Essay: The Christian Identity Movement

By Michael Barkun
Of all the movements that have appeared among white racists in America, Christian
Identity is surely one of the strangest. Though nominally Christian, it owes little to the
even the most conservative of American Protestants. Indeed, its relationship with
evangelicals and fundamentalists has generally been hostile due to the latters belief
that the return of Jews to Israel is essential to the fulfillment of end-time prophecy.
Identity has created for itself a unique anti-Semitic and racist theology, but despite its
curious beliefs, it rose in the 1980s to a position of commanding influence on the racist
right. Only a prolonged and aggressive effort by law enforcement, together with the
demise of influential leaders who were not replaced, brought about its present decline.
Christian Identity emerged out of an odd side-current of Protestant religious activity in
the United Kingdom usually called British-Israelism or Anglo-Israelism. In its simplest
form, it asserted that the British Isles had been peopled by the so-called Ten Lost
Tribes of Israel, who, having left their Babylonian exile, wandered west through Europe
until they crossed the Channel. Although hints of this strange revisionist history had
appeared as early as the 17th and 18th centuries, it did not gain much currency until a
writer and lecturer named John Wilson gave it systematic form in the mid-1800s.
Wilson acknowledged that Jews, too, had a place in what he termed All-Israel,
although he saw it as a subordinate one. He also believed that the tribes in their
wanderings also begat other northern European (primarily Germanic) peoples. Indeed,
in subsequent years British-Israelites sometimes quarreled bitterly about which nations
were in or out of the Israelite inheritance, a debate that took on a political edge with the
growing rivalry between England and Germany. Whatever claims British-Israelites
made for the Israelite origins of other nations, however, they always insisted on the
primacy of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples.
In retrospect, we can see in British-Israelism a bizarre religious manifestation of British
imperial aspirations, for if the British were indeed descendants of the Israelites, then
they were Gods chosen people, ruling not simply by power but by divine plan. Yet
Anglo-Israelism never developed as a separate religious denomination. Its members
remained within their original churches, often the Church of England. By the 1870s and
1880s, the movement had begun to take organized form and branches spread to
present and former outposts of the empire, notably to Canada and the United States.
Although eventually an umbrella organization formed the British-Israel World
Federation it was in truth a movement without a head, and as it spread, its doctrines
began to shift in some of the distant venues. It was these doctrinal mutations that set
the stage for Christian Identity.
Once British-Israelism began to grow outside Great Britain itself, two major doctrinal
deviations occurred that had major implications for the subsequent development of
Christian Identity. One concerned the place of Britain; the other concerned the place of
the Jewish people. As far as the significance of Britain was concerned, British-Israel
writers had deduced it from a variety of highly questionable sources, including spurious
etymologies (e.g., deriving Saxons from Isaacs sons), variant readings of biblical
passages, and interpretations of historical and archaeological evidence. American
Anglo-Israelites were not necessarily disposed to criticize this kind of argumentation on
methodological grounds, but they were anxious to place America at the center of Gods
plan, for American British-Israelites, like many other Americans in the late 19th century,
bought into concepts of Manifest Destiny. There was also a well-entrenched belief,
harking back to the Puritans, that America was the new Israel. Why, then, should it
not be linked to Israel by biology as well?
Beyond considerations of Americas special place in the world, when British-Israelism
crossed the Atlantic, it became enmeshed in radical American political currents. This
became evident in the early 1920s, when a major Anglo-Israelite in Oregon turned out
to be a leader in the Ku Klux Klan at a time the Klan was a major power on the West

Coast. The high tide of British-Israelism in America was reached in the next decade, for
the Great Depression was a boon to all manner of fringe groups that would otherwise
not have gotten a hearing. British-Israelism in America during the 1930s took the form
of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, led by a tireless Massachusetts lawyer,
Howard Rand, who crisscrossed the country organizing branches. Rand was joined in
the Federations leadership by William J. Cameron, an executive of the Ford Motor Co.
Cameron was not only Henry Fords public relations man; he had also edited Fords
weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. In the early 1920s, the Independent had
published an infamous set of articles, The International Jew, which popularized the
Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, probably the most influential antiSemitic tract of the 20th century. Cameron almost certainly wrote many of these articles
himself. Although Ford closed the Independent in 1927, Camerons presence in the
Anglo-Saxon Federation provided a conduit for anti-Semitism in the inner circle of
American British-Israelism.
