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

by Stuart Wexler

  Those known militants not in prisons were under constant surveillance by local police and often by federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. For this very reason, Bowers resorted to using Tarrants and Ainsworth in his White Knights campaign against Jewish targets in Mississippi. FBI biannual summary reports from the 1960s include weekly synopses detailing the activities of almost every key white supremacist in every major white supremacist group. Much of this inside information was collected by informants. It now appears very likely that the man who took over as Grand Wizard for the WKKKKOM when Bowers went to prison, L.E. Matthews, worked for the FBI. One of the most visible Klansmen in North Carolina, George Dorsett, was on the FBI payroll.4 At the peak of the COINTELPRO White program, “the Bureau had over 2,000 Klan members on its payroll, recruiting them at the average rate of two per day.”5 The number of informants turned against the Black Panthers dwarfed even this total: the FBI had more than seven thousand informants inside the Black Panther Party as of 1971.6 In addition to conventional surveillance and inside informants, wiretaps provided extensive information on white supremacist groups. If the wiretap surveillance on Stoner’s law office extended through the 1970s, it would mean that the FBI likely had inside information on a vast array of KKK activities across the nation, as Stoner represented dozens of racists across the country as a legal advisor.

  The combination of dirty tricks, electronic and human surveillance, informant activity, and strong-arm tactics debilitated white supremacist groups and greatly limited their freedom of movement until congressional investigations of the COINTELPRO program scandalized the FBI, forcing the operation to close in 1976. Among other things, Congress reported on “black bag jobs”—illegal wiretapping operations as well as warrantless burglaries of offices. The FBI also pursued legal, although questionable, tactics, often deliberately creating schisms within targeted organizations, such as the KKK, using informants to spread rumors of financial mismanagement among rank-and-file members. Under the weight of such government operations, memberships dwindled and the remaining activists shifted allegiance to different leaders or formed separate groups with different agendas.

  By the early 1970s, Christian Identity radicals found themselves at a crossroads. Without the large base of influence that came from southern resistance to integration, without the pretext of widespread civil disorder, without friendly treatment from local law enforcement, they lost much of their unity. The 1970 death of Wesley Swift, their charismatic, ideological figurehead, further fractured their movement. In the decade that followed, more than one of Swift’s acolytes attempted to heal the divisions within the movement and to foster the kind of solidarity seen in the 1967–1968 lead-up to Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, but to little or no avail. The aspiration for consolidation could not overcome the reality of fragmentation.

  But fragmentation had its benefits. The social turmoil from the previous decade created a residue of conservative, white grievance that manifested itself in many different forms. On the less radical end of the spectrum, it helped fuel the growing neoconservative movement, starting with the campaigns of Richard Nixon, whose “southern strategy” exploited implicit racism under the guise of “law and order” and contributed to two general-election victories.

  The latent prejudice also permeated more militant movements, including nativist, patriot, and anti-tax groups. In its decentralized form, Christian Identity theology adjusted itself to the contours of these movements like a medical adhesive and exploited them in much the same way it had coopted southern nationalism and anticommunism in the 1960s. It may have lost its focus, but Christian Identity grew in its raw influence and even shaped offshoot religions and pseudo-religions, some of which attempted (and failed) to distance themselves from two-seedline Christianity. At the same time, with so many different groups and organizations in play, the landscape of religious terrorism in the 1970s became a “laboratory of radicalism.” The internecine conflict within groups, and the rivalry between groups, became a proving ground that nurtured and developed some of the most important figures in white supremacist circles, men who would inspire acts of domestic terrorism for three decades.

  Nothing illustrated these concurrent developments more than the Posse Comitatus. Named after an 1878 law that forbids federal military intervention in domestic policing, the group did not openly profess any religious imperatives, but it harnessed the resentments of America’s farmers in a militant direction with an appeal to extreme federalism. According to the group’s charter, no unit of government above the county level was legitimate. The group openly opposed federal income taxes, for instance. But for most of its existence, the group served as a front for Swift’s sometime aide and sometime rival, William Potter Gale, who helped found the organization in the 1970s. As described by hate-group expert Daniel Levitas:

  The movement did not gain significant momentum until Gale was able to join his Christian Identity beliefs … with the growing anti-tax movement in the United States.

