The Politics of Ultimacy
This book has been a study in the transformation of ideas. What began as an eccentric but benign religious movement—British-Israelism—became a movement that, while still at the intellectual margins, took on a hate-filled political agenda. This metamorphosis might be regarded as little more than the internal concerns of obscure coteries but for the fact that here, as elsewhere, ideas have consequences. Beliefs can both drive and justify actions. As the belief system of Christian Identity incorporated more and more explicitly political components, it became capable of producing more serious societal consequences.
This chapter examines the process of ideological mutation, through which a benign and politically conformist movement turned into a movement obsessed with enemies and conspiracies. As the process of transformation went forward, Christian Identity was opened up to additional influences, emanating from the cultic milieu, the society’s domain of rejected and stigmatized ideas. This openness to rejected knowledge was a product of the pervasive fear of conspiracy. When that conspiratorialism was joined with a belief in the imminence of the apocalypse, Identity could become a breeding ground for revolutionary millenarianism, the final assault of the pure on the citadel of corrupt authority.
If the British are indeed a people both productive and tolerant of eccentricity, then Anglo-Israelism must surely be a quintessentially English phenomenon. Its devotees ordered their organizational and publishing lives around the curious belief that they alone had discovered the true Israelite origins of the British peoples, and they saw in it the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Despite their failure to convince most of their countrymen, British-Israelites persevered, unswervingly committed to the “identity message.” They were curious but essentially harmless. As we have seen, British-Israelites tended to be middle-class Anglicans, leavened by other Protestants and by a surprising number of titled aristocrats and military officers. None surpassed them in loyalty to the sovereign, the putative descendant of King David, and the Empire, which Britain was deemed to have acquired in fulfillment of divine promises. The achievements of British law and parliamentary institutions they attributed to the Israelite legacy brought by the tribes from their ancient Near Eastern homeland. In short, British-Israelism idealized and defended the political status quo.
While Christian Identity maintained and even extended the core belief in Israelite origins, it departed in significant ways from British-Israelism. Having abandoned the Anglophilic sentiments of American British-Israelism, Identity also left behind the traditional defense of the political status quo. While Identity believers idealized the Constitution and proclaimed their devotion to the common law, they regarded American political institutions as corrupt beyond any hope of reform. The political system had been captured by the Jewish conspiracy. The Jews, as “Satan’s spawn,” were here to do the Devil’s work on earth, and in furtherance of the demonic plan had taken over the governmental apparatus. Hence, in Identity’s view, government was illegitimate, and Christians owed no loyalty to it. They were obliged to yield to its demands only as tactical prudence dictated. In short, where British-Israelism rhapsodized about the goodness and virtue of the British political system, American Identity believers saw around them only hostile and malevolent forces.
What made this transformation possible? How did an English movement once unswerving in its support of the status quo give rise to an American successor at potential war with government? The transformation was facilitated by two factors: organizational form and intellectual style. As we have seen, almost from its inception British-Israelism was plagued by tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces. On the one hand, there were continual attempts to create overarching organizational structures that would draw British-Israelites together. These, however, always took the form of federations, groupings of at least semiautonomous units over which the center exercised only nominal control. While at least one tightly governed religious sect did eventually emerge from British-Israelism (the Worldwide Church of God), Anglo-Israelites in Britain and North America generally rejected the sectarian model. Members were encouraged to retain their denominational affiliations, for which British-Israelism was supposed to supply reinforcement rather than competition.
Thus the center—the offices of the various federative structures—lacked the machinery and the sanctions to enforce doctrinal conformity. Often as a matter of principle they rejected the desirability of such conformity. British-Israelites could believe as they pleased, provided they accepted some notion of Israelite ancestry. As a result, the movement lacked an orthodoxy but possessed an organizational structure so segmented that multiple centers of doctrinal variation could be sustained within it. Whether in Detroit, Vancouver, or Los Angeles, British-Israelites felt free to elaborate their own interpretations. In this multicentric organizational environment, a wide range of interpretations proliferated, some close to the views of such influential Anglo-Israel publicists as Edward Hine, others idiosyncratic and deviant. For example, many British-Israelites were content to follow Hine’s lead in regarding Jews as part of All-Israel, but as we saw in chapter 7, ideological permissiveness allowed some, like C. F. Parker, to argue that Jews had forfeited their place by intermarrying with heathens. Hence, British-Israelism was structured in a manner likely to produce a high degree of ideological variation—a reservoir of ideas, continually replenished with new and different contributions. Those at the center had limited capacities for controlling both what went into the reservoir (e.g., Ellen Bristowe’s notions about Cain) and what was drawn out (e.g., that the Jews, rather than the Turks, were modern-day Edomites). As the American movement began to draw increasing numbers of anti-Semites in the 1930s and 1940s, they found a congenial milieu. There were ample materials on which they could draw to reinforce and express their own predilections, and they could embellish those themes without being stigmatized as heretics.
