Extremist Construction
of Identity:
How Escalating Demands for
Legitimacy Shape and Define In-
Group and Out-Group Dynamics
This Research Paper examines how the white supremacist movement
Christian Identity emerged from a non-extremist forerunner known as
British Israelism. By examining ideological shifts over the course of nearly a
century, the paper seeks to identify key pivot points in the movement’s shift
toward extremism and explain the process through which extremist
ideologues construct and define in-group and out-group identities. Based
on these findings, the paper proposes a new framework for analysing and
understanding the behaviour and emergence of extremist groups. The
proposed framework can be leveraged to design strategic counter-
terrorism communications programmes using a linkage-based approach
that deconstructs the process of extremist in-group and out-group
definition. Future publications will continue this study, seeking to refine the
framework and operationalise messaging recommendations.
DOI: 10.19165/2017.1.07
ISSN: 2468-0656
ICCT Research Paper
April 2017
Author:
J.M. Berger
About the Author
J.M. Berger
J.M. Berger is an Associate Fellow at ICCT. He is a researcher, analyst and consultant,
with a special focus on extremist activities in the U.S. and use of social media. Berger is
co-author of the critically acclaimed ISIS: The State of Terror with Jessica Stern and author
of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam. Berger publishes the web
site Intelwire.com and has written for Politico, The Atlantic and Foreign Policy, among
others. He was previously a Fellow at George Washington University’s Program on
Extremism, a Non-resident Fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S.
Relations with the Islamic World, and an Associate Fellow at the International Centre
for the Study of Radicalisation.
About ICCT
The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) is an independent think and do tank
providing multidisciplinary policy advice and practical, solution-oriented implementation support on
prevention and the rule of law, two vital pillars of effective counter-terrorism. ICCT’s work focuses on themes
at the intersection of countering violent extremism and criminal justice sector responses, as well as human
rights-related aspects of counter-terrorism. The major project areas concern countering violent extremism,
rule of law, foreign fighters, country and regional analysis, rehabilitation, civil society engagement and victims’
voices. Functioning as a nucleus within the international counter-terrorism network, ICCT connects experts,
policymakers, civil society actors and practitioners from different fields by providing a platform for productive
collaboration, practical analysis, and exchange of experiences and expertise, with the ultimate aim of
identifying innovative and comprehensive approaches to preventing and countering terrorism.
1. Introduction and Overview
Political movements are not born extreme; they evolve that way over time.
This paper derives a theoretical framework for analysing extremist movements from a
text-based study of how an Anglophile movement known as British Israelism evolved
into the virulently racist Christian Identity over the course of a century.
Using a grounded theory approach
1
based on the analysis of ideological texts, this
framework aims to offer insights into how groups radicalise toward violence and how
to understand and counter these processes.
More broadly, this paper is a first step in developing and testing the hypothesis that
extremist group radicalisation represents an identifiable process that can be
understood as distinct from the contents of a movement’s ideology. That is not to say
that the content of an ideology is meaningless or unimportant. Rather, this research
seeks to explore whether universal processes of radicalisation provide a more useful
window into why identity-based extremist movements form in the first place and how
they evolve toward violence.
In future publications, the author intends to test this initial framework against a variety
of extremist movements, with the expectations that the findings will be further refined
based on analysis of additional texts.
The following hypotheses were developed as a result of this initial study:
Identity movements are oriented toward establishing the legitimacy of a
collective group (organised on the basis of geography, religion, ethnicity or other
prima facie commonalities).
Movements become extreme when the in-group’s demand for legitimacy
escalates to the point it can only be satisfied at the expense of an out-group.
Escalating demands for legitimacy can be measured in part by their expansion
from real, present-day conflicts between an in-group and an out-group (or
groups) to characterise the conflict as historical and set formal expectations for
the future of the conflict (such as through religious prophecy).
In texts, the process of escalation correlates to the increasing complexity of
linkages between concepts, and the bundling of multiple linkages into single
conceptual constructs. These mappings can inform efforts to counter extremist
messaging. However, it should be noted that this paper does not argue that
complexity is straightforwardly causative of extremist tendencies.
a) Definition of Legitimacy
Legitimacy is a word that encompasses many meanings in everyday use. In the context
of this paper, as derived from an analysis of the stipulated texts, it applies to the
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4
conclusion that a particular collective identity group may rightfully be defined,
maintained and/or protected.
Any social collective has a normal, healthy need for legitimacy, which serves to protect
the community. When the rightful existence of an identity group is challenged,
members may respond by seeking out justifications for the in-group’s existence. These
justifications may be more elaborate for “imagined communities,” to borrow a phrase
from Dr. Benedict Anderson: communities that are defined by their conceptual nature
rather than bounded by physical limits and interpersonal relationships.
2
Since communities based on nation, race or religion are highly (or wholly) conceptual,
they are also prone to volatility. The healthy need for legitimacy can therefore spiral
out of control when an identity collective turns toward extremism. If unchecked by
internal or external pressures, in-groups can escalate their demands for legitimacy in
ways that distinguish them from healthy social collectives and identify them as
extremist.
The relevance of this definition for legitimacy is clearly demonstrated in the first
paragraph of the creedal statement of the Aryan Nations, a violent extremist group that
subscribes to the white supremacist ideology of Christian Identity:
WE BELIEVE in the preservation of our Race, individually and
collectively, as a people as demanded and directed by Yahweh. We
believe our Racial Nation has a right and is under obligation to
preserve itself and its members.
3
The development of Christian Identity’s ideology, starting with its non-violent roots in a
movement known as British Israelism, will be examined at greater length below.
Groups that are in the process of becoming more extreme typically escalate their
expectations and demands within the following ranges:
Recognition: In-group demands more and more recognition of its claimed
legitimacy and treats lack of adequate recognition as a threat.
