Magazine: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science; July 1998
CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA
-----------------------------
ABSTRACT: As the millennium approaches, the wave of antimodernism that
has brought violent movements of religious nationalism in its wake
around the world has arrived at America's shores. In the United States,
attacks on abortion clinics, the killing of abortion clinic staff, and
the destructive acts of members of Christian militia movements are
chilling examples of assaults on the legitimacy of modern social and
political institutions, based on the theological frameworks of
reconstruction theology and Christian Identity thinking. These examples
of Christian militancy present a religious perception of warfare and
struggle in what is perhaps the most modern of twentieth-century
societies. The secular political order of America is imagined to be
trapped in vast satanic conspiracies involving spiritual and personal
control. This perception provides Christian activists with both the
justification and the obligation to use violent means to fulfill their
understanding of the country's Christian mission--and at the same time
offers a formidable critique of Enlightenment society and a reassertion
of the primacy of religion in public life.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978 heralded a new kind of
religiously motivated political violence and protest, a wave of
disaffection from modern forms of secular political authority throughout
the world that ultimately reached American shores. Writing in 1993, I
could characterize this as largely a Third World, postcolonial
phenomenon (Juergensmeyer 1993, 19-20). As the millennium approaches,
however, this wave of antimodernism has increasingly come to such
industrialized and thoroughly modern countries as Japan, which suffered
a nerve gas attack in Tokyo subways by the Aum Shinrikyo religious
movement; France, where militant supporters of the Islamic Party in
Algeria have placed bombs in Parisian subways; and, perhaps most
surprising, the United States, where the bombing of the World Trade
Center, attacks on abortion clinics and the killing of abortion clinic
staff, and the destruction of the Oklahoma City federal building are
chilling examples of assaults on the legitimacy of modern social and
political institutions.
The examples of Christian militancy in America are especially noteworthy,
for they present a religious perception of warfare and struggle in what
is perhaps the most modern of twentieth-century societies. It is not
totally uncharacteristic of Christianity to have a violent side, of
course: the bloody history of the faith--the Crusades, the Inquisition,
and the holy wars--has provided images as disturbing as those provided
by Islam, Hinduism, or Sikhism. What is significant about the recent
forms of Christian violence is not so much the violence as the ideology
that lies behind it: the perception that the secular social and
political order of America is caught up in satanic conspiracies of
spiritual and personal control. These perceived plots provide Christian
activists with reasons for using violent means.
The social history of Christianity--and theological positions based
ultimately on the Bible--provide legitimacy for the worldviews of a
variety of contemporary Christian subcultures. Some of them emerged from
mainstream denominations; others are fiercely independent from
traditional forms of organized Christianity. In the case of recent
attacks on abortion clinics, the theological justification and the
social vision associated with it are firmly rooted in Protestant
reformation theology. Such is the position of the Reverend Michael Bray,
for instance. He is a Lutheran pastor who has been convicted of a series
of abortion clinic attacks and defends the use of lethal weapons against
abortion clinic staff.
ABORTION CLINIC BOMBINGS
The Reverend Bray recalled that it was "a cold February night" in 1984
when he and a friend drove a yellow Honda from his home in Bowie to
nearby Dover, Delaware. The trunk of the car held a cargo of ominous
supplies: a cinder block to break a window, cans of gasoline to pour in
and around a building, and rags and matches to ignite the flames. The
road to Delaware was foggy that night, and the bridge across the
Chesapeake Bay was icy. The car skidded and a minor accident occurred,
but the pair was determined to forge ahead. "Before daybreak," Bray
recalled, "the only abortion chamber in Dover was gutted by fire and put
out of the business of butchering babies" (Bray 1994, 9). The following
year, Bray and two other defendants stood trial for destroying seven
abortion facilities in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of
Columbia, totaling over $1 million in damages. He was convicted of these
charges and served time in prison until 15 May 1989.
When I talked with the Reverend Bray in his suburban home in Bowie in
April 1996, there was nothing sinister or intensely fanatical about him.
He was a cheerful, charming, handsome man in his early forties who liked
to be called Mike. Hardly the image of an ignorant, narrow-minded
fundamentalist, Mike Bray enjoyed a glass of wine before dinner and
talked knowledgeably about theology and political ideas (Bray 1996).
