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

by Stuart Wexler

  According to Swift, Jesus is the savior for all true chosen people, including the lost tribes, but he condemned “false Jews” as serpents and devils. Over time, the descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh migrate to England and America, respectively; America becomes the new Holy Land.

  From the end of World War II on through the 1950s, through the work of Swift, but also Gale, and many other Identity preachers, two-seedline theorists developed their own creed, with a set of biblical references that are important in distinguishing between religious zealots and conventional racists. One of the leading Identity churches today, Kingdom Identity ministries, offers the following doctrinal statement:

  WE BELIEVE the White, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and kindred people to be God’s true, literal Children of Israel. Only this race fulfills every detail of Biblical Prophecy and World History concerning Israel and continues in these latter days to be heirs and possessors of the Covenants, Prophecies, Promises and Blessings YHVH God made to Israel. This chosen seedline making up the “Christian Nations” (Gen. 35:11; Isa. 62:2; Acts 11:26) of the earth stands far superior to all other peoples in their call as God’s servant race (Isa. 41:8, 44:21; Luke 1:54). Only these descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel scattered abroad (James 1:1; Deut. 4:27; Jer. 31:10; John 11:52) have carried God’s Word, the Bible, throughout the world (Gen. 28:14; Isa. 43:10–12, 59:21), have used His Laws in the establishment of their civil governments and are the “Christians” opposed by the Satanic Anti-Christ forces of this world who do not recognize the true and living God (John 5:23, 8:19, 16:2–3).

  WE BELIEVE in an existing being known as the Devil or Satan and called the Serpent (Gen. 3:1; Rev. 12:9), who has a literal “seed” or posterity in the earth (Gen. 3:15) commonly called Jews today (Rev. 2:9; 3:9; Isa. 65:15). These children of Satan (John 8:44–47; Matt. 13:38; John 8:23) through Cain (I John 2:22, 4:3) who have throughout history always been a curse to true Israel, the Children of God, because of a natural enmity between the two races (Gen. 3:15), because they do the works of their father the Devil (John 8:38–44), and because they please not God, and are contrary to all men (I Thes. 2:14–15), though they often pose as ministers of righteousness (II Cor. 11:13–15).

  Swift and his friends like Comparet and Capt were not the first people to interpret the Bible in a racist or anti-Semitic direction, but they did so in a radical way. Most racist interpretations of Genesis—the passages of the Bible used by some to justify slavery in the antebellum South and segregation in the decades that followed—rely on Chapters 9 through 11, which narrate the fate of mankind after the Great Flood. Segregationists specifically rely on what author Stephen Haynes calls Noah’s curse or the curse of Ham and on the story of the Tower of Babel. According to this racist interpretation, Ham, the son of Noah, witnesses and gossips about his father’s nakedness. Scholars have debated what this means, but for our purposes, the punishment is what mattered. Ham is cursed by Noah. In some treatments this curse includes black skin and applies to Ham’s descendants, the dreaded Canaanites. Later, by Genesis 11, Ham’s grandson Nimrod is king of an area that includes the town of Babel, where men in their arrogance build a mighty tower to make a name for themselves. God then “confused their language” and “scattered them abroad from there all over the face of the Earth.” While Nimrod is never directly mentioned as the ringleader of the tower project, commentators have traditionally associated him with it. Thus one can see, in a cohesive interpretation of Genesis 9 through 11, a similar theme: the God-ordained differentiation and separation of the races. Not surprisingly, this interpretation served as justification for segregation and for the notion of the racial inferiority (per Ham’s curse) of blacks.30

  These chapters do not leave much room for anti-Semitism, especially since the story of Abraham and Moses come later in the Bible. AntiSemitism, historically, has relied instead on an interpretation of the books of the New Testament that show some Jews rejecting Jesus as the Messiah and supposedly arranging for Jesus’s Crucifixion. For centuries, Jews were mistreated on the basis of these interpretations, but their basic humanity, their original role as the chosen people, and their potential for salvation have rarely been questioned. The closest one comes to the type of exegesis one finds in Christian Identity theology would be Martin Luther’s The Jews and Their Lies, published in 1543. But even Luther reserved the term devils for Jews who rejected Christ, not for all Jews; he did not assert that Jews were literally the offspring of Satan.

