In one sense, Christian Identity is barely half a century old. Its doctrinal basis was established after World War II by a network of independent preachers and writers. It passed rapidly from their hands into a variety of extreme right-wing political movements preoccupied with fears of racial mixing and Jewish conspiracy. Through such organizations as the Aryan Nations and Ku Klux Klan groups, Christian Identity had by the 1970s become, if not white supremacist orthodoxy, at least its most important religious tendency.
In order to understand how Christian Identity developed, the story must be pushed farther back, for Identity’s antecedents lay in England, not in America, and in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. Identity is an outgrowth of what was itself a strange development in religious history, known variously as British-Israelism or Anglo-Israelism (the terms will be employed synonymously here). Although Christian Identity eventually made major changes in British-Israel doctrine, it remains sufficiently related to Anglo-Israelism so that the one cannot be understood without first knowing about the other. Hence, this chapter traces the beginnings of Anglo-Israelism, its key doctrinal concerns, and its growth into a social movement during the late nineteenth century. Succeeding chapters of part I will trace the passage of British-Israel ideas to America; the creation of an American movement by Howard Rand during the 1920s and 1930s; the gradual association of Anglo-Israelism in America with anti-Semitism during the Depression years; and the eventual separation of the American movement from its British roots, when, during the post-World War II years, an autonomous and increasingly strident Christian Identity began to develop in California. This narrative focuses upon three key figures: Howard Rand, whose indefatigable organizing created British-Israel outposts throughout the country during the Depression; his colleague, William J. Cameron, the Ford Motor Company executive who coordinated and largely wrote the notorious anti-Semitic tracts published under Henry Ford’s auspices; and Wesley Swift, the California preacher, evangelist, and associate of Gerald L. K. Smith, who, more than anyone else, was responsible for promulgating Identity in the form we know it today.
Part II examines the central ideas in Identity’s religious system—its mille-narian thrust, its sense of living in the “Last Days,” and, particularly, its bizarre theology of anti-Semitism. For more than anything else, Identity has been distinguished from other forms of conservative Protestantism and right-wing politics by its view of the Jews. In the view of Identity, the Jews are the literal biological offspring of Satan, the descendants of Satan’s sexual seduction of Eve in the Garden of Eden. This demonization of the Jews—almost without precedent in even the most overheated forms of anti-Semitism—did not emerge from a vacuum. It was instead the result of a synthesis of religious and occult ideas, some centuries old and all marginal. Part II is largely given over to identifying the elements of this synthesis and reconstructing the process by which they were combined.
Part III examines the political consequences and implications of Identity. Identity believers have had two different orientations toward the political system. Some have sought to remain within it, either through the electoral system (for example, the Identity circles around David Duke) or by minimizing their contacts with nonbelievers (the so-called survivalists). A smaller but more widely noted segment of Identity has rejected the possibility of working within the system, seeking instead to overthrow American political institutions (the agenda of such guerrilla groups as the Order) or advancing proposals for the territorial separation of a “white nation,” a goal associated with the leader of Aryan Nations, Richard Girnt Butler.
Before we can understand either Identity’s theology or its politics, we must first seek its origins, and these lie in the convoluted history of British-Israelism itself.
