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Fight, Fight, Fight for the Prince of Peace
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19186 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1991 |
2,328 Words |
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Dean M. Kelley
Dean M. Kelley is counselor on religious liberty at the
National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United
States, a position he has held since 1960. He is the author of
Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (1972) and Why Churches
Should Not Pay Taxes (1977). He is now completing a five-
volume work titled The Law of Church and State in America:
Sourcebook and Analysis. |
THE POLITICS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
Idaho Christian Patriotism
James A. Aho
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990
296 pp., $24.95
Many of us have been aware for the past decade or so that there were some strange things going on in the wilds of the great Pacific Northwest--shootouts between the feds and extremist fanatics over nonpayment of income tax, or something--but for most of us it never reached the center stage of our attention. I was somewhat more (or less) fortunate, in that I had edited a booklet published by the National Council of Churches in 1986 titled The Christian Identity Movement: Analyzing Its Theological Rationalization for Racist and Anti-Semitic Violence, written by Leonard Zeskind of the Center for Democratic Renewal. From it I learned a little about the phenomenon of "British Israelism"--the belief that the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel are really the Nordic/Aryan/Anglo-Saxon nations, and that they therefore have the responsibility to fulfill the Law of God against the threats posed by "lesser" peoples.
But this task was no more than a bare intimation of the extent and texture of the remarkable movements described in The Politics of Righteousness by Idaho sociologist James A. Aho, who has interviewed and recorded the self-understandings of the men and women who make up the population he calls "Idaho Christian patriots." These come in two kinds, we learn from him: Identity Christians (or American Israelites) and Christian Constitutionalists. The former are found predominantly in mountainous northwest Idaho, the latter in southeast Idaho, which has a largely Mormon population.
Two kinds of patriots
Identity Christians center on several fundamentalist congregations: the Aryan Nations Church (the Church of Jesus Christ Christian); the Reformed Church of Christ-Society of Saints ("a front of the Socialist Nationalist Aryan Peoples Party"); the Ministry of Christ Church; and the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (based in Arkansas but with close ties to the Idaho folk). Parallel to these religious organizations and recruited from them are various militant and paramilitary survivalist organizations like the White American Bastion or Bruders Schweigen (the Order), more than twenty of whose members have been imprisoned for criminal activities related to
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