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

by Stuart Wexler

  In the 1990s, antiabortion and anti-gay violence became part of the Phineas Priesthood, an offshoot of Christian Identity radicalism that many believe influenced Buford Furrow when he opened fire at the Jewish community center in Los Angeles. When police found Furrow’s abandoned van, it contained “ammunition, bulletproof vests, explosives and freeze-dried food” and two books: an Army Ranger handbook and War Cycles, Peace Cycles by Richard Kelly Hoskins. The latter work, by “unlocking the mysteries and hidden secrets of the Bible,” predicts an apocalyptic economic catastrophe inspired by Jewish usury and “explains the necessity for the assassination of national leaders.”10 Hoskins, a reclusive Virginia-born Korean War veteran, has authored a number of tracts that combine fundamentalist theology, anti-Semitism and racism, and economic history. His most famous work, Vigilantes of Christendom, published in 1990, has to rank alongside The Turner Diaries as one of the most influential books for white supremacist, religious terrorism. In it, Hoskins recounts the biblical story of Phineas, the nephew of Moses, as a model for the kind of God-sanctioned activity that Hoskins felt was necessary to combat the growing satanic Jewish conspiracy. The Bible describes an episode in the ongoing rivalry between Israel and the neighboring tribe of Moab in which Hebrew men “indulge in sexual immorality with Moabite women” and begin to worship Moab’s pagan idols. The Hebrew God, infuriated with this behavior, punishes the Jewish people with a plague that ceases only when Phineas drives a spear through a Hebrew man and a Moabite woman.

  Several aspects of this account are important to Hoskins. First, God’s anger is driven, according to Hoskins, not simply because the Hebrews strayed from God’s commandments but by the act of miscegenation between the chosen people and a heathen tribe. Phineas shares in that anger and acts on his own accord, according to Hoskins. Moreover, Phineas does not ask permission of Moses, his father (the priest Eleazar), or even God. Yet God celebrates the deed in Chapter 25 of the book of Numbers: “Phineas … has turned my anger away from the Israelites. Since he was as zealous for my honor among them as I am, I did not put an end to them in my zeal.” Finally, Hoskins finds it relevant that God ended the plague against the Jews but then immediately ordered Moses to war against the Moabites. Taking this material together and filtering it through the prism of Christian Identity theology, Hoskins argues that the modern, true Christian, as part of an ongoing holy war, must take it upon himself or herself to punish those who violate God’s law and who mix with other races. God honored Phineas “and his descendants” with a “covenant of a lasting priesthood,” and so some Christian Identity radicals, taking their cue from Hoskins, refer to themselves as members of the Phineas Priesthood. Hoskins wrote, “There are those who obey God’s Law and those who don’t. Those who obey are Lawful. Those who disobey are outlawed by God. God has specified the outlaw’s punishment. The Phineas Priests administer the judgment, and God rewards them with covenant of an everlasting priesthood.”11 Jim Nesbitt of the Religious News Service wrote in 1999 that the Phineas Priesthood is “less an organization than a call to action and a badge of honor, followers of this blood-stained faith strive to live up to the example of Phineas.”12

  The Vigilantes of Christendom became a clarion call for a generation of self-directed domestic terrorists, acting alone or in very small groups to victimize interracial and homosexual couples, abortion providers, and secular-liberal institutions as well as Jews and minorities. Hoskins, while celebrating the intentions and activities of those in the Order, warned against any set of Phineas priests becoming as relatively large and interconnected as Mathews’s group. He said that groups should avoid having more than six members. Would-be Phineas priests took heed.