Scope of Action: In-group requires increasing latitude to take an ever-widening
range of actions to advance its claim to legitimacy.
Attack on Out-Group: In-group enhances its legitimacy at the expense of out-
groups, using tactics that escalate from discrimination to segregation to
violence; if left unchecked, this culminates in extermination of the out-group.
Threat and Vulnerability Gap: In-groups see themselves as increasingly
vulnerable, and they see out-groups as increasingly threatening. Vulnerability
and threat are related, but not always identically premised.
Shifting Criteria for In-Group Membership: The definition of the in-group
becomes dramatically more expansive or restrictive. In the former instance, the
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in-group is enlarged in order to maximise the marginalisation of the out-group.
In the latter, people who were defined as part of the in-group at earlier stages
are reclassified as out-group (for instance, as “race traitors” or “apostates”) if
they fail to keep pace with the in-group’s escalating demands for legitimacy.
For extremist in-groups, the insatiable need for legitimacy is an auto-immune disease
that will eventually deplete its host. If unchecked by internal or external pressures, the
process of escalation leads many extremist groups to expend resources faster than
they can be replenished. As a result, some extremist groups die out, but others adapt
by either reducing or further escalating their demands for legitimacy. In theory, the
former approach would be expected to slow the expenditure of resources; the latter
approach would be expected to be more effective at mobilising in-group members to
action.
The framework outlined in this paper is both related and indebted to social identity
theory. This framework follows a somewhat different structure and differentiates some
terms and concepts.
4
The substitution of legitimacy for the “status” sought by in-groups
as defined in Social Identity Theory is one meaningful distinction. Status must be
understood relative to in-group/out-group dynamics, whereas legitimacy offers a
starting point that primarily focuses on enhancing the in-group in the earlier stages of
identity construction, before expanding to address comparisons to out-groups.
b) Definitions of Extremism and Radicalisation
The words extremism and radicalisation (in the context of extremism) are poorly
defined in public discourse, and often not much clearer in the professional and
academic communities that study them. As Dr. Alex Schmid notes, “The popularity of
the concept of ‘radicalisation’ stands in no direct relationship to its actual explanatory
power regarding the root causes of terrorism.”
5
The same can be said for the term
extremism.
Many different definitions have been offered, none have been universally adopted. In
recent years, definitions have largely been framed in the context of violent extremism,
a term that is frequently used interchangeably with non-state terrorism (itself poorly
defined).
6
For various reasons, it is much more difficult and problematic to define extremism
outside of the context of violence, primarily because “extremist” is a politically freighted
term that is often used in a mainstream context to define opponents’ views.
Yet it should be clear that extremism is not always violent and it is not always associated
with non-state actors. For instance, movements based on discrimination, separatism
or voluntary social self-segregation do not necessarily advocate violence, although they
frequently evolve in that direction. And in-group/out-group dynamics have fueled
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6
government policies throughout history, from segregation to genocide and a host of
intermediate options.
Not only is there no universally accepted definition, it is difficult to identify even a
consensus. Some definitions, particularly in policy circles, discuss only violent
extremism, especially in countries where nonviolent extremism may be protected
under the law.
7
Others are framed against the perceived mainstream of society, a
moving target.
8
Some academics and scholars define radicalisation in circular terms as
“acquisition of extreme ideas,”
9
or define extremists as people who have “radical or
extreme ideas.”
10
In the context of identity-based movements and derived from the study featured in this
paper, as well as the author’s previous study of identity extremist movements,
11
the
following definitions are proposed:
Extremism: A spectrum of beliefs in which an in-group’s success is inseparable from
negative acts against an out-group. Negative acts can include verbal attacks and
diminishment, discriminatory behaviour, or violence.
Competition is not inherently extremist, because it does not require harmful, out-of-
bounds acts against competitors (such as sabotage). The need for harmful activity must
be inseparable from the in-group’s understanding of success in order to qualify.
Similarly, not every harmful act is necessarily extremist.
Violent Extremism: The belief that an in-group’s success is inseparable from violence
against an out-group. A violent extremist ideology may subjectively characterise this
violence as defensive, offensive, or pre-emptive. Again, inseparability is the key element
here, reflecting that the need for violence against the out-group is not conditional or
situational. For instance, war is not automatically an extremist proposition. But endless,
apocalyptic or genocidal wars are usually seen as inseparable from the health of the in-
group.
Violent extremist groups may claim (sincerely or insincerely) to consider temporary
cessation of hostilities when certain conditions are met. For instance, al Qaeda
statements regarding the West sometimes outline conditions under which a truce or
treaty can occur.
12
But al Qaeda’s ideological texts stipulate in various ways that fighting
against out-groups must continue until the end of history.
13
The ability to entertain a
truce does not disqualify a movement from extremism, although the inability to
entertain a truce is likely a definitive indicator of such.
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From the two definitions above, a third follows:
Radicalisation into Extremism: The escalation of an in-group’s extremist orientation
through the endorsement of increasingly harmful actions against an out-group or out-
groups (usually correlating to the adoption of increasingly negative views of the same).
These definitions are applied within this paper, and the author believes they may be
useful in other contexts. However, additional grounded study may lead to revisions for
wider contexts.
c) Definition of Extremist Ideology
Dr. Haroro Ingram writes that “ideology is a tool that is used selectively by violent
extremists to construct their ‘system of meaning’ in response to psychosocial and
strategic factors.”
14
Derivative of this definition, and based on the study of the texts
discussed in this paper, extremist ideology is defined here as the set of justifications
that legitimises an in-group, which is primarily expressed through texts, including both
the written and spoken word.
Extremist ideologies can contain dramatically different content depending on the
identity group from which they derive meaning, but identity-based extremist ideologies
of various types may be covered by the following provisos:
Ideology is a description of the nature of an in-group, including its history,
practices and expectations for the future.
