Blood and Politics (32 page)

He died on August 16. The rumor circulated that he had been killed, but the actual cause of death was never announced. Instead, daughter Marian asserted that “he loved and missed my mother so much that he didn’t wish to remain here without her.”
⁴⁵

He had already written his own obituary in the form of a birth announcement: “The Movement is dead . . . long live the movement! The movement which we built and saw pass, will live on in other movements yet to be born . . . The old is dead. It has passed with time. It is now for a new wave, a new age, to be born. For those of us who were the leaders from a generation now dying, the hour is late. We can aid in the birth but we must not delay such new birth from happening.”
⁴⁶

Miles’s prediction carried a germ of truth. Although the defendants had won their case in court, the extended crackdown had taken its toll on the vanguardists’ wing of the movement. And it would be several years before the squads of bombers regained their footing. Nevertheless, a new surge of white supremacist activism did occur after the trial, and the mass energy evident in Forsyth County flowed into the multiple engines powering the mainstreamers. One of the consequences: a new family-oriented trend became more prevalent among Christian Identity believers, leaving the gun-toting cultists to their jail cells.

July 24, 1988.
At this summer Bible camp, hundreds of families spent a week taking meals together, studying scripture, listening to live music presentations, and vying good-naturedly in contests of strength and spirit. Teenagers played volleyball, and adult men ran an obstacle course race. Families stayed in cabins or camped in RVs and tents. A special event catered to singles, and several couples were married during one of the nighttime assemblies. More than fifty adults were baptized in a nearby mountain river. A children’s choir of sixty performed a special camp song entitled “We Are Israel.” This could have been any other Christian gathering at beautiful Camp Cedaredge in the Colorado Rockies, except that the doctrine taught here was the so-called Christian Identity theology favored by a segment of the white supremacist movement that grew after the Fort Smith trial.

Much like the Aryan warriors who had been tried for seditious conspiracy, these campers believed the federal government was occupied by a Satanic force. But this was not a vanguardist gathering. No machine shop manufactured automatic weapons as at the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord compound in Arkansas. Paramilitary training most manifestly did
not
cap the week of summertime activities, as it had at Christian-Patriots Defense League survival fests. Camp Cedaredge was not a compound, but a rental facility where like-minded souls enjoyed the company of one another. On the Janus-faced Christian Identity countenance, this was what the mainstreamers looked like. They wore plain street clothes, not white-sheeted uniforms. They had marriages like any others, enrolled in higher education at the same rates as any other group of white people, and enjoyed commensurate income
levels. If you didn’t grasp the underlying meaning of their heavily coded lingo, the special nature of their cause might escape the nonbeliever.
¹

Peter John Peters presided over this camp. A dark-haired and mustachioed six-footer with close-set eyes, Peters spoke with an angry Middle American accent and cultivated the stern demeanor of a cowboy preacher in western-style suits and boots. Born in 1947 and raised on a ranch in the underpopulated stretches of western Nebraska, Peters harkened back to a time before hippies and civil rights activism. Like many graduates of small high schools on the Great Plains, he was startled to find the state university he attended in Colorado larger than his hometown. He had hoped to become a veterinarian but left the program, he said, because of conflicts with zoology teachers who taught evolution. He finally earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Colorado State University in Fort Collins and worked as a loan administrator for the Farmers Home Administration.
²

He also graduated from the fundamentalist Church of Christ Bible Training School in Gering, Nebraska, became a pastor in that denomination, and established his LaPorte Church of Christ. Peters’s flock was more than just a Sunday morning fellowship in someone’s living room. They maintained a modern church building and all the usual trappings of a small but devoted congregation. And when he embraced the Christian Identity doctrine during the early 1980s, Peters brought most of his congregation along with him on the trail from fundamentalism to Identity.

Much of Pete Peters’s pastoral success was due to the energetic contributions of his bright-eyed wife, Cheri, a Donna Reed 1950s mom type on the surface with a harder Carrie Nation–style zealotry burning underneath. Like many non-Identity fundamentalists, she insisted that men were endowed with God-given abilities and biblical rights that placed them “at the head” of women.
³
She left most matters outside her family to her husband and devoted herself to raising their two children. At the same time, she participated fully in the life of the church, including the summertime Bible retreat, where she led workshops and acted as husband Pete’s camp cohost.