  In a case reminiscent of the Order, in one of the first known acts with Phineas dimensions, Walter Eliyah Thody joined others, whom he refused to identify, in a string of bank robberies in hopes of financing “an assassination squad dedicated to killing advocates of one-world government.” Described as “gangly [and] bespectacled … with the long, ragged beard of a prophet,” Thody explicitly claimed to be a Phineas priest. In a 1996 prison interview, Thody asserted, “We’re having to fight to keep our country. Killing is normally murder… . Theft is theft. But if you’re in warfare, then those same acts are acts of war. I’m at warfare against the enemies of my country.”13

  Another major act of apparent Phineas terrorism occurred in 1996. Three men engaged in a months-long spree of violence in Spokane, Washington, detonating pipe bombs at an abortion clinic (which failed to kill the employees only because they were attending a conference in another building), a newspaper office, and a handful of banks, which the men had robbed beforehand. At each scene, the men left behind biblical literature signed with a symbol: “a black cross superimposed with the letter P … a symbol of members of the Phineas Priesthood.”14 Law enforcement arrested three men, Charles Barbee, Robert Berry, and Jay Merrell, all with connections to Christian Identity–based groups. The men never openly proclaimed their membership in the Phineas Priesthood, but that may have been for legal purposes, to deny the state motive-based evidence in their trial. Federal prosecutors could not prove, to the satisfaction of a jury (that deadlocked), that the men had directly participated in the robberies and bombings, so the government settled for convictions for conspiracy to commit such crimes, as well as “interstate transportation of stolen vehicles and possession of hand grenades.”

  The Vigilantes of Christendom also heavily influenced the Aryan Republican Army, whose members held a copy of the book up for cameras in their videos, calling it a “handbook for revolution.” When a jury finally convicted Byron de la Beckwith for murdering Medgar Evers in 1994, Beckwith publicly claimed to have recently become a Phineas priest. Violent acts attributable to Phineas priests have occurred as recently as late November 2014, when Larry Steve McQuilliams, a forty-nine-year-old unemployed Texan with a criminal history, opened fire with “two long rifle guns” on the Mexican Consulate in Austin, Texas. Over one hundred rounds pierced the walls of the building, although no one was hurt. Police found the Vigilantes of Christendom in McQuilliams’s rented van, “along with a note and Bible verses indicating he planned on fighting ‘anti-God people.’” The Austin police chief observed of McQuilliams, a self-described “high priest” of Phineas, “Hate was in his heart. He is a homegrown American terrorist trying to terrorize our people.”15

  Although high profile in nature, Phineas attacks remain relatively small in number. But that may be a function of the problems faced by students of terrorism in disentangling the multilayered influences that various hate groups and ideologies have on perpetrators. Beyond his connections to the Phineas Priesthood, Buford Furrow also once worked at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho; he had married Debbie Mathews, widow of the founder of the Order, and thus may have been influenced by Odinism. McQuilliams harbored general anti-immigrant feelings associated with his lack of employment. Criminology professor Brian Levin of California State University–San Bernardino told the Religious News Service, “You can really craft your own philosophy from this extremist buffet. You don’t have to stay married to one philosophy or another—you can pick and choose. You see a lot of morphing out there.”16 The legal implications of admitting a connection to a well-known, violent philosophy (as seen in the Spokane case) encourage less-zealous terrorists to obscure or hide their agendas from the public (and prosecutors). Hence the actual examples of Phineas Priesthood terrorism could be more numerous than reported.

  Other legal developments make it even harder to qualify and quantify acts of domestic, religious terrorism. These developments create incentives for leaders of Christian Identity (and similar) groups to obscure their connections to supposed lone-wolf terrorists. The connection between Furrow and Butler provides a suggestive case study. Butler definitely knew about Furrow, who once served as a security lieutenant at Butler’s Idaho compound. Butler, in turn, served as the master of ceremonies when Furrow married Debbie Mathews. He described Furrow to the New
York Post as “a good learner, he was passionate about the cause… . He was very intelligent, very sincere and quiet.” In the same interview, Butler said Furrow was a “good soldier” and someone who “was very well-respected among” the denizens of Hayden Lake. Butler became coy, however, when pontificating on Furrow’s violent actions. “Sometimes you have to do these kinds of things for the cause,” he asserted at one point. “He is a frustrated male like all us members of the Aryan Nation—with the Jews and nonwhites.” But then the Swift mentee calibrated his comments: “I don’t know why he did what he did, but I cannot condemn what he did—nor do I condone it.”17