Just as there is dispute about the origins of Christian Identity, so controversy surrounds the beginnings of its Anglo-Israel parent. British-Israelism, in the most general terms, refers to the belief that the British are lineal descendants of the “ten lost tribes” of Israel. This revisionist view of history did not become the basis for an organized movement until the second half of the nineteenth century. But long before that, there had been suggestions that the British and the biblical Israelites possessed some special affinity for one another. This linkage exerted particular force during the Puritan ascendancy in the mid-1600s, when anticipation of an imminent millennium was strong. Such Puritan sectarians as John Robins and Thomas Tany argued that Britain would play a central role in returning the Jews to Palestine, so that the rest of the millenarian scenario could be fulfilled. In like manner, Puritans in the American colonies saw themselves as a “New Israel” in the wilderness, confronting it for a providential purpose just as the original Israelites confronted the wilderness of Sinai after the Exodus. Two related but distinguishable tendencies were thus at work: either Britain as a nation was specially chosen by God to help realize the divine design in human history, or some spiritually purified portion of it was destined to take on this role.1
Nonetheless, this conviction of chosenness was based upon analogy, not upon the presumption of a direct biological link between England and the biblical tribes. Indeed, as far as seventeenth-century millenarians were concerned, the descendants of the Israelites were either their Jewish contemporaries or the fabled lost tribes, believed to be hidden somewhere in the fastness of Asia. As the seventeenth century progressed, the belief grew that the tribes would soon reemerge into the light of history, a development appropriate to the “Last Days.” Indeed, by 1665 Europe was swept by reports that this reappearance by the lost tribes had already begun, although its locale was variously reported to be Persia, the Arabian Desert, and the Sahara. These reports described a vast Jewish army moving westward, prepared to smite the Turk and, if need be, to enter Europe itself in order to wreak vengeance on anti-Semitic nations. Thus in November 1665, Robert Boulter of Aberdeen published a letter describing the army and one of its vessels: “There is Sixteen hundred thousand of them together in Arabia, and … there came into Europe Sixty Thousand more; as likewise … they have had Encounters with the Turks, and slain great numbers of them. … As for their Ship, … in the sails was this Inscription in fair Red Characters THESE ARE OF THE TEN TRIBES OF ISRAEL.” A similar letter, originating on the Continent, was published in London in February 1666. Millenarians were attracted to the reports because they believed that the Second Coming and the subsequent millennium could not occur until the Turks were defeated and the Jews regathered in Palestine, where they would accept Christ at the appropriate eschatological moment. As Gershom Scholem has demonstrated, this flurry of rumors in 1665–66 represented much-distorted reactions to the appearance in the Levant of the Jewish false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. Neither Zevi nor his prophet, Nathan of Gaza, commanded an army, of course, let alone could bring the lost tribes from Tartary, but news of Zevfs messianic pretensions and their electrifying effect on Jewish communities quickly fused with existing legends of the hidden tribes.2
The English, absorbed in considerations of the Last Days, consequently found the fate of the Jews an absorbing topic. They also saw in it momentous implications for Christian hopes, and they often regarded England as the ideal instrument for realizing those hopes by assisting Jews in their longing for Palestine. They did not, however, regard themselves as part of Israel, except in the common Christian theological sense that the church was the “New Israel,” formed on the basis of a new covenant.
