The strange story of the Christian Identity movement unfolds in a subculture few know and in which fewer still participate, where deviant religion, spurious scholarship, and radical politics intersect. I first became aware of it in the mid-1980s when, like many other Americans, I was struck by dramatic media accounts of new right-wing extremist movements. They had unfamiliar names, such as Aryan Nations, the Order, and Posse Comitatus, and they were often linked with episodes of violence—the killing of federal marshals, the assassination of a Denver radio personality, a daring armored-car robbery. Journalists tended to linger over the details of these episodes without paying much attention to the ideology of those involved in them. When they did talk about beliefs, the descriptions were as intriguing as they were mystifying. This new radical right, the media sometimes suggested, was connected in some distant way with a nineteenth-century religious movement called “British-Israelism.”1
I was vaguely aware of British-Israelism, but some casual research on it only deepened the mystery about the new radical right. British-Israelism was a small but vigorous movement in Victorian English Protestant circles that claimed the British were the descendants of the ten “lost tribes” of Israel. It was a curious notion, typical perhaps of the English love for eccentricity, but unfortunately, knowing what British-Israelism was shed little light on the activities of contemporary American rightists.
In the first place, there was no ready explanation for the presumed connection between a marginal religious movement in nineteenth-century Britain and a fringe political movement in late twentieth-century America. If the two did share ideas, how had the ideas crossed the Atlantic? In addition, as I delved further into British-Israelism, I found that it had beliefs about Jews quite different from those held on the radical right. Where right-wing groups typically attributed the world’s evils to a Jewish conspiracy, British-Israelism regarded Jews as brother Israelites, the descendants of different but related tribes. How had a philo-Semitic movement engendered groups that were fiercely anti-Semitic? Finally, British-Israelites were staunch defenders of the political status quo. They gloried in England’s triumphs and attributed the wisdom of its political institutions to the Israelite heritage, which they believed they had discovered. However, even a cursory examination of press accounts in the 1980s revealed American groups that challenged the very legitimacy of the federal government. What accounted for the metamorphosis?
In seeking answers, I was not helped by the language of news reports, for the media habitually classified right-wing groups under two conventional rubrics, “neo-Nazi” or “white supremacist.” Like other stereotypes, these contained a germ of truth. Many of the groups did in fact express admiration for Hitler and the Nazis, and some went beyond that to employ emblems and uniforms that were either Nazi or designed to summon up Nazi associations. Similarly, the groups did believe whites (or, as they preferred to put it, “Aryans”) were superior to other races in intellectual and spiritual endowments. The difficulty was not that such categories were untrue but that they were unhelpful. They revealed little about beliefs other than suggesting some fairly obvious sympathies and provided no clues whatever to links with the British-Israelites.
The links indeed existed, as the chapters that follow make clear. Beyond their sympathies for Nazism or their commitment to white supremacy, many on the extreme right are also deeply committed to a distinctive religious position known most often as “Christian Identity.” It is as strange as it is unstudied. Few Americans have heard of it, and few scholars have examined it. Yet its elaborate system of religious ideas often provides the driving force for the political agenda of the radical right. It also holds the answers to the questions raised above, for at a point in the recent past, Christian Identity split off from British-Israelism. This book seeks to demonstrate the continuities connecting the two, as well as the discontinuities dividing them.
Christian Identity as a religious orientation is virtually unknown. Its texts are not studied in universities. Its books and magazines are not available in bookstores. It goes unmentioned in all but the most encyclopedic accounts of American religion. No one is sure how many believe in it. It is not organized as a denomination, so that no central organization can be consulted for membership statistics. Made up of numerous small churches, Bible study groups, and Identity-oriented political organizations, it is too fragmented to permit anything but rough estimates. These cover a wide range—from two thousand to over fifty thousand—but the order of magnitude suggests a movement that claims the allegiance of only the tiniest fraction of the American population. So small a group would have little claim on our attention but for the fact that Christian Identity has created the most virulently anti-Semitic belief system ever to arise in the United States and that some of its believers are committed to the eradication of American political institutions.