It was a demeanor quite different from his public posture. As a leader
in the Defensive Action movement, he advocated the use of violence in
anti-abortion activities, and his attacks on abortion clinics were
considered extreme even by members of the pro-life movement. The same
has been said of his writings. Bray publishes one of the country's most
militant Christian newsletters, Capitol Area Christian News, which
focuses on abortion, homosexuality, and what Bray regards as the Clinton
administration's pathological abuse of government power.
Bray was the spokesman for two activists who were convicted of murderous
assaults on abortion clinic staffs. On 29 July 1994, Bray's friend, the
Reverend Paul Hill, killed Dr. John Britton and his volunteer escort,
James Barrett, as they drove up to the Ladies Center, an abortion clinic
in Pensacola, Florida. Several years earlier, another member of Bray's
network of associates, Rachelle ("Shelly") Shannon, a housewife from
rural Oregon, confessed to a string of abortion clinic bombings as well
as being convicted of attempted murder for shooting and wounding Dr.
George Tiller as he drove away from his clinic in Wichita, Kansas. Bray
wrote the definitive book on the ethical justification for anti-abortion
violence, A Time to Kill, which defended his own acts of terrorism, the
murders committed by Hill, and the attempted murders committed by
Shannon (Bray 1994). Yet, in person, the Reverend Michael Bray was in
many ways an attractive and interesting man.
Mike Bray had always been active, he told me, having been raised in a
family focused on sports, church activities, and military life. His
father was a naval officer who served at nearby Annapolis, and Mike grew
up expecting to follow in his father's military footsteps. An athletic
hero in high school, he took the most popular girl in class to the
senior prom. Her name was Kathy Lee, and later she became an actress and
a nationally televised talk show host, receiving top billing on her own
daytime show with Regis Philbin. Mike's own career was marked by less
obvious attributes of success. He attended Annapolis for a year and then
dropped out, living what he described as a "prodigal" life. He searched
for religion as a solution to his malaise and was for a time tempted by
the Mormons, but then the mother of his old girlfriend, Kathy Lee,
steered him toward Billy Graham and the born-again experience of
evangelical Christianity. Mike was converted and went to Colorado to
study in a Baptist Bible college and seminary.
Yet Bray never quite rejected the Lutheranism of his upbringing. So when
he returned to Bowie, he rejoined his childhood church and became the
assistant pastor. When the national Lutheran churches merged, Bray led a
faction of the local church that objected to what it regarded as the
national church's abandonment of the principle of scriptural literalism.
Seeing himself as a crusader, Mike and his group of 10 families split
off and formed their own Reformed Lutheran church in 1984, an
independent group affiliated with the national Association of Free
Lutheran Congregations. Over 10 years later, Bray's church remained a
circle of about fifty people without its own church building. The church
operated out of Bray's suburban home: Bray remodeled the garage into a
classroom for a Christian elementary school, where he and his wife
taught a small group of students.
Increasingly, Mike Brays real occupation became social activism.
Supported by his wife, members of the church, and his volunteer
associate pastor, Michael Colvin--who held a Ph.D. in classics from
Indiana University and worked in the federal health care administration--
Mike and his followers launched several anti-abortion crusades and
tapped into a growing national network of like-minded Christian
activists. They became consumed by the idea that the federal government--
particularly the attorney general, whom Mike called "Janet Waco Reno"--
was involved in a massive plot to undermine individual freedom and moral
values. He saw American society as being in a state of utter depravity,
over which its elected officials presided with an almost satanic
disregard for truth and human life. He viewed President Clinton and
other politicians as latter-day Hitlers, and the Nazi image pervaded
Bray's understanding of how ethically minded people should respond to
such a threat. Regarding the activities that led to his prison
conviction, Bray had "no regrets." "Whatever I did," he said, "it was
worth it."
According to Bray, we live in a situation "comparable to Nazi Germany,"
a state of hidden warfare. The comforts of modern society have lulled
the populace into a lack of awareness of the situation, and Bray was
convinced that if there were some dramatic event, such as economic
collapse or social chaos, the demonic role of the government would be
revealed, and people would have "the strength and the zeal to take up
arms" in a revolutionary struggle. What he envisioned as the outcome of
that struggle was the establishment of a new moral order in America, one
based on biblical law and a spiritual, rather than a secular, social
compact.