This was critical, for the issue of the Jews in British-Israelism presented an obstacle to
anti-Semites. At its origins British-Israelism had been philo-Semitic, not anti-Semitic. Its
goal was to see All-Israel living together in harmony, a millennial vision that would
place Jews and the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples together in the Holy Land at some
future time. While Cameron concentrated on ideas about a Jewish conspiracy for world
domination, he could provide no theological rationale for excluding Jews from Gods
plan for salvation. That was left to British-Israelites in western Canada. A group in
Vancouver, increasingly alienated from colleagues in both eastern Canada and in
London, began to argue that Jews were in fact descendants of the biblical Esau and
consequently bore Esaus curse. By the late 1930s, their ideas had begun to filter down
the Pacific Coast to branches of Rand and Camerons Anglo-Saxon Federation, where
they found a receptive audience. More generally, with the end of World War II, philoSemitism among British-Israelites began to wane. It became clear that Jewish settlers
in Palestine had no desire for the British Mandate to continue and wished to have a
state of their own, as promised in the Balfour Declaration. Anglo-Israelites, who had
seen British administration of the Holy Land as a sign of the imminence of the endtimes, regarded Jewish resistance to British rule as nothing less than betrayal.
The clear separation of what we know as Christian Identity from British-Israelism
began in Southern California immediately after World War II. The conditions there were
propitious. Los Angeles had long been awash in fringe religious sects, and Rands
Anglo-Saxon Federation had struck especially deep roots in California. The antiSemitic strain of Anglo-Israelism developed in Vancouver had filtered down the Coast,
and, in addition, the Klan and paramilitary organizations were active. Finally, Los
Angeles was then the headquarters of Gerald L.K. Smith, the most important antiSemitic organizer in America. There is no evidence that Smith himself embraced either
British-Israelism or Identity, but nearly all the first generation of Identity leaders had
some connection to him. That generation was dominated by three figures: Wesley
Swift, William Potter Gale, and Bertrand Comparet. None of the three had any
significant theological training, although Swift appears to have attended a small Bible
college. Gale had been a career military officer, and Comparet was a lawyer.
Identitys founding triumvirate built on British-Israelism, but made two critical
modifications: First, they made much more important and explicit the latent racism that
always lay behind Anglo-Israelism, with its glorification of Northern Europeans. Swift,
Gale, and Comparet, however, went beyond paeans to the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic
peoples and systematically denigrated non-white races, justifying racial inequality by
radically changing the traditional understanding of the biblical Creation story. Second,
drawing on the rising anti-Semitism of such British-Israelite groups as that in Vancouver
with its claim that Jews were the descendants of Esau, the founders of Identity
developed an even more sweeping theology of anti-Semitism. According to it, Jews
were nothing less than the Devils spawn. Both of these developments will be
discussed in more detail below.

Swift in particular was a powerful preacher. His preaching gifts, together with the
connection all three men had with Gerald L.K. Smiths right-wing network, allowed early
Identity to grow in Southern California in the late 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, Swift
may well have met with George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi
Party. What is beyond question is that around the same time, first Gale and then Swift
met a new Identity convert, an engineer at Lockheed named Richard Girnt Butler.
Butler would later proclaim himself Swifts successor and organize the Idaho-based
Aryan Nations and the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian.
Identity racial doctrine, like virtually all of Identity, is revisionist. In this case, it radically
revises the biblical story of humanitys creation. The California Identity preachers
claimed that God had created the races separately, and that the story in the book of
Genesis about the creation of Adam told only the story of the creation of the white race.
In their view, the non-white races were separately created later and could not trace
their lineage back to Adam. Adam then became for Identity the first White man. Thus
the egalitarianism that might have been taken from the biblical story that all human
beings, whatever their differences, ultimately shared a common ancestry was
rejected. By implication, too, the Bible could be understood as a book that spoke only
to whites. Identity writers professed to see its every feature under the aspect of race.
Thus Wesley Swift argued that God destroyed most of humanity in the Flood because
whites in earlier times had been guilty of the sin of miscegenation.
If anything, Identitys view of the Jews underwent an even more radical revisionism.
