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

by Stuart Wexler

  Stoner and Fields increasingly began to see how they could harness the toxic combination of youthful arrogance, neo-Confederate racism, and male testosterone. More than anything, this concept was obvious in Stoner’s approach to counter-rallies and counter-protests. Stoner, with his close colleague Charles “Connie” Lynch, toured various cities that were home to civil rights struggles. There the two men became what author Patsy Sims refers to in her book The Klan as “a two-man riot squad.” More than anyone, it was Lynch, a southern California native who traveled in a pink Cadillac and wore a jacket of stitched-together Confederate flags, who inflamed audiences, often to actual acts of violence. As Sims describes it:

  Lynch once told a Baltimore rally crowd: “I represent God, the white race and constitutional government, and everyone who doesn’t like that can go straight to hell. I’m not inciting you to riot—I’m inciting you to victory!” His audience responded by chanting, “Kill the niggers! Kill! Kill!” After the rally, stirred-up white youths headed for the city’s slums, attacking blacks with fists and bottles. At another rally in Berea, Kentucky, Lynch’s diatribe was followed by two fatal shootings. Again, in Anniston, Alabama, he goaded his audience: “If it takes killing to get the Negroes out of the white’s man’s streets and to protect our constitutional rights, I say, ‘Yes, kill them!’” A carload of men left the rally and gunned down a black man on a stretch of highway.5

  The most notable example of the rabble-rousing incited by Lynch and Stoner came in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. Stoner and Lynch joined regional NSRP leader Oren Potito as he fought efforts to desegregate a city that was on the edge of widespread civil disorder and violence. Lynch especially pushed local segregationists over the edge. Following one Lynch rant, young segregationists attacked a protest march of nearly two hundred blacks. In one diatribe, Lynch specifically called out a local civil rights leader Robert Hayling. “If you were half the men you claimed to be,” Lynch insisted, “you’d kill him before sunup.” Four men kidnapped Hayling and three colleagues, brought their victims to the rally, proceeded to beat them to unconsciousness and nearly burned them to death. Lynch and Stoner earned a reputation for demagoguery that alarmed even Klan leaders. As Sims notes, during race rioting in Bogalusa, Louisiana, the local Grand Dragon tried to run both men out of town.6

  Often Stoner played a secondary role as an agitator but a primary role as a lawyer, defending his friend Lynch against charges of incitement; Connie Lynch spent very little time in jail. Soon Stoner found himself defending fellow racists and NSRP members across the nation. He even extended the group’s influence into Canada. While it rarely had more than 150 active members, the NSRP established franchises in more than a dozen states across the union, often run by very young members trained under Fields and Stoner in Birmingham. These members included James P. Thornton, who helped grow the NSRP in California with the assistance of retired colonel William Potter Gale and Neuman Britton, who ran the NSRP offshoot in Arkansas. Another nexus of NSRP leaders came from Florida. They had fled the Sunshine State for other places in the Southeast, in part to escape the scrutiny of local law enforcement after the violence in St. Augustine. One example was Sidney Crockett Barnes, a painter and suspected bomb maker, who fled to Mobile, Alabama, joining a preexisting contingent of NSRP exiles from Florida, including a future member of Mobile’s White Citizens Council, Noah Jefferson Carden.7