Until this new moral order was established, Bray and others like him who
were aware of what was going on and had the moral courage to resist it
were compelled to take action. According to Bray, he had the right to
defend innocent "unborn children," even by use of force, whether it
involved "destroying the facilities that they are regularly killed in,
or taking the life of one who is murdering them." By the latter, Bray
meant killing doctors and other clinical staff involved in performing
abortions.
When I suggested that such violent actions were tantamount to acting as
both judge and executioner, Bray demurred. Although he did not deny that
a religious authority had the right to pronounce judgment over those who
broke the moral law, he explained that his actions in attacking abortion
clinics and the actions of his friend, the Reverend Paul Hill, in
killing abortion doctors were essentially defensive rather than punitive
acts. According to Bray, "There is a difference between taking a retired
abortionist and executing him, and killing a practicing abortionist who
is regularly killing babies." The first act is, in Bray's view,
retributive; the other, defensive. According to Bray, the attacks that
he and Hill committed were not so much aimed at punishing the clinics
and the abortionists for their actions as at preventing them from
"killing babies," as Bray put it.
APPROPRIATING BONHOEFFER AND NIEBUHR
Bray found support for his position in actions undertaken during the
Nazi regime in Europe. His theological hero in this regard was the
German theologian and Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer
abruptly terminated his privileged research position at Union
Theological Seminary in New York City in order to return to Germany and
clandestinely join a plot to assassinate Hitler. The plot was uncovered
before it could be carried out, and Bonhoeffer, the brilliant young
ethical theorist, was hanged by the Nazis shortly before the end of the
war. His image of martyrdom and his theological writings have lived on,
however, and Bonhoeffer is often cited by moral theorists as an example
of how Christians can undertake violent actions for a just cause and how
occasionally Christians are compelled to break laws for a higher
purpose.
These are positions also held by one of Bonhoeffer's colleagues at Union
Theological Seminary, Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Bray similarly admired.
Often touted as one of the greatest Protestant theologians of the
twentieth century, Niebuhr wrestled with one of Christianity's oldest
ethical problems: when is it permissible to use force even violence in
behalf of a righteous cause? Niebuhr began his career as a pacifist, but
in time grudgingly began to accept the position that a Christian, acting
for the sake of justice, could be violent (Niebuhr 1932, 1942).
Niebuhr showed the relevance of just war theory to contemporary social
struggles in the twentieth century by relating this classic idea-a
notion first stated by Cicero and later developed by Ambrose and
Augustine--to what he regarded as the Christian requirement to fulfill
social justice. Viewing the world through the lens of "realism," Niebuhr
was impressed that moral suasion was not sufficient to combat injustices,
especially when they are buttressed by corporate and state power. For
this reason, he explained in a seminal essay, "Why the Christian Church
Is Not Pacifist" (1940), it was at times necessary to abandon
nonviolence in favor of a more forceful solution. Building his case on
Augustine's understanding of original sin, Niebuhr argued that righteous
force was sometimes necessary to extirpate injustice and subdue evil
within a sinful world, and that small strategic acts of violence were
occasionally necessary to deter large acts of violence and injustice. If
violence is to be used in such situations, Niebuhr explained, it must be
used sparingly and as swiftly and as skillfully "as a surgeon's knife"
(1932, 134).
Bray borrowed this theological logic for justifying violence from
Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer, but where Bray radically differed from these
thinkers was in his interpretation of the contemporary political
situation that made the application of the logic credible. In a
conceptual sleight of hand that Bonhoeffer would have regarded as
inconceivable, Bray compared America's democratic state with Nazism. In
a manner that would have sent Niebuhr reeling, Bray insisted that only a
biblically based religious politics, rather than a secular one, was
capable of dispensing social justice. Both of these positions would be
rejected not only by these but also by most other theologians within the
mainstream of Protestant thought. Bonhoeffer and Niebuhr, like most
modern theologians, accepted the principle of the separation of church
and state. They felt the separation was necessary for the integrity of
both institutions. Niebuhr was especially wary of what he called
"moralism," the intrusion of religious or other ideological values into
the political calculations of statecraft.
