5
British-Israel Millennialism

Christian Identity believers think of themselves as living in the “Last Days.” when history will reach its consummation, a millennialist outlook they inherited from British-Israelism. The latter was concerned not merely with identifying the “Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples” as true Israelites but in drawing from this knowledge inferences about the fulfillment of biblical prophecies. Hence British-Israelism acquired an early concern for millenarian matters, as followers sought to demonstrate that the English-speaking peoples would be the beneficiaries of God’s redemptive power. Despite its idiosyncratic character, British-Israelism was significantly influenced by broader late nineteenth-century Protestant millennialist currents, and since British-Israelites had no sectarian ambitions of their own, the movement sought to demonstrate its compatibility with millenarian ideas circulating in evangelical circles.

Christian Identity received this millenarian legacy but then proceeded to alter it significantly. It was moved to do so for two reasons. First, the main carrier of millenarian ideas in contemporary America has been Protestant Fundamentalism. While British-Israelites maintained a generally open attitude toward much Fundamentalist theology, Identity was not inclined to be so receptive, in part because of the extent to which contemporary Fundamentalist millennialism depends upon the existence and security of the state of Israel. Clearly, no such flirtation with philo-Semitism could coexist with Identity’s demonization of Jews. Second, by linking Jews with the Devil, and the “Jewish conspiracy” with Satan’s struggle to subvert humanity, Identity has come perilously close to dualism, the view that history is a clash between good and evil forces. Indeed, partly for that reason the major dualist on the extreme right, the late Robert Miles, regarded Identity as compatible with his own views. Christian Identity, having raised the power of Evil to a status scarcely different from God’s, has made the attainment of the millennium a more problematic enterprise. The greater the power of the Jewish conspiracy, the more difficult, and therefore the less likely, its defeat. And while no Identity writer has abandoned the idea of inevitable redemption, the focus has shifted from the goal itself to the process of reaching it, a process fraught with considerably greater risks for Identity than for Anglo-Israelism.

This chapter and the next explore the development of millenarian ideas in the religious continuum that runs from nineteenth-century British-Israelism to modern Christian Identity. But before sketching British-Israel views of the End-time, it is first necessary to briefly examine where ideas of the millennium stood at the point when British-Israelism appeared on the Anglo-American religious scene.

Protestant Millenarian Thought

Under the stimulus of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, British millennialism flourished in the early nineteenth century. While British chiliasm never again manifested the zeal it had shown during the Puritan Revolution of the seventeenth century, it did awake from its eighteenth-century slumber. It was “premillennialist,” in the sense that the Second Coming was to precede the millennium itself. The premillennialism of the 1800s is best viewed as a dialogue between two approaches (“schools” would imply greater doctrinal organization than was the case). The two positions are most commonly labeled “historicist” and “futurist.” As the terms themselves suggest, the former looked to past events for evidence of prophetic fulfillment, while the latter placed such fulfillment in the future. Historicism, meditating upon the key texts of the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, concluded that most of the prophecies they contained had already been realized by the events of European history, and that by carefully analyzing political and ecclesiastical chronologies, millenarians could determine with considerable certitude the few remaining unfulfilled prophecies. Beyond this general attitude, histor-icists had also developed techniques for teasing precise meanings out of biblical texts, as in their practice of converting biblical “days” into historical years. The historicists’ combination of prophecies fulfilled by past history and devices for calculating the rest of the chiliastic scenario reached a climax in America during 1843–44, when William Miller became the center of a mass movement in anticipation of an imminent Second Coming. The traumatic failure of the Millerites’ predictions deeply undercut the credibility of historicism.¹

As the Millerites’ “Great Disappointment” suggested, the historicist position carried the seeds of potential public embarrassment. The more specific the predictions, the more massive the disconfirmation. But even before the Millerite debacle in America, some British millennialists had begun to advance an alternative position. Futurism was in some respects historicism’s opposite, for it rejected the latter’s reliance on history in order to validate prophetic utterances. To the contrary, futurism argued that nothing in the church’s past could be taken as fulfillment of prophecy. The crucial events described in the Book of Revelation were yet to occur. Further, futurists rejected the year-day equation, with all the date-setting temptations associated with it. The futurist position was articulated in the most influential manner by John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), a member of the Plymouth Brethren. Darby’s views were well formed by the 1830s but were not widely circulated in the United States until the early twentieth century, when they were incorporated into a Bible commentary prepared by C. I. Scofield (1843–1921).²

Darby’s version of futurism, known as “dispensationalism,” offered a profound challenge to the historicist position. Darby divided sacred history into a series of ages, or dispensations, each characterized by a change in the manner in which God dealt with humanity. Darby, however, had not invented the concept of dispensations, nor was use of the idea limited to futurists. Nonetheless, the process of periodization became in time so closely associated with Darby’s other, and more contentious, views, that dispensationalism came to mean only that version of millennialism that Darby had devised. Darby’s contribution lay in two unrelated ideas. First, he argued that at a point in the distant past, prophecies had ceased to be fulfilled, introducing a “parenthesis” into history, an era when the “prophetic clock,” as it were, had ceased to tick. The resumption of prophetic fulfillment, therefore, lay in the future. Second, at a future time impossible to calculate, as the key prophecies came to fulfillment, the saved would be secretly lifted off the earth by Christ in a supernatural event most commonly referred to as the “rapture.”³

Darby’s concept of the parenthesis, during which the fulfillment of prophecy ceased, was an outgrowth of his concept of the church, an entity unrelated in his mind to the organized church on earth. It was instead a nonworldly, spiritual entity. In the futurist rendering, when Jesus came and was rejected by the Jews, the original eschatological scenario was violated. Jesus was unable to make his originally intended rapid return, and God of necessity had to create a new people from among the Gentiles to take the place of the original Israel, the church as it is commonly regarded. Scriptural passages, therefore, existed in two sets, one concerning the newly created church and the other concerning the Jews. This division of Scripture came to be referred to by dispensa-tionalists as “rightly dividing the word of truth.” Most prophecies, in Darby’s view, referred to the Jews, and inasmuch as their continued dispersion and failure to recognize Jesus as the Messiah continued, there seemed to be no immediate prospect of the “clock” resuming its tracking of prophetic time.⁴

Darby’s approach left dispensationalists with a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward the Jews. On the one hand, God’s promises to the Jews—for example, restoration to their own land—would be fulfilled. On the other, they had rejected the Savior. Dispensationalists consequently adopted a paternalistic attitude toward Jewish national aspirations, a theme that was to be echoed in British-Israelism. At the same time, however, they often interpreted persecution as divine chastisement. As far as the Last Days were concerned, the Jews would indeed be restored to their homeland in Palestine, but during the Tribulation, they would suffer bloody persecution at the hands of Antichrist, until only a remnant was left to convert at the time of the Second Coming. Hence, dispensationalism advanced a philo-Semitic agenda, while at the same time not wholly abandoning the view that Jews were targets of wrath from both God and Satan. British-Israelism expressed a similar ambivalence. It emphasized philo-Semitic themes in the nineteenth century, but by the 1940s, as we shall see, increasingly emphasized that Jewish suffering was merited.⁵