  In the 1970s, Butler may not have been so circumspect in his support for an act of terrorism, but financial more than criminal concerns likely gave him pause in 1999. Starting in 1981, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), under the leadership of civil rights activist attorney Morris Dees, began to pursue civil actions against leaders of white supremacist groups who incited others to violence. The SPLC (and later the Anti-Defamation League) used this approach to great success against groups such as the New Order Knights, Ed Fields’s successor organization to the National States Rights Party, and Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, of which more will be said later. These efforts virtually bankrupted both groups. In fact, in 1999 Butler faced an SPLC lawsuit stemming from an incident involving a mother and son, Victoria and Jason Keenan, who had driven through the Aryan Nations property in Hayden Lake, Idaho, on their way home from a wedding. As the SPLC describes it:

  After Jason retrieved a wallet he had accidentally dropped out the car window, the two started toward home again. But something—a car backfire or fireworks—led the untrained, paranoid guards on the compound to think that they were under attack by their enemies. Within seconds, at least three neo-Nazi Aryans had leaped into a pickup truck and sped out after the Keenans, firing at them as they went and, after about two miles, shooting out a tire and forcing them into a ditch.18

  One reading of Butler’s comments about Buford in his 1999 interview could be that the pastor was fearful that his words would become grist for the upcoming SPLC lawsuit. (The SPLC eventually won the Keenan lawsuit and forced Butler to relinquish the Aryan Nations compound and land to the Keenan family in September 2000.)

  Another interpretation of Butler’s reticence could be that the Aryan Nations leader feared that any recent contact between him and Furrow could trigger an entirely new civil lawsuit. Butler may have feared that he would be accused of inciting Furrow to the 1999 community center shooting. In 1987 Butler and others had escaped criminal liability for sedition, in part because, even if they had discussed a government takeover in the presence of violent followers, it is difficult to separate political speech, however inflammatory, from an actual criminal conspiracy. But Morris Dees created a legal foundation, in civil court, to argue that white supremacist leaders bore monetary responsibility for instigating criminal activity. (No direct evidence shows Butler in contact with Furrow after Furrow left the Aryan Nations facility in the mid-1990s.)

  A similar fear of a civil lawsuit almost certainly impacted Ben Smith’s preparations for his 1999 killing spree in the Midwest over Independence Day Weekend. For the months prior to his murder-suicide, Smith had belonged to the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC; at first called simply the Church of the Creator or the Creativity movement), the 1970s brainchild of Ben Klassen, author of The White Man’s Bible. Klassen had expressly rejected any kind of supernatural foundation for white supremacy while simultaneously predicting a holy race war, which he abbreviated as rahowa. Klassen continued to write racist and anti-Semitic treatises from his compound in the hills of North Carolina. But he committed suicide in 1993 after an SPLC lawsuit nearly bankrupted both him and his group. Another individual, a law student from Illinois named Matthew Hale, reinvigorated the World Church of the Creator in 1995. Hale, as the so-called Pontifex Maximus, or supreme leader, of the church, continued to distance the group from Christian Identity while offering a near-duplicate proscription for America’s supposed satanic Jewish problem.

  Ben Smith not only joined the group; he became a devout member, distributing thousands of flyers on behalf of the WCOTC. Hale even named Smith “creator of the month” in August 1998. According to the SPLC, records show that Hale engaged in nearly thirteen hours of phone conversations with Smith in the three weeks leading up to the multistate murderous rampage, with twenty-eight minutes of conversation two days before the crime began. Yet for reasons he failed to explain or justify, Smith left a letter announcing that he had officially abandoned the church on the eve of the July killings. Many believe that Hale, privy to the upcoming violence but fearing another SPLC lawsuit, encouraged Smith to write the official letter, thereby releasing Hale and the WCOTC from civil liability for Smith’s crime spree. For his part, Hale offered a mixed review of Smith’s activities:

  He was a selfless man who gave his life in the resistance to Jewish/ mud tyranny—a man who for whatever reason ultimately decided that violence was the way to strike back against the enemies of our people—enemies who had used violence against our people for centuries. He was loyal to the core and who always put the interests of his Race before his own… . That the Church does not condone his acts does not affect the reality that when a people is kicked around like a dog, someone might indeed be bitten… . Our Brother August Smith will continue to live on in all of us. His actions resulted in Creativity being brought to the attention of the world. Now it is up to us to utilize the attention Creativity has received and ride the wave of publicity which his actions either intentionally or unintentionally created for us. This is what he would have wanted, and what we must indeed do. RAHOWA!19

  Throughout the 1990s, the WCOTC became, along with forms of neopagan Odinism, a popular choice in the ideological “buffet” for white supremacists. Smith, for instance, started his religious journey as a racist Odinist in 1997 and converted to Creativity months later. From 1995 to 2002, according to the SPLC, Hale increased the number of chapters from fourteen to eighty-eight, “making it the neo-Nazi group with the largest number of chapters in America” during its peak.20

  For a white supremacist, Hale became something of a media darling. He “appeared repeatedly on NBC’s ‘Today’ show and other national TV news programs.” He also built his organization by staying on the vanguard of another media trend that became key in sustaining white supremacist terrorist groups, the World Wide Web. As early as 1995, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported,

  Many extremist groups are on the web; the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and a covey of supporters, racist skinhead purveyors of “Aryan” music, some rabidly anti-Semitic “Identity” churches, groups sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan and several Holocaust deniers have sites. These efforts represent a well-thought out campaign to reach more people than these groups ever could have contacted through traditional mailings, handouts and demonstrations. The World Wide Web, the newest Internet technology, is an effective merchandising tool.21

  By 1997 the SPLC had identified 163 hate group sites on the World Wide Web; by 1999 that number had grown by 60 percent to 254. By the spring of 2001 almost four hundred hate group sites carried racist and anti-Semitic messages to anyone who could find them in a search engine. At last count, in 2014, the SPLC had identified 926 hate sites. This figure includes only group-based sites. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which uses a special algorithm to count both group-based and individual hate sites, puts that total number at more than ten thousand. As to specific Christian Identity websites, the number is hard to tally, but an anonymous CI adherent with the screen name of Obadiah listed fifty-nine Identity sites in 2012. More telling statistics come from an analysis of two of the most well-known Identity websites, Christogenea.org and Kingdom Identity Ministries. Analytics data on the former, which prominently features transcribed sermons by the Reverend Wesley Swift, show that from 2010 to 2014, the site welcomed 417,111 unique visitors. Kingdom Identity Ministries, one of the
oldest Identity websites, receives an average of 2,487 visits per month. To be fair, neither site directly advocates terrorism.

  But many hate sites indirectly promote such violence, according to technology experts Beverly Ray and George Marsh II. These sites include links to guerrilla warfare manuals and to how-to books like The Anarchist Cookbook. Several sites offer guidance to potential lone-wolf terrorists. For instance, the Aryan Underground and sites like it link directly to Louis Beam’s essay on leaderless resistance. Other sites, hoping their viewers will self-radicalize, speak directly to would-be isolated terrorists. Per Ray and Marsh, the Christian Identity hate site run by the Aryan Nations links to a page run by the Ayran Underground, which includes the following advice:

  Always start off small. Many small victories are better than one huge blunder (which may be the end of your career as a Lone Wolf). Every little bit counts in a resistance… . The less any outsider knows, the safer and more successful you will be… . Communication is a good thing, but keep your covert activities a secret. This will protect you as well as others like you… . Never keep any records of your activities that can connect you to the activity… . The more you change your tactics, the more effective you will become. Random chaos is never predictable… . Have a “rainy day” fund set aside in a safety deposit box (out of your local area and not in a high activity area), complete with new ID just in the event that something unexpected goes wrong.22