RECONSTRUCTION THEOLOGY
To support his ideas about religious politics, therefore, Bray had to
look beyond mainstream Protestant thought. He found intellectual company
in a group of recent writers associated with dominion theology, the
theological position that Christianity must reassert the dominion of God
over all things, including secular politics and society. This point of
view--well articulated by such right-wing Protestant spokespersons as
the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson--has led to a burst of
social and political activism on the Christian Right in the 1980s and
1990s.
The Christian anti-abortion movement is permeated with dominion theology
ideas. Randall Terry, the founder of the militant anti-abortion
organization Operation Rescue, writes for the dominion magazine
Crosswinds and has signed its Manifesto for the Christian Church, which
asserts that America should "function as a Christian nation." The
manifesto opposes such "social moral evils" of secular society as
abortion on demand, fornication, homosexuality, sexual entertainment,
state usurpation of parental rights and Godgiven liberties, statist-
collectivist their from citizens through devaluation of their money and
redistribution of their wealth, and evolutionism taught as a monopoly
viewpoint in the public schools. (Berlet 1996, 8)
At the extreme right-wing of dominion theology is a relatively obscure
theological movement that Mike Bray has found particularly appealing: a
movement known as reconstructionist theology, whose exponents long to
create a Christian theocratic state. Leaders of this movement trace
their ideas to Cornelius Van Til, a twentieth-century Presbyterian
professor of theology at Princeton Seminary who took seriously the
sixteenth-century ideas of the Reformation theologian John Calvin
regarding the necessity for presupposing the authority of God in all
worldly matters. Followers of Van Til, including his former students,
the Reverend Greg Bahnsen and Rousas John Rushdoony. and Rushdoony's son-
in-law, Gary North, have adopted this presuppositionalism as a doctrine,
with all its implications about the role of religion in political life.
Reconstructionist writers have regarded the history of Protestant
politics since the early years of the Reformation as having taken a bad
turn, and they were especially unhappy with the Enlightenment
formulation of church-state separation. They felt that it was necessary
to "reconstruct" Christian society by turning to the Bible as the basis
for a nation's law and social order. To propagate their views, the
reconstructionists established an Institute for Christian Economics in
Tyler, Texas, and published a steady stream of literature on the
theological justification for interjecting Christian ideas into economic,
legal, and political life (for example, Rushdoony 1973).
According to the most prolific reconstructionist writer, Gary North, it
was "the moral obligation of Christians to recapture every institution
for Jesus Christ" (North 1984, 267). This was especially so in the
United States, where secular law as construed by the Supreme Court and
defended by liberal politicians has taken what Rushdoony and others
regard as a decidedly un-Christian direction, particularly in matters
regarding abortion and homosexuality. What the reconstructionists
ultimately wanted, however, was much more than the rejection of
secularism. Like other dominion theologians, they utilized the biblical
concept of dominion, reasoning further that Christians, as the new
chosen people of God, were destined to dominate the world.
The reconstructionists have a postmillennial view of history. That is,
they believe that Christ will return to earth only after the thousand
years of religious rule that characterizes the Christian idea of the
millennium, and therefore Christians have an obligation to provide the
political and social conditions that would make Christ's return
possible. Premillennialists, on the other hand, hold the view that the
thousand years of Christendom can come only after Christ returns, an
event that will occur in a cataclysmic moment of world history, and
therefore they tend to be much less active politically. Postmillenial
followers of reconstructionist theology such as Mike Bray, dominion
theologians such as Pat Robertson, and many of the leaders of the
politically active Christian Coalition believe that a Christian kingdom
can be established on earth before Christ's return, and they take
seriously the idea of Christian society and the eruption of religious
politics that would make biblical code the law of the land.
In our conversation, Bray insisted that the idea of a society based on
Christian morality was not a new one, and he emphasized the "re" in
"reconstruction." Although Bray rejected the idea of a pope, he
appreciated much of the Roman Catholic church's social teachings and
greatly admired the tradition of canon law. Only recently in history, he
observed, had the political order not been based on religious concepts.