The insertion of this Darbyite parenthesis into history placed the church in the awkward position of being unable to affect or accelerate the attainment of the Second Coming and millennium. The parenthesis, however, might be removed by external intervention. This in turn was linked to Darby’s teaching concerning the rapture. Darby believed that at some unknowable future time, the true, spiritual church—unrelated to its often corrupt organizational manifestations—would be removed by Christ from the earth and dwell with him in heaven, to return with him to earth once again to inaugurate the millennium. In this sense, the Second Coming would occur twice, once in secret when Christ would come to snatch up the church, the truly saved, and again in a public Second Coming that would include Jesus’ physical return to rule over the thousand-year kingdom of the saints. Once the secret rapture occurred, the interrupted sequence of prophetic fulfillment would resume, including the seven-year period of violence and persecution known as the Tribulation, during which Antichrist would appear and great armies would marshal at Armageddon.⁶

Through the nineteenth century, Darby’s ideas continued to acquire influence in Great Britain, especially among evangelicals within the Church of England and the Scots Presbyterian church. With the exception of the Plymouth Brethren themselves, Darbyite dispensationalism made little headway in the dissenting churches. These futurist inroads were particularly striking in view of Darby’s pronounced antiinstitutional views, associating ecclesiastical organizations with worldliness and corruption. The rise of British-Israelism occurred simultaneously with the rise of dispensational premillennialism, and within many of the same denominations. Hence, in its formative decades, British-Israelism could not help but be touched by powerful millenarian currents. Darby was anxious to avoid the mathematical calculations and date setting associated with historicism. The Millerite episode only served to reinforce this aversion. Nonetheless, the prospect that the rapture and ensuing millenarian events might occur at any time produced an understandable desire to know when the present dispensation was approaching its end. Hence, although futurists have by and large retained their dislike for date setting, a countervailing desire for closure on so momentous a subject has continued to tempt them to seek “signs of the times” that might presage the imminence of the “latter days.”⁷

Millennialism in Edward Hine

In light of the simultaneous growth of British-Israelism and a new millenarian consciousness in English evangelical circles, it is not surprising that early Anglo-Israelism manifested a strong belief that the world was entering the final days of history. The same apocalyptic mood appears in writings by American British-Israelites as well, for by the time the movement had put down roots in the United States, American Protestants had begun to be influenced by English millenarian developments. Yet British-Israelism professed no orthodox position on eschatological matters, reflective of the fact that it never developed along fully sectarian lines and that Protestants themselves were not entirely certain how the road to the end ran. This can be seen clearly in the speculations of Edward Hine, the leading late-Victorian British-Israelite, who was fascinated by the prospect that the final dispensation was coming to a close but was not certain when it would occur.

Hine, like many millenarians before him, believed that the literal millennium—the thousand-year reign of Christ and his saints prior to the Last Judgment—would be a sabbath of sorts for the world, and would therefore be the seventh one-thousand-year period of history. Hence Hine was curious as to when the sixth such age would come to a close. His speculations suggest both vacillation and millennial yearning. Since he believed that the six thousand years of history had begun with the creation, he looked to biblical chronologies in order to see where humanity presently was. Responding in 1871 to an inquiry concerning the Battle of Armageddon, Hine suggested that it would be the final event of the six thousand years and that it would occur in another 125 years, that is, in 1996. By 1880, however, he had expanded this interval to 360 years (to the year 2240) in order to provide enough time to spread the British-Israel message. For inasmuch as the tribes now resident in England were to be at the forefront of the millennial age, they could scarcely occupy that exalted role until they accepted their true “identity.” In 1889, two years before his death, Hine was apparently satisfied that the movement had grown with sufficient rapidity (in no small measure as a result of his own efforts) so that the end was not nearly so far off:

We can see numerous millenarian crosscurrents in Hine’s thinking—the futurist aversion to date setting together with the historicist search for prophetic fulfillment in the past. British-Israelism always harbored a historicist strain, since its assertion that the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples were Israel compelled it to find in aspects of their history demonstrations that one or another biblical prophecy concerning the Israelites had been fulfilled by British descendants. In place of Darby’s great parenthesis, British-Israelism saw less reason to stop the prophetic clock. If the Jews were not Israel, their rejection of Jesus posed less of a problem in millenarian terms, although to be sure they would eventually have to be regathered in Palestine and convert. If Israel was another group, and a Christian one at that, it was entirely possible that prophecies had continued to be fulfilled throughout the Christian era. The obstacle in this case was the fact that these putative Israelites were unaware of their true identity, a problem the movement felt obliged to solve with any persuasive techniques available.⁸

Millennialism among American British-Israelites

The same conviction of accelerating apocalypse may be found in American British-Israelites. Thus Joseph Wild, one of the earliest Anglo-Israelite writers in America and a contemporary of Hine’s, saw numerous signs of prophetic fulfillment, “these being the latter days.” M. M. Eshelman detected in greater civil and political rights for Jews the threshold of that critical time when Jews would regather in Palestine so that events linked to the final consummation of history could begin. But among American believers, none bore down more heavily on millenarian themes than C. A. L. Totten. In part, the strength of Totten’s chiliasm was a function of the time in which he wrote, a decade after Eshelman and almost twenty years after Wild. Totten’s work reflected rising social tensions in an America beset by economic dislocations and inequality and the adjustments required by mass immigration. Internationally, tensions continued to build toward the coming flashpoint of the First World War. There was, finally, the more diffuse sense of expectation generated by the approaching end of the century itself. Thus in 1897, Totten observed that

While none of this reflects a particularly acute theological mind, it clearly suggests that the millenarian speculation rising in Protestant circles generally made a comparably deep impact upon British-Israelites.⁹

Systematizing British-Israel Millennialism

As British-Israelism matured, it eventually sought to present its millenarian views in a more logically connected fashion, although its theological efforts were limited by the fact that the movement never took fully sectarian form. It had, therefore, to contend with a membership that retained a range of denominational affiliations and the impossibility of enforcing orthodoxy on questions where believers were already divided. The most ambitious attempt to codify British-Israel beliefs took the form of a collection of extended essays, British-Israel Truth, first issued in 1891 and revised numerous times through the 1930s. Its authors laid out as clear a statement of Anglo-Israel millennialism as the permissive character of the movement allowed.

