Saturday, December 17, 2005

Christians or Just Plain Confused?

Below is an article that I wrote some time back when we were doing a spread on the Oklahoma City bimbing. I am placing it here because it deals with the religion called Christian Identity. CI is adhered to by a number of racists and is prominently linked to the group known as the Aryan Nations. Their teachings are much more complex than what is talked about here, but I thought it would, at least, give some better perspective on just how far all of this runs the gamut.

For more than a decade, federal lawmen have sternly advised all visitors not to go near the place. When US marshals tried to fly surveillance missions across the nearby hills, the pilot suddenly pulled away when he saw what he thought were muzzle flashes from the ground. Rumors hold that everyone who lives there, down to the smallest child, is trained and armed; that great underground bunkers hold vast stores of munitions, even chemical and biological weapons. It is a place that federal informants seek to infiltrate, and for which federal agents have laid out secret contingency plans for a Waco-type siege. And it is a place where everyone knows that to appear uninvited risks being shot on sight.
The place is Elohim City, an isolated religious community in the Ozark Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. Founded by a bearded former Canadian Mennonite preacher named Robert Millar, and currently being led by his son John, it is home to seventy-five men, women, and children who are true believers in the religious doctrine known as Christian Identity.



Clearly, this is a religious community with a difference. Its members believe that government is the enemy, that America's secular, multicultural society is a present-day Gomorrah, and that Elohim City is a bunker in a great battle between the children of darkness (the Jews) and the children of light (the Aryan race).

Elohim City became the subject of scrutiny in the last year when telephone records revealed thatTimothy McVeigh made calls to the rural enclave in the weeks prior to the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. More recently, however, it has been learned that Timothy McVeigh was heavily involved with the domestic terrorists who frequent Elohim City and who practice Christian Identity. But McVeigh's involvement is just one of a host of links that connect the increasingly violent activists of the racist far right to the doctrine which helps to inspire them. Christian Identity, which elevates white supremacy and separatism to a Godly ideal, is the ideological fuel that fires much of the activity of the racist far right.



By reinterpreting the biblical story of creation, practitioners of Christian Identity believe they have discovered a cosmic justification for modern-day racism. According to this reinterpretation, the origins of the Asian and African races lie in biblical "beasts of the fields" — beings of an order lower than humans, whose existence predates God's creation of Adam "in his own image." Adam was not the first man, but the first white man. As the Christian Identity version of the Creation story unfolds, the serpent, disguised as a white man, gets into the Garden of Eden and seduces Eve, who bears the devil — a son in the form of Cain. That's how the Jews get into the picture. Demonizing Jews has a lengthy history in Western culture, but for contemporary racists, Christian Identity provides the ultimate proof that Jews are indeed the "spawn of Satan." Their evidence is even more convincing than the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the faked 19th-century document which purported to be proof of a worldwide Jewis h conspiracy. Identity followers draw their antisemitism and racism from the Bible.



Although the connections are seldom made by the media, Christian Identity provides the ideological backbone of such groups as the Aryan Nations, which seeks to claim the western mountains as a white homeland; the Midwestern Posse Comitatus, a militant un derground which believes that the local sheriff is the highest legitimate elected official in the land; and Freemen groups like the one that held law enforcement authorities at bay in Montana in 1996.

On a more practical level, Christian Identity enclaves provide a trail of safe havens for movement activists, stretching from Hayden Lake in northern Idaho to Elohim City on the Oklahoma/Arkansas border. When Posse leader Gordon Kahl — eventually killed i n a shootout with federal marshals in 1983 — was on the run, he found shelter with Christian Identity followers in Arkansas. When the FBI was closing in on the Order gang, which had robbed banks and murdered Denver talk show host Alan Berg in the mid-1980 s, its members sought refuge in Bull Shoals Lake, Arkansas, encampment of the Covenant, Sword & Arm of the Lord, a Christian Identity religious community. And 1996 court documents indicate that members of the Aryan Republic Army, a Midwest gang of bank robbers who vowed to use their loot to finance a white revolution and who McVeigh became involved with, had ties to Elohim City.



Given the extraordinary prominence of Christian Identity in defining racial ideology and its political expression on the far right, it is astounding how little serious attention has been paid to the subject by mainstream Christian denominations. It is, after all, the most deeply held beliefs of Christian theologians and clergy — and the doctrines of their religious orders — that have been seized and twisted by Christian Identity practitioners to justify their very "un-Christian" acts. And these religious leaders have both the moral authority and — by virtue of their familiarity with the Bible and with Christian doctrine — the expertise needed to fight back. Yet with few exceptions, the mainstream denominations have remained curiously silent in the face of these modern-day crusades.



"I think one of the reasons is a great many clergy and others who would be equipped to deal with the theology don't really know much about it," says Michael Barkun, whose 1994 book Religion and the Racist Right explores the history and culture of Christian Identity. "They have some sense these are renegade groups that often espouse a white supremacist doctrine, but I think they are unfamiliar with the theology in many cases and not equipped to take it on. And even when they are equipped and k now something about it, I think there is a tendency to regard it not as worthy of attention because it's repugnant or because the numbers of people involved are small and because the groups lack much in the way of public visibility." Theologians who could confront it, says Barkun, "may feel that by doing so that would dignify it and give it a stature they don't wish to have."


