America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (36 page)

As they had with farmers' discontent through the Posse Comitatus, Christian Identity sycophants commandeered nativism to their cause, appealing to a larger audience than they could have acquired if they had made their religious aspirations and ideas more obvious.
But Metzger outgrew Duke's KKKK (and, he says now, Christian Identity), separating to form his own branch of the Klan in California. He eventually left the Klan altogether to start the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) in 1984. As will be detailed later, Metzger, through WAR, became a significant instigator for white supremacist violence. Even today he is regarded as “one of the most notorious living white supremacists in the United States.”
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If Metzger has a rival for that title, Dennis Mahon is a good candidate. Mahon joined Duke's group with his twin brother, Daniel, in the mid-1970s. Illinois farm boys, they rose through the ranks of the KKK until 1988, when Dennis formed his own group, the Missouri White Knights. He also became an important aide to Metzger with WAR. Mahon did not receive any official ordination in the Christian Identity movement, but his connections to the movement were to remain strong. He maintained a trailer at Millar's Identity compound, Elohim City. That association will become important in the upcoming discussion of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In 2009 federal prosecutors convicted both Mahon brothers for their role in a 2004 mail bombing of a post office in Arizona that injured three people.

Louis Beam, another Christian Identity adherent, left the United Klans of America to join Duke's KKKK in 1976. A Texan and veteran of the Vietnam War, Beam became the group's chief strategist and trainer on issues of guerrilla warfare. Beam's writings on leaderless resistance, in which autonomous, decentralized cells of militants work independently to perform acts of terrorism, became very important as supremacist terrorism evolved in the 1980s and 1990s. But Beam, together with Warner, also influenced Odinism, a new religious movement that combined Norse mythology with Christian symbolism. Based on Viking gods and religious folklore, Odinism found a natural fit with modern white supremacists, just as it had with German Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. Dennis Mahon, among others, began to shift his religious affiliation to Odinism in the 1980s. Rooted in an ancient European warrior ethic, and embracing the cultural anthropology of Aryanism, radical Odinism honored concepts similar to those of Christian Identity. Social scientist Timothy Miller asserts: “Militant racist Odinists advocate racial cleansing, believing
that the manifest destiny of Aryans is to become victorious over the ‘lower' races and eradicating them from the face of the Earth.” Odinists called their end-times “Ragnarok . . . a final war that will culminate in the restoration of Aryans to power and produce a new Golden Age.”
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In an odd replay of history, Odinism in the twentieth century seemed to parallel the evolution of its pagan progenitors before the first millennium. When the earliest Christians sought to convert pagans, including Teutonic tribes, to their growing flock, they often found willing proselytes, in part because the converts simply incorporated Christian beliefs, practices, and symbols into their preexisting belief systems. Jesus became simply another major deity, and saints became lesser gods in a process that cultural anthropologists call syncretism. But in the late twentieth century, when it came to militant Odinism, this process seemed to work in reverse. As paganism enjoyed a minor resurgence in the late twentieth century, some white supremacists were attracted to variations of Odinism that were heavily influenced by former Christian Identity sycophants like Louis Beam.

In fact, the ubiquitous presence and influence of radical Christianity within the upper echelons of America's hate groups in the 1960s meant that its theology exercised enormous influence on later belief systems, even when later groups openly ridiculed or distanced themselves from Christian Identity theology. In the early 1970s, two new religious movements, both with origins in the recalibration of right-wing extremism and both with legacies of rationalizing violence for decades thereafter, explicitly condemned Swift's theology but produced alternative belief systems that are indistinguishable from CI. These were Cosmotheism and the Church of the Creator (which came to be called the Creativity movement).