In this presentation, the prevalent concept of periodized, or dispensational, sacred history was retained. Those blessings the Bible promises to Israel that refer to temporal power and wealth must be fulfilled before the end of the present dispensation and, therefore, before the Second Coming. These include any prophecies that deal with the regathering of the tribes. Consequently, they cannot be fulfilled until the true Israel becomes fully aware of its real “identity.” This position is fully and unambiguously premillennialist—that is, it is deemed necessary that Christ return prior to the millennium rather than at its conclusion: “Our Lord’s second, personal, and premillennial advent is one of the foundation-stones on which we build our argument.” Nonetheless, H. Aldersmith, one of the volume’s editors, felt constrained to separate fundamental beliefs from those about which British-Israelites might legitimately differ:

In short, the movement strove to avoid taking a firm position in the still-ongoing debate between the historicists and the futurists, both of whom were premillenarians but were separated, as we have seen, on details of scriptural interpretation and apocalyptic chronology.¹⁰

In seeking to maintain a balance between premillennial orthodoxy and latitude concerning details, British-Israel writers nonetheless were often tempted to provide details of the Last Days. Hine himself had described how, prior to the Battle of Armageddon, the emperor of France would rise to greater power, Paris would be burned (by whom Hine does not say), and the Latin nations would form a confederation under the French emperor, ruling from Rome. With Napoleon III thus identified as the Antichrist, he goes on to identify

Russia with the apocalyptic Gog, a common millenarian practice. Russia would then defeat the Antichrist’s confederacy and move toward Palestine, which in the meantime had been resettled by Israel. Hine had also inscribed a millenarian scenario into the flyleaf of his Bible, probably around 1870:

1. Restoration of the Jews.

2. Pouring out of the Spirit.

3. The Universal acceptance of the Gospel.

4. The Great Tribulation.

5. The Resurrection of the Faithful.

6. The Second Coming of the Lord.

7. The Millennial Age.

The American Eshelman had worked out two such scenarios. In one, England conquers Palestine and opens it to settlement by Jews and “Israelites,” who elect an enlightened and learned ruler. Those Jews who have not returned to Palestine come under the rule of the Antichrist, who, unlike Hine’s Antichrist, becomes an ally of the czar. Their combined armies advance on Palestine, only to be decisively defeated by the Israelites aided by the returned Jesus. Alternatively, Eshelman has Palestine secured by an unknown power, the country now ruled by a Davidic descendant who rebuilds Jerusalem and the Temple, where services are reinstituted. “Russia and her allies” arrive for the Battle of Armageddon, where Christ destroys them.¹¹

By the post-World War I period, such speculations required additional attention in light of the defeat of the Ottomans and League of Nations’ assignment of a British mandate over Palestine. The defeat of Turkey had long had special significance for millenarians. Indeed, the Millerites and their Seventh-Day Adventist successors expended considerable ingenuity linking the fall of Turkish power with the sixth trumpet of the Book of Revelation. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, despite numerous international crises connected with “the Eastern question,” the Ottoman Empire survived, albeit in an increasingly enfeebled condition. British-Israelites looked back upon General Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1917, the subsequent defeat of Turkey, and the assignment of Palestine to Britain as a mandate territory in 1923 as the fulfillment of prophecy and, more specifically, as the vindication of decades of Anglo-Israelite teaching: “It will be seen that we fully expected this great European war-woe, the drying up of the Turkish power, the occupation of the promised land by Great Britain, and the return of the Jews to Palestine.”¹²

In the wake of these events, British-Israel millennialism took on both greater urgency and greater specificity. “The Anglo-Saxon race,” represented by England and the United States, was destined to have “the ultimate dominion of the world” during Christ’s millennial reign. Before that time comes, however, this latter-day Israel was to undergo disasters and trials to purge her of accumulated sins. In the time before the final Tribulation, the Jews would return to Palestine under British sponsorship and protection, effecting the ingathering, with the Anglo-Saxons, of “All-Israel.” In the days that will follow this ingathering, Gog in the form of Russia will invade the Holy Land at the end of the Tribulation period. As the Battle of Armageddon is joined, the Jews will acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, the Anglo-Saxons will call upon God for deliverance, and Christ will descend to save his people. In setting out this consensus position, however, British-Israelites were careful to note that theological divergences remained.¹³

This was nowhere more evident than in the gingerly manner in which they approached the issue of the rapture, perhaps the major source of division between historicists and futurists. While acknowledging that representatives of the twelve tribes would be reunited in Palestine at the time of the Second Coming, Aldersmith assured his readers that “the exact relation of’the rapture of the Church’ to the other closing events in this dispensation, has but little to do with the main question discussed in this book.” The church would be raptured and the saints would return with Christ, “but the time that will intervene between the two events is a matter that is much disputed by students of the prophetic Word.” Aldersmith’s personal view was that all the believers in Christ would be raptured near the end of the Tribulation, but “we distinctly assert, in the name of our Association, that we teach no dogmatic views on the relative position of future events connected with our Lord’s return, and everyone is free to hold his own opinion as to when these things will come to pass.” The significance of this theological toleration is not merely restricted to the British-Israelites’ desire to include both historicists and futurists. Rather, this acceptance of diverse viewpoints was to develop subsequently in unforeseen ways. American Fundamentalism came to be dominated by Darby’s futurist position, and, as we shall see, Christian Identity developed theological positions far more restrictive than those of its Anglo-Israel forebears. Where British-Israelites were content to let the two camps continue their debate as long as they accepted the Anglo-Saxons as Israel, Christian Identity has rejected futurism and the Darbyite dispensational model in unequivocal terms, in the process accusing Fundamentalists of ignorance, corruption, and distortion of God’s word. They reject the rapture and all the apparatus of interpretation that accompanies it, a matter to be taken up in greater detail in the next chapter. Hence, British-Israel latitudinarianism, welcoming millennialists of every stripe, was to give way to a cleavage between Christian Identity and the Fundamentalist community.¹⁴

Millennialism and Pyramidism

If one of futurism’s pillars was the doctrine of the rapture, another was the aversion to setting dates for the final events of history. There were, of course, practical as well as doctrinal reasons for this reluctance, since a movement could be destroyed by false predictions, as Millerism had been. British-Israelism, however, began increasingly to edge toward precisely this date-setting abyss, coming toward it, however, from an idiosyncratic direction. British-Israelism had since the late nineteenth century been fascinated by the mathematical properties of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, and it had become commonplace to ascribe its design to one or another of the Israelites’ ancestors, such as Enoch or Noah. By the 1920s, however, this occult fascination with the pyramid’s dimensions crystallized into a system for dating the events of millenarian history. This enterprise was principally connected with the work of a Scots engineer, David Davidson.

