6
Christian Identity’s Millenarian Vision of History

When Christian Identity defined its vision of the end of history, it was at once dependent upon the apocalyptic views already developed in British-Israelism and anxious to develop its own distinctive outlook on the future. From Anglo-Israelism it took belief in the imminence of the Last Days and in a premillennialism with a distinctive historicist tinge, for sacred history was a record of Israel’s continuation in the form of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples. At the same time, Identity began to distance itself from the pyramid studies that so enthralled British-Israelites and greatly accentuated racist and anti-Semitic motifs. These changes could be ascribed to a number of factors—the organizational developments, already described in chapters 3 and 4, that broke Identity free of remaining English connections; the tendency of Identity figures, less cerebral and less widely read than their English counterparts, to prefer simpler ideas; and the obsessive anti-Semitism that defined the American movement There was, however, an additional element, specific to the religious environment in which Identity grew.

Beginning in the 1970s, one of the most dramatic developments in American religious life was the resurgence of Protestant Fundamentalism. It was reflected in the rapid growth rates of evangelical denominations, the rise of such celebrity preachers as Jerry Falwell and other televangelists, and the political mobilization of Fundamentalists for conservative political causes. Casual observers often incorrectly lumped Identity with this “New Christian Right.” The confusion is understandable, since the Fundamentalist New Christian Right has been theologically as well as politically conservative. But, as we shall see, the two have always been adversaries. Fundamentalism has rejected Identity’s racism and anti-Semitism, and Identity has rejected Fundamentalism’s millenarian theology. More specifically, most Fundamentalists accept in one form or another John Nelson Darby’s dispensationalist view of history, with its unfolding sequence of the rapture of the saved, the violence of the Tribulation, the conversion of the Jews, Armageddon, and the Second Coming—a view unacceptable to Identity.

Identity and Fundamentalism

Even more than British-Israelism, Christian Identity rejects the dispensational premillennialism associated with the futurist perspective. Far from constituting an offshoot of Fundamentalism, as is often supposed, Christian Identity rejects the futurist orientation of most Fundamentalists. Its hostility is particularly directed at the rapture, a doctrine it regards as without scriptural foundation. Beyond questions about the meaning of biblical texts, however, Identity’s rejection of the rapture is linked to the disdain for anything that promises to rescue the saved from the rigors of the Tribulation. The rapture, as most Fundamentalists understand it, will remove the saved from the earth at the beginning of the Tribulation, sparing them the dangers associated with the Tribulation’s seven years of persecution, war, and violence that are to precede the Second Coming. Identity, however, far from wishing to avoid this period of tumult, yearns for an opportunity to engage the forces of evil in apocalyptic battle. Hence the rapture to them smacks of cowardice and retreat.

There is, of course, little doubt as to the nature of the evil Identity seeks to confront. Identity singles out Jews as the personification of cosmic evil, at once the offspring and instrument of the Devil. Hence any struggle during the Tribulation will, in their view, be between Aryans and Jews and is to be welcomed rather than avoided. The centrality of anti-Semitism in Identity belief provides a second basis for its rejection of dispensationalism, beyond its opposition to the rapture. In the view of John Nelson Darby and his British and American followers, biblical prophecies addressed to “Israel” had to be read literally. The church traditionally interpreted such prophecies metaphorically, applying them to itself as the “New Israel.” British-Israelism, of course, also insisted on a literal reading, but saw the Anglo-Saxons as Israel. Mainstream dispensationalists in the Darby mold, however, assumed that in postbiblical history, “Israel” meant “Jews.” In their view, the Jewish rejection of Jesus had halted any further fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel (the Jewish people) as part of the Great Parenthesis. But within the last half-century, Fundamentalists have become convinced that the fulfillment of these prophecies has once more begun, validated by such events as the founding of the state of Israel, the regathering of Jews on its territory, the reunification of Jerusalem, and the expansion of Israel toward its biblical boundaries. Fundamentalist concern for Jewish national aspirations and Israeli security coexists with predictions of enormous Jewish casualties when the warfare of the Tribulation focuses on the Middle East. Only a remnant of Jewish survivors will remain to convert at the time of the Second Coming. Despite this dispensational ambivalence, Fundamentalist End-time scenarios remain sufficiently philo-Semitic to arouse deep Identity mistrust. As a result, Christian Identity seeks to define a millennialism that is simultaneously distinct from that of Fundamentalism and consistent with Identity’s theological anti-Semitism.