  But Stoner and Fields also parlayed the NSRP’s growing membership and influence into more conventional expressions of political dissent. In 1960 the group nominated two candidates for office in the U.S. presidential election: Arkansas governor Orval Faubus at the top of the ticket and Admiral John C. Crommelin, of Montgomery, Alabama, as the vice presidential candidate. Faubus had virtually no connection to the NSRP but had earned a national profile among racists for his open resistance to federally imposed integration efforts. In the unusual role of a write-in nominee, Faubus never agreed to his nomination; nor did he actively campaign for office. But Crommelin was another story. A World War II naval hero from an illustrious family line of naval officers, Crommelin arguably became the most well-known public anti-Semite in America in the 1950s, meriting the label “most serious threat to Jewish security in the southern states.”8 By 1964 Crommelin had already failed to win the Democratic primary to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate four times and had lost a 1958 bid to be governor of the Yellowhammer State. Referring constantly to a Jewish-led communist conspiracy to subvert the United States, he also echoed the literal party line of the NSRP: that the civil rights movement was part of that conspiracy. Together, Faubus and Crommelin received less than 0.1 percent of the national popular vote. Undeterred, Stoner himself joined a presidential ticket in 1964, as the vice presidential candidate, with his old friend from Tennessee, John Kasper, as the NSRP’s presidential hopeful. It would be one among many unsuccessful political bids for Stoner, as the pair earned even fewer votes than the Faubus–Crommelin ticket.9, 10, 11

  The NSRP’s candidates focused most of their attention on their pro-segregation agenda, perhaps because they saw what impact overt and strident racism and anti-Semitism had on a campaign for national office. Crommelin’s 1962 campaign for Alabama Senate had included “5 sound trucks all over the state blasting away the Christian message that Communism is Jewish from start to finish and that racial integration of … White people is a Jewish directed scheme to mongrelize the White Race, so that the almighty Jew can sit upon a throne to rule a world populated by a mass of mulatto like zombies.”12 Crommelin lost in landslides in each primary, never coming closer than third place.

  In the 1964 race for the presidency, the Kasper–Stoner ticket tended to present its agenda in racist code, referencing states’ rights, constitutional conservatism, anticommunism, and national sovereignty (meaning opposition to the United Nations). Many saw through this facade. A Florida state legislative committee, lamenting the agitation and violence that Stoner and Lynch had brought to St. Augustine, noted: “Today’s hawkers of hate have made capital of hiding behind the facade of conservatism and waving the banner of anticommunism. With their bigotry thus cloaked, they have made converts who unwittingly serve to undermine the causes in which they believe.”13

  But the racism and anti-Semitism attributed to the NSRP by the committee only spoke to the byproducts of what these men devoutly believed. A closer examination of the NSRP reveals a web of associations and group affiliations, and ultimately a commonly held and obscured agenda, that only a few understand. Virtually every senior leader of the NSRP just mentioned was also a devout follower of the Christian Identity religion. Lynch, Potito, Gale, Barnes, and Britton all became ordained ministers in the Reverend Wesley Swift’s Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. Gale, in fact, was among Swift’s closest aides and advisors and was frequently pictured wearing a priest’s collar. When he waged his 1962 campaign for the Alabama U.S. Senate nomination, Crommelin invited five Identity ministers, including Swift himself, to openly campaign for him. Potito served as Crommelin’s campaign manager. Others, including Kasper, Fields, Thornton, and Carden, were all on the mailing list to receive tapes of Swift’s CI sermons. Stoner and Fields appointed Gordon Winrod as the NSRP’s official pastor; Winrod, along with his father and son, belongs to three generations of Christian Identity ministers. Stoner was on an FBI list of Identity followers as late as 1974.

  These individuals were not simply cogs in the NSRP machinery. In many cases they affiliated with, led, and founded concurrent white supremacist organizations that ranked among the most active purveyors of violence in America from 1960 through 1980; offshoots of those organizations promote and participate in violence to this day. A list of such groups, circa 1972, includes:

  The Minutemen (not to be confused with the present-day citizens’ border patrol group), which openly advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Several Christian Identity devotees, including Lynch, Dennis Mower, and Kenneth Goff, assumed key roles in the group.

 
The California Rangers, an early antecedent to modern-day militia groups, which was started, organized, and managed by Gale and Thornton.

  The Posse Comitatus, organized by Gale, a militant anti-tax and antigovernment group.

  Various Ku Klux Klan factions, most notably the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, the most violent KKK subgroup, led by Sam Bowers, a Christian Identity militant.