Extremist ideology describes the nature of an out-group, including its history,
practices and expectations about its future actions. Not all identity-based
movements need to describe an out-group, but extremist movements (by the
definitions above) must include this element.
In addition to defining general practices, ideology usually defines acceptable
tactics for maintaining or increasing the in-group’s legitimacy (such as isolation,
proselytisation, or violence against an out-group).
Ideology must be transmitted and marketed to members of an in-group in order to
become consequential; therefore it is inextricably linked to propaganda. Ideology has
no power if it cannot proliferate, and it cannot proliferate without the distribution of
texts (including the written word, video and audio). This paper will therefore frame
ideology as a textual and propagandistic process.
While the specific contents of an extremist ideology do matter, this research explores
the thesis that extremist ideologies emerge from a more clearly universal process.
Derived from the case study in this paper, a hypothesis is offered that the contents of
an ideology are retrofitted to meet a demand for greater legitimacy.
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8
Finally, this paper will argue that the process of ideological construction must be
understood at least as well as the contents of the ideology for purposes of countering
violent extremism, counter-terrorism messaging and deradicalisation programs.
d) Linkages and Bundles
This paper builds on the framework presented by Ingram in “A ‘Linkage-Based’
Approach to Combating Militant Islamist Propaganda”.
15
Elements of group identity are
presented in texts by ideologues and propagandists by linking concepts, for instance
by linking an out-group to a crisis or threat, or by linking an in-group to a solution or
benefit.
In the ideological texts examined herein, these linkages were seen to be bundled into
high-level constructs, in which several concepts are connected to one another and then
conflated into a single idea. An example would be an ideological argument that draws
connections between a conspiracy theory, a scriptural reference, a folkloric tradition
and a real historical event, representing the bundled product simply as “history.”
At the highest level, extremists tie an out-group to a crisis or crises, and connect the in-
group to solutions. But these high-level constructs can be unbundled into a series of
more complex links. For instance:
Elements of in-group and out-group identity (perceived beliefs, practices,
expectations, etc.) are linked to source knowledge (news, history, folklore,
scripture, myth, conspiracy theories, etc.).
Elements of in-group identity are linked to vulnerability assessment (mild,
major, existential, or apocalyptic).
Elements of out-group identity are linked to threat assessment (mild, major,
existential, or apocalyptic).
Vulnerability and threat assessment are bundled into a crisis construct,
which adds urgency to the in-group’s attempts to recruit and mobilise members.
The crisis construct is linked to prescribed solutions to the “out-group
problem” (such as assimilation, discrimination, segregation, or extermination).
Bundled concepts can themselves be bundled, resulting in very complex networks of
meaning. To fully dissect the construction of an identity group and associated
messaging, especially in the case of extremist movements, it is necessary to understand
how and when concepts are bundled and to unpack them into their component parts.
e) Automatic and Deliberative Thinking
In “Deciphering the Siren Call of Militant Islamist Propaganda,” Ingram argues that
extremist propaganda seeks to produce one of two reactions in target audiences:
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[Daniel] Kahneman’s research … argues that the mind is characterised
by two systems of thinking: “System 1 operates automatically and
quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” This
is also referred to as “thinking fast” or “automatic thinking”. In contrast,
“System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that
demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System
2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency,
choice, and concentration.” System 2 is also referred to as “thinking
slow” or “deliberative thinking”.
16
Ingram observes that deliberative thinking is invoked by extremist propagandists who
wish to trigger an assessment of automatic judgments in their audiences, often as a
response when automatic assertions are challenged. This paper will examine examples
of both types of thinking in the evolution of Christian Identity ideology. An expanded
explanation of these concepts can be found in “Deciphering the Siren Call of Militant
Islamist Propaganda.”
2. The Evolution of Christian Identity
a) Introduction
The violent racist movement Christian Identity provides a useful case study in the
evolution of extremist identity, because it went through a fairly clear and gradual
metamorphosis from a less extreme initial formulation into its full-blown violent
incarnation, and because its evolution is particularly well-documented in texts.
While there are many variations on the ideology, adherents of Christian Identity broadly
believe members of the “white race” are the Chosen People of God described in the
Christian Bible, and that other races are impure and part of a genetic lineage that can
be traced directly to Satan or to Satanic influences.
Dr. Michael Barkun provides an authoritative account of this movement’s origins and
evolution in his book, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity
Movement, and this paper will not attempt to recreate that comprehensive narrative
history, however a brief chronology of the movement’s development and the situation
of the texts examined in this paper is presented in Appendix B.
17
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10
This paper will instead examine a representative sample of the movement’s key texts,
from its earliest incarnations to its most-developed manifestations, to analyse the
movement’s evolution from the elevation of an in-group identity (by Christian Identity’s
direct precursor, British Israelism) into its later framing of a cosmic war against a
demonic out-group.
The texts are examined here in roughly chronological order, but the many competing
strains of thought and overlapping developments preclude a strictly linear evolution.
They were selected for their prominence and with an emphasis on texts that introduced
novel concepts which altered the movement’s trajectory. Some of these ideas
developed in parallel, while others are expressed more clearly or fully by texts taken
out of the chronological sequence.
b) Legitimacy of the In-Group
British Israelism was a historical theory originating in the late 19
th
century, which
stipulated with varying degrees of specificity that the “Chosen People” of the Old
Testament—known as the Israelites—were the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon “race”.
18
In its very earliest iteration, the theory held that many Europeans were (unknowingly)
Jewish.
19
But this swiftly gave way to an argument that Europeans were the
descendants and heirs of the Chosen People of Israel, distinct from a Jewish identity.