Christian Identity regards traditional churches as impure. Each denomination may begin in a state of purity but eventually succumbs to corruption at the hands of Jews. The churches have been deluded into believing that Jews are God’s chosen people when in fact they descend from Canaanites, pagan Khazars, and other impure peoples. Fundamentalism is believed to be in a state of “spiritual bankruptcy,” its members “very spiritually depressed” and hence easily gulled by “false prophets” promising an imminent rapture. As Dan Gayman puts it, “Their theology is on the rocks,” but this very corruption may provide Identity with an unparalleled opportunity for proselytizing among “sincere fundamentalist Christian people … yearning for a fresh breath of Bible truth.” This allegedly disillusioned and spiritually malnourished multitude may provide “the greatest opportunity for evangelical work in the history of the Kingdom-Israel message,” although to date, there has been no significant shift of religious allegiances.¹

Identity and the Rapture

Identity’s hostility to the rapture is unwavering and cuts across organizational lines. Although Identity writers differ on why the rapture will not occur and what will happen to Christians during the Tribulation, they are of one mind in condemning it. Indeed, few would quarrel with Sheldon Emry’s assertion that “the rapture ‘doctrine’ has done more to disarm and make American Christians impotent than any other teaching since the time of Christ.” To Emry, the rapture is a subversive notion, invented by Jesuits and insinuated into Protestantism. Borrowing from an anti-Catholic tract by Duncan McDougall, Emry concluded that John Darby allowed himself to be used as a tool for the promulgation of a pernicious, Jesuit-devised doctrine.²

Rejection of the rapture deprives believers of the assurance that they will be spared the dangers of the Tribulation. Jack Mohr of the Christian-Patriots Defense League viewed a raptureless future in light of his belief in an imminent Soviet attack and an American military defeat: “Then Christians will learn what is meant by the GREAT TRIBULATION, and you, my Christian friend, will be right in the middle of it. Don’t count on a RAPTURE to rescue you.” The Tribulation will be the final battle, and many Identity writers seem to welcome the closing of an escape hatch. The risk is, as Emry puts it, that “rapture-deceived Christians have deserted their posts on the frontiers of Christendom.”³

But some influential Identity figures, while rejecting the rapture as “false doctrine,” nonetheless manage to salvage a view of the latter days that places believers at minimal risk, even though they must stay on earth through the Tribulation. For some, God’s protection will be direct and absolute: “We shall endure the tribulation period, but we shall escape the wrath of God when His judgments are meted out…. God’s people will be divinely protected … not raptured OUT OF IT, but kept and protected THROUGH IT.” Wesley Swift directed his attention at a key point of rapture doctrine, whether there would be one Second Coming or two. He concluded that there would be only one, and it would be anything but secret and spiritualized. Instead, “He shall come with a triumphant shout. He shall come with the fleets and hosts of Michael; and He comes to defeat the enemy.” That being the case, neither Satan nor the Antichrist will be permitted to defeat the Anglo-Saxon lands, although they will come close to doing so. But at the moment when doom seems inevitable, rescue will occur, not through the rapture but by the kind of physical descent of Christ in majesty familiar to the Millerites: “YAHWEH—Christ—Yashua will come to earth at the climactic part of this last battle.” Swift’s Second Coming will even be televised; satellite transmission of the event will not be needed, for a divine ray will overcome any attempts at satanic jamming, and “television sets will lock into this… signal.”⁴

The issue of the rapture is of more immediate importance than might be suggested merely by doctrinal considerations. Identity rejection of it is believed to carry real and imminent consequences because of Identity’s conviction that the Last Days are about to begin, if they have not done so already. Bertrand Comparet spoke of the “death-agonies” that mark the demise of the present and the “birthpangs” necessary to usher in the new era. Swift, too, emphasized the nearness of apocalyptic events. He referred simultaneously to the violence that would attend the end of the age and the protection believers would enjoy. On the one hand, “with violence shall Babylon be destroyed!… The world is being plunged into its agony and its travail by an attempt to collectivize it, to socialize it, and this is being done by the same children of darkness [read: ‘Jews’] who designed the earliest catastrophes against your race, in order to carry out their objectives.” On the other hand, he assured his audiences, “you are not little people; you are the children of the Most High.” As the literal “sons and daughters of the Most High God,” Identity believers would be protected in the period of chaos and emerge from it to help rule the millennial kingdom: “We … have an assurance … that the God Who is not only with you, but is on your side … has ordained that His Kingdom shall triumph.” Hence, believers could face a raptureless Tribulation, perhaps already underway, from whose sound and fury they themselves would be spared.⁵