Cosmotheism—the idea that “cosmic order is God”—was the brainchild of one of the most important and influential figures in the history of domestic terrorism in the United States. At the time he founded the church, William Luther Pierce was a middle-aged physicist with an extensive background in white supremacy. Raised in Atlanta on the values of segregation, Pierce's earliest experiences were with groups like the American Nazi Party in the 1960s. Later
he joined Willis Carto, a leading public anti-Semite, in presidential politicking. The two converted the Youth for Wallace group—a sort of Young Republicans for racist Alabama governor George Wallace's 1968 third-party presidential campaign—into the National Youth Alliance. But Carto accused Pierce of double-dealing, and the two parted ways in the early 1970s, at which point Pierce, with sole control, converted the National Youth Alliance into the National Alliance. Pierce, who was also associated with the National State Rights Party, rejected the supernatural elements of Christian Identity but created Cosmotheism as a way to provide spiritual direction and solidarity for his membership. Pierce repurposed Cosmotheism in much the same way that Identity theologians coopted Christianity.

The idea that the laws of nature are manifestations of a higher power has a long tradition. Cosmotheism is more or less Deism for racists, and it likely appealed to Pierce in the same way that Deism appealed to Benjamin Franklin, also a scientist. The religion allows for spirituality without the concept of supernatural intervention in the secular world. In Pierce's formulation, a higher power designed the universe, with laws and a purpose, and then got out of the way, letting the laws guide human outcomes. For Pierce, the purpose was a racially pure world. Pierce often ridiculed Identity theology, but he spent his life working with groups and individuals who were influenced by its tenets. As many scholars have observed, Cosmotheism and CI bear a striking resemblance, making it impossible to ignore the influence of Identity ideology on Pierce.
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For instance, in his essay “What Is the National Alliance,” Pierce asserted, “After the sickness of ‘multiculturalism,' which is destroying America, Britain, and every other Aryan nation in which it is being promoted, has been swept away, we must again have a racially clean area of the earth for the further development of our people. . . . We will not be deterred by the difficulty or temporary unpleasantness involved, because we realize that it is absolutely necessary for our racial survival.”
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The “temporary unpleasantness” was a euphemism for a race war.

The FBI recognized Pierce's leadership potential before he assumed an influential role within the white supremacist movement. It recognized Pierce's talent for writing political propaganda as early
as 1966. As will become clear later, much misery and violence owes itself to Pierce eventually realizing his potential.

Much like Pierce, Ukrainian-born Ben Klassen understood the power of the written word to inspire movements. Having immigrated to North America at a young age, Klassen, like Pierce, eventually became active in the presidential campaign of George Wallace. Like Pierce, he found his voice in the fragmentation and proliferation of white supremacist groups of the 1970s. In 1973 Klassen wrote
The White Man's Bible
and began a movement. The Church of the Creator (COTC), or Creativity movement, continued to influence white supremacist terrorists as late as the 1990s. “Our Avowed Purpose,” Klassen asserted in his influential text, is to “again revive the healthy instincts with which Nature endowed even the White Race and to bring it back to sanity so that our people will not only recognize their enemies, but also learn to exercise their instinctive urge to overcome them.” Those enemies, Klassen insisted, were “number one, the International Jew, the whole Jewish network, the Jew as an individual. Number two is the mass of colored races, whom we shall designate simply as the mud races.”
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However similar these ideas are to Christian Identity theology, Klassen drew key distinctions. Notably, he called Christianity itself a harmful myth. He not only doubted that Anglo-Saxons had descended from one of the lost ten tribes of Israel but also questioned whether the ten tribes had ever existed. If Pierce's religious ideas represented a new take on Deism, then Klassen's philosophy, observed religious scholar Mattias Gardell, added a quasi-spiritual dimension to social Darwinism. In another book, published the same year as the
White Man's Bible,
Klassen spoke to “Nature's eternal law,” whereby the white man has naturally evolved into “a realized Nietzschean superman.”
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Despite a public fallout between Klassen and the followers of Christian Identity, it is hard to ignore how much CI influenced the COTC, especially when it came to Klassen's vision for the future. Like Swift's followers before him, Klassen set up a military-style training camp. On land in Otto, North Carolina, Klassen's trainees prepared “for total war against the Jews and the rest of the goddamned mud races of the world—politically, militantly, financially, morally and religiously. In fact, we regard it as the heart of our religious creed,
and as the most sacred credo of all. We regard it as a holy war to the finish—a racial holy war. Rahowa! is INEVITABLE.”
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Klassen, not a member of Christian Identity, coined the term
racial holy war,
and the abbreviation
rahowa
remains a popular tattoo among white supremacists across the nation.