Davidson created a system that involved the correlation of pyramid measurements with dates from both scriptural and secular history, employing the formula of one “pyramid-inch” (which deviated slightly from the English measure) equaling one year. This formula was then applied to the structure’s internal passageways, which led to the so-called King’s Chamber. Davidson’s system was in fact not unlike the historicists’ equation of one biblical day with one historical year, except that while biblical references to days were scattered throughout the Scriptures, the pyramidal system of passages was a well-bounded entity with demarcations in the form of changes in the height, dimensions, and direction of the tunnels. The advantage of the pyramid studies was that they gave the appearance of precision, indeed even of archaeological science, to British-Israel interpretations of prophecy. If God had indeed had the pyramid created to encode a message for humanity, and if in fact its internal dimensions could be precisely measured (which indeed was the case), then the divine design for both past and future history was displayed for “objective” study. The disadvantage of the approach, beyond the association of pyramid studies with occultism, was the same as that of more conventional historicist calculations, namely, that it raised the temptation of predicting the future and, inevitably, of being embarrassed by the results. Nonetheless, the sheer bulk and detail of Davidson’s work led to wide acceptance in British-Israel circles and, with it, entry onto the dangerous terrain of date setting.

The futurist message had been sufficiently strong to lead Aldersmith to write that

These sentiments notwithstanding, Aldersmith was also the coauthor of Davidson’s most influential work, The Great Pyramid: Its Divine Message, although his listing as coauthor was largely a courtesy extended by his senior collaborator. Aldersmith in fact died before the book was written, having been involved with the research that led to it, and there is no way of knowing what he would have made of the result. In the book itself, Davidson made no secret of his belief that the Last Days had begun and that he had predicted their onset.¹⁵

Davidson claimed, for example, to have predicted the Great Depression, when in the original edition of the book he claimed that the pyramid foretold “that a period of Tribulation on the British world order should extend from May 29, 1928, to September 16, 1936.” He regarded it, therefore, as no accident that London commodity prices began to fall on May 29, 1928, and that the pound reached its highest 1928 value on May 30, only to begin falling the following day. In fact, he claimed for pyramid prophecy the same precision that a century earlier William Miller and his followers had claimed for their calculations based on Daniel and Revelation. In Davidson’s case, the purpose of the pyramid was not only to make a divine proclamation of Jesus as the Savior, but “to announce the dated circumstances relating to His Coming” Davidson had, in effect, fused pyramidal numerology, the manipulation of the building’s measurements, with prophetic interpretation. The result was to give British-Israelism a means of relieving the anguish millenarians always feel that comes from not knowing when the inevitable will occur. It also gave British-Israelism a further claim to uniqueness, beyond that which already attached to its revisionist identification of Israel.¹⁶

Pyramid Millennialism in Norìh America

Davidson’s work had particular influence upon the millenarian expectations in North America. Three individuals in particular used it to help construct detailed and politically charged millenarian scenarios: the Canadian writer W. G. MacKendrick, a close friend of William J. Cameron; Howard Rand, the founder of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America; and, significantly, William Dudley Pelley, the organizer of such Depression-era political organizations as the Silver Legion and the Christian party.

Beginning with his first book in 1921, W. G. MacKendrick’s writings were saturated with millennial expectation and a thirst for precision about apocalyptic dates. Thus he concluded that the war that would climax in Armageddon was only a few years off, although his dating was sometimes difficult to follow. “This war is to take place in the Holy Land and will be finished by 1936 according to the best authorities,” he writes, only to observe a few pages later that “Armageddon will be upon us about eleven years from the time we took Jerusalem.” If that refers to Allenby’s conquest in 1917, it would put Armageddon at 1928. If MacKendrick means the assumption by Britain of the mandate over Palestine in 1923, that would push Armageddon to 1934, still two years shy of his 1936 prediction. It is unclear whether at the time MacKendrick wrote he had had any contact with Davidson. The latter began to publish only in 1925. However, both 1928 and 1936 were key dates in Davidson’s system. Nineteen twenty-eight marked the beginning of the Final Tribulation, while 1936 marked its conclusion.¹⁷

MacKendrick’s prophetic chronology became much more complicated during the years of World War II. This complexity was no doubt attributable to separate factors: the apocalyptic expectations generated by the war itself; the publications by Davidson, with whom MacKendrick was acquainted by this time; and a three-way correspondence he maintained with William McCrea, a Canadian British-Israelite, and William J. Cameron. The letters make clear MacKendrick’s acceptance of Davidson’s conclusions, which he melded with related but independent speculations based upon the pyramid and other ancient artifacts undertaken by McCrea.¹⁸

The tensions of the war clearly drove both McCrea and MacKendrick to increasingly desperate efforts to calculate its end. Thus McCrea wrote MacKendrick, apparently in the bleak summer of 1940, “You know that I have never, never liked this ‘date’ business. It was that reluctance of mine, then, to investigate the future which kept me from giving you the whole plan of the war sooner…1940 is THE YEAR of retribution, though the end does not come until March 2nd, 1941, five days after Feb. 25th, which is indicated as something terrific.” MacKendrick passed this letter on to William J. Cameron, as he did McCrea’s numerous other pieces of correspondence. Since 1940 obviously passed without an Allied victory, McCrea was forced to push the apocalypse further along, and by early 1942 he had settled upon March 6, 1942, with the cautionary note that it would mark not the end of the war but “a definite step in what Davidson calls ‘the Round-Up.’ ” “The Round-up” was Davidson’s term for the rounding-up of the powers of evil that would precede the final consummation. By the fall of 1942, it was clear that McCrea’s hopes would not be realized, and MacKendrick had to confess to Cameron, as so many other millennialists had in the past, “‘His ways are not our ways’ we are subject to error [sic].” McCrea had shifted by this time first to August 31 and then to September 10, and even as late as September 4 confessed to MacKendrick, “August 31st would be the start of the ten days that would see the end of hostilities…. August 31st… is THE GREAT DAY. There is no possibility of error. … If I am wrong … then I shall be completely baffled.” As for MacKendrick himself, he was assuring Cameron on September 22, that a major earthquake would take place December 8–10 and hoped the Ford Motor Company plants would survive. After so many apparently missed predictions, McCrea dug in his heels concerning September 10: “I DID NOT MAKE A MISTAKE.” Something had occurred on September 10, he concluded, but it was a mystic end of hostilities, the beginning of “that very short period during which Christ fights the battle alone.” Although none could see it, this was the war’s “real climax.”¹⁹

During the year of the McCrea-MacKendrick correspondence—1942— MacKendrick gave public voice to his own growing feelings of millennial imminence in a brief book, This IS Armageddon. He concluded that the conflict in progress had a finality none of its predecessors could claim: “This is the war of God’s Great Day—the final war of this age of wars.” He concluded that since Hitler “cannot possibly last until the fall of 1943,” the climactic events of this climactic struggle would begin momentarily, in the venue prophecy had set aside for it—not in the areas of central combat in Europe or the Pacific, but in Palestine. So certain was MacKendrick that the war would conclude in Palestine, and sooner rather than later, that two years previously, in the fall of 1940, he had set out a detailed military-religious scenario for the war’s conclusion and sent it off to General A. G. McNaughton, the commander of Canadian troops in Britain.²⁰