A Militarized Apocalypse

While Comparet and Swift spoke of millennial imminence in the somewhat abstract language of scriptural exegesis, others on the Identity right, notably those associated with paramilitary and survivalist groups, view the onrush of eschatological events in more concrete terms, as challenges to be overcome by organization, training, and discipline. By the same token, the orientation of such groups toward combat introduces an element of uncertainty into assurances of salvation, for what if preparations are inadequate or believers insufficiently resolute? John Harrell’s Christian-Patriots Defense League (for which Jack Mohr serves as “minister of defense”) is part of a constellation of affiliated organizations, including the Citizens Emergency Defense System, the Save America Gun Club, and the Christian Conservative Churches of America. In the early 1980s, the latter informed its members that “our nation is now rapidly rushing into the Valley of Decision.” If a “spiritual, political, and moral housecleaning” is delayed, evil will triumph in an outcome that will be “terrible, ineversible, and eternal” In Harrell’s survivalist pamphlet, “The Golden Triangle,” he urged retreat to an area in the center of the continent as a redoubt where the faithful can wait out the “ruthless Communistic dictatorship” or the total anarchy that will overwhelm North America during the Tribulation: “Prepare now, begin this day—whether you be saint or sinner; the storm’s almost upon us. Believe it or not, We are in training for the Tribulation.’ Time is exceedingly short. Remember, it wasn’t raining when Noah started building the Ark.” The Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, perhaps the most thoroughly militarized Identity commune, introduced its Survival Manual by announcing that “those who endure to the end shall be saved,” and that the compendium of guerrilla warfare tips, first-aid information, and camping advice is intended “for now, in the period before the collapse of the world as we know it…. Christians are headed for the tribulation. The days ahead are a chance to truly show our love and faith in God. Do not let the judgments that are about to fall turn you against God. Understand that this is the cleansing process needed before the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ can be established.” In the meantime, “the planet earth is about to become the battleground between the forces of God, led by Jesus Christ… and the serpent, father of deceit, Satan and his seed, the satanic blood-line Jews.”⁶

The Millenarian Scenario

Aryan Nations in the late 1980s published a potpourri of apocalyptic predictions, whose sources ranged from David Davidson, to an interpretation of the Aztec calendar, to religious gossip. Disparate though their origins, they all identified events in the 1980s as central to the Last Days and, more particularly, as miraculously correlated with events in the life of Aryan Nations. Thus the author is able to wring from biblical numerology the conclusion that the date of the Aryan Nations Congress—July 7, 1983—is 2,520 years plus 252 days after the supposed fall of Babylon (assumed to be October 29, 539 B.C.). The presumed significance lies in the belief that since Israel was to be punished, according to the Bible, seven times; and that since by exegetical tradition, conservative interpreters considered a “time” to be 360 years; therefore, seven times 360 yields 2520. Since the exercise begins with the observation that “most are aware today that these are the End times,” the assorted predictions, prophecies, and deductions appear to the author, and doubtless to readers, to be self-evident. Consequently, it appears equally plausible to report that a friend of the group’s pianist is alleged to have been told by her friend in Boise in 1979 that “a little Identity church in North Idaho with a cross on the steeple ‘would become the light of the world’ (or words to that effect).” Millenarian date setting thus takes on a reassuring circularity: these are the latter days because predictions say so, and predictions say so because these are in fact the latter days.⁷

In a description reminiscent of those written forty years earlier by W. G. MacKendrick and Howard Rand, Bertrand Comparet described the details of the final days. The Russian Gog will form a vast coalition of its own satellites-Iran, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, and other Arabs. In addition, the Soviets will be aided by “the mixed breeds of Asia and Africa and India, who … will ally themselves with anything which promises them that they can pillage and rape in the lands of the White Man.” Finally, the alliance will include “those who hate Jesus Christ,” Jewish “Edomites” and their bought political agents. “The Russian hordes” and their associates will attack along two fronts, seizing the eastern Mediterranean and the Suez Canal to shut off the flow of oil and then directly attacking the United States across the Bering Straits and by missile, submarine, and aircraft. After “nomadic warriors disperse … through the vast forests of the western Canadian mountains… the Asiatic hordes [will] roll in like a flood in our northwestern States.” This double assault will, of course, fail. The various Soviet armies will mutiny and the satellites revolt. God will send all manner of natural calamities against the invaders: epidemic diseases, storms, showers of meteors, and volcanic eruptions spewing toxic gases, until the enemy forces are utterly destroyed. The level of detail approaches that of earlier British-Israel millenarians (and, incidentally, that of such contemporary futurist millenarians as Hal Lindsey). But a number of distinctive differences emerge. One is the dramatic shift in the locus of action, away from traditional sites in Palestine and toward the United States. While the attack on the Suez Canal is reminiscent of more traditional accounts, Comparet makes clear that events in the eastern Mediterranean are a sideshow, a means of strangling Europe while the main battle centers on the United States. Where British-Israelites continued to reflect the historic link between British interests and the Near East, and especially to reflect British hegemony over Egypt and Palestine, Christian Identity had separated itself from the political loyalties of its parent. Howard Rand’s Anglo-Saxon Federation persisted in speaking of an Anglo-American partnership, of Ephraim and Manasseh doing God’s work together. Christian Identity insists on the cen-trality of America in God’s plan, an element made all the easier by the bipolar character of the Cold War. If indeed the United States and the Soviet Union were the only powers of significance, as was the case until the late 1980s, then surely the millenarian script concerned only the Soviet Union (Gog) and the United States (Israel). Hal Lindsey, in his best-selling book, The Late Great Planet Earth, insisted on a Salvationist role for the United States even though he was hard-pressed to find much biblical warrant for it. Comparet and other Identity writers, operating on the assumption that the United States is Israel, have no such constraints to limit their speculations.⁸