The organizational structure existed in a reciprocal relationship with intellectual style. British-Israelism was from the outset a revisionist movement, that is, it offered a new version of orthodox beliefs. Further, it was doubly revisionist, for it claimed to offer both a new interpretation of the Bible (making it religiously revisionist) and a new account of historical events connected with migration patterns that populated Europe and the British Isles (making it a form of revisionist history). British-Israel writings were genteel and mannerly, avoiding the accusations, name calling, and stridency common in the later Christian Identity literature. But it was abundantly clear that British-Israelites regarded the common Protestant understanding of biblical prophecy to be incomplete at best and likewise considered accounts of both biblical and British history to be deeply flawed. They thus set themselves in decorous but clear opposition to both religious and academic authorities. If both sets of authorities were in error, who then was correct? British-Israelism’s problem was always its inability to find a clear source of authority once it had rejected those of both the church and the academy.
The problem of authority was intertwined with that of organization. Having chosen not to found a sect, British-Israelites lacked the means to set up their own fount of authority. Like the Millerites before them, they seemed ever confident that the sheer force of their arguments would eventually win over denominational Protestantism. But having no authority structure of their own, and having rejected key views of both religious and secular authorities, they found it even more difficult to control doctrinal mutation. Not only did new ideas and interpretations grow because local centers were autonomous and little could be done to discipline deviation; in addition, the commitment to revisionism proved in practice to be unstoppable. If churches and universities were teaching errors, then institutionally sanctioned truth was suspect. If received biblical interpretation and history were false, then nothing was as it seemed. The real truth was hidden and had to be uncovered. In practice, British-Israelism gave the benefit of the doubt to certain institutions, such as the British monarchy. But their substitution of a daringly different picture of both sacred and secular history from that accepted by others had far-reaching implications.
Revisionism, once launched, proved difficult to control. It stimulated increasingly ambitious searches for hidden meaning, the truth concealed behind conventional ideas. The work of David Davidson codified British-Israel revisionism, extending it into new domains of revisionist history and supplying it with a new tool for separating false appearances from the concealed truth beneath. While Davidson’s date-setting exercises bothered some British-Israelites, they could scarcely fault him for logically extending the revisionist enterprise.
While British-Israelism did not apply its revisionism to political institutions, Identity had no comparable inhibitions. British-Israelism had already demonstrated to its adherents’ satisfaction that received knowledge is at best an illusion or, at worst, a deception. Identity merely extended the revisionist enterprise to new domains, notably politics. Unencumbered by the British-Israelites’ devotion to the Crown, Identity saw in political institutions the operation of sinister plots. Their belief that a Jewish cabal had seized control of government and the media thus merely took revisionism a step further. Similarly, it explains the readiness of Identity believers to accept Holocaust revisionism not only because they hate and fear Jews but also because every historical account has become suspect, whether of Egyptian pharaons, the origins of European peoples, or Nazi genocide.
In two respects, therefore, British-Israelism provided necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for the emergence of Identity: by an organizational structure that encouraged the proliferation of doctrines without being able to control the directions doctrinal development took; and by an intellectual style that encouraged a skepticism so radical that ordinary canons for distinguishing truth from falsehood seemed useless. When the fragmented organization and revisionist skepticism of British-Israelism impinged on the American right in the 1930s and 1940s, Identity was the result, and Anglo-Israelism’s harmless eccentricities took on a decidedly more sinister appearance.