British Israelism constructed an in-group identity with two primary and interrelated
components: nation and race. Adherents believed Anglo-Saxons were a distinct race
descended from the so-called “lost tribes” of the nation of Israel described in the Bible.
The fate of these tribes is unclear in canonical texts, although later apocryphal works
and religious and historical theories offer a variety of clues or explanations for their
disappearance.
20
British Israelists theorised that the lost tribes had migrated to Europe and seeded a
race of white Europeans, who were the rightful beneficiaries of covenants with God that
had been documented in the Christian Old Testament. British Israelism did not entirely
exclude modern Jews from the racial and religious line of God’s “chosen people”,
Rather, the theory initially sought to extend the biblical status of the “chosen” to the
race of Anglo-Saxons and the nation of the British Empire (and later to the United
States). As the movement solidified, the idea was fleshed out in a torrent of extremely
dense, pseudo-academic studies.
Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright
Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright, published in 1902 by J. H. Allen, represents a
mature explanation of the ideology.
21
The book also stands out as one of the more
accessible and influential works in a field overstuffed with elaborate scriptural citations,
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
biblical genealogies and the parsing of Hebrew names against other names and words
with similar sounds. In Barkun’s words, British Israelists “mimick[ed] techniques of
historical scholarship, so that conclusions might be advanced not merely as statements
of faith but as intersubjectively testable knowledge”.
22
In keeping with the general outline shared by most British Israelist theorists, Allen
argues that the nation of Israel described in the Bible has been misunderstood by
mainstream scholars as an exclusively Jewish state. He claims the lost tribes of Israel
migrated to the British Isles and survive today as Anglo-Saxons, constituting a separate
nation and a semi-distinct race from the tribe of Judah, whose descendants are
modern-day Jews.
In Allen’s iteration of British Israelist theory, scriptures are deployed to support a claim
that Anglo-Saxons and Jews descend from a single bloodline in antiquity that eventually
separated into somewhat distinct races, relying on the extensive genealogies
chronicled in the Old Testament.
23
The importance of these familial distinctions relate
to various Old Testament covenants that promised future greatness to the descendants
of Abraham.
Allen separates these covenants according to whom they were promised, resulting in a
“birthright” line, destined to be the “father of many nations”, and a distinct “sceptre”
line, which he interprets as the royal line of David, through the tribe of Judah, from
which Jesus Christ would be born.
24
A notable component of this genealogical history
involves junctures in the biblical narrative in which the birthright takes unexpected
turns. Allen relates several examples in which the birthright does not proceed to the
firstborn son, either due to God’s expressed preferences or due to actions taken by the
men involved (for instance, when God chooses Jacob, the younger son of Isaac, to
receive his birthright, instead of the older son, Esau).
25
In Allen’s view – which he defends with a mix of biblical citations, folklore and arcane
symbology – the lost tribes are heirs to the nation of Israel, distinct from the Jewish
people.
The biblical sources are a mix of what Allen presents as literal history and interpreted
prophecy. From folklore, Allen selects data points useful to his argument, such as
legends surrounding the “Stone of Scone,” an artifact used in the coronation of English
monarchs, said to have originally belonged to the biblical patriarch Jacob.
26
In the realm
of symbology, later in the text, Allen veers into increasingly fervid flights of imagination.
For example, he finds meaningful parallels between a biblical reference to a “scarlet
thread” linked to the “sceptre” bloodline and the British flag, which has literal scarlet
threads woven into its fabric.
27
Taken together, Allen argues, all of these data points prove that Anglo-Saxons are the
rightful heirs to God’s promises, specifically a promise that the descendants of the
biblical figure Ephraim would father “many nations” or “a company of nations”, which
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12
Allen casts as a prefigurement of the British Empire. He further separates one of the
lost tribes – linked to the biblical figure Manasseh – as antecedent to the United States,
making Americans rightful heirs of a prophecy that Manasseh’s descendants would one
day form “a great nation” in the singular.
28
Allen does not stop with this elevation of
Anglo-Saxon destiny, however. He takes it a step further and argues that the “sceptre",
or royal line, has passed from the Jews to Israel, meaning the Anglo-Saxon tribes.
Race as Text versus Subtext
Judah’s Sceptre is heavily concerned with distinctions of race, but these are important
primarily as it concerns the proper inheritance of God’s prophesied blessings. In a
chapter titled “Race Versus Grace”, Allen mounts an argument that both race and grace
(meaning religiously correct belief and action) are necessary for Israel to fulfil prophecy
and establish the word of God on Earth.
29
This formulation frames British Israelism as an ethno-nationalist movement with some
significant loopholes and exceptions for those who are willing to assimilate.
One key exception applies to the Jews. Allen portrays the rift between the Israelites and
the Jews as religious and historical in nature, rather than intrinsically racial, and he
argues that Anglo-Saxon “Israel” will eventually be reunited with the Jews in accordance
with prophecy. As Allen explains, “The brotherhood is still broken, but it shall be mended”
(emphasis in original).
30
For Allen, the shared racial heritage of Jews and Anglo-Saxons
unites more than it divides.
Implicit but essential to this racial calculus is some manner of patronising superiority
and ultimate sovereignty over the world’s other races. But despite the centrality of race
to his argument, Allen neglects to mention – in the course of nearly 100,000 words –
how people of African or Asian descent might be impacted by the ascendance of
divinely ordained Anglo-Saxon hegemony, aside from a tangential note that the
abolition of slavery in the West was morally correct and in accordance with prophecy.
31
Earlier iterations of the British Israelite theory were slightly more forthcoming on this
point. The earliest formal statement of British Israelism as a distinct ideology was the
1876 tract, Lectures on Our Israelitish Origin. The book’s author, John Wilson, is described
by Barkun as a key figure in institutionalising the ideology as a movement.