  A look at three different and highly influential ministers from the 1960s provides an interesting contrast to Swift. The Reverend Billy Graham, who was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr.’s, rarely cited any of the Christian Identity’s favored biblical passages in his major sermons. The Reverend Bob Jones, whose religious university embraced segregation well into the 1990s, referenced the Tower of Babel in a sermon warning against segregation; he did not mention the curse of Ham, and he was welcoming toward Jews. Segregationist minister Ferrell Griswold quoted from Genesis 9 through 11, but even though Griswold spoke to large gatherings of KKK members throughout Alabama, he did not couch his anti-Semitism in the two-seed theory of Genesis. What anti-Semitism appeared in Griswold’s sermons was similar to the charges voiced by Father Coughlin, who associated Jews with international communism.

  Swift’s sermons and writings completely reoriented the narrative and the justifications of racial and religious hatred. According to Swift, Jews and nonwhite races were not even in Noah’s bloodline, much less Ham’s. They were either satanic, in the case of Jews, or subhuman, in the case of nonwhite minorities.

  This shift has both substantive and evidentiary value as we proceed through the study of America’s hidden history of religious terrorism. Substantively, the dehumanization of Jews and other minorities serves the same function as dehumanization in many acts of human-on-human violence: justifying and rationalizing horrible treatment of “the Other.” In 1968, for instance, Sam Bowers, Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, referenced this very kind of religious rationale when publicly criticizing (in a letter) a Mississippi law enforcement officer who had killed one of his operatives. In an event that will be described later in more depth, two of Bowers’s operatives targeted a local rabbi in his home but never met their objective, as they were trapped in a law enforcement sting operation. In his letter after the sting, Bowers praised the dead operative and harangued the law enforcement officer. His reasoning? The operative was a good Christian. Though the rabbi’s life may have been spared by the officer, the rabbi was the spawn of Satan.31 Likewise, when Connie Lynch spoke at a St. Augustine, Florida, counter-rally in 1963, in reference to the recent bombing murders of four young black girls in Birmingham, Alabama, he commented, “The victims weren’t children. Children are little people. Little human beings, and that means white people… . They’re just little niggers, and if there’s four less niggers tonight, then I say, ‘Good for whoever planted the bomb!’”32 Such hideous public rhetoric was almost unknown even to the most hardened bigots, but Lynch was simply echoing the thinking of a minister convinced of the two-seed theory.

  From an evidentiary point of view, the unique nature of Swift’s biblical analysis becomes an important tool in identifying actual acts of religious terrorism. In public, for reasons that will become clear, Identity adherents rarely spoke openly about their unique religious vision. But one can find reference to a handful of biblical verses favored by the CI movement in the literature (such as pamphlets) surrounding attacks and in references to the core concepts, however coded, in CI members’ speeches.

  The very fact that these biblical justifications were available to a small but influential group of the nation’s most active white supremacists is also a testament to Wesley Swift. He not only shaped the theology of radical Christian Identity, he also became its chief evangelist. Swift, like Father Coughlin, became a major radio presence, delivering intense weekly sermons to over 1 million listeners.33 Smith’s reach and influ
ence benefited from one innovation that Coughlin did not have access to: tape recordings. Christian Identity followers became their own distribution nodes for Swift’s sermons, copying and playing the tapes for fellow travelers. As early as 1965, a mailing list of recipients of Swift’s taped sermons included dozens of people in nearly every U.S. state, Canada, Europe, and parts of Asia.34

