America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (6 page)

Smith had already adapted many of the CI ideas espoused by the likes of Rand and Cameron. In 1942 he parlayed the organizational and communication talents he had honed working for Long into his
own movement, the Christian Nationalist Crusade. The group's stated purpose was to “preserve America as a Christian nation being conscious of a highly organized campaign to substitute Jewish tradition for Christian tradition.”
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Smith published a newsletter,
The Cross and the Flag,
which espoused these ideas to a national audience.

Smith's newsletters and literature became influential among an Atlanta-based white supremacist group known as the Columbians. Though no direct evidence exists, the group appears to have become an incubator for Christian Identity leaders in the Southeast. The group itself did not assume or aspire to any religious or spiritual identity. Instead, as World War II came to a close, the Columbians presented themselves as a pro-Nazi group that could “ethnically cleanse” Atlanta of its Jewish and black citizens. By 1949 it had recruited an estimated two hundred members with a simple pitch: “Do you hate Jews? Do you hate Negroes? Do you have 3 dollars?” Privately, the group hoped to lead what one author called a fascist “putsch” to take control of not only Atlanta but also the state of Georgia and the entire United States, if possible. It stockpiled weapons and encouraged ethnic violence to that end. It also nurtured two people who became important members of the NSRP: Emory Burke and Dr. Edward Fields. Burke, in fact, had cofounded the Columbians, and by the time Atlanta law enforcement completed its crackdown of his group, Burke had become an active member of Smith's Christian Nationalist Crusade.

The Columbians may have been influenced by Canadian fascist groups, which likely had connections to Anglo-Israelism factions in places like Quebec and Vancouver. The symbol the Columbians adopted, a thunderbolt, had for years belonged to the Union of Canadian Fascists, which in turn embraced the symbol in honor of the Nazi SS. It later became the symbol of the NSRP. Reports show that Canadian fascist material entered the United States in scores in the 1940s. Some of it became highly influential in helping students of Gerald Smith shape Christian Identity into a fully formed theological framework by 1949.

An Anglo-Israelism contingent emerged in Canada in the early 1900s and blossomed through the 1920s. But soon a schism divided the British-Israelite congregation in Vancouver, with some members
shifting their ideology in the same racist, anti-Semitic direction as their American cousins. By the early 1940s, this Canadian offshoot, the British-Israelite Congregation of Greater Vancouver, appears to have anticipated several of the interpretative moves formalized by America's Identity theologians. The Canadians produced written works that heavily influenced many American white supremacists. Published anonymously in 1944, a small work of nonfiction called
When Gog Attacks
became especially important to CI thinking. Historian Robert Singerman characterized the book as follows:

Drawing on Lothrop Stoddard, the writer dissolves away, much like the cube of sugar falling into a cup of tea, the Jews who are not Jews at all, beginning with the Ashkenazim who are the round-skulled (brachycephalic) descendants of a “mongrel breed of minor Asiatic races, with a strong admixture of Turko-Mongol blood . . . the Ashkenazim is [
sic
] therefore neither Jewish nor Semitic, and that therefore their claims to Palestine have no basis of fact whatsoever.”
²⁸

Whereas Stoddard imagined two races of Jews, the author of
When Gog Attacks
applied the label of Ashkenazim to all self-proclaimed Jews. Those properly understood to be Jews by mainstream society were all imposters or “counterfeit.” The Canadian racists extended this idea one step further in another influential 1944 work,
When? A Prophetic Novel of the Very Near Future.
Authored under the pseudonym H. Ben Judah,
When?
imagines an apocalyptic world through the experiences of a British intelligence agent who visits Palestine. There the agent discovers the secret behind history's darkest conspiracy, one that goes back to Cain, the murderer of his brother Abel, in the book of Genesis. In the Bible's telling, as punishment for the murder, God exiles Cain to the Land of Nod, fated to be “fugitive and a wanderer,” his bloodline terminated by the Great Flood. But in his thriller, Ben Judah provides a different twist. The big reveal, according to Barkun, is as follows:

Cain, it seems, founded a secret society to do the Devil's work on earth, and had been so successful that everyone on earth with the
exception of Noah and his family “appears to have come under the control of Satan.” Unfortunately Noah's line was contaminated when Ham married a descendant of Cain's and thus “the contaminated blood was brought through the Flood.” Cain's conspiracy continued on through history, controlled by certain of the Ashkenazim Jews.”
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While there are only suggestions that the Canadian books found their way to the Columbians, there is no doubt that they became very important to a handful of Gerald Smith's mentees on the West Coast in the 1940s. Smith nurtured a generation of ministers who reinterpreted the book of Genesis, with Cain as the pivotal figure. They included among their ranks San Jacinto Capt, Bertrand Comparet, and Conrad Gaard. But the most influential and important apprentice to Smith was the Reverend Wesley Albert Swift.

