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THE RACIST RIGHT VERSUS CHRISTIANITY: THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN NATURE OF WHITE NATIONALISM By Michael Wagner (Originally published in the

October 2006 issue of the California-based newsletter, Christian Culture) Sometimes positions commonly associated with elements of the political Right are blatantly evil. This is most notably the case with the Racist Right, whose adherents often refer to themselves as White Nationalists. These are people who see preserving the White race as the most important political and social issue. Occasionally opponents of conservative Christianity try to claim that there is a connection between conservative Christians and the Racist Right. The purpose of doing so, of course, is to discredit Christians by associating them with a movement widely and correctlyregarded as extremist. But Christianity and the Racist Right are actually poles apart, as White Nationalists themselves point out. The most prominent White Nationalist leader of the last two or three decades was William Pierce, who died in 2002. In 1978 he published a novel, The Turner Diaries, written by himself under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. This novel became especially famous in 1995 when it was widely reported that Timothy McVeigh was heavily influenced by The Turner Diaries, and may have been acting out one of the books scenes when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The Turner Diaries is a horrible book, as will be explained in detail below. But one anti-hate writer has tried to associate the book with Christianity. Deborah Able, in her book for school children, Hate Groups, gives a brief account of the plot of The Turner Diaries. She then mentions that the book ends when a group of White Nationalists gain control of the US government and creates a white Christian paradise (p. 50). Its hard to understand why Able would claim that the end of The Turner Diaries results in a Christian paradise. Certainly the book itself does not make any such claim. And the author of the novel, William Pierce, was explicitly and self-consciously opposed to Christianity. It would seem that Able failed in her research.

William Pierce A very extensive book about William Pierce was published in 2001, the year before he died. This book, The Fame of a Dead Mans Deeds, was based primarily on interviews between Pierce and the books author, Professor Robert S. Griffin. As Pierce recounted to Griffin, he sees Christianity as a major threat to the White race. He said that by the late 1970s, I had pretty well concluded that Christianity was one of the major spiritual illnesses of our people and that we really had to come to grips with that. We couldnt

pretend it was just a minor problem: we had to figure out how to deal with it (p. 260). Furthermore, he continued, as I see it, Christianity has a number of elements that are very destructive to our people (p. 260). Frankly, I fail to see anything that is good or useful in Christianity (p. 263). One of Pierces solutions for the problem of Christianity was to create a new religion which he called Cosmotheism. Cosmotheism is a kind of pantheism based on evolution, whereby the White race evolves into an increasingly better race. White people should self-consciously cooperate with evolutionary forces to help create better human beings in the future. As Pierce himself puts it, If this process of which I am a part continues as we would hope, the result will be the emergence of what Nietzsche calls the Superman. It is a type of being that very few of us can get our minds around. And the Superman may be a step toward an even higher being. If one extrapolates indefinitely, the very end resultand we can only begin to imagine itI call godhood. We need to be the agents of this process. We need to serve it (p. 202-203). In sum, then, William Pierce is explicitly opposed to Christianity, and he wants to replace it with a new religion that he, himself, created. And this new religion entails a belief that White people can participate in the evolution of their own race into a Superman, and perhaps even godhood. This guy is not a Christian, he doesnt claim to be a Christian, and so anti-hate writers like Deborah Able should get their facts straight and acknowledge this important point, rather than trying to associate him with Christianity. Were Pierce some nameless figure, the misrepresentation would not be of much concern. But he was the central figure of a group called the National Alliance, which was for a number of years the leading organization of White Nationalists in North America. And he is still revered by many White Nationalists.

