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

by Stuart Wexler

  In fact, the ubiquitous presence and influence of radical Christianity within the upper echelons of America’s hate groups in the 1960s meant that its theology exercised enormous influence on later belief systems, even when later groups openly ridiculed or distanced themselves from Christian Identity theology. In the early 1970s, two new religious movements, both with origins in the recalibration of right-wing extremism and both with legacies of rationalizing violence for decades thereafter, explicitly condemned Swift’s theology but produced alternative belief systems that are indistinguishable from CI. These were Cosmotheism and the Church of the Creator (which came to be called the Creativity movement).

  Cosmotheism—the idea that “cosmic order is God”—was the brainchild of one of the most important and influential figures in the history of domestic terrorism in the United States. At the time he founded the church, William Luther Pierce was a middle-aged physicist with an extensive background in white supremacy. Raised in Atlanta on the values of segregation, Pierce’s earliest experiences were with groups like the American Nazi Party in the 1960s. Later he joined Willis Carto, a leading public anti-Semite, in presidential politicking. The two converted the Youth for Wallace group—a sort of Young Republicans for racist Alabama governor George Wallace’s 1968 third-party presidential campaign—into the National Youth Alliance. But Carto accused Pierce of double-dealing, and the two parted ways in the early 1970s, at which point Pierce, with sole control, converted the National Youth Alliance into the National Alliance. Pierce, who was also associated with the National State Rights Party, rejected the supernatural elements of Christian Identity but created Cosmotheism as a way to provide spiritual direction and solidarity for his membership. Pierce repurposed Cosmotheism in much the same way that Identity theologians coopted Christianity.

  The idea that the laws of nature are manifestations of a higher power has a long tradition. Cosmotheism is more or less Deism for racists, and it likely appealed to Pierce in the same way that Deism appealed to Benjamin Franklin, also a scientist. The religion allows for spirituality without the concept of supernatural intervention in the secular world. In Pierce’s formulation, a higher power designed the universe, with laws and a purpose, and then got out of the way, letting the laws guide human outcomes. For Pierce, the purpose was a racially pure world. Pierce often ridiculed Identity theology, but he spent his life working with groups and individuals who were influenced by its tenets. As many scholars have observed, Cosmotheism and CI bear a striking resemblance, making it impossible to ignore the influence of Identity ideology on Pierce.18 For instance, in his essay “What Is the National Alliance,” Pierce asserted, “After the sickness of ‘multiculturalism,’ which is destroying America, Britain, and every other Aryan nation in which it is being promoted, has been swept away, we must again have a racially clean area of the earth for the further development of our people… . We will not be deterred by the difficulty or temporary unpleasantness involved, because we realize that it is absolutely necessary for our racial survival.”19 The “temporary unpleasantness” was a euphemism for a race war.

  The FBI recognized Pierce’s leadership potential before he assumed an influential role within the white supremacist movement. It recognized Pierce’s talent for writing political propaganda as early as 1966. As will become clear later, much misery and violence owes itself to Pierce eventually realizing his potential.

  Much like Pierce, Ukrainian-born Ben Klassen understood the power of the written word to inspire movements. Having immigrated to North America at a young age, Klassen, like Pierce, eventually became active in the presidential campaign of George Wallace. Like Pierce, he found his voice in the fragmentation and proliferation of white supremacist groups of the 1970s. In 1973 Klassen wrote The White Man’s Bible and began a movement. The Church of the Creator (COTC), or Creativity movement, continued to influence white supremacist terrorists as late as the 1990s. “Our Avowed Purpose,” Klassen asserted in his influential text, is to “again revive the healthy instincts with which Nature endowed even the White Race and to bring it back to sanity so that our people will not only recognize their enemies, but also learn to exercise their instinctive urge to overcome them.” Those enemies, Klassen insisted, were “number one, the International Jew, the whole Jewish network, the Jew as an individual. Number two is the mass of colored races, whom we shall designate simply as the mud races.”20 However similar these ideas are to Christian Identity theology, Klassen drew key distinctions. Notably, he called Christianity itself a harmful myth. He not only doubted that Anglo-Saxons had descended from one of the lost ten tribes of Israel but also questioned whether the ten tribes had ever existed. If Pierce’s religious ideas represented a new take on Deism, then Klassen’s philosophy, observed religious scholar Mattias Gardell, added a quasi-spiritual dimension to social Darwinism. In another book, published the same year as the White Man’s Bible, Klassen spoke to “Nature’s eternal law,” whereby the white man has naturally evolved into “a realized Nietzschean superman.”21

