Christian Identity

Christian Identity is a theological system or ideology that has provided white supremacists with a rationale for racist, anti-Semitic, and bigoted violence. Beginning in the 1950s as a set of ideas that were marginal even among organized racists and anti-Semites at that time, its influence grew in the 1970s and 1980s to undergird Ku Klux Klan factions, Aryan Nations, Posse Comitatus, and a number of other organizations. While white-power skinheads after the 1990s have not, in the main, been Christian Identity believers, this theology has remained a potent force in the twenty-first century.

Based on a skewed reading of the Book of Genesis, Christian Identity adherents believe that only those they deem to be white people are descended from Adam. Those considered black, and other people of color, are considered to be “pre-Adamic,” or “man before man,” with less than fully human attributes. Within this schema, the whites of northern Europe—described as the Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Celtic, and Lombard peoples—are regarded as the direct biological descendants of the biblical “Tribes of Israel,” and the United States of America is considered the physical embodiment of their reassembly in a promised land.

On this point, Christian Identity is derived from a nineteenth-century set of beliefs known as British Israelism. Its early proponents regarded scriptural promises of greatness believed to have been made to biblical Israel as a prophetic forecast of the power and breadth the British Empire enjoyed in the late nineteenth century. As such, it was an ideology that explained white supremacy in biblical terms, rather than simply using the language of a so-called scientific and secular racism also popular at the time.

The Christian Identity theology that appeared in the post–World War II period, by contrast, flourished in a period of decolonization in the developing world and the end of Jim Crow–style segregation in the southern United States. As such, it sought to explain the supposed fall of white power and dominance, again in scriptural terms. Several Identity preachers in the 1980s and 1990s, including Pete Peters of Colorado, traced this collapse to sins committed by white people, including interracial marriage, tolerance for homosexuality, and allowing the presence of “strangers,” an Identity term for people of color. All Identity ideologues, however, placed blame on “the Jews,” and on the satanic nature of their power over all earthly affairs.

[Page 134]Two different ideas about Jews and Satan vie for dominance among Christian Identity believers, the “two-seed” and the “one-seed” theories. The former posits that Jews are the embodiment of Satan incarnate, the offspring of a mating between Eve and the Devil (the Snake in the Garden). The latter view holds that Jews have a Satanic character, rather than being simply the Devil himself. Both points of view, however, can motivate individual believers toward violence.

Also propelling adherents are ideas about the “End Times” embedded within Identity theology. In this eschatology, believers see a period of turmoil and disaster known as the “Tribulations” before the Second Coming of Christ and the establishment of God's Kingdom. Unlike others who share this belief, known as premillennialism, Identity devotees consider the Tribulations a time of armed warfare in which they will battle satanic forces (meaning “the Jews”) and win. In the parlance of a terrorist group from the early 1980s known as The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, believers must become “End Times Overcomers” in order to establish what they believe will be God's Kingdom on Earth. Compounding the drive toward violence and mayhem, some Identity believers think that they have already entered the Tribulations era, and that the time for guns and warfare is already upon them.

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