The description MacKendrick sent to General McNaughton was extraordinary both in its specificity and in its author’s conviction that God required events to play out in this way and in no other, and that those who had the ear of policymakers must make certain that strategic plans were drawn up accordingly. As MacKendrick had it, Germany would seek to capture the pipeline that led to the Haifa oil refinery, as well as to the Iraqi and Iranian oil fields, bombing Britain’s Mediterranean fleet in the process. Egypt would not hold: “Egypt is going to let us down and we will lose out there—that’s Biblical and certain.” As a sequel to these grim events, Mussolini would conquer both Egypt and Palestine, but a coalition of Russia, Turkey, and Iran would defeat and kill him there. The combined armies of Germany, Russia, Italy (presuming any forces remained), Turkey, and Iran would gather against Jerusalem, and in this atmosphere of direst need, King George VI would declare a national day of prayer. As England (i.e., Israel) placed itself in God’s hands, “by the Omnipotent power of our Lord … we will be saved to carry on into the NEW ERA as decreed in Holy Writ.” It is not known what response, if any, General McNaughton made to this remarkable letter.²¹

MacKendrick, however, did not limit such highly detailed predictions about the Last Days to his correspondence. In 1921 he had not only sought to date the Battle of Armageddon, as described above, but had written a totally different scenario for it, as reflective of the post-World War I political ambience as his letter to General McNaughton was of the World War II environment. His initial stab at Armageddon politics placed Britain in a common cause with India and with the Arabs, playing upon the romanticization of desert tribesmen by T. E. Lawrence. He dropped this imperial coalition under the pressure of events in the 1940s and in This IS Armageddon continued to elaborate the ideas outlined in the McNaughton letter. In the published version of his apocalyptic script, he foresees a successful attack by Hitler (not Mussolini) on Palestine, Egypt, and the Suez Canal in June or July 1942. Hitler literally sets up his tent between Mt. Carmel and the sea. But before he can take control of Iraqi oil, Russian forces (“Gog’s hordes”) march down the east bank of the Jordan and cut the Germans off. After the chastened Anglo-Saxons call upon God’s help, a series of natural calamities (“the Day of the Lord”) saves the day, including clouds of carbon monoxide generated when great earthquakes release and ignite subterranean pools of oil and “fire and brimstone” raining down from sudden volcanic eruptions. It is a picture as lurid as anything that came from the Millerite imagination in the nineteenth century.²²

While MacKendrick may have been unusual in the specificity of his predictions, he was by no means the only British-Israelite who combined Davidson’s predictive apparatus with a belief that the Second World War was part of the final clash between good and evil. A contemporary, Frederick Haberman, who was also heavily dependent upon Davidson’s work, exclaimed shortly after war broke out that “Great Pyramid Prophecy has been fulfilled” Indeed, Haberman was vulnerable to the same predictive mania as McCrea and Mac-Kendrick. He felt sure that if the German forces reached Palestine by the end of June 1941, “we may expect startling developments over there by the 25th of that month.” Davidson himself, interestingly, was far more circumspect in his approach to the war. He was anxious to demonstrate that he had predicted it and equally anxious to indicate what lay on the other side, but he did not succumb to the temptation to give a day-to-day forecast of military events.²³

Davidson presented two public lectures on the war in London on July 8 and October 8,1942, while the McCrea-MacKendrick-Cameron correspondence was at its height. He reminded his audiences that he had unveiled God’s pyramid messages in the 1920s, predicting both the Depression and the Second World War. With his customary facility, he was able to note that on pyramidally significant dates, something had always happened that might be linked to later, larger developments. Insofar as the war itself was concerned, Davidson had no doubts about its ultimate significance: “It is a war which is to end in the utter demolition of the tools and works of civilisation, to prepare the world for the foundations of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth…. If this war goes on as it is now going and as it must continue to a settlement, there will be nothing left for any nation to covet of another. It is the purpose of God Almighty that this should be so.” The purpose of the war, as he saw it, was to force submission to God’s will, to lead “modern Israel [to] the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.” Rather than anticipating an imminent Armageddon, as followers such as MacKendrick and Haberman had, Davidson focused on a somewhat more distant set of dates: the political union of Britain and America by January 31, 1947; the extension of unification “to every element of the race by 10th November 1948”; and “attaining cooperation with God” by August 20, 1953. As to the millennium itself, that was still further off, but datable nonetheless. “The millennial reign of righteousness” would begin, Davidson predicted, on September 17, 2001. The gap between Davidson’s views and those of what one might call the prophetic strategists in Canada at the same time suggests that Davidson’s system of pyramid calculations had, like other forms of millenarian date setting, taken on a life of its own, independent of the views of its creator. It had the twin virtues that it had sufficient precision to suggest to believers that they had access to a “science of prophecy” and was sufficiently ambiguous so that it could be molded to fit changing circumstances and differing tastes. No matter who employed it, however, the aim remained the same, to predict the millennium and to identify events on the road to it.²⁴

Davidson’s system excited millenarians not only in Canada but in the United States. As far back as the mid-1930s, it had captivated a figure not usually associated with British-Israelism, right-wing mystic and political organizer William Dudley Pelley.

William Dudley Pelley

William Dudley Pelley, the founder of the Silver Shirts, did not consider himself a British-Israelite, and, indeed, it is difficult to imagine a person of such idiosyncratic views subordinating himself to any belief system he had not invented. He mocked British-Israelism as an ideology based upon a flawed conception of the covenant between God and Israel. Nonetheless, Pelley’s entire vision of history was structured around the pyramid chronology of David Davidson. While it is not clear how early Pelley first became acquainted with Davidson’s ideas, Pelley reports that his lieutenant, Robert Summerville, was in correspondence with Davidson by March 1933. Summerville interrupted Pelley with a letter and a pamphlet “from Professor [sic] David Davidson, the eminent Great Pyramid authority.” Summerville asked him whether he was familiar with the pamphlet Davidson had sent, the title of which Pelley does not report. Pelley had not previously seen the pamphlet but is vague about whether he knew Davidson’s other writings. The general tenor of the passage in which the incident is described, however, suggests that this was not his first exposure to Davidson. Davidson had been publishing since the mid-1920s and had issued two works in the early 1930s that spoke directly to current political and economic issues, The Great Pyramid’s Prophecy on the Current Economic Oppression (March 1931) and The Great Pyramid’s Prophecy Concerning the British Empire and America (September 1932). It may well have been one of these that Summerville received.²⁵