Using Fiction to Spread His Views Pierce spent a considerable amount of effort trying to spread his racist message, and a fellow anti-Christian racist, Professor Revilo Oliver, encouraged him to try writing fiction as an avenue for spreading his beliefs. As a result Pierce wrote two novels, The Turner Diaries and the lesser known Hunter. The former has apparently sold over 300,000 copies and the latter has sold in the tens of thousands. So Pierces novel writing has been rather successful from that standpoint. Due to the success of The Turner Diaries, which was his first novel, Pierce became more conscious of the power of fiction to convey a serious message. He realized that fiction really can be a powerful medium for getting ideas across (p. 246). And he formulated a plausible explanation as to why this is so. Simply, the readeror television watcher or movie viewer or playgoercomes to identify with the protagonist. And once that happens, youve got this person where you want him. For one thing, he vicariously experiences the action and comes to care about the protagonist (p. 246). The reader feels what the protagonist feels to a certain degree. And if something is well-written the

reader starts to think as the protagonist does andthe most powerful thing of allif the protagonist learns something or comes to believe in something, if he changes his ideas, the reader tends to do the same thing, he changes too. So what you have is a powerful teaching tool, a persuasive tool (p. 246). And Pierce has successfully used this teaching tool to advance the cause of Neo-Nazism.

A Nasty Neo-Nazi Novel The Turner Diaries is the story of Earl Turner, an electrical engineer from Los Angeles. It takes the form of his diary, from September 1991 to November 1993. Originally published in 1978 (with a second edition released in 1980), the book looks toward a future race war in the United States. Turner joins a White Nationalist terrorist group called the Organization, and due to his devotion to the cause and his skills, he is inducted into the Organizations secretive leadership cabal, the Order. Most of the book details the events of Turners life over the two-year period of terrorism, where he describes bombings, assassinations, and the like. Interwoven throughout the text are segments describing his beliefs and his rationales for being a terrorist. The book is reasonably well-written and even exciting at times. In that respect it succeeds as a novel. However, the purpose of the book is to encourage racial hatred and the dream of a White world (p. 210). It would be easy to classify it as hate literature. Although Turner dies before the end of the book, there is an epilogue describing the final events of the Great Revolution, that is, the race war fought by Turner and his Organization comrades. They are victorious in the war, and their ultimate goals are all achieved in 1999. For as the epilogue states, it was in 1999, just 110 years after the birth of the Great Onethat the dream of a White world finally became a certainty (p. 210). Who is the Great One? Well, if you subtract 110 years from 1999 you get 1889, the year Adolf Hitler was born. The Great One is Adolf Hitler. This is a key to understanding the whole book. It is written from the perspective of a genuine National Socialist, or Nazi. Im not joking. The racial war described in this book is first and foremost a war against Jewish people. Turner says the purpose of the war is to rid ourselves of the Jewish yoke (p. 195). Elsewhere he states, We are in a war to the death with the Jew (p. 130). And when the war becomes particularly intense he writes, Now it was either the Jews or the White race, and everyone knew the game was for keeps (p. 182). And the worst is yet to come. With the war reaching its climax, Turner again emphasizes, in even bleaker terms, that this was a war of extermination: No matter how long it takes us and no matter to what lengths we must go, well demand a final settlement of the account between our two races. If the Organization survives this contest, no Jew willanywhere. Well go to the uttermost ends of the earth to hunt down the last of Satans spawn (p. 199).