The skepticism that British-Israelism encouraged and that Identity intensified made an already diffuse body of beliefs more nebulous still. Received ideas— those that bore the imprimatur of prestigious institutions—were stigmatized. The converse was also the case—that is, those ideas not associated with prestigious institutions ipso facto appeared more credible. The more doubt that was cast on accepted notions, the more persuasive unaccepted ideas seemed, for to be linked with churches and universities was to be tainted. British-Israelism could keep its tendency toward skepticism partially in check because of its loyalty to Crown and Empire and because of its members’ social backgrounds—middle class, leavened by the aristocracy and armed forces. Consequently, despite their suspicion of traditional Bible interpretation and history, they retained powerful links with the established order. Christian Identity, with a more plebeian social profile, had distinctly weaker institutional loyalties.1
Identity’s more thoroughgoing skepticism had opened the movement to a bewildering variety of influences beyond those that may be directly traced to British-Israelism and anti-Semitic politics. Many influences emanated from the “cultic milieu,” a concept described by the British sociologist Colin Campbell that has two significant aspects. First, it refers to a society’s “rejected knowledge,” beliefs considered unacceptable by such authoritative institutions as conventional religion, universities, the state, and the mass media. Second, the cultic milieu refers not simply to this body of rejected knowledge but to its expression in the form of a “cultural underground,” a “network of individuals, groups, practices, institutions, [and] means of communication.” The cultic milieu’s conception of the world is therefore a virfual mirror image of that shared by the majority. What institutions of orthodoxy consider error, the cultic milieu regards as truth—the occult, the crank, and the pseudo-scientific. The cultic milieu therefore implies a distinctive, even forbidden, vision of the world.2
The cultic milieu was in evidence from the early days of British-Israelism. The Israelites’ presence in Europe and the British Isles was inferred from deviant interpretations of archaeological evidence. According to it, Jeremiah had brought the daughter of the last king of Israel to Ireland, the Ark of the Covenant had been buried in the mound at Tara, and the Stone of Scone below the Coronation Throne at Westminster Abbey was the stone on which Jacob had lain his head at Beth El. The intersection of Anglo-Israelism with pyramidol-ogy introduced an additional body of cultic material, which achieved increasing prominence. By extension, other ancient monuments throughout the world, including Stonehenge, were also given Israelite provenance.3
Initially, the cultic milieu exercised influence in areas that reinforced the central religious message. Speculations about migrating peoples and mysterious structures were ransacked for confirmation of the Israelites’ wanderings in strange lands. But given the dynamic of historical revisionism, there were temptations to draw in cultic materials less immediately germane. As Wesley Swift and William Potter Gale pushed the battle between good and evil back before biblical times, they drew on the imagery provided by science fiction and the flying saucer/UFO literature. The rebellion of the fallen angels had been fought by armadas of spaceships, one commanded by Lucifer and the other by the archangel Michael. In anticipation of such later occult writers as Eric van Daniken, some of the ships crashed and brought celestial creatures to earth.
The reach of the cultic milieu extended to nonreligious areas as well. Christian Identity literature combined its discussions of religion and race with encomiums to the medicinal value of garlic, attacks on processed food, and analyses of UFOs. Indeed, but for the agenda of religion and race, Christian Identity exhibited striking parallels with New Age literature. While the two may seem radically opposed, both drew on the cultic milieu, a common reservoir of excluded ideas, whose very exclusion from common discourse is taken as evidence of their validity.4
The cultic milieu was attractive for several reasons. In the first place, as has already been indicated, British-Israelism drew from and contributed to the cultic milieu by the very nature of its central beliefs. Second, the uncontrollable dynamic of historical revisionism tended to take speculation into new fields, so that it was virtually impossible to limit the cultic milieu’s influence to a single facet of the belief system. Third, the power of the cultic milieu was enhanced as the theme of conspiracy became increasingly prominent.
Conspiratorialism, of course, was itself an idea nurtured in the cultic literature, in such concepts as that of the Illuminati, the shape-changing secret society alleged to have been at the bottom of every untoward event in Western history since the French Revolution. At the same time, the more Identity fastened upon a conspiratorial view of history, the more attractive the cultic milieu became as a source of themes and “verification”—and not simply because conspiracy theories tend to be relegated to the cultic milieu. Rather, there was an additional reason. The more seriously conspiracies are taken, the less trust can be placed in centers of authority. If the conspiracy is everywhere—embedded in the churches, universities, governments, banks, the mass media—then no knowledge promulgated by such institutions can be trusted. Hence, seekers after knowledge must by default go to the cultic milieu, precisely that body of ideas condemned by the centers of authority. According to the line of reasoning employed, if the conspiracy has co-opted authority, and if authority has rejected certain ideas, then those rejected ideas must be the really true ones, for if they were not true, then why would the conspiracy have condemned them?