At one of these summer camps Cheri Peters scripted a corny practical joke for a contest to crown a “Woman of Grace” from among the campers. More than sixty-five women answered an extensive questionnaire about their faith and practices. Three finalists then were selected to serve meals to three male judges, apparently to test their skills as homemakers and servants before a nighttime assembly. Just as it appeared the women were all dutifully bound to servant status, they poured water in the men’s laps and slopped spaghetti on their clothes.
As the audience roared with laughter, the three women slapped cream pies in the judges’ faces in a slapstick routine worthy of any Catskills summer resort.

Despite the comedy of that moment, the nature of a “godly” relationship between husbands and wives was a much-discussed topic at these camps. Several workshops focused on teaching women how to be non-assertive “helpmates,” smiling sweetly in Christian obeisance to their husbands. Cheri Peters presented one workshop only for married women on the subject of “intimacies in marriage.” It was a subject she often visited. At another summer camp she called a similar workshop “God’s Perfect Triangle.” It covered “sensitive issues of submission and wisdom in a godly marriage.”

Like other fundamentalists who strictly defined gender roles in a patriarchal fashion, Christian Identity believers tried to reinforce a pattern of submission and servitude for women while often relying on the same women for the most important social tasks that bound together the family, clan, or tribe.
⁴
The result was a contradiction: powerful women with no independently recognized power. No one at the Peterses’ Bible camp personified this internal conflict better than Peggy Christiansen, a Montana woman well-known among tax protesters.

She titled her workshop “The Wife Secret Behind Husband’s Courage.” A large, ruddy-faced woman with a bob, she had the ability to command a crowd that seemed at variance with the demure flower print dress she wore and the Bible she cradled while talking to several dozen women sitting in chairs under a tree. Christiansen told stories about her own audacious adventures, laced with homilies about how she didn’t do
one thing
without her husband’s permission. Although she spent weeks traveling from one tax protest hot spot to another, she assured the other women that she did not neglect her children. It was her husband, she claimed, who had sent her out into the world because she had a special gift to give. That was the “wife secret.” Her husband told her it was okay, so she engaged in everything from making mischief at the United Nations’ Year of the Woman meeting in the Houston Astrodome
⁵
to counseling men to stop paying their taxes to the IRS.

By the reckoning of those around her at Camp Cedaredge, Peggy Christiansen had boldly stood up against a Beast system imposed upon Bible-believing Christians. The Beast would have women standing “at the head” of men, in direct disobedience to God’s Law. It wasn’t Peggy’s husband who demanded submission but God who commanded her to obey his leadership. In this fashion, she added to the guidance that the summer camp provided on how to live.

This was the third Scriptures for America summer camp. The Peters
couple provided the motivating force behind these Bible camps, which served as movement-wide gatherings for Identity believers. More than periodic weekend conferences or even regular Sunday morning church services, these weeklong affairs enabled believers to socialize with their brethren and create the interstitial tissue of a social movement. Occasionally personalities such as Kirk Lyons and Louis Beam attended. Even the reclusive Willis Carto showed up one year.
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A select group of men, designated as Elders, deliberated over theological issues and conducted ceremonies during the week. They led congregations and churches of their own at home and traveled long distances—from North Carolina, California, Wisconsin, and Arizona—to participate. The end purpose of these summer camps, after all, was to guarantee the spread of a specific variant of their doctrine.

At the 1988 session, Peters presented a “special recognition” plaque to Liberty Lobby’s aging secretary, Lois Petersen, who led three workshops during the week. Kirk Lyons lectured on the recent acquittals in the sedition trial. Gordon Kahl’s widow, Joan, told her side of the story, five years after the Posse farmer’s death in Arkansas. Other workshops covered subjects such as tax protests, gun rights, and the supposed wrongs of the hated Fourteenth Amendment, which had guaranteed citizenship rights to freedmen after the Civil War. The speaker who gave a history lesson on the Reconstruction-era Klan that year requires some additional note, for his biography tells much about the trajectory of the white supremacist movement and the attraction of Christian Identity.