The first indisputably British-Israel figure about whom anything substantial is known appeared much later. He was Richard Brothers (1757–1824), a retired naval officer who began having millenarian visions in 1791. About 1793, he concluded that he had a divine mission to lead the Jews back to Palestine, an idea not unlike those that had circulated among the Puritans in the preceding century. Brothers, however, differed by adding two other ideas. First, he decided that he himself was a descendant of the House of David; and, second, that most Jews were hidden among existing European, and particularly British, peoples, unaware of their exalted biblical lineage. This idea of a “hidden Israel” that believed itself Gentile, ignorant of its true biological origins, marks the initial appearance of what was to become British-Israelism’s central motif. Brothers, however, was in no position to translate his beliefs into a social movement, in part because of his disinterest in organizational work, but more significantly because of his escalating personal eccentricity. His behavior become more and more bizarre with his increasing royal pretensions. In the end, Davidic scion or not, he was declared insane and institutionalized from 1795 until 1806. His followers maintained their faith for a time, but after Brothers’s release, they drifted away, in part disillusioned, in part stricken with acute social embarrassment. Consequently, although Brothers has some claim to being the first British-Israelite, and is so identified in some accounts, the movement certainly did not begin with him, for by the time of his death, he was a lonely figure.3
The British-Israel movement, as opposed to the British-Israel idea, begins more than a generation after Brothers with the writings of John Wilson (?—1871 ). The self-educated son of a radical Irish weaver, Wilson lectured tirelessly in Ireland and England, advancing his claim to have discovered the hidden origins of the nations of northern Europe. His central work, Lectures on Our Israelitish Origin, appeared in 1840 and ran through five editions, the last published posthumously in 1876. This work, together with Wilson’s lectures and the periodicals he edited, brought the British-Israel message to a large middle-class audience. The Lectures depended less on the interpretation of biblical prophecy than on Wilson’s attempt to demonstrate empirically that the lost tribes had in fact migrated from the Near East to Europe. Like many writers after him, one of his favorite techniques was to look for words in different languages that sounded the same, assuming, usually erroneously, that if the sounds were similar, then the languages and their speakers had to be connected. Since similar sounds often crop up in otherwise unrelated languages, they allowed Wilson to claim, and to believe, that he had proved that “many of our most common [English] words and names of familiar objects are almost pure Hebrew.” He was equally confident that similarities in social institutions were the result of an Israelite legacy directly imported by the migrating tribes themselves, whom he deemed responsible for everything good and British, from limited monarchy to trial by jury. Every strand of evidence seemed to lead Wilson to his conclusion that the search “for the Lost Sheep of the House of Israel” must necessarily end “in the NORTH-WEST—in our own part of the world.”4
If the British were Israelites, then what of the Jews? Wilson never went so far as to deny the Jews a place in “All-Israel,” but he saw nothing to suggest that they held a religious status equal to their newly discovered northern European brethren. In the first place, Wilson and all his successors drew a sharp distinction between the southern kingdom of Judah, from which Jews were deemed to have sprung, and the northern kingdom of Israel, the ancestors of the British and other European peoples. Hence, Jews bore only those divine promises God had given to the few tribes that dwelt in Judah, while the bulk of the prophecies were inherited by descendants of the tribes that dwelt in Israel—preeminently the tribe of Ephraim, which populated the British Isles. In addition, Wilson was skeptical of Jewish claims to undiluted descent from biblical ancestors. Patterns of intermarriage, he maintained, had intermixed Judah’s descendants with other, spiritually inferior peoples: “ISRAEL, who were taken out of the land, cannot be more lost among the heathen than were the people called ‘Jews’ who remained in it,” for the Jews, having mingled with “the worst of the Gentiles,” had inherited the Gentiles’ curse, which could be lifted only with the acceptance of Jesus. Thus Wilson’s attitude toward the Jews was at once fraternal and patronizing. They were erring brothers who needed to be shown the true path to salvation by the spiritually more advanced Israel/Britain, now made aware of its true Identity.5