32
In Lectures, Wilson presents a fairly typical theory of the time, describing three “major
races” that branch off from the sons of Noah – Shem (white), Ham (black), and Japheth
(Asian and indigenous people such as Native Americans) – accompanied by patronising
descriptions of non-white characteristics.
33
Few of these racial formulations were
original to Wilson; some had existed for centuries as part of theological justifications
for slavery. For instance, Wilson reiterates a well-known theological interpretation of
the day, used by others to justify the enslavement of Africans based on a biblical story
in which Ham’s son is cursed by God to be a slave.
34
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Wilson devotes more ink than Allen to a discussion of race and more visibly reflects the
prevalent racist attitudes of his day, but these elements are also clearly tangential to
his primary argument that Anglo-Saxons are the lineal inheritors of the nation of Israel.
While early adherents of British Israelism waxed on at great length to assert and justify
their elevated in-group status as the rightful heirs of prophecy and special status in the
eyes of God, their writings rarely ventured into out-group dynamics in any meaningful
way – even when discussing the most obvious potential challenge to their scriptural
claims of legitimacy, the Jews.
Out-Group Status Quo
British Israelism patently disenfranchises the Jews of their biblical covenants with God
and transfers the benefits of those covenants to Anglo-Saxons. But from the
perspective of Wilson, Allen and other British Israelists, this wasn’t larceny, it was simply
a lateral variation on the “normal” status quo.
British Israelists started from the assumption that the Jews had no covenants left to
lose. Most mainstream Christian theologians of the day endorsed some form of
“replacement theology” – a belief that Old Testament covenants were either
superseded or fulfilled by the coming of Christ.
35
We know the British Israelists
emerged from that tradition because they devoted many pages to detailed refutations
of replacement theology,
36
arguing that the old covenants had not been superseded or
fulfilled, but were still valid and subject to a legitimate claim by Anglo-Saxons.
In other words, British Israelists did not emerge to contest the legitimacy of a Jewish
claim to the benefits of the covenants. The very notion was so irrelevant to their
thinking that they never even dignified it with their attention. Instead, they emerged to
contest the contemporaneous Christian claim that the covenants had been replaced.
Thus, most early British Israelists did not frame Jews as an enemy out-group, treating
them instead as an alienated segment of the Israelite in-group. For Wilson, Jews and
Europeans alike are descendants of Shem and thus genetically superior to the other
two major races. Wilson often uses Caucasian and Semitic interchangeably, although
he specifies that Anglo-Saxons are the best exemplars of the race and further claims
that the Jewish line has been polluted by race-mixing—a point that would be recalled
by later writers and eventually take on much greater importance.
This miscegenation, along with the rejection and execution of Christ, contributed to
disqualifying modern Jews from participation in God’s covenants, Wilson argues, but he
stipulates that the Jews can be re-assimilated into the nation of Israel by converting to
Christianity.
37
While he criticises the Jews for “unceasing hatred [of] not only Christ, the
Head, but also His followers”, he is also very specific that they must not be excluded
from the fulfilment of prophecy, explaining:
Do we bring forward these historical truths to disparage the Jew? Far
from it. Only to illustrate the truth regarding Israel.
38
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14
Allen, writing 27 years later, is far more careful to avoid disparaging Jews (or anyone
else) on racial grounds, arguing that in the future, Anglo-Israel and the tribe of Judah
“are again to be united, become one kingdom, and then remain so forever”.
39
Other
British Israelist authors generally followed the same template, expecting a future
reunification and embracing a patronising and often freighted philo-Semitism.
“Ephraim – the Anglo-Saxon – are reaching out the hand of love – of fraternal affection
– to Judah, the Jews, inviting them to terms of fellowship, such as in the days of old
when they came out of Egypt, and before the separation”, wrote E.P. Ingersoll in 1886’s
Lost Israel Found in the Anglo-Saxon Race.
40
“View the Jews, therefore, in any aspect you please, they at once arrest our attention,
inspire our thoughts and command our admiration”, wrote William H. Poole in 1889’s
Anglo
‐
Israel or the Saxon Race Proved to be the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel – before describing
a stereotypically unpleasant Jewish “countenance” as a byproduct of their rejection of
Christ.
41
Despite all the qualifications and stipulations, the fraternal impulses of the British
Israelists were fraught with underlying tensions, chiefly that their magnanimity toward
the Jews was predicated on a firm expectation of eventual assimilation. Jews must
eventually embrace Christianity in order for British Israelists’ prophetic expectations to
be fulfilled. This underlying tension would grow sharper as British Israelism evolved
into the mid-20
th
century, at the same time that a broader social strain of anti-Semitism
was evolving from a religious construct into a racial one.
Judah’s Sceptre: Linkage Analysis
British Israelites sought to enhance in-group legitimacy by making Anglo-Saxons the
inheritors of biblical covenants and promises of greatness. This was accomplished in
texts through a pseudo-scholarly approach, designed to woo potential recruits through
deliberative arguments.
42
Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright creates its constructs of identity by establishing
elaborate conceptual linkages among a number of in-group concepts and knowledge
assets. These include but are not limited to:
Linkage
Justifies
Documents
Correlates with
Correlates with
Is
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Documents
Grants
Made covenants with
Descended from
Inherit
Are ignorant of
Are
Are
Are
Are
Are
Prophesied to be
Prophesied to be
Judah’s Sceptre is not a fully formed extremist interpretation of the world, in part
because it emerges from a discriminatory worldview in which it is not necessary to
disenfranchise Jews of what they do not possess. Furthermore, it does not critique
Jewish practices or historical behaviour (or rather, it does not single Jews out for more
criticism than Anglo-Saxons). Instead, its primary critique is intellectual in basis and
directed at mainstream Christian theologians whose conclusions differ from Allen’s.
