinet Bible study run by Capitol Ministries. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, one of the leaders of the revived study, is currently facing a lawsuit for proselytizing to her non-religious staff. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, another key leader of the initiative, faced scrutiny during his 2017 confirmation hearing when he refused to reject the claim that non-Christians, including Jews, are “condemned” for not accepting Jesus as a savior.
There is no public evidence confirming whether Johnson’s policy positions are shaped by Drollinger’s teachings, or if he sponsors the Bible studies because their theology already aligns with his long-held personal beliefs. When asked in 2024 if he believed there was a biblical justification for U.S. support for Israel, Johnson confirmed his personal view that the Torah’s promise that God “will bless the nation that blesses Israel and curse the nation that curses Israel” is a core reason for his support, adding that faith adds a deeper layer to his already pragmatic support for the Middle Eastern democracy.
This position directly aligns with Drollinger’s core theology, as laid out in the study shared with Netanyahu. Drollinger argues that while Jews collectively committed deicide by killing Jesus — a claim that all major Christian denominations have formally renounced — God has only temporarily set the Jewish people aside, rather than voiding the original Abrahamic Covenant. Because of this, he argues, the promise of blessings for allies of Israel and curses for its enemies remains in effect, requiring Christian politicians to support Israel to receive divine favor. Drollinger also repeats other common antisemitic tropes in his materials, including claims that Jewish people are inherently “smart” and “good with money,” tropes that have been used to justify anti-Jewish persecution for centuries.
The irony of the moment is hard to overstate: Netanyahu himself has explicitly referenced the long history of antisemitic violence tied to the deicide myth, telling the United Nations years ago that “For centuries the Jewish people have been demonized with blood libels and charges of deicide.” The Anti-Defamation League similarly classifies the deicide claim as a dangerous antisemitic myth, noting that “the myth that Jews collectively murdered Jesus … has been used to justify violence against Jews for centuries. Historians as well as Christian leaders have agreed that the claim is baseless.” Multiple Jewish and secular advocacy groups condemned the 2025 Bible study for repeating the harmful slur.
Despite this, the incident offers a clear reminder that evangelical Christian theology shapes U.S. foreign policy in underreported ways. While many evangelical leaders are vocal supporters of Israel, that support is often tied to end-times theology that requires a sovereign state of Israel for Jesus Christ to return to Earth — even as that same theology perpetuates core antisemitic claims like deicide. Following the U.S. entry into the 2025 strikes on Iran, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation received reports from active-duty service members that military commanders were openly celebrating the strikes as a sign that the biblical End Times were imminent, with grinning leaders telling subordinates the attack fulfilled prophecies in the Book of Revelation.
Drollinger argues that his work does not create new pro-Israel beliefs among members of Congress and the cabinet, but rather reinforces existing predispositions rooted in their cultural Christian backgrounds, providing a formal biblical foundation for their policy positions. “We need to buoy the convictions of our members based upon Scriptural truths … so that, when push comes to shove, they know why they believe they’re pro-Israel: from what the Bible says,” he explained. In recent years, as congressional Democrats have increasingly broken with Israeli policy and voted in growing numbers against U.S. arms transfers to Israel, Drollinger has argued that the Republican Party’s alignment with biblical teaching makes their pro-Israel stance righteous, while the Democratic Party’s departure from Mosaic law will lead to its political ruin. Drollinger insists he does not advocate for Christian nationalism or theocracy, but simply wants elected officials to align all their policy decisions with what he frames as God’s will.
This investigative report was originally published on Jonathan Larsen’s Substack and is republished with permission. Larsen is an independent journalist and former executive producer at MSNBC.