Wilson was not, however, concerned only with the British. He found manifestations of Israel in a range of mostly northern European peoples, “not only among the Germans and their Anglo-Saxon offspring, but also in Italy, and especially in France and Switzerland,” as well as in Scandinavia. Britain retained a place of spiritual preeminence, since the British were descendants of the tribe of Ephraim, one of Joseph’s sons. Jacob’s birthright blessing, which originally had gone to Reuben, was taken from him and transferred to Ephraim and his brother, Manasseh, but Jacob “set Ephraim before Manasseh” (1 Chron. 5:1; Gen. 48:19, 20). Although other peoples might descend from sons of Jacob, it was the descendants of these “adoptive sons,” his grandsons, who would lead the way; and since Britain was deemed to flow from the loins of Ephraim, its position was assured. Nonetheless, in Wilson’s view, the British needed to recognize their kinship with Germanic peoples across the Channel, a contentious point, for later Anglo-Israel writers were far less willing to share Britain’s divine vocation. Wilson’s flirtation with “Teutonism” in fact reflected a broader British fascination with Germanic prehistory.6
The linkage Wilson made between the British and other Teutonic peoples was reinforced by a number of tendencies in English political thought and intellectual life. There was, in the first place, the prevalent belief that a natural democracy had been practiced by the unspoiled Anglo-Saxon peoples, which presumably developed organically out of their tribal life in Germany and England. This, in turn, was contrasted with the “Norman yoke,” the authoritarian and inegalitarian practices that the Norman invaders imposed upon these natural democrats they conquered in 1066. To link England with Germanic peoples was to return to pre-Norman roots and, by implication, to rein-vigorate the indigenous democratic inheritance. At a scholarly level, English intellectuals were drawn to the efforts of German philologists who sought to trace the English and German languages to a common Indo-European origin, part of the search for the Aryans from whom both languages were presumed to have sprung. Germanic peoples were therefore deemed to be linked by shared democratic propensities, language, and, ultimately, common descent. By the period 1815-40, which is to say during the time when John Wilson was formulating his version of British-Israelism, these ideas began to take on a more explicitly racial tone. In the hands of Thomas Carlyle and others, links among Anglo-Saxon peoples were increasingly associated with claims to racial superiority. The imperial expansion of England and the settlement of the American West suggested that the Anglo-Saxons had a special destiny to prevail over lesser breeds. Wilson’s assertion that the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples were the very offspring of Israel whom God addressed in Scripture fit in a seemingly natural way with these ambient notions about political institutions, linguistics, and race.7
Wilson’s book was widely noted, and he worked assiduously to promulgate his ideas from the lecture platform, yet at the time of his death—1871—the task of turning his ideas into a social movement was just beginning. The beginning of British-Israel organizing, however, demonstrated the vulnerability of Wilson’s emphasis upon the common destiny of the Germanic peoples, for by the 1870s, Germany was politically unified, economically thriving, and aggressively seeking its “place in the sun.” It had, in a word, emerged as Great Britain’s chief rival in Europe. At the same time that German and British interests were coming into more frequent conflict, the British Empire continued to grow. And the Empire was taken to be a sign of God’s special favor, for had not God promised that Ephraim would become “a company of nations”? Thus, the British-Israelites were not disposed to sacrifice England’s imperial mission to Germany at a time when they were experiencing a growing sense of British uniqueness. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the Teutonist position fell into increasing disfavor, although, as we shall see, contemporary Christian Identity believers enamored of Hitler’s Germany eventually revived it. But insofar as the early British-Israel movement itself was concerned, by the 1870s and 1880s, it felt a pressing need to revise Wilson in order to make the Israelite heritage a more exclusively British concern.8
In the 1870s, British-Israel associations began to form in London and elsewhere in England. The Anglo-Ephraim Association continued to advance the Teutonist position, while the Anglo-Israel Association was set up to combat Teutonism. Given political trends, it was inevitable that the anti-Teutonists would prevail, and in 1878 the Anglo-Israel Association absorbed its AngloEphraim rival. By 1886, the association, based in London, boasted twenty-seven affiliated groups throughout the country.