In any case, Davidson’s work evidently made a profound impression on Pelley. In 1935 Pelley announced the organization of the Christian party, on whose ticket he intended to run for president in 1936. For the inner circle of the party—its Councils of Safety—he created a set of Master Councillor’s Addresses, in which he laid out his application of Davidson to both world and American history. The Master Councillor’s Addresses cite Davidson copiously. Indeed, Pelley appropriated most of Davidson’s system of pyramid chronology unaltered. Even when Davidson is not explicitly cited, his system permeates Pelley’s view of events.²⁶

Despite Pelley’s disdainful comment on British-Israelites, he retained a good deal of British-Israelism. Although he occasionally implied that Jews were descended from Israelites—as when he referred to the latter’s Exodus as “their petty and spleenish experiences”—he was inclined to accept British- Israelism’s distinction between the two. Intellectual rigor, never Pelley’s strong suit, collapses in a heap of contradictions. On the one hand, the people led out of Egypt by Moses were “Hebrews and Israelites. By no means were they Jews.” On the other hand, “it’s from the tribe of Judah that we get modern Jews.” The tribe of Judah, according to Pelley, were the bane of Moses’ existence, as “disruptive [and] cantankerous” in the desert as their descendants were subsequently. Pelley’s confusion apparently arises from his emphasis upon the period of the Exodus rather than upon the subsequent division of the Israelite polity into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Pelley also adopted the notion, occasionally found among Anglo-Israelites, that descendants of Abraham also migrated east and south to become ancestors of the Hindus. A similar idea—this time that some members of the ten lost tribes fathered modern Hindus—appeared at the turn of the century in the writings of the founder of Pentecostalism, Charles F. Parham, also a believer in British-Israelism.²⁷

Pelley held back, however, in tracing other modern descendants of the Israelites. He clearly had little patience with the claim that the British were descendants of the lost tribes and was apparently unaware of the British-Israel belief in the central role to be played by the descendants of Ephraim (the British) and Manasseh (the Americans). As for the place of the United States in Pelley’s cosmic drama, he was characteristically muddled, uncertain how much to embrace the biological determinism of British-Israelism. Thus he seemed to interpret American chosenness figuratively when he asserted that “my Chosen People aren’t composed of a race. They’re those who’ve given their allegiance to a king” But in nearly the same breath he announces that “the real Chosen people … are here in America. It’s the Twelve Tribes here in the United States.” Whether his tribes are symbolic or literal, however, is never explained.²⁸

The key to understanding God’s design for Pelley, as for Davidson, lies in the configuration and measurements of the passageways of the Great Pyramid, what British-Israelites were fond of referring to as “the Bible in stone.” He saw in pyramid prophecy an infallible guide to history: “Great Pyramid prophecy has never been wrong,” although there can be difficult problems in correlating the prophecies with the right kind of evidence. The pyramid is always right about issues of timing; if the date comes up, something must have happened. As Pelley put it, “The quandary which we, as reasonably enlightened students of universal affairs, are faced with, isn’t WHEN great events are due to occur, but WHAT the nature of those great events is to be in each case when chronology arrives at Great Pyramid markings.” In other words, the assumption that pyramid prophecy is infallible implies that something must have occurred on the assigned date.²⁹

This approach to prophetic fulfillment effectively eliminates a major vulnerability of date-setting schemes, the danger that specific, empirically testable predictions will produce massive public embarrassments for a religious movement, of the sort experienced by the Millerites in 1844. Such predictions customarily involve statements that some particular event, most frequently the Second Coming, will occur on a particular date; hence its nonoccurrence is traumatic. Pyramidologists emphasized the significance of the date and then looked to see what had happened on it. Given the intrinsic ambiguity of events, they were almost always able to find an event that could be appropriately classified.

Pelley, however, was reluctant to place all of his confidence in a single view of history, especially one concocted by someone else, if only because it appeared to make him dependent upon the insights of others. Accordingly, he was at pains to make clear that whatever Davidson had discovered had already been vouchsafed to him (Pelley) independently. Pelley always claimed special access to divine or supernatural forces, beginning with a revelatory, out-of-body experience he claimed to have gone through in 1928. He assured his followers that before he had ever read or heard of the pyramid literature, his “Oracle” had already revealed to him the significance of a key pyramid date: “‘Your True labors in this nation begin on the morning of September 17, 1936’” the date the Silver Shirts were founded. The work of Davidson could then function as a confirmation of the prophet’s revelation.³⁰

The principal alteration Pelley made in Davidson’s system lay in the radically changed significance of the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. For Davidson, as for other mainstream British-Israelites, the Exodus was a central episode in the history of the “Adamic race,” Davidson’s term for the white race, the spiritual elite that was subsequently to populate Britain. Indeed, for Davidson it was one of the “three chief occasions of Divine Interference in the normal course of human history,” the other two being the Resurrection and the final, apocalyptic “Exodus of civilisation from Economic Bondage under the rule of Money-Power.” Pelley took a very different view of things, suggesting that the travails of the escaping Israelites were less a significant set of events in themselves than they were a préfiguration of later history. He was inclined to see in the events of the Exodus merely a microcosmic anticipation of the future. The Israelites of the Exodus were “little” Israel, “petty and spleenish,” people temperamentally unworthy of performing great events. What they experienced was important only because it provided “a literal model for the Program of the Greater Israel coming out of real Egyptian bondage 3,000 years afterward.” And who was this latter-day “Greater Israel”? It was none other than the white Christians of Pelley’s own day. And “real Egypt”? In language the Populists might have appreciated, Pelley described it as “the economic structure founded on gold, where the true followers of Christ must make bricks without straw.”³¹

Pelley was prepared to go a good deal further in identifying “Egypt.” In an inversion whose irony Pelley himself seems to have realized, the Jews became “Egypt”: “Now we’ve got the ironical situations of the tables being turned…. The ‘Egyptians’ are the racial plunderers who imagine they’re Israelites because they’ve descended from the one tribe of Judah…. The Jews are the Egyptians, and the Gentiles are the Israelites.” In a way, Pelley simply completed the theme of reversal begun in British-Israelism. The latter, by rejecting Jewish chosenness and asserting Anglo-Saxon chosenness, had reversed the positions of Jews and Gentiles. Now Pelley’s version of the Exodus reversed the roles of Israelites and Egyptians. Not only were the Jews merely a tiny fragment of the Israelites (“from the one tribe of Judah”); they now played Egyptians to the “Christian Israelites,” as Pelley called them. In this replay of the Exodus as modern economic allegory, the story of escape from Egyptian slavery became something “not to glorify the Jews, but to give us a Code Book for all that is to happen in the 65 years ahead.” The crossing of the Red Sea even became the passage “unscathed through the great sea of Red Bolshevism.”³²