For that reason, Bray labeled himself an "antidisestablishmentarian." He
was deeply serious about his commitment to bring such religious politics
into power. He imagined that it was possible, under the right conditions,
for a Christian revolution to sweep across the country, bringing in its
wake constitutional changes that would allow for biblical law to be the
basis of social legislation. Failing that, Bray envisaged a new
federalism in America that would allow individual states to experiment
with religious politics on their own. When I asked Bray which state
might be ready for such an experiment, he hesitated and then offered the
names of Louisiana and Mississippi, or, he added, "maybe one of the
Dakotas."
CHRISTIAN IDENTITY
A somewhat different set of theological justifications lay in the
background of another anti-abortion activist, Eric Robert Rudolph.
Rudolph was the subject of a well-publicized manhunt by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation early in 1998 for his alleged role in bombing
abortion clinics in Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia; blasting
a gay bar in Atlanta; and exploding a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
He subscribed to the theology of Christian Identity. The thinking of
Christian Identity has been part of the background of such movements as
the Posse Comitatus, the Order, the Aryan Nation, the supporters of
Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Herbert Armstong's Worldwide Church of God,
and the Freeman Compound. It also has been popular in many militia
movements throughout the United States.
Christian Identity ideas were most likely a part of the thinking of
Timothy McVeigh, the convicted bomber of the Oklahoma City federal
building. McVeigh was exposed to Identity thinking through the Michigan
militia with which he was once associated and which had a strong
Christian Identity flavoring, and through his visits to the Christian
Identity encampment, Elohim City, on the Oklahoma-Arkansas border. He
also imbibed Christian Identity ideas through the book The Turner
Diaries (Macdonald 1978), which he treated virtually as a bible and
which was strongly influenced by Christian Identity ideas.
McVeigh had distributed The Turner Diaries at rallies and had contacted
the author shortly before the Oklahoma City blast. A copy of the book
was found in his car when it was intercepted leaving Oklahoma City
within an hour of the attack. The anti-Semitic novel, which was written
by William Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, tells the story
of the encroachment of government control in America and the resistance
by a guerrilla band known as the Order, which attacked government
buildings using a modus operandi almost exactly the same as the one
McVeigh used in destroying the Oklahoma City federal building. Pierce,
who received a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado and for a time
taught physics at Oregon State University, once served as a writer for
the American Nazi Party and in 1984 proclaimed himself the founder of a
new religious group, the Cosmotheist Community (Solnin 1995, 8).
Although Pierce denied affiliation with the Christian Identity movement,
he knew the literature well, and his own teachings were virtually
synonymous with those associated with the movement.
Pierce, like many members of the Christian Identity militia groups,
distrusted ordinary Christian churches for their liberalism and lack of
courage. He claimed that in the future described in his novel, the
"Jewish takeover" of the Christian church would be "virtually complete"
(Macdonald 1978, 64). The members of the fictional Order in his novel
were characterized as being intensely religious, having undergone an
initiation similar to that of joining a monastic order. The narrator in
the novel tells of being required to take an oath, "a mighty Oath, a
moving Oath that shook me to my bones and raised the hair on the back of
my neck" (Macdonald 1978, 73). With this oath the members of the Order
were spiritually armed to be "bearers of the Faith" in a godless world
(Macdonald 1978, 74). According to Pierce, such missionary efforts were
necessary because of the mind-set of secularism that had been imposed on
American society as a result of an elaborate conspiracy orchestrated by
Jews and liberals who were hell-bent on depriving Christian society of
its spiritual moorings. In formulating his own version of this view,
McVeigh had read Pierce and The Turner Diaries; Pierce, in turn, had
read thinkers associated with Christian Identity.
