ABSTRACT
British-Israelism is first and foremost religious tradition, and it is one which explicitly avows its inheritance from Biblicist traditions of Protestant reformers and from the Biblical religion with which the Protestant Reformers had such affinity. In example of British-Israelism, the author finds a much thicker account of meaning of Israel to British Protestants. British-Israelists continually engage in the construction of ethnicity, in an ongoing process. At certain times Afrikaners, the Irish, the Russians, the Jews, the Germans and others have been considered Israel nations. If British-Israelists believed that God had promised imperial glory for Israel, then that prophecy was disconfirmed by the events of the twentieth. British-Israelists launched publicity campaigns throughout the twentieth century with the aim of alerting the people of Britain to their unknown heritage. In 1967, the sociologist David Martin described the sense, amongst some British evangelicals, that Britain remained the centre of Christian world. The extreme end of this spectrum, he observed, was occupied by British-Israelists.