Owing as much to his charisma as his biblical exegesis, Swift popularized a form of Christian Identity known as the two-seedline theory, rooted in a twist on the biblical creation story. Swift and others argued that Eve engaged in two conjugal relationships: one with Adam, creating the seedline for white Europeans, and a second with the serpent (representing Satan), creating the seedline for Jews. In arguing that Jews were literally Satan's spawn, Swift provided ideological justification for many acts of religious terrorism. This twisted theology continues to be believed and used as justification for violence to this day.

The son of a Methodist minister, Wesley Swift became an evangelical minister at age seventeen. He moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles to continue his studies at Kingdom Bible College. By the mid-1940s, he had established his own church in the nearby city of Lancaster. In California Swift became friendly with other sycophants of Gerald Smith, including San Jacinto Capt and Bertrand Comparet.

That southern California became the epicenter for Christian Identity thinking may not have been an accident. Readers of John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
are well aware of the migration of Great Plains farmers to counties like San Bernardino and Orange. Among other things, the region's clime and soil allowed for the farming of cotton, a familiar crop to the disposed farmers. But those same
farmers often came from states and regions with a history of Jim Crow segregation. Tom Joad, in other words, could well have been a racist. Connie Lynch, son of a cotton farmer from Texas, certainly was when he migrated to the Golden State in 1936.

Again, prior to the 1940s, Anglo-Israelism rooted its belief system in speculation on the genealogy of the lost tribes of Israel. For the most part, the religion followed the traditional interpretations of Christianity, at least in its fundamentalist, evangelical context. This belief system included a conventional interpretation of the book of Genesis and the human origin story. As has been told for centuries, the basic story has God creating the earth in seven days, forming Adam from dust on the sixth day, forming Eve from Adam's rib, and placing both in the Garden of Eden. Warned by God to avoid eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, Eve succumbs to the temptations of the serpent, a manifestation of the devil, and both Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise. The children of Adam and Eve are Cain and Abel; the former kills the latter and then Eve gives birth to another son, Seth. Seth and Cain become the biblical basis for mankind's bloodlines. Generations hence, Abraham reaches a covenant with God; Abraham's descendants, the Hebrews, or tribes of Israel, are blessed by God. In the Christian tradition, centuries later the Jews are blessed with a savior, Jesus, who changes the covenant and extends God's grace to Jews and gentiles alike.

But Swift and others offered key revisionist interpretations to the original story of the Garden of Eden, with cascading effects for Christian Identity theology. In Swift's retelling, Eve engaged in an illicit sexual relation with the serpent. Cain is not the offspring of Adam and Eve; per Swift, he is the child of Eve and Satan. Cain's bloodline yields demonic offspring—and in Swift's genealogy, those descendants are the humanoids who in the modern world call themselves Jews. These Jews—referred to by Swift as Ashkenazic Jews—are imposters, engaged in a centuries-long cosmic conspiracy against the true chosen people, the descendants of Seth, white Europeans. The imposter Jews manipulate other races, who Swift insisted were not fully human either but instead were descendants of the “beasts of the field,” animals that, per Genesis, roamed the world before and concurrently with Adam and Eve.

The introduction of another seedline, from Satan through Cain, closed the biblical circle for dedicated racists of a religious bent like Swift and his friends. They had already embraced the genealogical ideas proposed by men like Hine in the 1880s: The Hebrew patriarch Abraham still reaches a covenant with God; his grandchild Jacob still becomes the father of Israel; Jacob's son Joseph still becomes viceroy in Egypt; the prophet Moses still leads the Israelites out of Egypt and into Palestine. None of these events refers to the history of the people currently identified as Jews, however, for theologians like Swift. Rather, the descendants of Jacob, the twelve tribes (representing Jacob's children and grandchildren), are from a different bloodline. When ten of those tribes, occupying northern Israel, are deported by the Assyrians, they migrate to the European continent over a span of centuries. Two tribes in particular, descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh, migrate to and populate the United Kingdom. As descendants of Jacob's son Joseph, these two tribes are, according to biblical tradition, especially blessed by God to form the House of Israel.