Although the writers associated with the Christian Identity movement
distrusted most modern churches, they railed against the separation of
church and state--or, rather, religion and state--and longed for a new
society governed by religious law. They were strongly anti-Semitic, held
an apocalyptic view of history, and possessed an even more
conspiratorial view of government than the reconstructionists. Christian
Identity originated in the movement of British Israelism in the
nineteenth century. According to John Wilson, whose central work,
Lectures on Our Israelitish Origin, brought the message to a large
British and Irish middle-class audience, Jesus had been an Aryan, not a
Semite; the migrating Israelite tribes from the northern kingdom of
Israel were in fact blue-eyed Aryans themselves who somehow ended up in
the British Isles; and the "Lost Sheep of the House of Israel" were none
other than present-day Englishmen (Barkun 1994, 7). Adherents of this
theory hold that those people who claim to be Jews are imposters--
according to one variation of the theory, they are aliens from outer
space--who pretend to be Jews in order to assert their superiority in a
scheme to control the world. Their plot is allegedly supported by the
secret Protestant order of Freemasons.
British Israelism came to the United States in the twentieth century
through the teachings of the evangelist Gerald L. K. Smith and the
writings of William Cameron, who was the publicist for the famous
automobile magnate, Henry Ford (Zeskind 1986, 12). Ford himself
supported many of Cameron's views and published a book of anti-Semitic
essays written by Cameron but attributed to Ford, The International Jew:
The World's Foremost Problem. Central to Cameron's thought were the
necessity of the Anglo-Saxon race in the United States to retain its
purity and political dominance, and the need to establish a biblical
basis for governance. These ideas were developed into the Christian
Identity movement in America by Bertram Comparet, a deputy district
attorney in San Diego, and Wesley Swift, a Ku Klux Klan member who
founded the Church of Jesus Christ--Christian in 1946. This church was
the basis for the Christian Defense League, organized by Bill Gale at
his ranch in Mariposa, California, in the 1960s, a movement that spawned
both the Posse Comitatus and the Aryan Nation (Zeskind 1986, 14).
In the 1980s and 1990s, the largest concentration of Christian Identity
groups has been in Idaho--centered on the Aryan Nation's compound near
Hayden Lake--and in the southern Midwest near the Oklahoma-Arkansas-
Missouri borders. In that location, a Christian Identity group called
the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord established a 224-acre
community and a paramilitary school which it named the Endtime Overcomer
Survival Training School (Zeskind 1986, 45). Nearby, Christian Identity
minister Steven Millar and former Nazi Party member Glenn Miller
established Elohim City, whose members stockpiled weapons and prepared
themselves for "a Branch Davidian-type raid" by the U.S. government's
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (Baumgarten 1995, 17). It was
this Christian Identity encampment that Timothy McVeigh visited shortly
before the Oklahoma City federal building blast.
The American incarnation of the Christian Identity movement contained
many of its British counterpart's paranoid views, updated to suit the
social anxieties of many contemporary Americans. For instance, in the
American version, the United Nations and the Democratic Party were
alleged to be accomplices in a Jewish-Freemason conspiracy to control
the world and deprive individuals of their freedom. According to a 1982
Identity pamphlet, Jews were described as "parasites and vultures," who
controlled the world through international banking (Mohr 1982). The
establishment of the International Monetary Fund, the introduction of
magnetized credit cards, and the establishment of paper money not backed
by gold or silver were the final steps in "Satan's Plan" (Aho 1990, 91).
Gun control was also an important issue to Christian Identity supporters,
since they believed that Jewish, U.N., and liberal conspirators intended
to remove the last possibilities of rebellion against their centralized
power by depriving individuals of the weapons they might use to defend
themselves or free their countrymen from a tyrannical state. The views
of Timothy McVeigh, although less obviously Christian and anti-Semitic
than most Christian Identity teachings, otherwise fit precisely the
paradigm of Christian Identity thought.
THE HIDDEN WAR
The world as envisioned by both reconstructionist theology and Christian
Identity was a world at war. Identity preachers cited the biblical
accounts of Michael the Archangel's destruction of the offspring of evil
to point to a hidden, albeit "cosmic war" between the forces of darkness
and the forces of light (Aho 1990, 85). "There is murder going on," Mike
Bray explained, "which we have to stop." In the Christian Identity view
of the world, the struggle was a secret war between colossal evil forces
allied with U.N., U.S., and other government powers, on the one hand,
and a small band of the enlightened few who recognized these invisible
enemies for what they were in their view, satanic powers--and were
sufficiently courageous to battle against them. Although Bray rejected
much of Christian Identity's conspiratorial view of the world and
specifically decried its anti-Semitism, he did appreciate its commitment
to struggle against secular forms of evil and its insistence on the need
for a Christian social order. Both Christian Identity and
reconstructionist thought yearned for a version of American politics
rooted in Christian values and biblical law.