Nevertheless, Allen provides seeds for the eventual development of an out-group
dynamic, setting the stage for the next generation of British Israelists. These are derived
from the in-group linkage that “God made covenants with the Israelites” and that
“Anglo-Saxons are Israelites”. The conclusions that follow from this premise are:
Linkage
Are not
Are not
Do not inherit
Allen could have marshaled the same sources to argue that Anglo-Saxons were simply
included or co-equal with the Jews in the inheritance of covenants. The fact that he, and
most other British Israelite authors, chose not to take this approach provided the
opening for an increasingly virulent strain of anti-Semitism that would eventually
subsume the original ideology’s particular and specific worldview.
At this stage in the movement’s evolution, however, Allen does not perceive a threat
from the out-group. Therefore, his prescription for a “solution” to the tension between
16
in-group and out-group franchises and preference divergence is relatively mild and
relegated to the vanishingly distant future:
Solves
Assimilate
Many of the concepts in the text are bundled (see chart, next page), particularly the key
idea of heredity, which is a bundled collection of links between history, scripture,
folklore and analysis. The crucial argument that “Anglo-Saxons are Israelites” is built on
multiple bundles. Allen’s articulation of the ideology can be usefully diagrammed
according to these linkages and bundled concepts.
Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright uses these links and bundles to establish several
benchmarks of in-group identity, including:
Defining shared beliefs (religious)
Defining shared history (scripture, heredity)
Defining intrinsic, non-negotiable identity (heredity, Anglo-Israel nation)
For the early British Israelists, the heavy lifting is found in the work of constructing an
intrinsic identity (Anglo-Israel) through “historical” proofs, derived from the bundled
concepts of scripture, history and folklore. These are not treated as entirely
interchangeable. Scriptural genealogies and history are seen as identical constructs;
folklore is relegated to providing secondary and supporting proofs.
This bundle of concepts is the linchpin that keeps the wheels from flying off. Without
the genealogical argument, British Israelism falls apart. In contrast, the future fruits of
heredity are presented in relatively modest fashion – blessings due to a “great nation”
and a “company of nations”. When Allen invokes prophecy, he is most often pointing to
prophecies he believes have already been fulfilled, which in turn are bundled into the
historical and intrinsic constructs. Expectations for the future of the identity group
remain vague. The movement, in its early stages, seeks its legitimacy in the past.
Linkages in the text of Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright. Green lines represent links defining
the in-group; red lines pertain to out-groups.
c) Illegitimacy of the Out-Group
Racialisation of Jewish Identity
Around the time that British Israelism was evolving as a defined movement, a parallel
ideological shift regarding attitudes toward Jews was taking place in Germany and other
parts of Europe. It is not the intent of this paper to provide a thorough overview of this
transition outside of the British Israelism context. The brief summary here draws
primarily on Evans (2005) and Katz (1980).
43
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
18
Anti-Jewish sentiment was nothing new by the 19
th
century, but historically, its major
focus had been religious and based on a narrative that the Jews played a critical role in
the death of Christ. With the rise of nationalism in Europe, it became expedient to
define Jewish identity as racial rather than religious, in part because it meant that Jews
who intermarried or converted to Christianity (a significant 19
th
century demographic
in Germany) could not remove themselves from the out-group.
44
A series of French and German works promoted racialised concepts of anti-Semitism
throughout the late 19
th
century.
45
While the British Israelists were industriously
Semitising Anglo-Saxons with extensive biblical citations, influential German writers like
Theodor Fritsch instead Aryanised Christ, discarding biblical evidence to the contrary
as tainted by Jewish revisionism.
46
The new anti-Semitism did not win hearts and minds overnight, but its influence in
European society grew. In 1899, an English immigrant to Germany named Houston
Stewart Chamberlain published a book, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which
was widely read and helped spread racial anti-Semitism to a much wider audience.
47
There is considerably more to this story, of course, including the catastrophic
expansion of these themes in Nazi Germany, but the purpose here is simply to
introduce the strain of racialised anti-Semitism that would come to infect British
Israelism.
The shift from religious to racial anti-Semitism was extraordinarily consequential.
Although bigotry of any kind is problematic, racial prejudice is inherently more extreme
than religious prejudice in one key respect – members of a religious out-group can
usually convert to join the in-group through established procedures, but members of a
racial out-group cannot join the in-group, except through subterfuge (i.e., “passing”) or
through a lengthy, often generational, process of assimilation.
48
Simply put: you can elect to change your religion in order to escape persecution, but
you can almost never elect to change your race. This has serious ramifications for the
extremity of actions that an in-group will contemplate toward the out-group.
The shift to a racial out-group identity contributed to an ideological vision of a deeper
and more sinister conflict, one which by its very nature could never be mended or
reconciled, and one which required more extreme solutions. When a cultural dispute
between people of different races becomes grounded in beliefs about the intrinsic
qualities of race, it becomes profoundly radicalised.
British Israelism, Barkun writes, was often “philo-Semitic”, but it “operated in an
environment rife with anti-Semitism” and “racial theorizing”.
49
The movement also had
implicit elements of anti-Semitism in its elevation of the Anglo-Saxon line over the
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Judaic line, as well as reflecting general white racial attitudes of the day, which were not
especially enlightened and at times tended toward the conspiratorial.
50
For some early British Israelist writers, the movement actually allayed concerns about
perceived Jewish influence by offering a prophesied path toward purification and
reconciliation of the tribes of Israel.
51
The religious basis for the out-group formulation
offered an important escape clause, and one that could be safely postponed until
prophetic conditions were met at some unspecified point in the future.
William Cameron
British Israelist writer William J. Cameron was more notorious for his role in publishing
virulent racist and anti-Semitic material in the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper
owned by automobile magnate and infamous Nazi sympathiser Henry Ford.
Cameron was likely a British Israelite first, and an anti-Semite later.