This war had become necessary because the White nations of the world had allowed themselves to become subject to the Jew, to Jewish ideas, to the Jewish spirit (p. 195). So the Whites must bear their share of the blame for this situation. And the Whites had many previous opportunities to correct the situation. Turner says that even after we were well down the Jewish primrose path, we had chance after chance to save ourselvesmost recently 52 years ago [i.e., in 1941], when the Germans and the Jews were locked in struggle for the mastery of central and eastern Europe (p. 196). The problem was, however, that American Whites ended up on the Jewish side in that struggle, primarily because we had chosen corrupt men as our leaders (p. 196). So you get the picture. The great issue of life is a racial struggle for mastery of the world, primarily between Whites and Jews. Hitler was trying to save Europe from the Jews, but America was led by corrupt leaders to fight for the Jews and help defeat Hitler. But in this fictional race war of the 1990s, the American Whites know who their real enemy is, and they will complete the task that Hitler had set out to accomplish. This is the heart of the book. Turner is driven by a passionate desire to exterminate every Jew in the world, just like his hero, the Great One. But in another sense, Turner is an equal opportunity exterminator. He wants to kill all non-Whites, not just Jews. As the Organization gains control of territory, it expels and/or executes all non-Whites. But Turner himself is not too troubled over all the killing that must occur. It is frighteningly clear now that there is no way to win the struggle in which we are engaged without shedding torrentsveritable riversof blood (p. 79). And your White skin wont save you if you are a White race criminal. Race criminals were Whites who had close relationships with non-Whites or who helped non-Whites. The Organization issued proclamations that anyone who knowingly harbors a Jew or other non-Whites would be executed (p. 163). During the Day of the Rope thousands of White race criminals were strung up on lampposts, power poles and trees, each wearing a placard containing the words I defiled my race. Turner describes one such woman who was executed, and then notes, There are many thousands of hanging female corpses like that in this city tonight, all wearing identical placards around their necks. They are the White women who were married to or living with Blacks, with Jews, or with other non-White males (p. 161). In short, all Jews, Blacks, all other non-Whites, and even White race criminals are exterminated. This is how the Organization achieves its goal of a White world. As mentioned earlier, the leadership of the Organization is vested in a small, secretive group known as the Order. With the completion of the Great Revolution, the Order rules the world as an oligarchy. The Order does not like the US Constitution or popular selfgovernment. This is clear in the criticism Turner applies to an American Army general who is a conservative (Turner hates conservatives). This fellow, General Harding, wants to use his forces to restore the US Constitution. In response Turner writes, Doesnt the old fool understand that the American people voted themselves into the mess theyre in

now? Doesnt he understand that the Jews have taken over the country fair and square, according to the Constitution? Doesnt he understand that the common people have already had their fling at self-government, and they blew it? (p. 173). The common people are not to be trusted with self-government. It is also made clear that the Orders goal is to rule the entire world. One high level member of the Order tells Turner that it claims the right to rule the world in accord with our principles (p. 98). The Organization later sends an ultimatum to the US government saying, we intend to liberate, first, the entire United States and then the remainder of this planet (p. 181). And the very last sentence in the book notes that the Order would spread its wise and benevolent rule over the earth for all time to come (p. 211). It is interesting to see the degree to which Turner hates conservatives as touched on above. One member of the Organization, Harry Powell, is executed after it was discovered that he was a conservative, not a revolutionary (p. 51). In one of the first acts of terrorism in the book, the Organization blows up the car of a conservative (with him inside) after he criticizes its activities (p. 17). And Turner writes threateningly, Woe betide any whining conservative, responsible or otherwise, who gets in the way of our revolution when I am around! (p. 94). Also in keeping with his anti-conservative stance, Turner starts sleeping with a female member of the Organization even though they arent married and hardly know each other (p. 28). It could be said that The Turner Diaries has some literary merit in the sense that it is reasonably well-written and interesting. But it is more important to judge the book on ethical grounds, and to recognize it as Neo-Nazi hate literature. The worldview held by the writer of this book involves racial violence and murder on a scale never before seen. It would dwarf the Holocaust of the 1940s. If this book is any indication, Nazism is alive and well on planet earth. This would be enough in itself to condemn William Pierce. But in his subsequent novel, Hunter, Pierces strident anti-Christian views become especially prominent.

Bible-believers as Dimwits and Morons Hunter is the story of Oscar Yeager, a former American combat pilot who served in Vietnam, and subsequently became a consulting engineer for the Air Force. He is greatly disturbed about racial mixing, and therefore assassinates mixed race couples in his spare time. After assassinating some prominent religious and political figures who support racial mixing, Oscar is contacted by a high level FBI official, William Ryan, who has discovered what Oscar has been up to and sympathizes with his views and his work. Ryan then sends Oscar on errands to eliminate people who are working against the interests of White Americans. During this time Yeager also becomes involved in the work of a White Nationalist group called the National League. He becomes the driving force behind the Leagues most successful activity: using a fraudulent television preacher to subtly introduce White