  The appeal of these tapes to right-wing zealots cannot be overstated. More than one person claimed to have been personally indoctrinated into the Christian Identity faith from listening to Swift’s taped sermons. Starting in the late 1960s, distributors in Jackson, Mississippi, held popular listening parties, where they played Swift’s tapes. One Mississippi man, Burris Dunn, appears to have been brainwashed by Swift’s message. Described by his ex-wife as a mild-mannered if dedicated segregationist, Dunn began listening to Swift’s tapes, becoming more and more radicalized with each recording. Soon Dunn began forcing his wife and children to listen to the tapes, at the threat of violence. The wife was forced to flee with her children. For his part, Dunn became one of the key aides for Sam Bowers, whom he idolized.35

  Just as importantly, Swift, a former rifle instructor for the California KKK, began to use his Church of Jesus Christ–Christian as a front for paramilitary activities connected to the Identity message. Together with his then-ally Colonel William Potter Gale, who had counterinsurgency expertise from his days in the military, Swift created the Christian Defense League (CDL) in the early 1960s. The group was a multilayered organization, aimed in part at hiding military-style hit squads behind seemingly benign fronts. Researcher David Boylan describes four such fronts:

  The “First Front” was the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian. Faithful members of the CJCC were recruited for the “Second Front” [known as] the AWAKE movement. The more militant members were then recruited in to the “Third Front” which was the Christian Knights of the Invisible Empire (CKIE) “which will have the outward impression of a political-religious group not interested in violence.” It was from this group that the most militant members were recruited for the “Inner Den.” These recruits were the ones that committed acts of violence. Gale stated that “leaders in our country might have to be eliminated to further the goals of the CKIE” and that “God will take care of those who must be eliminated.”36

  Gale and Swift experienced a rift in December 1963, but the CJCC and the CKIE persisted, and both men continued as influential members of the Christian Identity movement. But for all Swift’s influence and publicity, few Americans, either during his lifetime or in the twenty-first century, understood the impact he had on racial violence in the United States.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the first (and only) people to catch on to the danger posed by groups like the NSRP and the CDL, and to recognize the web of connections between members of several right-wing organizations, was the attorney general of California, Thomas Lynch. In 1965 he wrote a report that singled out the NSRP as “more potentially dangerous than any of the American Nazi groups.” The report also covered the CDL, the California Rangers, and the Minutemen. Lynch even pointed out the connections between leaders of these groups and the CJCC.37 But the report failed to take the next step: to argue that religion was one of the driving forces behind these groups’ terrorist actions.

  There are at least two explanations for this oversight. First, as noted in the previous chapter, the context for anti-Semitic violence was shaped by the world community’s experience during World War II. Americans were not even a generation removed from the Holocaust, and Hitler’s Final Solution was motivated primarily by scientific racism, not religious theology. The language of the report, referring to these diverse right-wing organizations as “American Nazi groups,” suggests that that mind-set still dominated the thinking on anti-Semitism.

  But if the California attorney general was keen to the religious devotion of people like Stoner and Gale, why didn’t he see these groups as an exception to that rule? The obvious answer is that from 1959 through 1966, there were few attacks by these men or their organizations against Jewish targets such as synagogues (or rabbis). Many people assume that the attacks on Jewish targets in the 1950s were part and parcel of the wider resistance to integration that came later. If this was Lynch’s theory, the attacks on Jewish targets after racists lost their struggle against integration in the South raises serious questions about that rationale. But the California attorney general was writing before Sam Bowers targeted Jewish institutions in Mississippi from 1967 to 1968. Attorney General Lynch, and others, could reasonably ask: If religion was such a motivating force, and the men and groups in question hated Jews as much as if not more than blacks, why did the attacks on Jewish targets stop from 1960 to 1965, when white supremacist groups were at their most powerful?