All of this was keyed, of course, to Davidson’s pyramid chronology, which marked off dates on a sacred calendar. Using his formula of one “pyramid inch” for one solar year, Davidson calculated that there would be a two-phase Tribulation as part of the Last Days, the outcome of “the Great Pyramid’s Scientific prophecy.” The first phase would run from August 4, 1914, to November 11, 1918, the second and greater phase from May 29-30, 1928, to September 15-16, 1936. Then, “between September 16, 1936, and August 20, 1953, the English-speaking peoples should be guided, as the nucleus of the Theocratic (or Theocentric) World-State, to receive Divine Protection ensuring racial isolation and true safe-guarding under the Law of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.” Pelley proceeded to incorporate into Davidson’s eschatology his own conceptions of a war against the Jews and his own meta-historic role in human redemption.³³

Not surprisingly, Pelley focused on the year in which he was writing, 1936, the year of the foundation of the Christian party, when he would attempt to vindicate himself at the polls. Davidson had predicted great events for September 16, when the Tribulation would give way to the final march toward “the Theocratic [i.e., millennial] … World-State.” According to Pelley, September 16 would mark a “crisis,” “the lowest ebbs of this depression” In his idiosyncratic reading of the Exodus story, September 16, 1936, was going to mark the beginning of freedom from “Jewish-Egyptian economic bondage.” Davidson’s pyramid date was anticipated by Pelley’s Oracle, who had independently revealed to him that“‘your true labors in this nation begin on the morning of September 17, 1936.’” After September 16, 1936, nations would have the next seventeen years to decide whether to adopt theocratic government, after which those who rejected it would be destroyed.³⁴

The Jews played rather a different role in Pelley’s scheme than they did in Davidson’s. As we shall see in a later chapter, Davidson, together with other twentieth-century British-Israel writers, incorporated covertly anti-Semitic themes. However, he regarded Britain as divinely charged with rescuing Jews from persecution and facilitating their ingathering to Palestine. Pelley, of course, considered the Jews responsible for the Depression as well as much else in the way of the world’s evil, although he was willing to forego genocidal massacre, largely on the grounds that “so long as one Jew remained, in the furthest corner of Patagonia, the deed down distant years would have to be repeated.” He was perfectly willing to tolerate “incidental” violence but was confident that the establishment of “Christian economics” would drastically alter Jewish behavior. Consequently, he was impatient with Davidson’s seeming disinterest in “the Jewish question.” Indeed, as a result, he said, Davidson had entirely missed the significance of January 31, 1933, when Hitler came to power “and began smashing the predatory clutch of Judah on civilized institutions.” It was the struggle against the Jews that was central for Pelley, for that was “THE GREAT ARMAGEDDON OF ANCIENT PROPHECY,” the battle of Gog and Magog.³⁵

This struggle would inexorably lead, in Pelley’s view, to both the end of the Depression and the millennium. He held out little hope that the Depression would end any time soon, however; surcease would come only on the night of September 16, 1969, “and not one moment sooner.” As to the millennium, he was of two minds. In one sense, he expected the millennium to begin in a matter of months, on September 16 of the year in which he was writing, for everything from then on would be improvement. On the other hand, that position reflected a kind of postmillennialism, the point when beneficent forces would begin to operate in America, thanks presumably to the Silver Legion and the Christian party. The true, world millennium was farther off, on September 17, 2001, at which point the entire world would be incorpo- rated into “the Christ form of government.” Although the date was distant, the finality of the outcome allowed Pelley to indulge his premillennialism as well.³⁶

The Christian party’s performance in the 1936 election was pathetic even by minor party standards. Indeed, Pelley’s efforts were paltry compared with the far more conspicuous campaign by the Union party, the coalition formed by Dr. Francis Townsend, Gerald L. K. Smith, and Charles Coughlin. Although Pelley claimed significant efforts in sixteen states, the party appeared on the ballot only in the state of Washington. Of the nearly 70,000 votes cast in Washington in 1936, the Union party received 17,463. Only 1,598 went to Pelley, 300 fewer than the Communist party received and only 550 more than the Prohibition party garnered.³⁷

Notwithstanding Pelley’s failure to draw any significant electoral support, such grass-roots activity as the Silver Legion and Christian party had generated was heavily concentrated in a few areas of the country. Pelley’s followers clustered in the Great Lakes region and the Pacific Coast, probably never amounting to more than fifteen thousand at any one time. Modest though the size of the movement was, its concentration, particularly on the West Coast, may have nurtured coteries of proto-Identity believers, persons who had been exposed to Pelley’s personal fusion of British-Israelism and anti-Semitism and hence were more receptive to other such combinations later. Among them was Henry L. “Mike” Beach, who in 1969 was one of the founders of Posse Comitatus. In the mid-1970s Beach’s organization, CLERC (Citizens Law Enforcement and Research Committee), reprinted a turn-of-the-century extract from C. A. L. Totten’s Our Race, and in so doing brought Identity from its roots in late nineteenth-century British-Israel missionizing, through Pel-ley’s mystic anti-Semitism in the mid-1930s, to the militantly antiauthority stance Identity took in the 1970s.³⁸

Howard Rand

Howard Rand, as the American representative of the British-Israel World Federation, assiduously promulgated the millenarian views of the parent organization. In keeping with the position of other Anglo-Israelites, Rand also shaped his millennialism to the date-setting apparatus developed by Davidson. On the occasion of Davidson’s death in 1956, Rand wrote of him: “He was a man called of God to proclaim the meaning of the Structural measurements of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh…. The material he so carefully compiled … will yet be used mightily of God to glorify His own Name and demonstrate the accuracy of the revelation measures built so many centuries ago into this Great Witness in the midst of the land of Egypt.” Rand’s extraordinary longevity—he remained active as a writer and publisher from the late 1920s into the early 1990s—compelled him to maintain his millenarian views through a variety of economic, religious, and political circumstances, including the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the development of Christian Identity.³⁹

Rand rejected the futurist view associated with John Nelson Darby in a manner consistent with British-Israelism’s rejection of Darby’s belief that the prophetic clock had stopped. Indeed, to believe that prophetic fulfillment temporarily ceased after the Jewish rejection of Jesus would fly in the face of the Anglo-Israelite belief in the redemptive history of the Anglo-Saxons:

Rand’s objection to the parenthesis theory was in part founded on divergent readings of key scriptural passages, particularly from the Book of Daniel. But by the late 1940s, Rand’s view of futurism was also colored by his hostility to Zionism. As we shall see in chapter 7, anti-Zionism had become relatively common among British-Israelites in England as a result of the Zionist challenge to the British mandate in Palestine. In Rand’s case, this hostility was compounded by the anti-Semitism that had been endemic in the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America virtually since its founding in 1928 and that had been personified in the 1930s by William J. Cameron.⁴⁰