Nationalist themes into his sermons in the hopes of converting some Fundamentalist Christians into White Nationalists. Yeager and his National League cohorts (and apparently Pierce who wrote the novel) see Fundamentalist Christians as mindless robots who believe whatever TV preachers say. The discussion of Christianity and Christians in this book clearly demonstrates Pierces deeply anti-Christian views. Yeager and the National League members see Fundamentalist Christians as suckers who can easily be used to further their own agenda. Yeager states that Christian Fundamentalists are perfectly capable of absorbing the wildest inconsistencies you can dream up, without batting an eyelash (p. 168). They are described as Fundamentalist Christian stooges (p. 136), Fundamentalist morons (p. 157), rubes (p. 160), boobs (p. 176), superstitious dimwits (p. 193), self-indulgent materialists (p. 196), thumpers (p. 209), and nut-case Christians (p. 246). At one point Yeager regrets that the National League has to use a fraudulent preacher to manipulate the Fundamentalists. But he rationalizes it this way: The Jews trick them, the government tricks them, the churches and the other evangelists trick them, the controlled media trick them, and we have to trick them too. They were born to be tricked all their lives (p. 222). Fundamentalist Christians are stupid, and can easily be manipulated by others. At one point in the book a leader of the National League, Harry Keller, encourages Yeager to become anti-Semitic. He discusses the Jews, certain passages in Isaiah and Deuteronomy, as well as his understanding of Gods covenant with His people in the Old Testament. The discussion is virulently anti-Semitic, and contains blasphemous comments about the God of the Bible. Naturally, those comments cannot be quoted in a Christian magazine. Suffice it to say that the book of Deuteronomy is said to be full of baloney (p. 101). Keller also instructs Yeager about Christianity. It is, he says, a religion of equality, of weakness, of regression and decay, of surrender and submission, of oblivion. If our race survives the next century it will only be because we have gotten the monkey of Christianity off our backs and have found our way to a genuinely Western spirituality again (p. 105). Keller links Jesus with Marx and Freud as all being Jews whose ideas have damaged the interests of White people. They were illusion builders. In each case the Jew involved concocted an illusion, and then his fellow Jews marketed the illusion to our people. In each case disaster followed (p. 106). Keller says that a crew of talented hucksters successfully promoted these illusions among White people. In the case of Christianity the head huckster was Saul of Tarsus, alias Paul; he was the one who infected the Roman underworld with it (p. 106). In a subsequent discussion, Yeager himself refers to Christianity as an alien superstition and then says, Christianity is a slave religion, and that suits the nature of a lot of White people, unfortunately. They cant get along without the idea of a Big Daddy in the sky to watch over them. Theyll never be taught to stand on their own feet, to think like aristocrats, to have an aristocratic religion (p. 199).

Earlier in the book Keller and Yeager are both identified as Nietzscheans, and Keller even states that National League members are the conscious, responsible preparers of the way for the Superman (p. 148). The explicitly positive reference to Nietzsche seems to tie in with the reference to Christianity as a slave religion. Just because characters in a novel make certain statements doesnt necessarily mean the novels author shares the views in those statements. But in reading Hunter it is clear that Pierce himself speaks through Yeager and Keller. When Pierce wrote Hunter he was very self-consciously using fiction as a tool to promote his beliefs. The views of Christianity and Christians quoted from Hunter are undoubtedly the views of Pierce himself, especially when you consider the comments he made to Professor Griffin.

Conclusion The evidence clearly demonstrates that White Nationalism and Biblical Christianity are antithetical. William Pierce made this point strongly, and this is one issue where he was certainly correct. The Bible proclaims Gods grace and mercy to all who will look to Christ for forgiveness of their sins, regardless of their race or nationality. And all Christians are brethren, again, regardless of their race. White Nationalism, on the other hand, is a form of idolatry, where the White race takes the place of a god. It seems to inescapably entail a hatred for Jewish people and other races. Biblical Christianity and White Nationalism are mutually exclusive. Any attempt to link Biblical Christianity to White Nationalism is fraudulent.

References Able, Deborah. 2000. Hate Groups. (Revised edition). Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers Inc. Griffin, Robert S. 2001. The Fame of a Dead Mans Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce. 1st Books Library. Macdonald, Andrew (William Pierce). 1980. The Turner Diaries. (Second edition). Hillsboro, WV: National Vanguard Books. Macdonald, Andrew (William Pierce). 1998. Hunter. (Second edition). Hillsboro, WV: National Vanguard Books.

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