America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (4 page)

In the 1964 race for the presidency, the Kasper–Stoner ticket tended to present its agenda in racist code, referencing states' rights, constitutional conservatism, anti-communism, and national sovereignty (meaning opposition to the United Nations). Many saw through this facade. A Florida state legislative committee, lamenting the agitation and violence that Stoner and Lynch had brought to St. Augustine, noted: “Today's hawkers of hate have made capital of hiding behind the facade of conservatism and waving the banner of anticommunism. With their bigotry thus cloaked, they have made converts who unwittingly serve to undermine the causes in which they believe.”
¹³

But the racism and anti-Semitism attributed to the NSRP by the committee only spoke to the by-products of what these men devoutly believed. A closer examination of the NSRP reveals a web of associations and group affiliations, and ultimately a commonly held and obscured agenda, that only a few understand. Virtually every senior leader of the NSRP just mentioned was also a devout follower of the Christian Identity religion. Lynch, Potito, Gale, Barnes, and Britton all became ordained ministers in the Reverend Wesley Swift's Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. Gale, in fact, was among Swift's closest aides and advisors and was frequently pictured wearing a priest's collar. When he waged his 1962 campaign for the Alabama U.S. Senate nomination, Crommelin invited five Identity ministers, including Swift himself, to openly campaign for him. Potito served as Crommelin's campaign manager. Others, including Kasper, Fields, Thornton, and Carden, were all on the mailing list to receive tapes of Swift's CI sermons. Stoner and Fields appointed Gordon Winrod as the NSRP's official pastor; Winrod, along with his father and son, belongs to three generations of Christian Identity ministers. Stoner was on an FBI list of Identity followers as late as 1974.

These individuals were not simply cogs in the NSRP machinery. In many cases they affiliated with, led, and founded concurrent white supremacist organizations that ranked among the most active purveyors of violence in America from 1960 through 1980; offshoots of those organizations promote and participate in violence to this day. A list of such groups, circa 1972, includes:

       
   
The Minutemen (not to be confused with the present-day citizens' border patrol group), which openly advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Several Christian Identity devotees, including Lynch, Dennis Mower, and Kenneth Goff, assumed key roles in the group.

       
   
The California Rangers, an early antecedent to modern-day militia groups, which was started, organized, and managed by Gale and Thornton.

       
   
The Posse Comitatus, organized by Gale, a militant anti-tax and antigovernment group.

       
   
Various Ku Klux Klan factions, most notably the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, the most violent KKK subgroup, led by Sam Bowers, a Christian Identity militant.

The violence these groups wrought on the United States is well documented and extensive. In many ways, the plots they considered but failed to execute are downright frightening. But scholars have failed to see the interactions and connections between members of these various groups—a protean social network of the most hardcore white supremacists America has ever produced. In failing to see the depth of these connections, scholars have also understated the common bond of solidarity that united these men: a radical strain of an offshoot Christian sect that predated the factious violence of the 1960s by more than one hundred years and that did not even originate in America.

The theological school now called Christian Identity traces its roots back several hundred years, to when the “discovery” of the Americas fueled speculation about biblical history, specifically the destiny of the so-called ten lost tribes of Israel. Its most recognizable incarnation developed in Victorian England as an idea known as British Israelism. At the turn of the twentieth century, the idea spread to North America. There, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, it assumed an Ameri-centric hue and became more popular and more widely known as Anglo-Israelism. In both the U.S. and Canadian contexts, elements of Anglo-Israelism began to shift in a more racist direction. The key moment in the intellectual development of Christian Identity theology emerged as World War II came to a close. It centered around a major reinterpretation of the biblical creation story, one that shaped the landscape of white supremacy and racist violence in the decades that followed, thanks in large part to the work of the Reverend Wesley Albert Swift.

But a new biblical genealogy lay at the heart of Christian Identity teaching. For hundreds of years, scholars have speculated about the “lost” tribes of Israel, who according to the Old Testament were deported by the Assyrians in the eighth century
BCE.
According to the biblical narrative, following the prophet Abraham's covenant with
God, the descendants of the Hebrew patriarch became the genealogical foundation for the Jewish people. Specifically, God blessed Abraham's grandson Jacob as the forefather of the nation of Israel. Ten of Jacob's children and two of his grandchildren originated the bloodlines of the migrants who settled Palestine after Moses led the enslaved Hebrews out of Egypt during the Exodus. Ten tribes became the demographic foundation of the northern half of Israel, known as the Kingdom of Israel. (The southern half was known as the Kingdom of Judah.) But King Shalmaneser V of Assyria, following his conquest of the northern kingdom, exiled the ten tribes from the region. The Old Testament never discusses their ultimate destiny, as the rest of the narrative focuses on the tribes that remained in Judah, the descendants of Judah and Benjamin.

The fate of the ten lost tribes (sometimes referred to as the House of Israel) remained important to Jews and Christians alike because of its association with biblical prophecy. Many theologians interpret texts of the Bible to suggest that in the last days of the secular world, on the eve of the so-called Final Judgment, the House of Israel and the House of Judah will reunite in the Promised Land. Only then will God send a Messiah to save his chosen people. Many Christians believe this event will coincide with the second coming of Jesus.