Identity flourished during the Cold War and constructed its millenarian scenario against the backdrop of U.S.-Soviet conflict. In this they were no different than their adversaries, the Fundamentalists. Both groups face the necessity of recalibrating their visions of the Last Days, adapting them to a world in which neither the Cold War nor the Soviet Union exists. The adaptability of millenarians, however, can scarcely be underestimated, and their capacity to revise their understanding of the future in the light of changed political circumstances will doubtless allow them to meet the challenge of a post-Cold War world. Thus Paul Boyer’s perceptive comments on Fundamentalist views of Armageddon apply to Identity as well. Because of

Surviving the Tribulation

In the meantime, during the run-up to the final conflagration, the conditions of organized social life can only worsen. It is the nature of the Tribulation that this should be so and, in the absence of a rapture, natural also that Identity believers note with particular care the character of the decay that will attack social institutions during the period. They, after all, expect to have to live through it. Hence the Tribulation is cast not in general terms but in terms of specific developments, against which believers need to take immediate protective action. George Stout, the leader of Aryan Nations in Texas, asserts that “as we enter into the Kingdom Age, we will see the greatest tribulation period ever known to our race.” Dan Gayman of the Church of Israel is more concrete:

The question that remains is that of the appropriate response to this onrushing chaos. Gayman’s church believes that “like Noah we seek to build an Ark of Safety in this time of national and world travail,” which entails the “people of God … [making] an exodus to the land” in the form of settlements of groups of families “in isolated places across the country, principally west of the Mississippi River.” Both the groups and the families that comprise them should strive for maximum self-sufficiency. The same survivalist imperative lay behind the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord’s purpose, “to prepare a physical refuge for God’s people during the time of upheaval in America.” Lest the undercurrent of violence be forgotten, William V. Fowler, a follower of Wesley Swift’s, advises his readers to arm themselves, for even if the dire predictions prove incorrect, the guns and ammunition can always be sold at a profit: “I firmly believe, right or wrong, that if you GET YOUR GUNS AND AMMUNITION NOW and prepare for war, you have nothing to lose. If you sell your guns later, after you proved me wrong, you are going to make a profit…. But the best possible investment you can make is to get enough guns, foods, and ammunition for a half a dozen families…. TIME IS so SHORT.” As we shall see in chapter 10, such responses to Tribulationist predictions carry a dangerous potential for becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, in which millenarians create the very climate of violence they seek to flee.¹⁰

The coming disasters will be both familiar and novel. Some resemble not only those cataloged by British-Israelites but those favored by millenarians since the seventeenth century—plague, flood, earthquake, and eruption. An Aryan Nations author predicts cataclysmic seismic events throughout the West Coast and Pacific Northwest, which would not only destroy major population centers but cause the waters of Lake Tahoe to pour down on the Carson Valley in Nevada. But other disaster fears are of a distinctly novel character, growing out of Identity’s pervasive racialism. For Identity, the ultimate disaster is not natural but demographic, and they harbor an obsessive concern with racial obliteration. This fear that the Tribulation may result in the destruction of the white race, that believers will not survive intact, pushes Tribulationist fantasies away from millenarian expectation and toward apocalyptic despair, an issue to which we shall return at the end of the chapter. The alleged plots of ZOG (the movement’s habitual acronym for Zionist Occupation Government, i.e., the federal government) are all directed toward “destroying] from the earth our Aryan Race and Heritage,” principally through the sale of drugs and the right of abortion. “Those who are spared this genocide and grow into adults have the threat of jew wars ever present to dampen the promise of any kind of plausible future.” David Lane, a member of the Order who is now in prison, puts the matter in even grimmer terms: “The political entity known as the United States of America has attempted with near single-minded determination, almost from its inception, to destroy any White territorial imperative, of any size and on any continent where such a state could be found. Genocide of the White Race has been the aim and result of the American political entity.” Such circumstances were never dreamed of in the British-Israel tracts of an earlier era, written under the impress first of British imperial expansion and then of the American rise to superpower status. Christian Identity therefore harbors an altogether less stable set of millenarian ideas, in which the determinism of the divine plan is in constant tension with the apparently limitless power of Satan.¹¹