Rand rejected the futurist view that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine constituted the fulfillment of prophecy. Instead, he asserted that the return of Jews to Palestine was part of a different divine plan, which would see “the gathering of the enemies of our Lord for the final execution of judgement upon them for their rejection of Him.” Hence, in Rand’s view, Jews were returning to the Holy Land “under an urge which they themselves cannot wholly define … so that they may arrive in time at the place of execution when the sentence will be carried out.” In short, the setting up of a Jewish state, far from being a sign that a dormant “prophetic clock” had begun to run, was rather a sign of the imminence of “the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord.” In words that did not require much elaboration, Rand broadly hinted that the state of Israel would be destroyed by God and its Jewish inhabitants would be killed to punish them for their and their ancestors’ refusal to convert to Christianity.⁴¹

As was the case with many British-Israelites, Rand looked more kindly at the Zionist movement when it did not appear to threaten British hegemony in Palestine. In 1943 he saw “the program to again make the Jewish people an independent nation” as evidence that “the fig tree is truly budding again.” If that were the case, then his would be the generation of the latter days: “We are witnessing an age coming to an end; and we will see the resurrection and return of Our Lord.” A year later, Rand saw in Britain’s refusal to recognize Zionist claims the catalyst for a political situation that would ultimately draw Russia (“the hosts of Gog”) into Palestine, and when that occurred, the final events of history were bound to follow, that complex of battles and disasters Rand habitually referred to as “the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord.”⁴²

Although nuances changed in Rand’s voluminous millenarian writings, his views remained staunchly premillennial, although more closely wedded to the historicists than to the futurists. Like generations of premillennialists before him, Rand adopted the view of “the worse, the better,” in the sense that the millennium would be preceded by rising “evil and corruption” rather than by the waxing of virtue and spirituality. Every sign of multiplying vice was evidence that divine judgment was imminent. When that judgment came, it would destroy “all evil, after which the righteous will shine forth as the sun.” Jesus would return to physically rule over the earth and to “establish the millennial rule of righteousness.” Rand never wavered in his belief in the imminence of the apocalypse. Nonetheless, like other Anglo-Israelite millenarians such as W. G. MacKendrick and the pseudonymous “Ben Judah,” author of the chiliastic novel When?, Rand’s millenarian passions reached their peak during the Second World War.⁴³

Like MacKendrick, with whom he was almost certainly in contact, Rand was tempted to spin elaborate religiomilitary scenarios of the manner in which the forces of good and evil would engage one another in Palestine. In a 1944 essay, “Final Theater of War,” Rand elaborated his narrative in terms strikingly similar to those employed by MacKendrick, although unlike MacKendrick in 1942, Rand had given up on an apocalyptic role for the Axis powers. The British fleet would anchor the “Israel” line in the north opposite Armageddon and in the south off of Aqaba. The land fortifications would then run from the Gulf of Aqaba to Haifa. Russian forces (Gog), deterred by the British fleet from moving on Palestine by sea, would be forced to march overland from the area between the Black and Caspian seas through Iran and Iraq, turning west to cross the Jordan River north of the Dead Sea. At the same time, Palestine would be threatened by two other armies, one coming east through Turkey from “a Sovietized Europe,” and the other “composed of Asiatic hordes,” crossing the Jordan south of the Dead Sea. A threat from the southwest would materialize when “an enemy coup” in Egypt closed the Suez Canal to British shipping (Rand, like MacKendrick, distrusted the Egyptians).

The European confederacy, led by the Soviet Union, would threaten both the British forces at Haifa and those at Armageddon. Jerusalem would fall. The Asiatic army would occupy the valley of Jehoshaphat, and if it could link up with the Soviets coming in from the north, the forces of Israel-Britain could be decisively defeated. Like MacKendrick, at this desperate juncture, “the governments of Israel call for a solemn assembly of their people to petition God for deliverance.” In the ensuing destruction of enemy forces, a great earthquake would destroy the southern army and cause the northern army to flee in terror. World War II was only the prologue, setting up the circumstances for Gog’s confederation of Europe and invasion of the Middle East.⁴⁴

Once the Second World War was in fact over, Rand turned his attention to more systematically integrating these predictions into a larger framework of sacred history. He placed the “Times of the Gentiles” in the period between the reign of Nebuchadnezzar and the First World War. When Allenby captured Jerusalem in 1917, “it came into possession of its rightful heirs again” (i.e., Britain-Israel), but symbolic though this may have been, it did not “finally bring Gentile rule in all of its ramifications to an end.” That process required, among other things, the defeat of Babylon, which Rand identified with the Germany of both Kaiser and Hitler. Once the “Babylonian Succession of Empires” had ended in 1945, the way was clear for the advance of Gog (the Soviet Union). As to the Great Pyramid, he saw in its measurements evidence “that in these years of ours the time is fulfilled.”

Insofar as pyramid numerology is concerned, the key date was August 20, 1953, the point at which measurement reaches the far wall of the so-called King’s Chamber. Once the date had passed, Rand had no difficulty demonstrating that it “marked a distinct change in God’s dealings with His people.” And what was the evidence of this epochal change? The announcement that the Soviet Union possessed the hydrogen bomb—for “it was immediately recognized, and so stated by thoughtful men and women, that, to curb the mad rush toward self-destruction, a new order must be born.”⁴⁵

The most evident characteristics of British-Israel millennialism have been not only its pervasiveness but its extraordinary elasticity. No matter the shifts in political alignments and military power, confidence in the validity of predictions never decisively flagged. This enduring quality is not merely a confirmation of cognitive dissonance theory, the desire to achieve harmony between cherished beliefs and external evidence. If that were true, Millerism would have retained its following after the Great Disappointment of 1844. (In fact, while some Millerites retained their commitments and set about constructing rationalizations for the failed prediction, the movement as a whole foundered.) The difference between Millerite collapse and British-Israel resilience lies in the fact that Millerite date setting concentrated upon a single visible event, the return of Jesus to earth. In British-Israel millennialism, particularly in the complex numerological form developed by David Davidson, the End-times could be almost indefinitely stretched out through innumerable transitions, anticipations, stages of fulfillment, and periods of probation and judgment. On the one hand, something could be discovered to give significance to almost any date. On the other hand, no single date was so pivotal as to place the entire system in jeopardy.⁴⁶

The implications of this malleability for Christian Identity were considerable. Had British-Israelism possessed the rigidity of Millerism, it—or at least its millenarian propensities—would have been extinguished long before Christian Identity emerged in the United States. However, its capacity to be bent and reinterpreted, its potential for adaptation to changed conditions, and its balance between specificity and vagueness—all of these characteristics permitted this idiosyncratic millenarian system to persist from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Operating outside the dispensationalist framework of most Fundamentalists, it provided an alternative understanding of history that purported to give believers leverage over otherwise incomprehen- sible events. As we shall see in the next chapter, Christian Identity, anxious to maintain independence from Fundamentalist conceptions of the millennium, which depended on the creation and security of the state of Israel, had at hand a parallel eschatology, at once complex, adaptable, and resistant to falsification. It became in their hands not merely a predicter of Anglo-Saxon triumph, but a vision of a racist apocalypse.