If the national landscape of white supremacist groups appears to be a panoply of new and idiosyncratic organizations, loosely and independently shaped by the influence of Christian Identity, this was not the objective of all racialist extremists. Some resisted the trend toward fragmentation.

The Reverend Robert E. Miles, a Christian Identity pastor from Michigan, described by scholars as an “elder statesmen” of the movement, attempted to consolidate the trend toward greater cooperation and collaboration among CI-connected hate groups that had begun in the mid-1960s. Calling his movement Unity Now, Miles attempted, in 1970, to unite disparate antigovernment and anti-Jewish groups to attack the establishment. As a gathering of Unity Now in 1973 demonstrated, almost all its key members were racists or Christian Identity zealots. An awards ceremony held at the gathering speaks to the extent to which Identity theology had thoroughly penetrated the ranks of American extremist organizations. Pastor Roy Frankhouser won the Valor Under Fire award; Minister James Freed won the Defense of Christian Law honor; Renato Verani, an American Legion commander, won the Christian Militancy award; CI pastor George Kindred won the Resistance to Taxation prize; and Miles himself took home the honor for White Christian Brotherhood. The groups represented at the conference included the United Klans of America as well as the Western Guard of Canada. The benediction was given by James Forster, a pastor from the Ministry of Christ Church, which was essentially a seminary for Identity preachers. But a heavy concentration of attendees and award winners came from Miles's own state of Michigan, and Unity Now never gained widespread momentum. In 1971 Miles was arrested. He soon went to prison, convicted of firebombing ten empty school buses and of tarring and feathering a school principal in protest of government-imposed integration programs in his home state.
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Miles aligned himself closely with Frankhouser, but as it turned out,
by 1973 the former eastern regional head of the Minutemen was a paid informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The most enduring effort to unify white supremacist groups relates, not surprisingly, to Wesley Swift. When Swift died in 1972, he left the legacy of the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian to an understudy, Richard Butler, an engineer for Lockheed-Martin. Butler moved the CJCC to Hayden Lake, Idaho, where it became the church for his new group, the Aryan Nations, an organization that welcomed neo-Nazi and KKK factions under one umbrella. In 1979 Butler hosted the Pacific Kingdom Identity Conference, “a springboard for his attempts to align such fairly diverse groups as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, Posse Comitatus, and others during the 1980s.”
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By the 1990s, Butler's hate group had become one of the nation's largest and best known, building a base of young, disaffected skinheads using a strategy similar to Jim Ellison's.

But divisions and rivalries continued to make it difficult to unite disparate groups behind some kind of collective action. The Associated Press reported that the Klan in 1979 was a “hodge podge of factions, names and philosophies.”
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In one example, Bill Wilkinson, a key member of David Duke's KKK outfit, split from his mentor's hate group to form his own KKK organization, poaching hundreds of members from Duke's group in the process. Duke ridiculed Wilkinson's group as “illiterate, gun-toting, rednecks.” “We're not just a bunch of fools running around in bed sheets,” Duke claimed.
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As it turned out, Wilkinson had been an FBI informant since 1974. When this fact was exposed in 1981, Wilkinson went into hiding, possibly through the Federal Witness Protection Program. It is difficult to tell if Wilkinson was simply a source of information on the Klan or if he formed his new organization at the government's urging, as yet another attempt to divide and fragment the white supremacist community.
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For that reason, it is also difficult to say whether the FBI exposed itself to criminal complicity by associating with Wilkinson and his group.