Dr. Susan Michael - Sep 12 - 1:30 pm

0:00Welcome to the Israel Answer Series, connecting Israel, the Bible, and you. Join Susan Michael as she explores timely issues and current events from a scriptural perspective to equip the Christian world with a balanced and biblical response. Be sure to subscribe for future episodes, which will ignite your faith and bring the Bible to life in your everyday world. Now let's join Susan with your Israel answers. Well, welcome to today's Out of Zion podcast. I'm your host Dr. Susan Michael and I am just so happy to have with me a dear friend Dr. A. J. Nalti from Regent University and he is the director of the Israel Institute as well as many other descriptions like the director of the MA program in. MA in government and MA international development and then also I chair our PhD program as well at the Roberts School. Yeah, I could never remember all that.

1:00So A. J. welcome and thank you. It's great to be here. You don't mind I'll call you A. J. That's perfect. Yeah. Good friends. So I would love for you to just tell our audience first a little bit about your background and that leads up to you being at Regent. Yeah, you know, it's funny in my 20s it's old God I would never do two things. I never wanted to plant the church and I never wanted to be the Israel guy. And so now I work at Regent and when I'm not at Regent I'm helping plant the church and Anglican church in the area that we live. So tell God your plans and God laughs. I through my undergrad and graduate studies I was focused on Christianity and Islam sort of Middle East politics, South and Southeast Asia as well. Really looking at the relationship between Christianity and Islam at Regent there was a need for someone to teach on Israel and I started teaching on Israel from a very political perspective. In fact, you know, my I remember and I chuckle at this memory now I was I was very naive. My first year teaching at

2:02Regent said, okay guys in this class we're just going to talk about history and politics. I'm not going to talk to you about theology. The problem being that as I studied the history and politics I started realizing this this didn't really make sense. Countries don't come back after 2000 years. Countries don't have the political system that Israel has without some sort of crack up, national crack up. I mean Italy couldn't maintain a government for more than 30 seconds and yet Israel is able to do all this stuff to a high level of competence. And I started to try to figure out, so what's what's different? What's going on here? Well, and as a Christian political scientist, when you eliminate all other secular explanations you have to start looking at, you know, sort of divine action. And then, providentially at that time, I was put in touch with your friend and mine Susan, father, doctor Gerald McDermott and he was my like myself fellow Anglican and he had an entire theology of this is that

3:06theology I'd never encountered before. So I read his book The New Christian Zionism and I was so impressed by it and you know, some of his theological writings, I started assigning it. And so just from there really God pulled me into the Israel space and I realized, you know, this is something that is a unique distinctive feature of regent. And if this is something it's a unique distinctive feature of regent, then let's figure out how we do it well and how we pass on a love for Israel based on understanding of Israel to the next generation of pro-Israel Christian leaders and out of that eventually, you know, postdoctoral or seventh and with a little help from my friends at the ICJ along the way came the Israel Institute that we now have at Regents. You know, I didn't know that story. As you just presented it and the role that Dr. McDermott played, but his writings and his knowledge of it has really helped a lot of people. Absolutely. And that's great. So now since your background, your

4:10expertise was in Islamic studies, right? And more the political. You really understand the battle against Israel where it's coming from, the ideology and the role of the ideology. Absolutely. Yet as a Bible-believing Christian, you understand the theological, I would say the spiritual underpinnings to what's happening politically. And that's what is missing in so many schools. Either a student is in seminary, they're studying Israel, the Bible, you know, the Israelites and they don't know how to connect that to today and Israel today or vice versa. They're in government, polypsych, international affairs, international law, whatever. And they're studying the conflict and they don't understand the spiritual underpinnings that are affecting, you know, the politics and the conflict. So to have someone such as yourself that really gets both ends of that, it's it's

5:13unique. And and that's why I'm so appreciative of what you're doing at Regent. And so I'm so glad to be partnering with you too as we can. Thank you. I appreciate that. And you're right. That holistic understanding is very rare and it's very important. I always say that Christians have a little bit of a home-filled advantage when it comes to studying, you know, radical Islam. Because we start from the assumption that religious people do things for religious reasons. And that's very hard for sometimes my secular colleagues to understand. And it's impossible to understand Israel without that frame. Yeah. Without the sort of not it's not just a contest over land over resources. It's a it's a conflict of theological visions and visions for the world. It's in many ways a conflict of civilizational visions. Those who share the civilizational values of Judeo Christian civilization and those who have a different approach that's that's a you know, it's based on a different civilizational matrix of different ideology. And that comes from a different

6:18cultural and religious background. And I think if we understand it in those terms, we can also understand some of the domestic struggle over Israel as that same fight over those civilizational values and religious and spiritual values as well. Right here. Well, so AJ, they're at region and you bet a great student body of Christian young people that are there because they wanted to go to a Christian university. And I've disown hearts in the right place. But I also have to assume that you've been seeing some increased challenges to Israel. Tell us about what you're observing. So before September of 2025, the biggest problem we had with the student body is the problem you have with any student body at any college when you're trying to do anything, which is apathy combined with there's a thousand other things going on. Right. And so it was really not that there was any negativity toward Israel.