  The first phase, when Gale developed all these theories about “citizens’ government” and the Posse Comitatus, was in the early to mid-1970s. In reality, Gale’s ideas were really nothing more than verbal flourishes used to disguise old-fashioned vigilantism.

  The second phase started in the late 1970s, when Gale and his allies were able to take advantage of the agricultural crisis brewing in rural America and use it to disseminate Posse ideology throughout the farm belt.

  The third phase was after the Posse really came into public view in 1983, with the killing of two federal marshals by [Posse adherent and tax protester] Gordon Kahl in North Dakota. After that, everybody knew the Posse was trouble with a capital T.7

  If there was a level of deceit in the message of a group like the Posse Comitatus, it may have been due to the difficulty of developing a large base of members with a radical reinterpretation of Christianity that would strike most Americans as foreign and idiosyncratic. As in the 1960s, plenty of Americans might sympathize with some goals of a Swift or a Bowers—distrust of Jews, a desire for segregation, displeasure with the central government—but to combine all into one package under the umbrella of a new form of Christianity may have been one step too far. Getting someone to hate tax collectors is one thing; getting the same person to reject what she has been taught in Sunday school since early childhood is much more difficult.

  It is not surprising that, in the absence of a dominant and far-reaching voice like Swift (who died in 1970), the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian ceased to be the central headquarters for Identity theology and teachings. The movement grew, instead, in small pockets throughout the country under the auspices of several independent ministers. By and large, these men developed Identity theology in a way that mitigated domestic terrorism—to a degree. As individual religious figures took up the mantle of spreading two-seedline ideology, some shifted the theology in a more passive direction. Passive should be carefully defined here; it does not mean that these new leaders became any less anti-Semitic or racist, or any less convinced that a race war was imminent. Rather, passive in this sense means that these leaders became less apt to encourage or engage in violence as a way of provoking that race war. The new Identity churches formed white separatist compounds or communities and stockpiled weapons, but they waited for God to initiate the end-times.

  Three people in particular reflect this trend. Starting in the mid-1970s, Dan Gayman of the Church of Israel, situated in southwestern Missouri, became one of the most influential spokespeople for this separatist strain of Identity teaching. In 1972 Nord Davis created a similar Identity community in Topton, North Carolina, eventually calling his group Northpoint Tactical Teams. At present, his compound includes “a farmhouse, numerous outbuildings, an underground bunker and fortifications made of granite, placed as a shield against invading government agents.”8 In 1973 the Reverend Robert G. Millar created an Identity commune with “slightly less than one hundred true believers … on a 400-acre tract”9 in Okl
ahoma near the border with Arkansas. He called it Elohim City.

  But for all their isolation, these men and their groups became indirectly entwined with religious terrorism as the decades proceeded. Gayman’s and Davis’s teachings helped nurture a young Eric Rudolph, who in the mid-to late 1990s bombed abortion clinics and, most famously, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Both Millar and Gayman maintained ongoing associations with militant Identity radicals, and both men’s teachings helped inspire at least one separatist hamlet, Zarephath-Horeb in Arkansas, to radicalize into what became an extremist, terrorist camp.

  In the mid-1970s, Jim Ellison, a Christian preacher, set up the Zarephath-Horeb Community Church as a refuge for disaffected drug addicts and individuals who had been victimized by other religious cults. Described by one observer as a “cross between John the Baptist and James Dean,”10 the charismatic Ellison loved to welcome new members. According to follower Kerry Noble, Ellison would always cite a favorite passage of scripture: “David therefore departed and escaped to the cave Adullam… . And everyone that was in distress, and everyone that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them, and there were with him about four hundred men.” But Noble, now a recovering extremist, realizes that this was all a ploy. In his memoir, Tabernacle of Hate: Seduction into Right-Wing Extremism, Noble explains, “Although I didn’t realize it at the time, here [in the passage of scripture quoted by Ellison] was the first ingredient necessary for creating an extremist: a philosophical or theological premise, based upon discontent, fear, unbelief, hate, despair, or some other negative emotion… . A [potential radical’s] view of the present and future had to be dark and bleak.” Noble explains, “Ellison … knew that people who had used drugs and who had previously been in cults were basically discontented with society and the kind of people he wanted, who would be easier to mold than regular church people… . People often join groups like this because they are … alienated from society … to find a community—sense of belonging.”11