  Despite a public fallout between Klassen and the followers of Christian Identity, it is hard to ignore how much CI influenced the COTC, especially when it came to Klassen’s vision for the future. Like Swift’s followers before him, Klassen set up a military-style training camp. On land in Otto, North Carolina, Klassen’s trainees prepared “for total war against the Jews and the rest of the goddamned mud races of the world—politically, militantly, financially, morally and religiously. In fact, we regard it as the heart of our religious creed, and as the most sacred credo of all. We regard it as a holy war to the finish—a racial holy war. Rahowa! is INEVITABLE.”22 Klassen, not a member of Christian Identity, coined the term racial holy war, and the abbreviation rahowa remains a popular tattoo among white supremacists across the nation.

  If the national landscape of white supremacist groups appears to be a panoply of new and idiosyncratic organizations, loosely and independently shaped by the influence of Christian Identity, this was not the objective of all racialist extremists. Some resisted the trend toward fragmentation.

  The Reverend Robert E. Miles, a Christian Identity pastor from Michigan, described by scholars as an “elder statesmen” of the movement, attempted to consolidate the trend toward greater cooperation and collaboration among CI-connected hate groups that had begun in the mid-1960s. Calling his movement Unity Now, Miles attempted, in 1970, to unite disparate antigovernment and anti-Jewish groups to attack the establishment. As a gathering of Unity Now in 1973 demonstrated, almost all its key members were racists or Christian Identity zealots. An awards ceremony held at the gathering speaks to the extent to which Identity theology had thoroughly penetrated the ranks of American extremist organizations. Pastor Roy Frankhouser won the Valor Under Fire award; Minister James Freed won the Defense of Christian Law honor; Renato Verani, an American Legion commander, won the Christian Militancy award; CI pastor George Kindred won the Resistance to Taxation prize; and Miles himself took home the honor for White Christian Brotherhood. The groups represented at the conference included the United Klans of America as well as the Western Guard of Canada. The benediction was given by James Forster, a pastor from the Ministry of Christ Church, which was essentially a seminary for Identity preachers. But a heavy concentration of attendees and award winners came from Miles’s own state of Michigan, and Unity Now never gained widespread momentum. In 1971 Miles was arrested. He soon went to prison, convicted of firebombing ten empty school buses and of tarring and feathering a school principal in protest of government-imposed integration programs in his home state.23 Miles aligned himself closely with Frankhouser, but as it turned out, by 1973 the former eastern regional head of the Minutemen was a paid informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

  The most enduring effort to unify white supremacist groups relates, not surprisingly, to Wesley Swift. When Swift died in 1972, he left the legacy of the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian to an understudy, Richard Butler, an engineer for Lockhee
d-Martin. Butler moved the CJCC to Hayden Lake, Idaho, where it became the church for his new group, the Aryan Nations, an organization that welcomed neo-Nazi and KKK factions under one umbrella. In 1979 Butler hosted the Pacific Kingdom Identity Conference, “a springboard for his attempts to align such fairly diverse groups as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, Posse Comitatus, and others during the 1980s.”24 By the 1990s, Butler’s hate group had become one of the nation’s largest and best known, building a base of young, disaffected skinheads using a strategy similar to Jim Ellison’s.