Christian Identity is built around three key beliefs. First, Identity believes that white “Aryans” are descendants of the biblical tribes of Israel and thus are on earth to do God’s work. Second, Identity believes that Jews are not only wholly unconnected to the Israelites, but are the very children of the Devil, the literal biological offspring of a sexual dalliance between Satan and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Third, Identity believes the world is on the verge of the final, apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, in which the Aryans must do battle with the Jewish conspiracy and its allies so that the world can be redeemed. By any criteria, these are beliefs that place Identity at the farthest margins of American religion, but they also suggest its potential political volatility.
This book attempts to answer the questions of where Christian Identity came from, how it was related to British-Israelism, and how the two separated. While I begin the story of Identity with its nineteenth-century ancestry, this is not a complete history of Anglo-Israelism, a subject that deserves a volume of its own. Rather, I concentrate on those aspects of British-Israelism that led to Christian Identity. Other offshoots of the movement, unrelated to Christian Identity, such as Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, have been omitted or treated in summary fashion.
This inquiry proceeds on two levels, looking first at the visible manifestations of Identity—the organizations, writings, and leading figures—and then at the ideas themselves. We begin with the earliest hints of British-Israelism in the seventeenth century, move through the origin and consolidation of British-Israelism as a social movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, and trace its diffusion from Britain to America. As we move through the story of the American branch of the movement, three figures dominate: C. A. L. Totten, the military-science instructor at Yale who became the movement’s first major figure in America; Howard Rand, the dour New England lawyer whose Anglo-Saxon Federation of America gave British-Israelism a firm foothold during the Depression; and Rand’s colleague, William J. Cameron, editor and publicist for Henry Ford who linked the American branch with anti-Semitism. The generation that followed took the American brand of British-Israelism that Rand and Cameron had built and transformed it into Christian Identity. Central to this transformation was a cadre of West Coast preachers, most in southern California and all in the orbit of the leading ultra-right-wing figure of the 1940s and 1950s, Gerald L. K. Smith.
But to tell the story solely in terms of organizations and personalities is to leave much unanswered, for the beliefs that separate Christian Identity from British-Israelism lie so far outside even traditional right-wing discourse that they cannot be explained merely in terms of organizational connections. In particular, the belief that Jews are the offspring of Satan is sui generis on the American right. Where did it come from? As we shall see when we move to the beliefs Identity holds, it did not arise suddenly or in a vacuum. Rather, it was gradually pieced together out of strange fragments from religion, fringe scholarship, and the occult, until a final synthesis was achieved after World War II.
Identity doctrine drives a significant amount of extreme right-wing political activity, ranging from the lawful to the violent. It was a subsidiary factor in David Duke’s rise, and it was a major force in a string of violent incidents connected with the Order, the Posse Comitatus, and the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord—all groups that combined paramilitary organization with a sense of living in a climactic, apocalyptic time.
Curiously, the subject has never found much favor among scholars. Although Hollywood has recycled elements of it (e.g., Betrayed, Costa-Gavras’s film based very loosely on the story of the Order), and journalists have been quick to recognize a good story, academics have had little to say. To date, only one work—James Aho’s fine study of rightists in Idaho—has provided a sustained discussion of Identity. The journalistic accounts of the extreme right, often colorful and detailed, usually manage to garble its religious aspects. Thus an otherwise useful book on the Order projects Identity anti-Semitism back into the writings of the nineteenth-century British-Israelite Edward Hine, who, as it happens, was a /)/z//o-Semite.2
As Paul Boyer points out, scholarly disdain may also be seen in the failure of academics to explore the prophecy beliefs that pervade evangelical Protestantism, a far more extensive religious phenomenon. The much smaller number of Identity believers might seem to explain the absence of research, but since Christian Identity has become the dominant religious orientation on the extreme right, the failure to examine it is in fact difficult to justify. There are, however, two explanations. First, despite the rise in political militancy of many religious groups in the last twenty years, some scholars continue to regard religion as politically irrelevant. The long-standing belief among social scientists that secularization is an irresistible force dies hard, even in the face of a worldwide resurgence of Fundamentalist groups. Many still find it difficult to accord religious beliefs a significant place among determinants of political behavior. Second, that tendency is exacerbated in the case of Identity by the nature of its beliefs. They are bizarre and seemingly unconnected to recognizable forms of American religious expression. They are also often distasteful, particularly when they address the status of Jews and nonwhites. A movement whose beliefs are both strange and repugnant is difficult for many observers to take seriously, and because they cannot take it seriously, they conclude that it is unimportant.3
Unfortunately, odd and repellent belief systems can be important, regardless of what academics may think, if their believers take them seriously and act upon them. The “respectability” of a system of ideas is not a particularly useful test for determining whether it is worthy of study. To close the door on a subject because it is distasteful is to pretend a part of the world does not exist and hence to leave open the possibility of facing unpleasant surprises in the future. The present work seeks to take Identity beliefs seriously, not because I agree with them (quite the contrary) but because of my conviction that they are an important and understudied phenomenon that we ignore at our peril. Hence, I have for the most part sought to suspend my personal views in order to reconstruct as accurately as possible the movement’s story.
