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Author: PARTON, NIGEL R.
Title: Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the
Christian Identity Movement.(Review) reviewed by
NIGEL R. PARTON
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COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Chicago
BARKUN, MICHAEL. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian
Identity Movement. Rev. ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1997. xv+330 pp. $39.95 (paper).
The Christian Identity movement has not been the object of extensive study
in the field of American religious history. The revised edition of Religion
and the Racist Right, Michael Barkun's latest book, rectifies this deficiency
with admirable scholarship.
The Gospel according to Christian Identity bears little resemblance to the
message of salvation presented in the Bible. Instead, it incited the criminal
activities of the Posse Comitatus in the last decade. It also motivated ten
men to join the Order, a terrorist cell that robbed armored cars in Washington
state and assassinated a Jewish radio personality in Denver.
Some years later, in 1992, Identity compelled Randy Weaver into a showdown
with federal agents in Idaho. It also prompted Richard Wayne Snell to murder a
black state trooper in Arkansas. Snell was executed for this crime on April
19, 1995, a date marked by the denouement of Timothy McVeigh's bomb plot in
Oklahoma City.
Identity presently justifies the siege mentality of sects like Aryan
Nations; Christian-Patriots Defense League; Covenant, Sword and Arm of the
Lord; Elohim City; and Montana Freemen.
In terms of lineage, Christian Identity is a militarized version of the
genteel British-Israelism embraced by ultramonarchists at the height of the
British Empire and transported to North American parlors as one of many
fin-de-siecle religious novelties. Both systems teach that the Nordic races of
Europe are descended from the "Ten Lost Tribes" of Israel, those dispersed by
invading Assyrians seven centuries before Christ. Both systems, therefore,
insist that Nordics are the chosen people of God.
The first generation of Identity adherents, however, went to great lengths
in divesting Jewry of the same status. Appalled by Zionism's conquest of
Palestine in 1948, teachers intoned that Jews are the biological offspring of
an unholy union between Eve and Satan. The sermons of Bertrand Comparet,
Conrad Gaard, Jonathan Perkins, and Wesley Swift systematized this doctrine.
Although the commitment of political agitators like cryptofascist Gerald Smith
to Identity is uncertain, during the 1950s Smith secured extensive support
from the new religious movement.
Personal connections spawned two subsequent generations of professional
misanthropes in ministerial garb. These dumped the fusty monarchism, abstruse
pyramidism, and philosemitism of early British-Israel ideologues. Identity, by
contrast, viewed the exalted role of Nordics in God's plans from the
perspective of the populist mindset that colors American religious practice.
Richard Butler, Sheldon Emry, and James Warner represented the second
generation of Identity preachers, while Carl Franklin, Bob Hallstrom, and Pete
Peters represent the current one.
The demonization of Jews within Christian Identity placed believers in a
precarious tension with society, which Barkun calls the "dynamic of withdrawal
and engagement" (p. 251). Identity zealots, for example, physically separate
themselves from a society that is perceived to be almost wholly corrupted by
an omnipotent enemy. Consequently, in the 1970s, Identity churches shifted
their base of operations from southern California to the Rocky Mountain
states, where militants aspired to found an Aryan Republic.
At the same time, Identity sects amassed enormous arsenals in order to do
battle with the minions of the "Zionist Occupation Government" that controls
the White House. A gun-waving "post-tribulationism," Barkun observes, is an
important eschatological teaching separating Identity disciples from most
American Protestants (the latter anticipate an imminent second coming of
Christ).
Although the historical and theological treatment of Identity is impeccable,
Barkun fails to substantiate the main contention of the book's revised
edition. This consists of the assertion that McVeigh was in some fashion
inspired by Identity. Federal prosecutors, however, demonstrated that The
Turner Diaries (Washington, D.C., 1980), penned by William Pierce, a neo-Nazi
who deprecates Christian Identity, served as the master plan. Still, several
points are worth noting.
First, Barkun contextualizes the intellectual history that unites the
otherwise organizationally fractured racist right in the United States. A
crucial bond is the "cultic milieu," an environment of ideas characterized by
"rejected knowledge" and condemned by elites (p. 247). Second, Barkun himself
follows a generally overlooked path of social inquiry blazed by a coterie of
scholars who reject the strictly mechanistic interpretations of human action
advanced by many colleagues. Instead, Barkun insists on the continuing
relevance of obscurantism and millenarianism in the politics of the modern
era. Fine scholarship, for example, has taken place under the auspices of
James Billington (Fire in the Minds of Men [New York, 1980]) and Nicholas
Goodrick-Clarke (The Occult Roots of Nazism [New York, 1985]).
Religion and the Racist Right, in conclusion, is a valuable contribution to
the expansive bibliography of American racism and, in particular, a brand of
hate-mongering known as theological racism.
NIGEL R. PARTON, Haiku, Hawaii.
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