Nonetheless, Identity remains committed to a literal Second Coming and millennial reign of the saints. Thorn Robb, Klan leader and pastor of the Christian Identity Church in Harrison, Arkansas, affirms belief “in the literal return to this earth of Yashua the Messiah (Jesus Christ)… to take the Throne of David and establish His everlasting Kingdom.” When that occurs, “righteous government” will be restored to the earth and “a day of reckoning will come” for evildoers. Dan Gayman foresees a comparably final consummation of history, to which his Church of Israel adds the regathering of the tribes of Israel to Palestine, presumably only in representative form, since most “will be apportioned throughout much of the globe.” This suggests that Israel (the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples) will then exercise dominion over their spiritual inferiors. Jerusalem, or rather “the New Jerusalem,” will serve as the headquarters of the millennial theocracy. In like manner, Aryan Nations believes “that there is a day of reckoning. The usurper will be thrown out by the terrible might of Yahweh’s people as they return to their roots and their special destiny. We know there is soon to be a day of judgment and a day when Christ’s kingdom (Government) will be established on earth as it is in heaven.” The last sentence of the Aryan Nations’ position is taken up word for word in the creedal statement of James K. Warner’s New Christian Crusade church.¹²

Identity and British-Israelism

While Identity retains the sense of millenarian imminence inherited from British-Israelism, the manner in which the vision of the Last Days is conceived has undergone subtle but significant changes. The emphasis on the centrality of America has already been mentioned. In addition, British-Israel pyramidology—central to Anglo-Israelite millennialism at least since the time of Davidson—has been deemphasized in Christian Identity. North American British-Israelites, such as Howard Rand, retained a central place for date calculations based upon pyramid measurements. Some, like W. G. Mac- Kendrick and William McCrea, often seemed to lose themselves in a maze of mathematical manipulations, certain that if they could only perform the correct operations, the millennial dates would flow with absolute accuracy. Without repudiating pyramidism, Christian Identity has deemphasized it, especially as a date-setting device. At one level, this appears symptomatic of the movement’s desire to separate itself definitively from English antecedents. The English movement never seemed sufficiently racist or anti-Semitic to suit Identity tastes. In addition, the reliance upon Davidson’s methods and conclusions left a trail of incorrect predictions. While these failures were more easily rationalized away than those of the nineteenth-century Millerites, one senses that by the 1950s, devotees of pyramidism were wearied by two decades of disappointments and by ever-more-intricate rationalizations. Some, like Rand, appeared to have had boundless faith that Davidson had been correct, but fewer and fewer American believers seemed interested in pursuing such an elusive quarry. Finally, just as Identity was anxious to distinguish itself from British-Israelism, so it was committed to sharpening the boundary between itself and the dispensational Fundamentalists.

One of dispensationalism’s early virtues appeared to be precisely its hostility toward date setting. Indeed, in the wake of the Millerite fiasco, this aspect of dispensationalism particularly commended it to wary millenarians. The fact that the rapture and Second Coming could occur at “any moment” rendered the embarrassing matter of date-setting moot, according to the futurists. Nonetheless, when Fundamentalism experienced its most recent surge as a result of the changed politics of the Middle East, latent date-setting propensities began to surface once again. As Timothy Weber observes, “Since the founding of Israel in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967, many of premillennialisn’s most popular writers have become rather reckless in their predictions.” Weber points especially to the very widely read Hal Lindsey, who, although careful not to specify precise dates for apocalyptic events, nonetheless comes perilously close to making falsifiable predictions. As a result, he and other “modern premillen-nialists may find themselves in the same position as the Millerites.” For reasons already discussed, Identity finds dispensationalism scripturally invalid and theologically repugnant, particularly in the role assigned to the Jewish people. This view has engendered a visceral Identity rejection of anything associated with the Fundamentalist perspective on the End. Hence, as Fundamentalism moved closer to date setting, Identity sought reflexively to move even further from date-setting tendencies. The movement from pyramid chronology may thus reflect a desire to distance Identity from its rival. Indeed, the connection between the pyramid literature and date setting has led some Identity figures to repudiate pyramidology completely. Among them is Thorn Robb, who lumps pyramid writers with other “crystallball prophets’ who believe “they can pinpoint the time of the return of Christ.” Instead, they practice a corrupt “scriptural gymnastics.”¹³