As Mike Bray explained, the destruction of abortion clinics was not the
result of a personal vendetta against agencies with which he and others
have had moral differences, but the consequences of a grand religious
vision. His actions were part of a great crusade conducted by a
Christian subculture in America that has seen itself at war with the
larger society and, to some extent, victimized by it. Armed with the
theological explanations of reconstruction and Christian Identity, this
subculture has seen itself justified in its violent responses to what it
perceives as a violent repression waged by secular (and, in some
versions of this perception, Jewish) agents of a satanic force. Mike
Bray and his network of associates around the country saw themselves
engaged in violence not for its own sake but as a response to the
institutional violence of what they regarded as a repressive secular
state. When he poured gasoline on rags and ignited fires to demolish
abortion clinics, therefore, Mike Bray was firing the opening salvos in
what he envisaged to be a great defensive Christian struggle against the
secular state, a contest between the forces of spiritual truth and
secular darkness, in which the moral character of America as a righteous
nation hung in the balance.
In this regard, the Reverend Bray joined a legion of religious activists
from Algeria to Idaho who have come to hate secular governments with an
almost transcendent passion, and dream of revolutionary changes that
will establish a godly social order in the rubble of what the citizens
of most secular societies regard as modern, egalitarian democracies.
Their enemies seem to most of us to be benign and banal: modern secular
leaders and such symbols of prosperity and authority as international
airlines and the World Trade Center. The logic of their ideological
religious view is, although difficult to comprehend, profound, for it
contains a fundamental critique of the world's post-Enlightenment
secular culture and politics.
After years of waiting in history's wings, religion has renewed its
claim to be an ideology of public order in a dramatic fashion:
violently. In the United States, as in other parts of the world,
religion's renewed political presence is accompanied by violence in part
because of the nature of religion and its claims of power over life and
death. In part, the violence is due to the nature of secular politics,
which bases its own legitimacy on the currency of weapons and can be
challenged successfully only on a level of force. In part, it is due to
the nature of violence itself. Violence is a destructive display of
power, and in a time when competing groups are attempting to assert
their strength, the power of violence becomes a valuable political
commodity. At the very least, the proponents of a religious ideology of
social control such as those American activists associated with the
ideas of reconstruction theology and Christian Identity have to remind
the populace of the godly power that makes their ideologies potent. At
their destructive worst, they create incidents of violence on God's
behalf.
References
Aho, James. 1990. The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian
Patriotism. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Barkun, Michael. 1994. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the
Christian Identity Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
Baumgarten, Gerald. 1995. Paranoia as Patriotism: Far-Right Influences
on the Militia Movement. New York: Anti-Defamation League.
Berlet, Chip. 1996. John Salvi, Abortion Clinic Violence, and Catholic
Right Conspiracism. Somerville, MA: Political Research Associates.
Bray, Michael. 1994. A Time to Kill: A Study Concerning the Use of Force
and Abortion. Portland, OR: Advocates for Life.
-----. 1996. Interview by author. Bowie, MD, 25 Apr. 1996.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. 1993. The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism
Confronts the Secular State. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Macdonald, Andrew [William Pierce]. 1978. The Turner Diaries. Arlington,
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Mohr, Gordon "Jack." 1982. Know Your Enemies. N.p.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1932. Moral Man and Immoral Society. New York:
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-----. 1942. The Nature and Destiny of Man. New York: Scribner's.
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~~~~~~~~
By MARK JUERGENSMEYER
Mark Juergensmeyer is professor of sociology and director of global and
international studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He
has been a fellow of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S.
Institute of Peace, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is
author or editor often books, including Violence and the Sacred in the
Modern World and The New Cold War? named by the New York Times as one of
the most notable books of 1993. He is currently writing a book on
religious terrorism.
Copyright of Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social
Science is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its
content may not be copied without the copyright holder's
express written permission except for the print or download
capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This
content is intended solely for the use of the individual user.
Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science,
Jul98, Vol. 558, p88, 13p.
Item Number: 787367
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