Thus the fixation upon conspiracy drove Identity deeper into the cultic milieu by rendering all noncultic ideas suspect. Since the plot of satanic Jews was regarded as all-encompassing, social institutions and the ideas they produced were deemed untrustworthy. Just as conspiratorialism accentuates tendencies toward the reception of occult and other heterodox ideas, so conspiratorialism leads to a conflict-laden political agenda.
Identity constructed a Manichaean universe, divided into realms of light and darkness. The central figures of each, God and Satan, are in combat. Each is aided by coalitions made up not only of allies but of literal descendants, white Aryans who are the children of God and Jews who are the children of Satan. A universe structured along dichotomous lines leads to a characteristic form of politics, a politics of ultimacy.
The politics of ultimacy rejects conventional political norms of coalition building, compromise, and incrementalism. There can be no coalition building, except in the most limited sense, for other groups are almost certainly either willing participants in the conspiracy or its hapless dupes. The range of potential coalition partners is limited to coteries regarded as racially self-conscious and untainted. In like manner, compromise is unacceptable, for that means complicity in the program of Satan. Further, if Identity’s political program fulfills God’s requirements for racial redemption, then it becomes nonnegotiable. Flowing from a divine source, it constitutes the ultimately valid scheme of social organization and governance. Modification of it can result only in replacing virtue with sin. Conventional politics as a practical necessity accepts not only the need for coalition building and compromise but also the inevitability of piecemeal achievements, acquired bit by bit over a long period of time. Here too prevailing norms conflict with Identity theology, for Identity’s millenarian consciousness argues the imminence of the Last Days. Gradualism is a luxury that requires endless future time, precisely the commodity deemed to be in shortest supply. Victory must come soon and totally, or not at all.
Such unconventional politics, intolerant of others’ interests and impatient of slow-moving political processes, resembles what Norman Cohn has called “revolutionary millenarianism”: “It is characteristic of this kind of movement that its aims and premises are boundless. A social struggle is seen not as a struggle for specific, limited objectives, but as an event of unique importance, different in kind from all other struggles known to history, a cataclysm from which the world is to emerge totally transformed and redeemed.” The motifs of Christian Identity place it within the revolutionary millenarian fold: “Israel” as a self-identified spiritual elite, which as God’s progeny must fight his battles in the world; the belief that they face the ultimate adversary, Satan and his minions; the siege mentality that flows from the perception that God’s forces are encircled; and the conviction of an approaching, apocalyptic battle that will determine for all time whether good or evil prevails. This is at once an invitation to violent confrontation and a prescription for political defeat. The collision of revolutionary millenarians preaching a politics of ultimacy with a refractory reality sets in motion Identity’s unstable political dialectic.5
On the one hand, much in the religiopolitical message imparts a drive toward continual confrontation, even at the price of defeat and suppression at the hands of law-enforcement agencies and courts. The defeated are God’s martyrs, simultaneously role models and the objects of cultlike devotion. Figures such as Robert Mathews and Gordon Kahl became objects of movement hagiography. The closed character of Identity’s belief system tends to filter out contradictory messages and information. Whatever does not fit or is inconsistent comes by definition from the enemy, a worldview that encourages the overestimation of one’s own strength and the underestimation of the adversary’s. Finally, like all millenarians, Identity counts on God to provide. What they lack in numbers and resources will be amply compensated for by divine assistance. Since victory is assured, what appear to be defeats need not be taken seriously.
Counterpoised against these factors, however, are others that work against revolutionary millenarianism. When defeats are dramatic and governmental pressure strong, even the most committed can doubt the direction of history. Failure feeds forces of quietism and withdrawal, nurtured by Identity’s post-Tribulationism. Since the rapture will not rescue the saved, they must be prepared to separate themselves from the world and hunker down until God is ready to act. At the same time, traditional politics exerts occasional temptations, as the career of David Duke demonstrates. While Identity rejects the legitimacy of conventional politics, the success of Duke and those with similar views sometimes suggests that the political arena has its uses—to lessen pressure by hostile prosecutors, to spread aspects of the Identity message, and to draw in recruits who might otherwise not be reached. Finally, as has already been indicated, Identity’s very Manichaeanism can sap millenarian vitality. The more formidable the conspiracy appears, the more difficult victory may be to attain, and the harder it is to maintain confidence and optimism.