7:23It was just more like, you know, we're competing with all the hundreds of other great options that Regent has for students, which makes it such a fun and exciting place to study, you know, if you want to learn more, go to region.edu. Anyway, but starting in September, we actually saw something very different, which is young men with a conservative inclination were coming back from summer break with a new attitude of negativity toward Israel. And a series of arguments about Israel that really caught some of our student leaders off guard. Couple of fascinating aspects about this. Number one, it was specifically politically active conservative young men. They're similarly situated female peers were not had not been exposed to these memes and arguments. And the arguments really boiled down to a couple of things. One, the idea that Israel as

8:25a state is somehow antithetical to Christians or bad for Christians or periscuting Christians. Two, the idea that there is an inerradicable conflict between Christianity and Judaism. And I even had some student tell me that they thought that Islam was closer to Christianity than Judaism that shared more in common and that the Quran was more positive toward Jesus than the townland. So that was another common. And then the third line of argument was the idea that the US government is too beholden to Israel and that we are sort of too favorable toward Israel. And the idea that it's okay to burn an American flag but not okay to burn an Israeli flag. That was an easy question for me to answer. I said, what on earth makes you think I'm okay with people burning American flags? That's the flag of my country. Oh, absolutely not. So I was well positioned to answer a lot of these questions given my background. But a lot of our student leaders were taken completely off guard. And so we pivoted to a more kind of Charlie Kirk proved me wrong style of

9:28response where I would actually just get in a room with the students, invite any of the students that had questions and do an Israel Q&A and try to answer the questions that they had. And that was reasonably effective. Of course, the trick is getting those students that are really anti-Israel or show up in the first place. But it was a rapid shift. Significant enough that I kind of feel like there was an orchestrated campaign targeting that subgroup. Sometime between May and September. Did you get any more specific information as to who they'd been listening to where it was coming from? I mean, we know it's on social media. Yeah. So some of it's coming from, you know, the usual suspects at this point, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens. Are they listening to Nick Fuentas? Some, some. I don't know that that for a Christian audience like this, if they're listening to Nick Fuentas, I don't necessarily think they're listening to Fuentas in a sense where they agree with him. I think

10:30they think that he's sort of, you know, like people like to listen to morning drive time shock to shock, shock radio guys who would say really shocking controversial things. And they just want to see people's reaction. So I think even a lot of the young guys are listening to Fuentas for that. Now that doesn't mean there's not harmful because even if they reject it, it does sort of inject some of those ideas into the bloodstream. But I think some of it's also coming from a spillover from both some of the more traditional Catholic social media. There's definitely been some on social media, some of the anti-Vaticant to Catholics are very anti-Semitic. And then also, as you're aware, the sort of Christ is king. That is definitely catching on. That mean some of those motifs with some of the younger guys. And you know, I appreciate the energy, and I tell them this, look, I appreciate the energy of wanting to stand up and fight for your faith. But right now you're pointing your guns at our allies. You're pointing your

11:32pointing fire in the wrong direction. And so, you know, those are some of the sources that I've seen. Well, how do you feel about your efforts? Like, are you satisfied that you've been able to answer their questions and and turn things around? Or are you feeling frustrated that it's just ongoing? I think, you know, for our level corner of space, I think we've done reasonably well. You know, I can't answer questions if people don't show up, but if people have shown up and brought those questions, you know, I feel like we're pretty well equipped to answer them. And we're equipping our student leaders to answer them. I think what needs to happen more broadly is thinking about holistically, how do we solve the problem in social media? And I think the problem is not a lack of pro-Israel influencers. There's people out there right now that are great, that are doing great work, that are very effective in the space. What I want to do is think about how can we equip them? You know, I think of the model from World War Two of the United States was the arsenal of democracy. And so, I want us to be the arsenal of Judeo-Christian civilization for this eight front war at the Israel

12:35Institute. You know, and that might not mean us being on the front lines, but it does mean take the answers that we have and get them out to the people on the front lines of social media so that there is equipped as possible to combat that battle. Wonderful. Well, tell us a little bit more about the Israel Institute. Then what is it and what do you do under that banner? So in a nutshell, the purpose of the Israel Institute is to train and equip the next generation of pro-Israel Christian leaders. You know, Regent's motto is Christian leadership to change the world. We want to make sure that those Christian leaders are pro-Israel and that they are trained and equipped to go out and to the fight. And we do that in a couple of different ways. We do that through course offerings. So we collaborate with other academic units to produce course offerings. I just worked with the Robertson School and we've got a new concentration in Israel's studies in our Masters in Government at Regent. We also have a wonderful scholarship from an organization, Susan that you know well. It's called the ICEJ scholarship. And that is for pro-Israel