  But divisions and rivalries continued to make it difficult to unite disparate groups behind some kind of collective action. The Associated Press reported that the Klan in 1979 was a “hodge podge of factions, names and philosophies.”25 In one example, Bill Wilkinson, a key member of David Duke’s KKK outfit, split from his mentor’s hate group to form his own KKK organization, poaching hundreds of members from Duke’s group in the process. Duke ridiculed Wilkinson’s group as “illiterate, gun-toting, rednecks.” “We’re not just a bunch of fools running around in bed sheets,” Duke claimed.26

  As it turned out, Wilkinson had been an FBI informant since 1974. When this fact was exposed in 1981, Wilkinson went into hiding, possibly through the Federal Witness Protection Program. It is difficult to tell if Wilkinson was simply a source of information on the Klan or if he formed his new organization at the government’s urging, as yet another attempt to divide and fragment the white supremacist community.27 For that reason, it is also difficult to say whether the FBI exposed itself to criminal complicity by associating with Wilkinson and his group.

  Allegations that the FBI went beyond surveillance and infiltration, graduating to provocation, began to surface in congressional investigations at this time. One of the most controversial charges involved an offshoot of the Minutemen known as the Secret Army Organization (SAO). With DePugh in federal prison since 1968, the Minutemen splintered and dissolved. But in 1970, a handful of onetime Minutemen decided to reverse course, convinced that government infiltrators, rather than a lack of leadership and organization, lay at fault for the Minutemen’s demise. They believed that, if purged of informants, the SAO could continue the fight against “the communists” controlling the American government and against New Left radicals outside of government. With a new and smaller organization, they hoped to avoid infiltration by federal law enforcement. As it turns out, one of SAO’s founding members, Howard Godfrey, provided information on the group’s activities to the FBI from the start.

  Godfrey represented a rare type of informant, someone like the controversial Gary Rowe, who during the 1960s had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama at the FBI’s behest. Described by the Los Angeles Times as an “unimposing ex-San Diego city fireman,” the thirty-two-year-old Godfrey told the press that he had assisted the SAO while it “conducted a reign of terror against the left in a series of attacks including bombings, burglaries and harassment.”28 He confessed that the group had plotted “the assassination of President Nixon and several controversial leftists,” stolen “membership files and lists from leftist organizations,” and shot “into the home of a Marxist college professor, wounding a woman guest.” For five years, using the false identity Captain Mike McGann, Godfrey reported on right-wing activities. He rose from a mere recruit in 1967 to head of the San Diego branch of the Minutemen to cofounder of the SAO.

  As noted earlier, infiltrators like Godfrey and Rowe present conflicts of interest to their official handlers in law enforcement because they often must prove their worth to fellow radicals by engaging in criminal activity. Recall that Rowe even became an accessory to a murder in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 while on the federal payroll. The government, to this day, routinely offers waivers to informants who perpetrate crimes in the “call of duty.” But with Godfrey, federal law enforcement went way beyond looking the other way while ultra-right-wing militants engaged in violent criminal activity.

  When the press uncovered Godfrey’s activities, he revealed that he had told his FBI handler about all SAO criminal operations, sometimes in advance of a crime. “We used to meet a couple of times a week, in parking lots throughout the city, behind stores, anywhere that happened to be handy. We would grab a few minutes and talk,” he told the Los Angeles Times. What’s more, the FBI supplied Godfrey with a substantial amount of money for weapons—$20,000—to help cover 75 percent of the SAO’s operating expenses.29 It appeared to some, especially in the New Left, that in supporting Godfrey, the FBI was more or less subsidizing the group’s activities. The ACLU insisted to Congress that the SAO was set up “on instructions of FBI officials” to “serve as agents provocateurs, inciting disorders as a means of exposing ‘domestic radicals,’ particularly campus leaders of the New Left protesting the war in Southeast Asia.”30

  The FBI, for its part, maintained that it simply offered Godfrey passive approval—that it did not encourage any criminal activity. Yet there is no doubt that after Godfrey and a colleague fired shots into the home of Professor Peter Bohm, injuring Paula Tharp, Godfrey’s FBI handler took the informant’s weapon and hid it from the San Diego police for six months. The extent to which the FBI promoted the activity of the SAO remains a point of contention to the present day. For instance, in 2013 the Department of Homeland Security updated its database of historic terrorist activity to note that the SAO “was possibly funded by the FBI.”31

  By 1976 such FBI operations (as well as illegal wiretapping and “black bag jobs”) had been exposed by Congress, leading the FBI to end COINTELPRO. But as the Wilkinson story shows, the established FBI informant network inside KKK groups had become so vast that it may have been impossible to reel it back in. The kind of conflicts described in previous chapters, whereby the FBI was forced to balance the need to protect sources and methods with the need to prevent criminal activity, persisted. This dilemma applied not only to the FBI but also to local law enforcement agencies, which increasingly began to infiltrate white hate groups.