  The answer lies in what at first seems to be a counterintuitive observation: Because of their power and influence from 1960 to 1965, devotees of Christian Identity could not directly attack Jewish targets during the peak of the civil rights movement. While it may be accurate to refer to devotees such as Stoner as religious terrorists, it would not be accurate to refer to the rank-and-file members as religious terrorists. For all its theological gymnastics, Christian Identity theology, and two-seed theory in particular, is an outlier in the Christian world, and CI remains a very minor sect to this day. The typical KKK member, the typical subscriber to The Thunderbolt (the NSRP’s periodical), if he was religious at all, had attended a Sunday school that had taught the conventional narrative of Adam and Eve. He had also grown up in an environment with few Jews—and Jews who “kept their heads down.” To the average dues-paying Klansman, Jews did not pose a threat to the “southern way of life”—African American civil rights activists did.

  Wallace Allen, one of the men tried (and acquitted) for bombing the Temple in Atlanta in 1958, wrote a letter to Emory Burke that same year, describing his frustration with the “no-goods” in right-wing organizations who “want to stop integration without fighting the Jews.” Allen wanted a new set of leaders who would drive these “lukewarm” people out of the white supremacist cause. He longed for a “band of hard core, idealistic, fanatical leaders (who will tackle all, not part of the problem) to organize into a group of their own and set out, like the disciples to win over everyone in this fight to the death with the Jews. Anything less will never succeed.” There is little doubt that Allen, like his colleague J.B. Stoner, embraced something like Christian Identity, as he closes the letter by calling for “a careful thought out mass movement as scientific as it is fanatical, idealistic, devoted, and determined to destroy the Asiatic Jewish Khazars, who are not only responsible for integration, but whose evil fangs are at the jugular vein of civilization itself—this I’ll die for anytime.”38

  But Allen never got his wish. Even as the civil rights movement made gains in the early 1960s and white opposition became more intense, Christian Identity adherents could not sway the neo-Confederate southern nationalists to attack Jews.

  Few mainstream KKK groups routinely interacted with the NSRP because of its extremism, especially on the Jewish question. Attempts were made, for instance by Sam Bowers in Mississippi, to convince the general membership of some KKK groups to shift their focus to Jewish violence—but that did not work, not even in 1964 when northern Jewish students flocked to Mississippi by the thousands to help blacks in the Delta register to vote.

  Though speculative, it seems likely that the religiously motivated extremists were left with a choice between two options. They could align their goals to those of the wider segregationist movement and thus maximize their influence and financial backing, or they could commit to ideological purity and target Jews at all costs. Favoring the latter would mean sacrificing the former. Attacking Jewish targets would alienate many would-be foot soldiers who would otherwise be happy to burn down a black church or beat down civil rights protestors. Connie Lynch could inflame a crowd with a rant on race mixing, but similar rhetoric against Jews would probably b
affle the same audiences.

  As will become clear in the next several chapters, from 1959 to 1968, Christian Identity zealots like Bowers and Stoner chose the first option. They chose to hide their religious agenda from their rank-and-file followers. They engaged in Machiavellian manipulation, but they were not resigned to a life of “lukewarm” violence that ignored the core problem, as they saw it: the satanic Jewish conspiracy. America’s early Christian Identity terrorists were playing the long game. To understand how men like Stoner and Bowers exploited vigilante racism and blue-collar KKK members, one must appreciate what that long game was. Once again, the answer lies in a radical reinterpretation of biblical texts. Only this time, the material in question is not about the beginning of time but the end of times.

  3

  THE DAYS OF NOAH

  the 1962 OLE MISS INTEGRATION RIOTS and the 1963 MURDER of MEDGAR EVERS

  On September 30, 1962, the Reverend Wesley Swift delivered a sermon at the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian in Hollywood, California:

  As we turn tonight to survey the situation, you remember that we discussed quite thoroughly this afternoon as we talked about being surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses—this continual invasion of state rights, and individual liberties by those who control the Federal Government. We only mention that there is nothing more abhorrent to every free American than increasing Federalism, guided by the enemies of Jesus Christ surrounding the President of the United States, whose mind they must hold captive… . I charge that the President of the United States has committed a felony… . And with his using of Federal troops which he used today in the state of Mississippi, he has become a felon whether there is courage enough in the Congress to charge him for impeachment and for the Senate to hear such a case.1