  The violence these groups wrought on the United States is well documented and extensive. In many ways, the plots they considered but failed to execute are downright frightening. But scholars have failed to see the interactions and connections between members of these various groups—a protean social network of the most hardcore white supremacists America has ever produced. In failing to see the depth of these connections, scholars have also understated the common bond of solidarity that united these men: a radical strain of an offshoot Christian sect that predated the factious violence of the 1960s by more than one hundred years and that did not even originate in America.

  The theological school now called Christian Identity traces its roots back several hundred years, to when the “discovery” of the Americas fueled speculation about biblical history, specifically the destiny of the so-called ten lost tribes of Israel. Its most recognizable incarnation developed in Victorian England as an idea known as British Israelism. At the turn of the twentieth century, the idea spread to North America. There, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, it assumed an Ameri-centric hue and became more popular and more widely known as Anglo-Israelism. In both the U.S. and Canadian contexts, elements of Anglo-Israelism began to shift in a more racist direction. The key moment in the intellectual development of Christian Identity theology emerged as World War II came to a close. It centered around a major reinterpretation of the biblical creation story, one that shaped the landscape of white supremacy and racist violence in the decades that followed, thanks in large part to the work of the Reverend Wesley Albert Swift.

  But a new biblical genealogy lay at the heart of Christian Identity teaching. For hundreds of years, scholars have speculated about the “lost” tribes of Israel, who according to the Old Testament were deported by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. According to the biblical narrative, following the prophet Abraham’s covenant with God, the descendants of the Hebrew patriarch became the genealogical foundation for the Jewish people. Specifically, God blessed Abraham’s grandson Jacob as the forefather of the nation of Israel. Ten of Jacob’s children and two of his grandchildren originated the bloodlines of the migrants who settled Palestine after Moses led the enslaved Hebrews out of Egypt during the Exodus. Ten tribes became the demographic foundation of the northern half of Israel, known as the Kingdom of Israel. (The southern half was known as the Kingdom of Judah.) But King Shalmaneser V of Assyria, following his conquest of the northern kingdom, exiled the ten tribes from the region. The Old Testament never discusses their ultimate destiny, as the rest of the narrative focuses on the tribes that remained in Judah, the descendants of Judah and Benjamin.

  The fate of the ten lost tribes (sometimes referred to as the House of Israel) remained important to Jews and Christians alike because of its association with biblical prophecy. Many theologians interpret texts of the Bible to suggest that in the last days of the secular world, on the eve of the so-called Final Judgment, the House of Israel and the House of Judah will reunite in the Promised Land. Only then will God send a Messiah to save his chosen people. Many Christians believe this event will coincide with the second coming of Jesus.

  In the 1500s various European scholars and adventurers claimed to have discovered the lost tribes: in North America as Native Americans; in Afghanistan as the Pashtuns; in Ethiopia as the Falashas. The foundational tenet of what is now called Christian Identity—that some or all of these tribes mixed with early Europeans, especially Anglo-Saxons—can be found as early as the 1790s. In his book A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and the Times, Richard Brothers, a British naval officer, claimed to have received a divine revelation on this and related ideas. The book, and a very minor movement started by Brothers, lost traction after his death in 1824.

  A more meticulous and far less mystical articulation of the same idea emerged in 1837, when Scottish linguist John Wilson published research speculating that the British people (he specifically referenced the bloodlines of the British monarchy) were connected to the lost tribe of Ephraim. Publishers reprinted Wilson’s book on the subject five times during his lifetime. By the time of his death, another Englishman, Edward Hine, had popularized a variation on the idea, arguing that white Europeans were the true chosen people of the Bible, that Jesus was an Aryan and not an ethnic Jew, and that European Jews were descendants of Mongolian-Turkish Khazars and had not originated in North Africa and the Middle East. In Victorian England, when the British Empire controlled more than one-quarter of the earth’s land mass and the British Navy dominated the world’s oceans, this kind of chauvinism gained wide currency. Hine’s book became a best seller, selling 250,000 copies. In the 1880s Hine took himself and his ideas to another emerging world power with Anglo-Saxon roots: the United States of America. Hine gained a modest following in the Northeast and Canada, where he toured and gave presentations on his theory, which became known as British Israelism.14