Because Christian Identity has always been organizationally fragmented, the task of capturing its belief system is unusually difficult. Rivalries among leaders, organizational splits, and the extinction of old and the creation of new groups all make the “mapping” of Identity a frustrating undertaking. My view of this elusive terrain, therefore, may differ from that of others by virtue of the groups upon which I have focused and the time period I have emphasized. Thus, particularly in chapters 6, 9, 10, and 11,1 have tried to provide a picture of where Identity theology and politics stood in the mid- and late 1980s, a period defined by the emergence and suppression of the armed group known as the Order.
Two points of style require clarification. The first concerns the use of the word identity. It in fact appears early in the literature of British-Israelism as shorthand for the belief in the Israelite descent of the British peoples, who could now become aware of their true identity. Notwithstanding this early usage, I have chosen to limit my employment of the term (always capitalized) to references concerning the contemporary Christian Identity movement, and have avoided employing it in its original, nineteenth-century sense in order to avoid confusion. This practice becomes problematic only for a brief transitional period, in which British-Israelism in America was metamorphosing into Christian Identity, roughly from the early 1930s until shortly after World War II. It is difficult to know what to call the movement at this point, since it still retained significant elements of traditional British-Israelism while becoming hospitable to new and characteristically Identity motifs. I have sometimes tried to finesse this problem with the term “proto-Identity.”
The other matter of style concerns citation of sources. In order to avoid the proliferation of notes, I have limited them to the ends of paragraphs. The order in which sources are listed in each note parallels, therefore, the order in which they were employed in the paragraph.
Given the esoteric and ephemeral character of much of the material examined here, I owe special debts of gratitude to the libraries and archival collections that welcomed me. The Library of the British-Israel-World Federation in London extended warm hospitality to me at both their present location in Putney and their former offices at Buckingham Gate. I am grateful to the federation’s staff and especially to its secretary, A. E. Gibb. I was also privileged to be able to draw on the extraordinary American Religions Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which covers not only the religious mainstream but also the kinds of exotic tributaries dealt with here. J. Gordon Melton, who assembled the collection, was a gracious and informed guide to its contents. The Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements at the University of Kansas, the premier collection of right-wing literature in the United States, was of enormous value, and the working conditions provided at the Spencer Research Library could scarcely have been more conducive. I am grateful to Becky Schulte and Sheryl Williams of the Spencer Library and to the collection’s donor, Laird Wilcox.
A number of other repositories offered generous aid and access. I wish to express my appreciation to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and to Gail Gans of the league staff; to the Ford Motor Company Archives in Dearborn, and to Jeanine W. Head, archivist; to the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan; to the Library of Congress; and to the interlibrary loan staff of Bird Library at Syracuse University, my own institution.
John Werly generously shared with me his substantial holdings on and wide knowledge of William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts. Many individuals also provided me with a variety of published and unpublished materials, suggestions, and information not part of the public record. While there are too many to list fully, I wish particularly to acknowledge the assistance of the following: Bruce Barron, Mario DePillis, Floyd Cochran, David R. Elliott, William C. Hiss, Glen Jeansonne, Jeffrey Kaplan, Russell Osmond, Richard V. Pierard, Mrs. Wesley Swift, Eckard Toy, and Laird Wilcox. James Aho and Paul Boyer read the entire manuscript, and I benefited greatly from their comments. I also want to express my special appreciation to Krisan Evenson for her labors in preparing the manuscript for publication.
I also wish to gratefully acknowledge the support I received from Syracuse University through the Appleby-Mosher Fund of the Maxwell School, the Senate Research Fund, and the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflict.
As in all I have written, my wife, Janet, has been a marvelously acute and perceptive critic.