Richard Kelly Hoskins was a mild-mannered and well-educated stockbroker, with a stiff military bearing, punctilious manner, and patrician Olde Virginia accent. He traced ancestors back to 1615 in Virginia and a plantation near the Rappahannock River in the 1780s.
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Born in 1928, he joined the air force during the Korean War and afterward remained a reservist. He married in 1957 and had six children and multiple grandchildren. He went to New York to learn the investment business and returned home to work for Francis I. du Pont and Co.
⁸
He later joined the local office of Anderson & Strudwick, Inc., and became a vice president.

His activities spanned more than four decades, all while he “vehemently” denied that he was a white supremacist.
⁹
In the 1950s he joined a group called The Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties and fought under the banner of states’ rights against the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation. In a 1959 pamphlet entitled
Our Nordic Race
, he wrote that the entire world was seething with a “line of conflict . . . wherever the protective ring of outposts of our western
civilization comes in contact with the now belligerent and aggressive nations of the colored world.”
¹⁰

His segregationist activities got him in trouble with the air force reserves, but sympathetic politicians, including Senator Harry Byrd and Senator Willis Robertson, bailed him out.
¹¹
(Willis Robertson was the father of the Reverend Pat Robertson, who became a leader of the Christian Coalition.) Hoskins also joined Wilmot Robertson, Roger Pearson, and other acolytes of Francis Parker Yockey, writing for Willis Carto’s
Western Destiny
magazine.
¹²

The secular Yockeyite suffered from a bout of alcoholism in the early 1960s.
¹³
Then, Richard Kelly Hoskins says, “on April 28, 1965, at 4:00 in the afternoon, in the green rocking chair on the front porch,” he got religion.
¹⁴
“When He saved me all He got was a drunk with a nervous breakdown who couldn’t work and who had no money,” he recounted. The Jesus who saved Richard Kelly Hoskins wasn’t the Jew from Galilee. He was an Aryan, or, to use Hoskins’s term from the 1950s, a Nordic. Hoskins became a devotee of Christian Identity.

Hoskins self-published a history of the world entitled
War Cycles, Peace Cycles
in 1985 and developed a readership among Christian patriots of all types. He presented himself like a mainstreamer, while promoting a form of vigilante vanguardism. He had stood up in a Posse Comitatus–style rally in a business suit and fedora and sounded completely rational, while other speakers in overalls and blue jeans advocated a farm strike with guns. And his history of the post–Civil War Klan doubled as a critique of the contemporary Klan and an endorsement of Christian Identity Bible camps.

These multiple lessons struck home. One camper from Texas expressed a typical reaction in a letter: “I honestly can’t find the words to express adequately how edifying, educational, how emotionally and spiritually uplifting and how revitalizing and refreshing your camp was.”
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Another from Connecticut wrote, “What I find particularly satisfying is that each camp retreat is unique and not a facsimile of [the] previous year’s retreat.”
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Each year more believers attended the camp, and Peters grew increasingly important within his end of the white supremacist movement.

As Peters’s following spread beyond the walls of his LaPorte Church of Christ, he held meetings across the country: this month in Virginia, that month in Wisconsin, another visit to southern Illinois, and still another regular stop in either Georgia or Florida. He issued bimonthly newsletters, published tracts on every topic, and distributed Bible lessons and weekly sermons on cassette tapes. Prior to the wonders of the
Internet, his materials were widely and easily available. He bought a regular time slot on almost twenty AM and FM radio stations to broadcast his sermons everywhere from Washington State to Georgia. The cost of the radio time was covered by the free will donations of his listeners in those locales. (Later he developed a satellite television program.) At the core of this nationwide ministry, Peters’s Colorado church was growing. During 1988 he acquired new high-end video production equipment and made other technological improvements in his operations. All this was done with the goal of spreading his message.