It is here that the introduction of Cain as an agent of Satan and as a progenitor of the Jews becomes so important. A conventional interpretation of the Gospels of Jesus (and the letters of Paul) suggests the potential for all the world to embrace Jesus's message and in so doing find salvation. Presumably this could include Ashkenazic Jews, if they accepted Jesus as the Messiah. But if Ashkenazic Jews were not even human, if they were the spawn of Satan, then such grace could never be given. Taken out of context, passages in the New Testament where Jesus refers to Jews as “the Synagogue of Satan” or as a “brood of vipers” give support to this interpretation and become key parts of the Christian Identity message under Swift. The Pharisees and the Sanhedrin who Jesus confronts are not just the chosen people gone astray. They are servants of Lucifer.

According to Swift, Jesus is the savior for all
true
chosen people, including the lost tribes, but he condemned “false Jews” as serpents and devils. Over time, the descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh migrate to England and America, respectively; America becomes the new Holy Land.

From the end of World War II on through the 1950s, through the work of Swift, but also Gale, and many other Identity preachers,
two-seedline theorists developed their own creed, with a set of biblical references that are important in distinguishing between religious zealots and conventional racists. One of the leading Identity churches today, Kingdom Identity ministries, offers the following doctrinal statement:

WE BELIEVE the White, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and kindred people to be God's true, literal Children of Israel. Only this race fulfills every detail of Biblical Prophecy and World History concerning Israel and continues in these latter days to be heirs and possessors of the Covenants, Prophecies, Promises and Blessings YHVH God made to Israel. This chosen seedline making up the “Christian Nations” (Gen. 35:11; Isa. 62:2; Acts 11:26) of the earth stands far superior to all other peoples in their call as God's servant race (Isa. 41:8, 44:21; Luke 1:54). Only these descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel scattered abroad (James 1:1; Deut. 4:27; Jer. 31:10; John 11:52) have carried God's Word, the Bible, throughout the world (Gen. 28:14; Isa. 43:10–12, 59:21), have used His Laws in the establishment of their civil governments and are the “Christians” opposed by the Satanic Anti-Christ forces of this world who do not recognize the true and living God (John 5:23, 8:19, 16:2–3).

WE BELIEVE in an existing being known as the Devil or Satan and called the Serpent (Gen. 3:1; Rev. 12:9), who has a literal “seed” or posterity in the earth (Gen. 3:15) commonly called Jews today (Rev. 2:9; 3:9; Isa. 65:15). These children of Satan (John 8:44–47; Matt. 13:38; John 8:23) through Cain (I John 2:22, 4:3) who have throughout history always been a curse to true Israel, the Children of God, because of a natural enmity between the two races (Gen. 3:15), because they do the works of their father the Devil (John 8:38–44), and because they please not God, and are contrary to all men (I Thes. 2:14–15), though they often pose as ministers of righteousness (II Cor. 11:13–15).

Swift and his friends like Comparet and Capt were not the first people to interpret the Bible in a racist or anti-Semitic direction, but
they did so in a radical way. Most racist interpretations of Genesis—the passages of the Bible used by some to justify slavery in the antebellum South and segregation in the decades that followed—rely on
Chapters 9
through
11
, which narrate the fate of mankind after the Great Flood. Segregationists specifically rely on what author Stephen Haynes calls Noah's curse or the curse of Ham and on the story of the Tower of Babel. According to this racist interpretation, Ham, the son of Noah, witnesses and gossips about his father's nakedness. Scholars have debated what this means, but for our purposes, the punishment is what mattered. Ham is cursed by Noah. In some treatments this curse includes black skin and applies to Ham's descendants, the dreaded Canaanites. Later, by Genesis 11, Ham's grandson Nimrod is king of an area that includes the town of Babel, where men in their arrogance build a mighty tower to make a name for themselves. God then “confused their language” and “scattered them abroad from there all over the face of the Earth.” While Nimrod is never directly mentioned as the ringleader of the tower project, commentators have traditionally associated him with it. Thus one can see, in a cohesive interpretation of Genesis 9 through 11, a similar theme: the God-ordained differentiation and separation of the races. Not surprisingly, this interpretation served as justification for segregation and for the notion of the racial inferiority (per Ham's curse) of blacks.
³⁰