13:36Christians who are wanting to do a PhD dissertation on Israel because we need scholars as well if we're going to fight and win the battle in academia. And then for undergraduate students, we've done everything from trips to educational events. We're taking a group of students to pull in in Israel here in a couple of weeks assuming that everything holds up in terms of the region and what's going on there. What we're hoping to move into more is again developing those training resources for whether it's in social media, whether it's in peer-to-peer interactions for some of our young leaders to actually be able to go out and be equipped with the knowledge that we have and then take it into their contacts. One of the things that I've learned with Gen Z is that far and away the most effective way to reach them is peer-to-peer engagements. They're not going to listen to even us older millennials or folks in generations out from that but they will listen to their peers. So then if that's the case, you know I look at it as how do we arm and equip their peers to win the battle for the hearts

14:39of minds of their own generation. And that's kind of I think the purpose of these are on institute. Yeah it's one by one and it's about relationship. Absolutely. And that generation, you know, my heart goes out to them honestly because they really don't know who to believe. Our media has been so co-opted that and you could hear anything on social media, on the mainstream media. You don't know who to believe anymore. So they're looking for those trusted sources. Yeah absolutely. And I am so glad that at region they have you. Well thank you, I appreciate that. It's a trusted source and I'm hoping that I see J could be seeing as a trusted source for that generation. I'm optimistic about Gen Z simply because I work with them day in day out in the classroom, out of the classroom and they're great kids and they're hungry for truth. Yes. They're in some ways more hungry for truth even than my generation was. But the problem is it is so hard to find because the zone is flooded. And you know if there's any advice I have if

15:44you're a parent listening to this and you've got young kids, teach your kids the Bible. Get your kids reading the Bible and get your kids connecting the Bible not only to the land but also the land where it took place but the people among whom it took place because if you can do that then they come to region. We'll give them the rest of the way. But that is so foundational. What we find is that students that come in understanding the Bible took place in a place was connected to a people and that really understand that Abrahamic covenant. They are solid and they are more insulated against some of this anti-Israel propaganda. Doesn't mean they always necessarily have the answers but they know that the answers are out there. So I don't think we need to despair about Gen Z. I think there's a fight to be had. And I also think we need to start preparing the ground for Gen Alpha as they're coming up as well so that we can make sure that they have the resources and particularly the Biblically based resources that they need. I agree with you. I love Gen Z. I love Alpha and just want to see them find the truth that they're looking for. I think they are

16:48a powerhouse. They want to do good. They want to affect the world and so we just need to help them and one of the best ways we can help them is not only through your program there at region but getting them to Israel and one way or the other. And I know you're taking a group over next month. We are. And you and I are working together on another program that every summer we hope we'll be able to get young people over there and earn credit. Absolutely. We're a university so there are a number of opportunities and I just want to encourage our listeners that if you want to get behind reaching Gen Z and Alpha that's coming up I ask you to consider making a donation to our ICEJ next Gen fund. From there we're helping young people get to Israel. We're partnering with regions and in ways that we can really affect the next generation but we need

17:49your financial help to be able to do more so I encourage you we'll put the link into the show notes. We encourage you to get behind this. Region needs more money for the scholarship absolutely and you can give to ICEJ and we can continue supporting that ICEJ scholarship fund at region universities so we invite your participation of AJ we just want to thank you for joining us and sharing about your important work. Absolutely and if people want more information about the institute. Yes. Go to region.edu slash Israel and you'll find our podcast you'll find our website you'll find our upcoming events and we appreciate your partnership as this audience and of course Susan you know we could not have done what we've done without the support of ICEJ. Well we love we love working with with them and we're looking forward to seeing where this partnership goes in the future. Thank you AJ. God bless your work there at region. We love it and you're doing a great work so thank you. Thank you. But thank you so much for listening in today.

18:52Please visit our show notes for more information. God bless. Hey just give me one more minute. I want to offer you one of our free resources. We have wonderful resources in our show notes and if you go to our website at icieusa.org slash show notes you'll find links for a number of our free offers. We have downloadables to help root you in scripture. Help you to understand the issues surrounding Israel and the importance of be of Christian support for Israel. And don't forget please follow us on Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn and stay connected. Thank you and God bless. We hope you have enjoyed this episode of Out of Zion with Susan Michael. Be sure to subscribe to Out of Zion now on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, prey.com, Salem One Place, Salem Life Audio,

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