  But the religious ideas exported by Wilson and Hine were less anti-Jewish than they were pro-Anglo-Saxon. An unfortunate byproduct of timing meant that the religious movement began its geographic spread inside the United States—mostly westward toward California—during the early twentieth century, when America was becoming increasingly xenophobic and hospitable to racism. The nation’s second major wave of immigration, which brought millions of southern Italian Catholics and Eastern European Jews through places like Ellis Island, elicited a backlash against the new arrivals, which only intensified in the cauldron of ugly anti-ethnic feelings stirred up by World War I. AntiSemitism and racism began to manifest themselves in both academic circles and popular culture as a whole.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, a number of American community activists, biologists, and social scientists responded to the influx of European immigrants with alarm. Fearing that the newly arriving Americans could not assimilate into the wider culture, and worried that “inferior” races would contaminate America’s gene pool or populate American society with generation after generation of imbeciles or criminals, these men and women became the foundation for the modern eugenics movement. Historian Ed Black asserts that the eugenicists hoped that by “identifying so-called ‘defective’ family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs they could literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior—the so-called ‘unfit.’”15 Not surprisingly, eugenicists often counted Jews among the “unfit” given their sizable presence among the immigrant population.

  In 1926 one of the leading eugenicists of his time, historian Lothrop Stoddard, described two races of Jews. He said that the “aristocratic” Sephardic Jews, who had entered the Mediterranean world, were the genuine Semites and that the Ashkenazic Jews (from Eastern Europe and Russia) were a mixture of diverse bloods, with features that reflected intermarriage with the Hittites. He said that these eastern Jews had migrated into southern Russia, where they had blended with the Khazars, whom Stoddard regarded as a combination of Turkish and Mongoloid peoples. Although Stoddard had no connection with British Israelism, the movement readily adopted the Khazar identity of the Jews as a further way to invalidate their claim to be descendants of the biblical Hebrews.16

  According to religious scholar Michael Barkun, this secular strand of anti-Semitic genealogy developed from similar sources as British Israelism but evolved separately as an independent canon of pseudo-anthropological research. The scientific racism of people like Stoddard helped legitimize and reinforce racism against other minorities as well, blacks in particular.

  In his highly influential work The Rising Tide of Color, Stoddard clai
med that the black man’s “most outstanding quality is his animal vitality.” Blacks were “the quickest of the breeders,” but they lacked “constructive originality,” and had it not been for the intervention of other races, “the negro would have remained a savage.” But while their “ineptitude” helped keep their populations in check, outside interventions by more cultivated races since the 1800s meant that blacks were “assured to multiply prodigiously” in the next few decades. The danger to white civilization came not from their growing numbers but because blacks could be easily manipulated by other (nonwhite) races and because of the potential for “crossbreeding.” Stoddard asserted that “black blood, once entering human stock, seems never really bred out again.”17 These ideas would become a direct influence on the intellectual development of Christian Identity in the 1940s. By the 1960s, according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, “the Khazar ancestry of the Jews was a firm article of faith” for white supremacists.18

  In the meantime, eugenicists’ ideas indirectly impacted the evolution of British Israelism in the United States by providing intellectual cover to deeply held prejudices with a long pedigree in certain segments of American society. By the 1920s these prejudices were becoming more and more widespread. During World War I, African Americans began to migrate to northern cities in large numbers to escape Jim Crow and to take readily available factory work. This migration stoked latent racial antagonism in the North. World War I also left a residue of xenophobia and jingoism directed at America’s immigrant population, including Jews. This combination of racism and nativism found its outlet in what historians refer to as the first Klan revival or the Second Klan, which began in 1915.