  Too many of Ellison’s cult either never came to this realization or, like Noble, came to it too late. In a four-year span, the church “underwent a frightening metamorphosis from pacifist to survivalist to paramilitarist to terrorist.”12 Gayman’s teachings, reinforced by those of Millar, who developed a close personal relationship with Ellison (Ellison later married Millar’s daughter), shaped the development of this radical evolution. Ellison became, in one FBI agent’s estimation, “the General Patton of the Christian Identity Movement.” His soldiers were onetime disaffected souls whom Ellison molded into militant extremists. While a follower, Noble became the propaganda minister for what Ellison would relabel the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA). Members within the CSA became violent terrorists in the 1980s, as will be described later in the book.

  James Warner may have lacked Jim Ellison’s public charisma, but he also had deep roots in the Christian Identity movement, becoming an influential figure in white supremacist circles during this transitional period in the 1970s. Warner originally belonged to George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party. But he famously not only abandoned that group but also stole its membership roster and provided it to his new cause, the National States Rights Party. Nurtured by the likes of Stoner and Fields, and heavily influenced by Swift, Warner may not have had the strong personality of his mentors. But what he lacked in oratory he made up for in his skill at written communication. In 1971 Warner built his own Christian Identity organization, the New Christian Crusade Church, headquartered in Louisiana. It was there that Warner, an avid writer and pamphleteer, formed a partnership with a highly charismatic radical David Duke. By the 1980s, Duke had parlayed his good looks and down-home charm into a mainstream appeal rarely seen in white supremacist circles. Duke felt comfortable enough to run in the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries, and he won a seat in the Louisiana State Legislature not long after. Distancing himself from his extremist past, he then made a surprisingly, and to many alarmingly, strong bid to become Louisiana’s governor in 1991. Republican activist Elizabeth (Beth) Rickey soon put the lie to Duke’s public proclamations that he—and his KKK group—were more “pro-white” than anti-black and anti-Jewish by exposing Did Six Million Really Die?, a little-known and blatantly anti-Semitic book written by Duke.

  But media coverage rarely went far enough to connect this prominent racist with his Identity influences. Rickey described ongoing interactions she had with Duke when he tried to charm her into tempering her coverage of his racist background. But for all his charisma, Duke could not avoid showing his true colors. As Rickey relates,

  From the start … it was always Jews. Blacks were not interesting to him. He was always upset about something, about a new conspiracy theory: World War I, World War II, the civil rights movement, bombings—he linked it all to the Jews… . [At one point] he propped up Six Million on the table and pointed out passages from the Talmud that he claimed proved the Satanic qualities of Jewish people.13

  Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK) became an important breeding ground for future white supremacists, many of whom cut their teeth in the organization while absorbing Christian Identity ideology. Three notable examples are Tom Metzger, Dennis Mahon, and Louis Beam.

  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in his late twenties, after serving in the U.S. Army, Metzger became active in anticommunist organizations. He migrated from the John Birch Society to the Minutemen, temporarily formed his own organization in the early 1970s (the White Brotherhood), and eventually joined David Duke’s KKK outfit. Metzger worked his way through the ranks of the Klan, and Duke appointed the Los Angeles transplant (Metzger is from Indiana) Grand Dragon of the California chapter of the KKKK.14 In Duke’s organization, Metzger embraced Christian Identity theology, becoming an ordained minister in 1979. At the same time, he began to develop a national platform, spearheading the Mexican Border Watch, an initiative aimed at stemming illegal immigration. According to Michael Zatarain, a Duke biographer,

  The idea was to create a “civilian patrol along the U.S.–Mexican border … extending from Brownsville, Texas, to the Pacific Ocean. Klansmen would drive the route in caravans from dusk to dawn. Six Klan “spotters” would work together, with about one-quarter mile between vehicles. Klan members were instructed to report immediately to immigration officials any suspicious-looking people they might find.15

  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.”16

  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.”17

  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.