  This situation became apparent after an investigation of one of the most shocking acts of KKK violence in the 1970s. On November 3, 1979, members of the Greensboro, North Carolina, Ku Klux Klan opened fire on an anti-Klan protest march staged by the local Communist Workers Party (CWP). Five members of the CWP, which had been trying to organize black factory workers in the area, were killed. Tensions between the two groups had escalated in the previous weeks, with each side openly provoking the other and more than hinting at violence. The name of the CWP rally was Death to the Klan. But film footage of the shooting demonstrates that the KKK, with the help of the American Nazi Party, fired the first salvos on November 3. As many as forty of the sixty to eighty extremists who joined the counter-protest fired on the leftists, some of whom were also armed and returned fire. Police arrested fourteen Klansmen, many associated with Grand Wizard Virgil Lee Griffin’s Confederation of Independent Orders of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for the murders. But in a decision reminiscent of injustices of the past, an all-white jury acquitted the men.32

  Years later, new investigations into the crime—including a truth and reconciliation commission modeled on the body that investigated Apartheid-related atrocities in South Africa—uncovered disturbing information. The local police, whose investigative interests extended both to the communists and to the Klan, had employed an informant inside the KKK who, according to several witnesses, encouraged the KKK members to bring weapons to the event. The same man, who worked as a federal informant as well, appears to have warned both the FBI and the local police about the potential for violence, but nothing was done.33

  One participant in the Greensboro massacre, Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., symbolized many of the developing trends in the white supremacy movement. A Vietnam veteran, Miller was loosely associated with Virgil Lee Griffin’s KKK group, which in turn was an offshoot of Bill Wilkinson’s KKK group, which in turn was an offshoot of David Duke’s KKK group. No one knows if Miller fired a shot on November 3, but he later split with Grif
fin to form his own KKK chapter, the Carolina Knights of the KKK, and then an antigovernment group, the White Patriots Party. At some point in the early 1980s, he became an Odinist, but he continued to associate with Christian Identity extremists who were swayed to terrorism by the writings of William Pierce. Miller later turned FBI informant and helped law enforcement develop charges against Louis Beam, among others, in a 1987 federal sedition trial. The conviction never materialized, and despite his cooperation with federal authorities, Miller’s hatred for Jews and blacks did not abide.34

  In prison Beam elaborated on his theories on leaderless resistance, adding the idea of “lone wolves” who would “act when they feel the time is ripe, or [would] take their cues from others who precede[d] them.” On April 13, 2014, in an ironic and tragic manifestation of Beam’s strategy, the seventy-four-year old Miller opened fire at a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement home in Kansas. When arrested, Miller believed that he had killed three Jews and repeatedly said “Heil Hitler” to police officers. In reality, all three victims were Christians.35

  Miller had first become attracted to white supremacy when he returned from Vietnam and read a copy of The Thunderbolt. He joined the National States Rights Party in 1973. He left the group, he claims, because it was “made up mostly of elderly people who were not that active.”36 For the most part, Miller’s observation rings true. By the early 1970s, the NSRP included, according to one estimate, as few as seventy to eighty-five active members. Neuman Britton was literally the only member of the Arkansas NSRP, and despite the best efforts of people like Danny Joe Hawkins, the group could never even establish a chapter in the white supremacist stronghold of Mississippi. What public attention the NSRP could draw had come from J.B. Stoner’s campaigns for public office in Georgia—all of which eventually failed, although he did garner seventy-three thousand votes in his 1974 campaign for lieutenant governor.