The balance between these factors is in part a function of the dynamic of withdrawal and engagement. Identity believers are rejecting of, and rejected by, the larger society. They regard that society as dominated by Satan, and they in turn are regarded as supporters of bigotry. Their contempt for the world as it is causes them to withdraw from it, and the opposition they stimulate confirms them in their view that they face a diabolical adversary. If, as they often believe, the rule of Antichrist is imminent, and if Christians cannot count on the rapture and thus must survive Antichrist’s rule, then believers feel the necessity to disconnect themselves from the larger environment. They do so by adopting a survivalist life-style, moving to sparsely populated areas, and minimizing contacts with public institutions. Regarding the outside world as evil, and predicting the imminent breakdown of order in apocalyptic racial conflict, they arm themselves and train for what they call “the final battle.”
But as their fears engender withdrawal into armed enclaves, the result can only be yet greater suspiciousness from those outside, which confirms Identity’s original apocalyptic fears. Since “the great conspiracy” is deemed to be the source of all evil, the actual source of opposition is immaterial. Few distinctions are made between pressure from the news media, the FBI, and the Anti-Defamation League; all are part of ZOG, different manifestations of the same adversary.
However, the very factors that stimulate withdrawal—belief in the imminence of the Last Days and fear that the world is about to fall into the hands of primal evil—make it impossible for that withdrawal to be complete. Paradoxically, the very efforts to cut themselves off bind communally based mille-narians to the environment they detest. The more radical the withdrawal, the greater the likelihood that those who withdraw will be tempted to ignore, circumvent, or violate the complex network of laws and regulations that governs a modern society, whether in the regulation of firearms, tax payments, or the treatment of children. Conflicts between withdrawing millenarians and the administrative state are inevitable.
In this respect, contemporary sectarians fare differently than most of the communal groups of the pre-Civil War period, such as the Shakers. Antebellum communitarians were generally dealt with more gently by the state (the Mormons were of course the great exception) for a number of reasons: the governments they faced were weaker and less intrusive; the groups were eager to present themselves in a favorable light in order to increase their followers; and while they viewed the outer world as corrupt, they often regarded it as salvageable.
The conflict between revolutionary millenarianism and quietistic withdrawal makes the course of Christian Identity difficult to predict. The former is undaunted by battles against hopeless odds, while the latter desires only to wait on God’s timetable. The uncertainty is amplified by organizational forces that govern the content of beliefs. Decentralization and reliance upon the cultic milieu create their own form of instability—not an instability that results from clashes with political authority, but an instability that results from multiple centers of authority and the indiscriminate embrace of diverse bodies of ideas. Identity constantly mutates in a process dictated by the whims and interests of autonomous leaders and the ingestion of new themes from the cultic milieu. In complex ways, these intrinsic forces interact with extrinsic forces from the larger political environment. As a result, the movement may change rapidly in the future, toward either greater militancy or greater disengagement. It may also fission if the family resemblance among the groups within it weakens.
An imponderable concerns changes in Identity leadership. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, an entire generation of leadership had left the scene. The first generation of leaders—figures such as Swift, Gale, and Comparer— had given way to a second generation in the 1970s. Usually younger, this second generation had come to Identity through the preaching and message of the first. Now members of the second generation have themselves succumbed to death or the infirmities of age, such as Robert Miles (important to Identity although not strictly speaking an Identity figure) and Richard Butler; or, like James Ellison and James Wickstrom, they were removed from active religious and political activity by incarceration. There is some evidence that their places are now being taken by a third generation of leaders, not simply younger than their predecessors but better educated, more polished, and more adroit in shaping their message to a skeptical audience, having learned from David Duke’s example how effectively appearance and manner can deflect hostility.6
Even if disengagement wins out against militancy, and the revolutionary millenarian drive weakens, however, Christian Identity will not have lost a capacity for future disruption, for it has already introduced into American life—albeit thus far only at the margins—motifs not present before, which for sheer virulence are virtually unprecedented. Should Christian Identity disappear through internal transformation, membership erosion, or fissioning, it will still have created dangerous new potentialities. Whatever may happen to Identity as a religious movement, or to its organizational parts, its doctrines of demonic conspiracy and apocalyptic battle exist where they did not before, for others to exploit in the future.