Here, too, the revisionism focused on Genesis, but instead of looking at the creation of
Adam, Identity retold the story of Eves primal sin in the Garden of Eden. In Identitys
version, the Serpent was Satan, and the sin was more than merely tasting of the fruit of
the Tree in the center of the Garden. Rather, Eves sin was that she had sex with
Satan, and gave birth to Satans child, Cain. Where the Vancouver British-Israelites
linked Jews to Esau, Identity now went back to this original sin and claimed that Jews
were the offspring of Cain. This so-called two-seedline theology thus posited that one
seedline went from the union of Eve and Satan through Cain and his progeny, the
Jews; the other from the union of Eve and Adam through their child Seth and his
progeny, the white race. The two were, according to Identity, in continual conflict until
some final end-time battle.
Thus Identity racial doctrine, positing Adam as the progenitor only of whites, was linked
to the anti-Semitic two-seedline theology. Together, they envisioned an apocalyptic
struggle between whites on one side and, on the other, Jews together with their
nonwhite allies. The end-time struggle was thus in the broadest sense associated with
a racial millennium, for Identitys perfect future would be a world free of Jews with
nonwhites in perpetual subordination and servitude.
Given these beliefs, it is not surprising that Identity detested the conservative
Protestantism of the religious right. The latter accepted African-Americans as equals,
whatever debates there might be about particular policies such as affirmative action.
Conservative evangelicals are also frequently premillennialists who believe in a
sequence of end-time events that requires the protection of the State of Israel and the
rebuilding of a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, as conditions necessary for the fulfillment
of biblical prophecy. This is anathema to Identity adherents, who believe Jews to have
no relationship to the Israelites mentioned in the Bible a far cry from the philoSemitism of early British-Israelism. Consequently, Identity often characterizes
evangelicals as dupes and traitors, in language scarcely more restrained from that they
use in discussing Jews and blacks.
Making generalizations about Christian Identity has always been difficult, for the
movement is fragmented. There has never been a central structure, even for
rudimentary coordination. Instead, there have been entirely separate churches, Bible
study groups, radio and electronic ministries, and publications, each claiming
autonomy. Further, like many other movements on the far right, Identity has been beset
by feuds and rivalries, sometimes between leaders and sometimes within groups,

causing frequent ruptures. Finally, there are often no clear distinctions between
Christian Identity and other segments of the racist right. Thus Identity has sometimes
overlapped with the Klan or neo-Nazi groups. Therefore, there has never been an
authority to define, much less enforce, orthodoxy, in either doctrine or practice. The
summary of doctrine above hews closely to views of the first generation of Identity
leadership, but does not preclude the possibility of variations. Indeed, even during the
period when Gale, Swift, and Comparet were active, some more traditional BritishIsrael groups continued to operate.
Where practice is concerned, there is even more variability, largely because the
California founders had little interest in developing a ritual or ceremonial component.
The one area where distinctive ceremonial practices have developed has been in
holiday celebrations. This derives from the conviction of Identity believers that they, and
they alone, are the lineal, biological descendants of the biblical tribes of Israel.
Consistent with that belief, they consider that at least some of the biblical
commandments enjoined upon the Israelites apply also to them. The ones most
frequently observed concern festivals, such as Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles,
holidays traditionally observed by Jews. In principle, and depending upon variations in
individual or group practice, Identity believers might also choose among the large
number of other commandments, such as those imposing biblical dietary restrictions.
Christian Identity is not inherently violent, but individual believers have been involved in
many violent incidents and have sometimes advocated violence. In addition, some
Christian Identity groups have been heavily armed. In a short space, it is impossible to
do more than give some examples of associations between Christian Identity and
violence. It is clear that in many of these cases, believers employed, recommended, or
prepared for violence because they thought their religion required it.
Two groups in particular deserve mention, the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord
(CSA), and The Order. The Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord was a communal
settlement founded in northern Arkansas in 1976 by James Ellison. Originally a bornagain, evangelical community, it underwent a transformation when Ellison converted to
Identity. Convinced that American society was about to crumble and that hordes of
nonwhites would come marauding through the countryside, Ellison turned his rural
commune into a militarized, fortified redoubt whose members not only received military
training but gave it to others on the radical right. Although the community as such did
not commit violent acts, a number of its individual members did when off community
premises. When the CSA was raided by the FBI in 1985 for serious firearms violations,
its members did not resist, and the community quickly collapsed thereafter.