For the most part, the Great Pyramid appears in Identity literature merely as an occasional reminder of the distant glories of the “Adamic race.” There are exceptions, as in William V. Fowler’s fears that a communist invasion of the United States was about to take place in early 1979 in order to set the final eschatological events in motion, because “the Pyramid points to September of 1979, as being a very important date in Israel, which I believe to be the sealing date for the Bride.” And Calling Our Nation reprinted an article on biblical chronology by Bertrand Comparet that relies heavily on Davidson’s calculations. On the whole, however, the pyramid receded to a distinctly subordinate position. It is taken as evidence of a mysterious ancient priesthood in Egypt, whose modern descendants are “the White Christians.” The “non-white priests” hid the fact that Noah and his sons were “the builders and designers of the great marvels of constructions,” and that Shem himself had built the Great Pyramid. Shem was “the greatest Adamite after Jesus Christ,” and God chose him for the task so that the pyramid could stand “as an eternal testimony to the advanced civilization of His chosen people, the Adamic race.” It would stand as one of “God’s Silent Witnesses… beyond the reach of destructive tampering of the modernists and the higher critics.” But of elaborate deductions concerning the meaning of present and future events, there is scarcely a word. The pyramid becomes simply one other testimonial to the greatness of long-dead Aryan patriarchs. Even where the mathematics of pyramid measurements enter, as they do in the publications of the Lord’s Covenant church, they do so in the manner of the nineteenth-century pyramid writers, who saw it as conclusive evidence that the structure could never have been built by the Egyptians themselves, who, the British “knew” from their colonial experience, were lazy, superstitious heathens. Hence, the more remarkable the pyramid seemed to be in the mathematical complexity of its dimensions, the greater the likelihood that someone like themselves had built it, and who better than the dim figures of Genesis, from whom the British-Israelites liked to trace their own descent? Davidson’s elaboration of this early literature to produce a millenarian time-clock, however, seems to Identity a different and potentially more embarrassing matter, threatening to enmesh them in a web of failed predictions. Better to leave the pyramid as an “Adamic” testimonial and go no further.¹⁴

Identity millennialism differs from that of British-Israelism in another re- spect as well: its inner conflicts about the certainty of the outcome. While Identity writings give ample evidence of faith in the inevitability of the Second Coming and millennium, they provide equally vivid testimony concerning the obstacles to their achievement. These difficulties fall into two related categories: the extraordinary power imputed to the Jewish conspiracy, and the soft and corrupt character of the American people, which prevents them from resisting evil. The New Christian Crusade church of James K. Warner concludes that “our White race enters the twilight of its very existence…. Without your help, this truly is—The End.” Karl Schott observes that “we seem powerless to break this bondage,” something only God can do. As The Turner Diaries (not an Identity work but widely read on the Identity right and consequently discussed in chapter 11) puts it, “Americans have lost their right to be free.” Thus Identity seems precariously balanced between a belief that no matter how great the obstacles, the deterministic millenarian script will be played out, and the fear that the power of evil will thwart divine intentions. As with other practitioners of “the paranoid political style,” Christian Identity seems caught between optimism and pessimism, much in the manner of the nineteenth-century Populist writer, Mrs. S. E. V. Emery, who dedicated Seven Financial Conspiracies to “the enslaved people of a dying republic.” If the people were really enslaved and the republic in fact dying, there would have seemed little point to her book, but she was obviously unsure that even her propagandistic efforts would be sufficient to rouse the citizenry for the final battle against the conspirators. Christian Identity exhibits the same ambivalence.¹⁵