In his research Barkun ran across just one graduate student at a seminary studying Christian Identity. When he talks about his book to religious groups, Barkun says, "It's as if they are hearing it for the first time. ...It strikes them that it is so unimaginably distant from the intellectual universe that they inhabit, I might as well be talking about a subject from another planet."



Finley Schaife, minister of the progressive Park Slope Methodist Church in Brooklyn, believes that the mainstream churches do not take the Christian racists seriously because "They don't have power in the mainline church. Nobody pays attention to the powerless. That's why they are blowing up things."



And that is precisely what this writer believes. Those living in Elohim City and other compounds across the country have been seen as impotent and thus regarded as a non-threat to our society. As they have been allowed the luxury of privacy from public scrutiny, so have they been afforded the opportunity to nurture and promulgate their brand of hatred. That hatred has manifested itself over the last few decades in increasingly more violent and heinous acts culminating most recently in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.


Timothy McVeigh was an agnostic. There is nothing indicating that he ascribed to the Identity religion. His political ideology, however, was the same as those who follow the Identity teachings. That he made friends with those who were the most extreme in their beliefs and actions is now well documented. That he was involved in the robberies and actions of the Aryan Republican Army has been attested to.

That Christian Identity adherents have spawned some of the most violent domestic terrorists of recent history is unquestionable. And that they have the blood of one-hundred and sixty-eight Americans on their hands is undeniable. And in view of recent evidence and intelligence reports obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Christian Identity adherents of Elohim City are known to be implicated in the domestic terrorist attack of April 19, 1995. Every Citizen Against Hate should be outraged. Every Citizen Against Hate should demand that each and every one of them be held accountable. Every Citizen Against Hate should demand justice.

12 comments:

  1. Just plain confused.

    Christian Identity has nothing to do with real christianity. Identity types merely take a few words of scripture totally out of context, and then ignore the rest of the bible.

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  2. Yeah, I agree, Harry. These guys are more than just a little squirrely.

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  3. They sound like a bunch of good ole Boys to me. It probably wouldn't be a bad place to live.

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  4. Again, Stevo - you missed the whole point of the article. How sad that you can't join in the discussion.

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  5. Matt...you assume an awful lot about me. You attribute affiliations and friendships to me and you know absolutely nothing about me.

    I have some very strong feelings about what happened in Oklahoma City on that day - and I have written about that extensively. Yes, Mr. Trentadue has made some revelations. The fact that there are still FBI documents that have not been released is quite unsettling.

    I keep my eyes and my mind open on this subject - and I can tell you that I really don't like anything about the government's "story."

    Please don't assume that you know anything about me. If you are unsure - just ask.

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  6. I think the Government did have some intelligence on Oklahoma City but not enough to put the pieces together similiar to the 911 attacks. You probably had 3 or 4 government agencies that had intelligence but did not share it with each other.

    Oklahoma City bombing was a turning point in the decline of white supremacist groups. They became much more splintered and infilterated. All those militias that formed in the early 90s started to drop off the map after the OKC bombing.

    And Oklahoma City was interesting because instead of starting a race war like William Pierce wrote it would, it lead to white racist running for the hills and countless others running to the cops.

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  7. A bit off topic but I just found the official anthem of the NSM

    http://tinyurl.com/7a7x5

    You're need Windows Media Player to open the song file.

    Enjoy

    :-)

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  8. Or to listen to the anthem of the NSM, just visit this page

    http://www.johnnyleeclary.com/nsm.htm

    It's a good essay on the NSM that plays the official NSM anthem in the background.

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  9. I found these quotes very intresting. But if you look up racial quotes and prose you find tons of it. For whites & against whites. For black and against them. ect...

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  10. Oh please! Ajax, I was giving you a lot more credit than this! You posting these same old tired quotes that have been making the white power circuit for years! Do you have any idea how long I have been responding to guys who throw these in our faces? I swear - you guys really DO need some new material!

    For every single one of those quotes I can present you with ten quotes that are are just as despicable or more so by whites against blacks. But, what's the point? YES AJAX, THERE ARE RACIST BLACKS, HISPANICS, ASIANS AND JEWS. There are those who HATE white people. But you know what - they aren't marching in lock-step down the streets of America and standing on the steps of state and municipal buildings screeching out their messages of hate. They aren't on the internet or standing outside the doors of our schools trying to recruit our children. They aren't preaching genocide and ethnic cleansing to the masses.

    Now...when you come up with something new...something that has not been done to death - come on back and see me. Until then, I refuse to respond to the hackneyed drivel that just seems to flow out of the racist movement.

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  11. Nikki,

    Just point him to stormfront or VNN forum's. 100s of messages a day.

    Then ask him to show ONE RACIST BLACK forum on the same scale.

    He can't.

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  12. You're the ones confused, not the Christian Identity. They do NOT pick and choose scriptures, they aren't like the judeo-christians who sell out the Bible for cash. You're a sad bunch in my eyes and you've made false charges against CI, my racial brethren.

    Adam and Eve were named Heb and Moheb, Man and woman. The literal translation of Heb is "Able to show blood in the Face". Only white people can do that, by blushing. Your problem as I said is misunderstanding and complacency. The truth is out there, you have only been misled by false teachers. Better a millstone be tied around your neck and thrown in the well than lead even one of my little ones astray. Guess you forgot to read that part too ?

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All comments must remain civil. No threats, racist epithets, or personal attacks will be tolerated. Rational debate, discourse, and even disagreement are all acceptable as long as they remain on point and within the realm of civility.