The Order (also known as the Silent Brotherhood) was a quite different organization,
for it was a clandestine insurgent group intent on provoking a race war in order to bring
down the federal government. Roughly evenly divided between Identity believers and
neo-pagan Odinists, The Order was founded in 1983 and was active only until late
1984. But in that short time it committed significant crimes, including counterfeiting, a
synagogue bombing, an armored car robbery and an assassination.
The numerous acts of violence committed by individual Christian Identity believers is of
interest primarily because of efforts by some in the movement to construct justifications
for their behavior. In 1990, the Christian Identity writer Richard Kelly Hoskins
popularized the figure of the Phineas priest, an image he took from Psalm 106, which
implies that a plague among the Israelites ceased when Phineas slew the sinners
among them. Hoskins argued that individuals who take it upon themselves to kill racial
defilers are similarly doing the Lords work of purification. In 1992, the influential
Christian Identity minister, Pete Peters, convened a meeting in Estes Park, Colo., to
protest shootings by law enforcement during an armed standoff at the Ruby Ridge,
Idaho, cabin of Randy Weaver, a Christian Identity believer. One of the highlights of the
meeting was the distribution of an essay, Leaderless Resistance, by former Klan
leader Louis Beam. Beam argued that organized activity to destabilize the government
had become too dangerous, largely as a result of the efforts of state and federal law

enforcement to dismantle The Order and infiltrate similar groups. Beam argued that
even cellular organizations could be penetrated and that action could be safely
undertaken only by individuals or very small groups acting completely outside any
organizational framework. The individual, he went on, must act against targets of
opportunity at times and places of his choosing, on the basis of his own sense of the
rightness of his actions, derived from his deepest beliefs. In effect, Hoskins and Beam
were giving a blank check to the freelance assassin, assuring him that his idiosyncratic
act of violence was really Gods work.
Although Christian Identity dominated the racist right in the 1970s and 1980s, by the
1990s it was in decline. It faded because of a combination of factors, including more
aggressive governmental action, limits to its appeal, and a growing leadership vacuum.
The exposure of The Order in the mid-1980s raised awareness about movements like
Identity among federal and state law enforcement agencies. Although religious groups
benefit from the freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment, Identity groups found
themselves subject to a level of governmental interest they had not previously felt.
Indeed, Louis Beams Leaderless Resistance essay was itself a response to this
interest. It is impossible to determine the extent to which surveillance and infiltration
may have deterred individuals from joining Identity organizations, but a chilling effect is
certainly possible.
In addition, Identity doctrine itself almost certainly made the movement self-limiting. It
demanded a wholly new understanding of biblical history and a rejection of some of the
central teachings of evangelical Christianity. Many individuals even those already
hostile to Jews and blacks may have been unable or unwilling to completely recast
their views of scripture in the ways Identity demanded. On the other hand, by the 1980s
those who wished to be true cultural radicals had an alternative to Identity, a religious
orientation even more extreme neo-pagan Odinism, which broke completely with
Christianity by constructing a racial version of Norse mythology. Thus Identity was
caught between those who considered it too extreme and those for whom it may not
have been extreme enough.
Finally, there were problems of leadership, which led to internal turmoil. The trio of
California preachers who founded Identity died out even as the movement grew
Wesley Swift in 1970, Bertrand Comparet in 1983 and William Potter Gale in 1988 after
his conviction on tax charges. Swifts successor, Richard Butler, died in 2004 after a
long period of decline. Without a clear successor to Butler, Aryan Nations fragmented
into bickering coteries. One of the few Identity figures to retain a following has been
Pete Peters, who leads the LaPorte Church of Christ in LaPorte, Colo. But
significantly, like many others in the movement, Peters refuses to use the label
Christian Identity. Indeed, his church calls itself an independent, non-denomination
Christian church. The term Christian Identity has been so often linked with acts of
violence and with criminal prosecutions since the 1980s that even those to whom it
properly belongs flee from it.
Michael Barkun is a professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse
University. He is the author of Religion and the Racist Right (University of North
Carolina Press, 1997).
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/christianidentity/the-christian-identity-movement