52
In part thanks to
Cameron’s influence, British Israelism would shift from a patronising but inclusive
stance toward the Jews to the enemy out-group politics of extremism.
While it contained some British Israelist content, the Independent was heavily focused
on exposing so-called Jewish conspiracies emerging from the infamous anti-Semitic
tract The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. First published in English in 1919, the
book was popularised in the United States by Ford, Cameron and the Independent, and
its contents soon began to infect British Israelist thought.
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
While not part of the current of thought that produced British Israelism, the publication
of the infamous anti-Semitic conspiracy tract, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,
would have a fateful impact on the movement. The book was a semi-plagiarised
concatenation of conspiracy theories about Jewish influence over society, first
published in Russia and later in English.
British Israelism’s shift toward anti-Semitism tracked with its rising popularity in
America. The Protocols were first published in book form for an American audience in
1920 by Small, Maynard & Co. of Boston, which is the reference work for this paper.
53
Protocols is essentially a litany of everything that can theoretically go wrong in a society
based on representative government, but it argues all these potential abuses are
happening or have already happened, and attributes them to a near-omnipotent Jewish
conspiracy by the titular “Learned Elders of Zion,” characterised in a very un-British
Israelite manner not just as the Jewish “race”
54
but also the nation of Israel.
55
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
20
Pushing a racial view of Jewish identity, Protocols has resonated throughout the years
for many reasons, particularly because of its astute critique of modernity and
representative government,
56
which was substantially lifted from Maurice Joly’s French
book Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864). In that book, the
salient critique is attributed to a fictionalised version of Machiavelli in the context of
contemporaneous French Emperor Napoleon III.
57
In Protocols, the critique is recast as a description of international crises caused by a
race-based Jewish conspiracy. The crises are so diverse and wide-ranging that readers
could readily associate them with worrisome developments in the real world. The
prologue and appendix of the American edition clearly frames the October Revolution
of the Bolsheviks in Russia as a Jewish conspiracy, linking anti-Semitism to Communism,
a connection that would play out in British Israelist texts.
The conspiracy theories contained in Protocols were amplified and popularised by some
of the biggest megaphones of the day, including the propaganda machine of Hitler and
the Third Reich. In the United States, articles in Ford and Cameron’s Independent, were
subsequently collected in a book called The International Jew.
58
These ideas began to be echoed by British Israelists in the 1920s, but they did not
immediately subsume the movement.
59
Racialising British Israelism
Cameron availed himself of the implicit opening created by British Israelism’s
separation of the chosen nation of Israel and the Jewish tribe of Judah, which his
predecessors had studiously avoided. For example, one vituperative Independent
article, unattributed but believed to be authored by Cameron, seizes and expands on a
pillar of the British Israelite theory that previous authors had treated carefully – the
disenfranchisement of Jews from the covenants of God:
The pulpit has ... the mission of liberating the Church from the error
that Judah and Israel are synonymous. … The Jews are not ‘The Chosen
People,’ though practically the entire Church has succumbed to the
propaganda which declares them so.
60
The case for British Israel had always included this double-edged sword, although most
early authors declined to exploit it: if the British were the true heirs of Israel, was it
really necessary to allow any special consideration for the tribe of Judah, even
historically? British Israelism was slow to advance the argument, in part because of its
painstakingly constructed scriptural framework which relied heavily on the Old
Testament, a collection of Jewish holy books that did not easily lend itself to
disenfranchising its authors.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
In order to synchronise the new anti-Semitism with the old British Israelist theories, the
question of race would have to be addressed. Here, Cameron drew on John Wilson’s
pre-existing work. The racial theory presented in Wilson’s Lectures on Our Israelitish
Origin was tangential to the book’s primary argument and carefully hedged to avoid
“disparaging” the Jews, but crucially, he made reference to the Jews “mixing” with
Gentiles descended from the cursed lines of Cain and Esau (aka Edom), although he
still allowed for their eventual redemption and qualified return to the Anglo-Saxon line
through acceptance of Christ.
61
Cameron would adopt some of Wilson’s theories directly in his later writings, but by the
1930s, a wider racial theory was already becoming an important focus. In 1933, he
articulated his views in a series of lectures laying out a racialised version of British
Israelism. They were later collected and published as a book, The Covenant People.
62
After suffering significant professional blowback from his association with Ford,
Cameron was careful in his choice of words, but the lectures represent a clear
racialisation of British Israelist tradition. Cameron describes the Bible as being first and
foremost a racial history, the history of a racially delimited “chosen people,” forbidden
from mixing with other races.
63
He says:
Race is one of the most indelible natural facts and race is one of the
most insistent Biblical facts. The Bible is not a history of the human
race at large, but of one distinct strain of people amongst the family of
races. All the other races are considered with reference to it. … The
race to whose story our Bible is largely devoted is called "The Chosen
People."
64
Cameron then articulates an inherent contradiction in British Israelism, but one that
earlier influential writers had carefully avoided. If one race is “chosen”, or privileged,
then the stature of other races must be correspondingly diminished. Legitimacy can be
measured without direct reference to an out-group. In contrast, privilege cannot be
asserted in a vacuum; it is by definition predicated on relative status.
A man will rise and demand, "By what right does God choose one race
or people above another?" I like that form of the question. It is much
better than asking by what right God degrades one people beneath
another, although that is implied.
65
Despite his anti-Semitic track record, Cameron here rejects the premise that being the
chosen race means enjoying superiority over other races. He argues instead the
“chosen” status is a responsibility rather than a perquisite, charged with the sombre
responsibility lifting up the other people of the world—“it is a burden imposed,”
Cameron says—literally “the white man’s burden,” he says, citing Kipling.
66
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
22
To support his theory, Cameron frequently turns to Old Testament apocrypha, texts
which had been excluded from the canonical bible for various reasons, including
questions about their authenticity.