The principal exponent of the anti-Teutonist view was a self-proclaimed disciple of Wilson’s, Edward Hine (1825–91), whose indefatigable propagandizing consolidated the movement in England and North America. Hine claimed to have been converted to British-Israelism in 1840 when, as a youth of fifteen, he heard John Wilson lecture. “He [Wilson] lodged a thought in my mind which has lived there ever since,” Hine recalled. Despite the powerful impression Wilson made, Hine in fact neither published nor spoke publicly about British-Israelism for nearly thirty years, during which he passed from one modest job to another, all the while privately cultivating the religious interest Wilson had stimulated.9
Hine was an avid and effective publicist for the cause, but he proved to be a weak and ineffectual organizer. He gave his first public lecture in 1869, wrote his first pamphlet in 1870, and founded his first magazine in 1873. Tireless though he was in reaching out to new audiences, he had little stomach for the drudgery of organizational work. As Hine reflected, wrote, and spoke, he began to deviate from Wilson’s views and promulgated an increasingly Anglo-centric doctrine. His message eventually found its organizational instrument in a retired civil servant, Edward Wheeler Bird. Although in the byzantine politics of Anglo-Israelism Hine and Bird became adversaries, Bird in fact supplied the organizational vehicles for Hine’s message. Bird’s Metropolitan Anglo-Israel Association and his magazine, Banner of Israel, were the instruments to rout the Teutonists and define a new mainstream Anglo-Israelism. Hine, despite his distaste for organizational work, could not bear to have institutions outside his control, and he thus saw in Bird a rival rather than an ally. When Hine’s attempts to create his own organization, the British-Israel Identity Corporation, and his own magazine failed, he returned to his true métier as missionary and pamphleteer. The movement in England was now centered upon the institutions Bird created, and Hine set off seeking new audiences to woo in North America, where we shall pick up his career in the next chapter.10
Whatever Hine lacked as an organizer, he more than made up for it in his ability to reshape and articulate doctrine. To an English public increasingly suspicious of Germany, Wilson’s notion that both England and Germany partook of the Israelite inheritance was distasteful. A public accustomed to the seemingly limitless growth of British wealth, power, and prestige were attracted to the notion that their nation’s successes were the result of God’s will, not luck or brute force. Hine satisfied their appetites.
Hine took strong exception to Wilson’s inclusion of all the Teutonic peoples within the newly discovered Israel, but his disagreements were theological rather than political. “The main point of my differing with the late Mr. John Wilson,” he wrote in 1885, “… is that he sought to identify all the Modern Teutonic Nations as parts of Israel, whereas I stoutly maintain that to accept this view would lead us to terrible inconveniences and calamities.” The “inconveniences and calamities” Hine had in mind concerned how biblical prophecies could be fulfilled if “Israel” were parceled out among a large number of nations. As far as Hine was concerned, fulfillment required that “the whole Ten Tribes … become consolidated in an Island Nation.” For Wilson it was enough that England descended from the tribe of Ephraim, but in Hine’s reading of Scripture, “the term Ephraim is synonymous with Israel, and embodies the Ten Tribes as a consolidated people.” Only the “thirteenth tribe,” Manasseh, lay outside, and British-Israelites in time came to identify it with the United States, so that between them, Britain and the United States constituted all of Israel that was not Jewish.11
Hine did more than merely deprive the Teutons of their Israelite status; he placed them in the enemy camp. That is to say he argued that just as the ten tribes of Israel had been “lost,” so too had Assyria, and the modern-day Assyrians were none other than the Germans. By implication, therefore, just as Israel and Assyria had fought in the biblical past, so Britain and Germany, their latter-day descendants, were destined to continue the struggle, this time on terms more favorable to Israel.12
Hine also parted company with Wilson’s view of the Jewish people. While Wilson acknowledged their part in “All-Israel,” he emphasized their contaminating intermarriages with the idolatrous peoples around them. Hine, on the other hand, insisted on elevating the Jews’ position. While they were subordinated to the ten tribes, they nonetheless remained a valued and important part of “All-Israel,” which was made up of the House of Israel and the House of Judah. The House of Judah was comprised of the tribes of Judah and Levi, and “these are the Jews of the present day.” Unlike the ten tribes, they were never “lost,” so that they might be a reminder of the Jews’ rejection of Jesus’ messiah-ship. The House of Judah had once included the tribe of Benjamin as well, Hine went on, but Benjamin had separated from Judah and had become part of the House of Israel, “so that Benjamin is not now with the Jews.” Consequently, in a comment often repeated in British-Israel literature, “the Jews are of Israel, but Israel is not of Judah”; “the people of the Ten Tribes were never Jews.” The reuniting of All-Israel, inevitable in the Last Days, would require that the present-day ten tribes, that is, the British, come together with the descendants of the remaining tribes, that is, the Jews. A significant part of British-Israel eschatology was to be the common enterprise of Anglo-Jewish resettlement of Palestine as essential to the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.13
