The Most Insane Christians

[Raven]

Christian Identity is about as wack as they get. When you get down to it, it's really not very Xtian at all. They don't get along with conservative Xtians very well because Baptists and such are looking forward to the Jews return to the Holy Land in order to fulfill end time prophecy. They've dreamed up a very racist and antisemitic world-view that helped it get a influential position back in the '80s with the racist right wing loons. Only a prolonged and aggressive effort by law enforcement, together with the demise of influential leaders who were not replaced, brought about its present decline.

Earlier I had mentioned British Israelism. They believed that the British Isles were populated by the lost 10 tribes of Israel who had been captured by the Assyrians and that they somehow after escaping ended up in the British Isles. This was a rather nutty manifestation of British Imperialism that flowered in the 19th Century. The appeal was that the British were actually God's Chosen People. Once this wacky religious cult made it's way across the Atlantic it quickly became mixed up with radical political groups. This became evident in the early 1920s, when a major Anglo-Israelite in Oregon turned out to be a leader in the Ku Klux Klan at a time when the Klan was a major power on the West Coast. It peaked in the 1930's as did lots of right wing groups because hard financial times always have their best days when things are rough. Things continued to become steadily more antisemitic and that led to the split with British Israelism, which was not all that antisemitic, and what became Christian Identity.

This happened in Southern California after WWII. Even back then LA had long been home to all sorts of fringe groups. Los Angeles was then the headquarters of Gerald L.K. Smith, the most important anti-Semitic organizer in America. All the original leaders of Identity had links to this guy. Wesley Swift, William Potter Gale, and Bertrand Comparet were the men who were the first generation. None of these guys was a preacher. Gale was a military man, and Comparet was an attorney. The three of them really cranked up the volume on the racism that had always exited in British Israelism, teaching that Genesis was only about the white race. Everybody else came later, and Jews were the offspring of Cain – the first murderer. Cain himself was the product of Satan and Eve, Adam was not his dad.

Identity has sometimes overlapped with the Klan or neo-Nazi groups. While Identity is not violent per se, various members of it have proven to be. I already mentioned the Order, or Silent Brotherhood. You also had the CSA or Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord,. a communal settlement founded in northern Arkansas in 1976 by James Ellison. Originally a born-again, evangelical community, it underwent a transformation when Ellison converted to Identity. Convinced that American society was about to crumble and that hordes of nonwhites would come marauding through the countryside, Ellison turned his rural commune into a militarized, fortified redoubt whose members not only received military training but gave it to others on the radical right. They themselves, although highly paranoid, were not violent. But there were some members who did commit violent acts.

Although Christian Identity dominated the racist right in the 1970s and 1980s, by the 1990s it was in decline. It faded because of a combination of factors, including more aggressive governmental action, limits to its appeal, and a growing leadership vacuum. But the KKK has always waxed and waned in popularity, as has neo nazism. Perhaps, though I hope not, Identity will as well.

edited for spelling