Controversial San Antonio Pastor John Hagee Visits With Trump

SAN ANTONIO, TX — Pastor John Hagee, whose Cornerstone Church services are broadcast nationally on television and radio, revealed details on his visit with Donald Trump last week.

Hagee said he was visiting the nation's capital for unrelated meetings, but decided to drop by the Oval Officeto visit with Trump, according to the San Antonio Express-News. The topic of the day: Israel.

That's about the extent of details spokesman Ari Morgenstern disclosed. But the meeting is significant, advancing the perception that Hagee has never been shy of mixing his fire-and-brimstone theology with politics. He was especially critical of President Barack Obama, in 2014 calling him one of the most anti-Israel president's in the nation's history.

He went so far as to strongly hint for whom he planned to vote in the November general election: "I'm not going to vote for the party that has betrayed Israel for the past seven years," he said. In the run-up to the election last year, he added: "No candidate is perfect but I want you to go vote and may God give us a leader who has the courage to put America first and stand up for 'we the people."

Hagee is the founder of Christians United For Israel, sharing Trump's passion for the issue. On Instagram Monday, Hagee labeled his meeting with Trump as a successful and conveyed the president's gratitude for all the prayers and support.

The conciliatory tone was a departure from some of the more bombastic pronouncements Hagee has made from the pulpit of his San Antonio-based megachurch. He's reserved much of his vitriol against the Catholic church, once calling it the "great whore of Revelations."

He vowed to his flock he would embark on his own personal crusade but with a twist: "I'm not going to do anything in my lifetime that hasn't been done by the Roman Church for the past 800 years, I'm only going to do it on a greater scale and more efficiently," he said.

Hagee has gone so far as to suggest the antisemitism of Adolf Hitler was fueled in part to his Catholic sensibilities. In his book Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee said Hitler's pogroms were informed by his Catholic background, and the church under Pope Pius XII encouraged Nazism rather than denouncing it.He posited Hitler as "a spiritual leader in the Catholic Church" in his 1989 book, despite historical evidence that the dictator attended Mass after 1918.

It's also unclear from the post-meeting missives if Hagee and Trump discussed Hagee's views on Russian, a country for which the president has expressed fondness. In the same book, interpreted the Bible to extrapolate a prediction that Russia and the Islamic states will team up to invade Israel, which will give rise to the anti-Christ (the head of the European Union, he theorized) to create a confrontation over Israel between China and the West.

Such musings have garnered criticism from some Jewish leaders, including Reform Rabbi Eric Yoffie, who has criticized Hagee for being an "extremist" on Israel policy while disparaging other faiths. The Christian Research Institute and others have strongly criticized Hagee's 2007 book, In Defense of Israel, for intimating that Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah for the Jews, only the Savior for the Christian Church.

Journalist Bill Moyers is another notable critic, noting that Hagee and other evangelicals are working solely to support the religious right. "Someone who didn't know better could imagine from the very name Christians United For Israel that pastor John Hagee speaks for all Christians," Moyers once said. "Well, he doesn't."

But all that aside, Hagee said on Instagram his meeting with Trump went well: "He was very gracious, very kind and very appreciative of your prayers and support," the pastor wrote on Monday.

>>> Photo credit: Paul Wharton via WikiMedia Commons