Identity, Satan, and the Jews

This ambivalence is ultimately traceable to the one tenet that most clearly distinguishes Christian Identity from British-Israelism: the belief in the Satanic origin of the Jews, a belief traced in the next three chapters. While British-Israelism manifested considerable anti-Semitism, particularly by the 1940s, its Jews were always salvageable. Their alleged corruptions could be cast off and their crimes purged by the act of conversion to Christianity, which they were expected to perform eventually, if not now, then surely at the time of the Second Coming. It is no accident that the North American writers whose millennialism is most detailed, consistent, and free from ambivalence are those most closely tied to the British-Israel mainstream, figures such as Howard Rand, William J. Cameron, and W. G. MacKendrick. All were prepared to engage in vicious libels against the Jewish people (none more than Cam-eron), but each left the door of salvation open, as had Christian anti-Semites throughout history. Christian Identity definitively closed that door by declaring that the taint was one of blood, and that the diabolical nature of the Jew could never be altered, either by him or by anyone else. Identity’s “final solution,” scarcely original but here placed in a novel theological context, is the obliteration of the Jewish people. Identity writers differ only in the instrumentality of a future Holocaust, whether at the hands of revolutionary millenarian Christians or at those of an enraged racial deity.

By its elaboration of a line of descent from the Devil/Serpent in the Garden, through Cain, the Edomites, and the Khazars, to contemporary Jews, Identity has fused belief in a world Jewish conspiracy with that of a cosmic satanic conspiracy. The latter belief flourished in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, and ensnared thousands of hapless old women and social deviants in accusations of witchcraft. The former, its secularized counterpart, achieved “canonical” form with the late nineteenth-century publication of The Protocols. The plot outlined in The Protocols was bent on economic dominance and political supremacy, and one could believe in it, as William J. Cameron did, and still urge Jews to repent and renounce it. The satanic cabal, on the other hand, could potentially be regarded as providing the central theme for the history of the cosmos, describing a struggle between light and darkness that began with the revolt of Lucifer and the fallen angels and would end only with the Devi’s destruction in a lake of fire at the end of time. Identity fused the two conspiracy theories, theologizing that of The Protocols to bring its machinations within the larger context of the transhistori-cal battle between light and darkness.

Having done this, Identity has created a form of millennialism that is not only unstable, hovering uncertainly between optimism and pessimism, but that has a distinctly dualistic character. Its Devil is no mere pesky upstart or insubordinate underling; he is an adversary with the resources potentially to unseat his master. This potential for dualism is nowhere better exemplified than in the writings of the late Robert Miles. Despite the idiosyncrasies of his theology, the avuncular Miles functioned as a kind of elder statesman of the racial movement and was largely divorced from its feudings. He is important both for the explicitly dualistic theology he developed and for the manner in which others systematically misperceived his beliefs. He was frequently classified as a major Identity figure by organizations that monitor extreme right-wing activity, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Center for Democratic Renewal. The confusion is understandable, since Miles was involved in numerous collaborative activities with Identity groups and leaders, and because his theology, while not an explicit Identity creed, does in fact accentuate precisely that dualistic element that is latent in so much Identity thought itself.¹⁶

Miles’s dualism was based on a struggle between the true God and a false God, Satanael. Satanael had been Lucifer, the “chief angel, first or eldest son of God,” before his rebellion. Jesus, by contrast, was “the Younger, Loyal Son.” Some of the “astral seed” (i.e., angels) followed Satanael-Lucifer into rebellion against his father, while others remained loyal. “The ongoing stellar civil war,” spreading through the universe, continued to be fought on earth. The whites to whom Miles preached he presumed to be the loyal astral seed who took “the flesh form,” and thus had an angelic existence prior to their lives on earth and would return to that spirit state once their battle with evil had been completed. Yet Miles’s neo-Catharist myth was not simply a description of a struggle between rival angelic forces, for it was complicated by his account of the process by which the contending angelic armies assumed human form on earth.¹⁷

Miles believed that in addition to the warring groups of angels, human beings were created on earth not once but twice. In an account of dual creations reminiscent of Charles Fox Parham’s, God the Father created human beings on the sixth day. They, however, were not Adam and Eve; Adam and Eve were created on the eighth day by God’s rival, Satanael, in the hope that they would be sufficiently attractive to tempt the loyal angels. Adam and Eve, however, turned out to be less than perfect or manageable and, hence, inadequate to the task. Thus in this primal age there were four different creatures: two groups of angels, representing the contending deities; and two groups of creatures of flesh, created respectively by God and the Devil. Since the angels possessed sexual urges, angelic warriors of both camps “fraternized” with “the daughters of men,” thus embedding their respective “astral seeds” in flesh form. The offspring of the mating between the two types of human beings and the loyal angels “produced a towering ethnic strain … your strain … the true seed of the North.” (i.e., the white race).¹⁸