While John Wilson continued to enjoy respect as Anglo-Israelism’s founder, Hine’s version, not Wilson’s, prevailed. Nonetheless, despite its influence, even Hine’s reformulation never amounted to an orthodoxy; British-Israelism never organized as a sect, never required that its adherents break their existing denominational affiliations, and never developed machinery to authoritatively define doctrine and punish deviation. Consequently, from time to time other ideas became engrafted onto Hine’s. The most important and improbable of these additions was “pyramidism,” the belief that great religious truths were incorporated into the structure and dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
At first glance, the only connection between pyramidism and British-Israelism is the fact that both represent “rejected knowledge,” ideas outside the academy’s definition of respectable knowledge. In fact, their affinity goes far beyond their common pariah status. In the first place, English pyramid literature began to appear at the same time as the publications of Wilson and his followers and therefore was known and available to early generations of Anglo-Israelites. Second, mathematical analysis of the Great Pyramid’s dimensions seemed to reveal extraordinary and unexpected numerical relationships. This in turn led pyramidologists to conclude, as a colonialist mentality might dictate, that the ancient Egyptians were too primitive to have created so sophisticated a structure. And, indeed, the more pyramid students experimented with dimensions, the more relationships they were able to find—with pi, with astronomical constants, and with dimensions of the earth. This led to an additional conclusion: not only were the Egyptians incapable of such a feat, but a building incorporating such subtle mathematical relationships must have a purpose beyond merely serving as a pharaoh’s resting place. Third, both the pyramidologists and the British-Israelites were engaged in constructing revisionist accounts of the history of the ancient world and consequently were drawn together by a common disposition to question conventional scholarly views. Once the pyramid writers disposed of the Egyptians as the architects, they were prepared to entertain other possibilities, notably that the pyramid had been designed by some biblical figure endowed with divine wisdom. The most common candidates were hazy, prepatriarchal figures, such as Enoch, Noah, and Job. If the structure was not primarily a tomb, what was its function? If a biblical figure had designed it, then, the argument went, its purpose must be related to scriptural truths. Although pyramidologists often argued bitterly with one another about interpretations of the measurements, they agreed that in some way the structure “encoded” biblical truths and had been placed in the world by God to await a generation (their own, of course) sufficiently advanced to understand it and sufficiently close to the Final Days to give the message special significance.
Pyramidism began with the writings of John Taylor (1781–1864), who published The Great Pyramid in 1859, when Wilson’s British-Israel book was enjoying great attention. In addition to the usual mathematical manipulations, Taylor also believed he had proven that the pyramid was constructed on the English inch-based measurement system. This was a boon to English critics of the metric system, affronted that the hated French would challenge British tradition. It also led to the more fanciful notion that whoever had constructed the pyramid (Taylor’s candidate was Noah) later traveled to England, bringing his measurement system with him.14
Taylor’s work was continued and integrated into British-Israelism by a more substantial figure, C. Piazzi Smyth (1819–1900), the royal astronomer of Scotland. Piazzi Smyth, notwithstanding his scientific background, advanced a theological rather than simply a mathematical theory of the pyramid. If the Great Pyramid had been built by Adam’s descendants, he reasoned, it must have been for some divine purpose: “It is the crowning glory of the Great Pyramid to have been prepared by Divine inspiration in the beginning of the world, so as to be now capable of standing up a more than mortal witness to these latter days, both of there being a finite-appointed time for the First, and now, at last a close approaching of the exceeding glories of the Second Coming—though seen through times of trouble.” Those who fathered the Israelites had thus built this structure using their own superior measurement system, which later appeared in England after the dispersion of the tribes, and the building that they had built was intended to be read by the present generation as a confirmation and expression of prophecy.15
The pyramid functioned for many British-Israelites as a gigantic prophetic clock, in which sacred history was displayed by the length and configuration of its internal passageways. In this system, one “pyramid inch” (which deviated one one-thousandth from the British inch) equaled one year. This equipped British-Israelism with a mechanism familiar to other millenarians, a system of date setting, by which the proximity of apocalyptic events could be precisely ascertained. In the early twentieth century, when this literature reached its greatest influence, some in the movement’s umbrella organization, the British-Israel World Federation, attempted to suppress date setting, on the ground that “the exact date of our Lord’s appearing… is known to God … yet the precise time is hidden, and probably will be till the end.” Nonetheless, a vast date-setting literature proliferated. Its central figure was a structural engineer, David Davidson, who, in his magnum opus, The Great Pyramid: Its Divine Message, and a stream of other books and articles, sought nothing less than a revision of the entire history of the ancient Near East—an enterprise that was to touch a surprising range of figures in both England and North America.16
The inability of British-Israelism to suppress date setting was symptomatic of a doctrinal permissiveness present when the movement began and continuous throughout its history. Although sects developed that were influenced by it (notably, Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God), British-Israelism itself remained a movement without a head, steadfastly latitudinarian where matters of belief were concerned. While various umbrella organizations sought to define views on theological issues, they were neither able nor willing to read those with divergent views out of the movement. (Thus, Mrs. Sydney Bristowe, whose eccentric views about Cain, discussed in chapter 8, significantly influenced Christian Identity, was published by the Covenant Publishing Company, an arm of the British-Israel World Federation, even though the federation dissociated itself from her position.)
In keeping with this permissiveness, the movement avoided elaborate creedal statements, even in its widely used theological compendium, British-Israel Truth. In it, the influential Canadian Anglo-Israelite William Pascoe Goard rejected the notion that the volume defined orthodoxy: “The book does not profess to be a complete statement, neither is any part of it to be looked upon as an authoritative statement, but simply as a contribution of each writer from his own view point.” Far from constituting a “handbook,” the volume was based upon the belief “that the only handbook of British-Israel Truth is the Bible, by which all other contributions must be tested.” That extended to such controversial but critical questions as the timing and sequence of millennial events such as the tribulation, rapture, and Second Coming. In light of such attitudes, it was scarcely surprising that when a British-Israel group was organized in Vancouver in 1909, its members resolved at their second meeting to be “strictly unsectarian.”17
A contemporary academic student of British-Israelism calls it “an interdenominational fellowship,” open to any Protestant believer, “a party which could operate within any of the Protestant denominations.” Since “it does not claim to have a monopoly of the saving truth,” believers can, and indeed are encouraged, to retain active church memberships. Since Anglo-Israelism does not claim to have a message necessary for salvation, it can do little more than exhort followers, assuming that those doing the exhorting can themselves agree on the limits to be placed on beliefs or actions.18
The movement in England appears to have peaked in the 1920s, when it had approximately five thousand members. While the number even then was exceedingly small, the movement was staunchly middle class, leavened by conspicuous numbers of aristocrats and high military officers, which assured it resources and visibility out of all proportion to its size. Its decline has been precipitous, and by the early 1990s there were barely seven hundred members, with virtually none of the titled individuals who once served as its patrons.19
Anglo-Israelism thus advanced a novel view of both the Bible and of ancient history. Its identification of the ancient Israelites with contemporary Britons gave its antiquarianism a peculiarly modern twist, for no one outdid British-Israelites in their support of the British Empire. They espoused their ideas while remaining in existing mainstream religious denominations, predominantly the Church of England. Since British-Israelism never presented itself as a road to salvation, it did not object to adherents retaining their traditional religious loyalties. Finally, by refusing to organize as a sect, British-Israelism never developed machinery to impose doctrinal discipline, so that it remained open not only to the disparate religious views of its members, but to a variety of eccentric ideas about the relationship between sacred and secular history that it was powerless to exclude. This openness later allowed Christian Identity to draw in equal measure from the traditional and the bizarre.