After this complex series of interminglings, the “stellar civil war” continued on earth between the angels-made-flesh. Notwithstanding descent from Adam and Eve, “God had interceded with His grace” and made Noah a “blessed man … beyond reproach.” Thereafter, the battle became a competition for the loyalty of Noah’s descendants. “If God wins Noah and his descendants, despite their flesh mixes, despite the impurities which such contain, God wins the eternal war. Satanael will repent. Satanael may be forgiven for the mercy of God the Father is boundless and endless. Harmony will then reign on earth as it once was in heaven. The balance of the forces of life will be restored.” On the other hand, a victory by Satanael will give him dominion over the earth, converting it into “part of the darkness, the anti-matter void which we call in other areas, the black holes.” That will deliver the world to the Jews, for “a jew … is anyone who believes only in the flesh and this world, and follows the Prince of Darkness.”¹⁹

While dramatically different in its symbolism from Christian Identity, it is, as far as Miles was concerned, compatible with Identity. The respective groups of believers are “true cousins in the present, but from the same household in the past.” The difference lies in point of view. Dualists and Identity begin sacred history at different points, according to Miles. The dualists move it back to “the arrival of the Sons of God to the earth,” while Identity begins with Abram/Abraham. Miles’s dualism linked the arrival of the angels to a mythic era of the “ice ages,” whereas “Identity sees a need to concentrate on that period subsequent to the ice ages.” Identity is “totally correct,” Miles says, but is preoccupied with the descendants of Shem, while the dualists know that their own history long predates the period of the patriarchs. As a courtesy, however, “we do not stress [these differences] in their company.”²⁰

The idiom Miles employed, with its mélange of references to Norsemen, Cathars, and astral beings, is distinctive, as well as remote from much of the language employed by Identity. That Miles was so frequently considered an Identity figure despite these differences is not simply the result of the fact that outsiders tended to lump him together with Identity associates (he had, for example, been a conspicuous participant in the Aryan Nations congresses). Rather, it reflects the fact that he unabashedly advanced a Manichaeanism that exists in much less open form within Identity itself. For Identity, having conjured up an adversary of seemingly overwhelming power, finds its millennialism transmuted as a consequence. Eschatological events cannot be presumed to occur in an automatic way under conditions of warfare with an equal or possibly superior enemy. The millennium, together with the racial triumph it is taken to represent, continues to be the goal, for if it were not, what else would keep believers at their tasks? But millennial expectation has become shadowed by the fear that the consummation of history will be undone at the last moment.

Identity as a Spiritual Elite

The tension between confidence and despair that casts a shadow over millenarian certainty is reinforced by the fact that Identity is, even by the standards of American sectarianism, a tiny movement. Accurate estimates of its size are impossible to obtain because of its decentralized character. It has no denominational structure, merely shifting and overlapping groups with family resemblances to one another. However, even the guesses have placed its maximum size at no more than one hundred thousand, and it may be less than half that. Further, there is no evidence Identity can attract large numbers of new members, although it has proselytized among small populations of the alienated (e.g., skinheads and white prison inmates). Consequently, it cannot look forward to a foreseeable future as a mass movement.

That being the case, Identity believers must resolve the dissonance between, on the one hand, their belief that they are God’s instruments on earth and, on the other hand, their manifest failure to convince others. Resolution of the dissonance is key not only to the survival of the Identity coteries but to their continued confidence in the predicted millennial outcome. This they have done through two interrelated means. First, they lay claim to possessing special knowledge—knowledge of the workings of social institutions, American society, world politics, and, ultimately, the universe itself. Second, they assert on the basis of this claim to special knowledge that they have been the victims of a gigantic, cosmic swindle engineered so successfully that non-believers cannot see that the crime has occurred. The deception that obsesses them is that, in their view, the Aryans’ claim to being God’s real chosen people was stolen from them by the Jews, who now masquerade as chosen while the true spiritual elite languishes in obscurity.

Hence, Identity’s millenarian scenario is interwoven with the need to expose this “crime,” convince others of its occurrence, and reverse its consequences, at which point history will achieve its consummation. The motifs of election and theft—of a granted and stolen birthright—produces a theology of resentment. Unable to convince others that the theft has occurred, Identity simultaneously fastens upon the retelling of the myth, together with the elaboration of political scenarios that would restore them to what they see as their rightful place as the world’s spiritual elite. But before the political strategies can be understood, we must first unravel the myth that the arrival of the millennium is frustrated by the theft of the true Israel’s birthright. The myth describes Satan’s plot, carried out by those Identity asserts to be his progeny, the Jewish people. The diabolization of the Jews lies at the heart of Identity millennialism, for the Jews are deemed to be those who stole and will not relinquish the prize.