67
In justifying their citation, Cameron characterised
the apocrypha as akin to historical novels: “They are not history per se, but they are
historically accurate.”
68
Unlike his predecessors, Cameron brings a strong indictment against the current “race”
of Anglo-Saxon Israelites, particularly the United States, foreshadowing a critique that
would later flower in the Christian Identity paradigm. Cameron says the status of Anglo-
Saxons in America as the Chosen People is not intended as racial glorification. To the
contrary, he says:
When I turn to the United States of America and recall the hypocritical
character of much of our public life, of our intense engrossment with
material pursuits; when I think of the vast reaches of economic slavery,
of our antagonistic social classes, of our lawlessness, our violence, our
corruption in high places and low, our shameless surrender to sex, our
descent to dirt in drama and literature, our trampling of the Lord's
Sabbath, our supercilious sneer at religion, our dollar aristocracy and
our teeming millions of pauperized citizens - please don't tell me that
the truth that enables me to see these things is a truth invented to
glorify them!
69
Prefiguring later extremist currents, he characterises the founding documents of the
United States, excepting the Constitution, as a new covenant with God, particularly the
Declaration of Independence. “That declaration made us a People,” according to
Cameron. “It was the forerunner of our government. (What a descent we have made
since then!)”
70
Also foreshadowing extremist arguments to come, he claims unfair
taxation was at the heart of most biblical crises.
The Covenant People lectures moved the ball down the field, but Cameron remains
cautious in this text, likely due to the professional and social consequences of his earlier
and more overt anti-Semitism.
71
He discusses the importance of race extensively and
definitively states that the Bible is an intrinsically “racial” history. Cameron stipulates
that Biblical heroes like Moses are not Jewish, but despite his history with Ford, he does
not frame Jews as the out-group in these distinctly British Israelist ruminations.
In these lectures, the process of framing out-groups is instead seminal. While Cameron
likely held harsher views in private, here he simply plants seeds for more extreme
iterations of the ideology to come—specifically framing the spectre of an out-group
through a more exclusionary tone toward Jews.
In parallel, Cameron sets the stage for “purifying” the in-group with his criticisms of
America’s “corruption,” “shameless surrender to sex” and “descent into dirt.” The
nascent “othering” of insufficiently pure in-group members is concurrent with the
nascent process of defining the out-group.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The Covenant People: Linkage Analysis
Linkages in the text of The Covenant People. Green lines represent links defining the in-group; red
pertains to out-groups.
Both implicitly and explicitly, The Covenant People radicalises and racialises British
Israelist ideas, although it still falls far short of a mature extremist outlook. Cameron
begins to define and justify the existence of racial out-groups, but he does not (in this
text) proscribe their existence or rights, except in the context of biblical covenants.
Notably missing (especially in light of Cameron’s previous ventures) is an external-
threat mentality. Cameron de-emphasises earlier British Israelist hereditary claims that
linked Jews to Anglo-Saxon Israel in antiquity, but he does not refute them. His
characterisation of the “white man’s burden” clearly subordinates other races to Anglo-
Saxons, but Cameron posits no threat from out-groups. And, sincerely or not, he
strongly criticises “racial vanity” and “racial egotism,” saying Anglo-Saxons should not
revel in a feeling of superiority.
Ultimately, The Covenant People is still recognisably British Israelist in form, but it shows
signs of mutation that would soon escalate in the work of Cameron’s close associate,
Howard Rand.
24
A two-page spread from the inside cover of Howard B. Rand’s Documentary Studies. Vol. 2
Howard B. Rand
Howard B. Rand was a tireless organiser and a “second-generation British Israelite,”
according to Barkun, having grown up reading Judah’s Sceptre at his father’s prodding.
He was involved in founding the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America in 1930, which
soon established branches around the United States.
72
His desire to expand the reach of British Israelism led him to William Cameron, who
helped extend the organisation’s reach by aligning with the American far right, where
Cameron was already well-known thanks to his work with Ford and the Independent. As
a result, elements of Communist paranoia and derivative anti-government rhetoric
began to infiltrate the ideology.
73
Under Rand, British Israelism also began to take on
apocalyptic and millenarian overtones, reflecting the mood of the late 1930s and the
outbreak of World War II.
74
Cameron and Rand parted ways around this time, due in part to Cameron’s alcoholism,
leaving Rand to continue to publish and largely author the British Israelist magazine
Destiny through 1970.
75
Highlights of Rand’s voluminous output were collected in three
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
volumes under the title “Documentary Studies,” consisting of more than 1,800 pages of
writings on British Israelism and related issues.
76
This paper will focus mostly on the first volume, covering 1939 to 1945, in order to
highlight elements that would morph into the earliest iteration of Christian Identity
toward the end of this period. It should be noted that the tremendous volume of Rand’s
output, and the equally vast and twisting corridors of his ideological constructs, cannot
be comprehensively captured in the extracts analysed here.
“No subject is more fascinating than prophecy”, Rand wrote, and he proved his
fascination with the topic at considerable length.
77
Although he continued to reiterate
past themes and biblical proofs of Anglo-Saxon descent, Rand forcefully brought
forward themes of prophecy and the destiny of Anglo-Saxons to play a fateful role in
the waning days of humanity, which he predicted were soon at hand.
In Rand’s conception, the historical puzzle-box of Anglo-Saxon descent, once the
primary fascination of British Israelists, increasingly took a back seat to the modern role
of the Anglo-Saxon race in a turbulent world. Correspondingly, Rand’s scriptural focus
turned from genealogies to prophecies, or passages that could be interpreted as such.
In prophecy, Rand found cause to escalate the legitimacy and importance of Anglo-
Saxon identity still further, building on Cameron’s conception of the “white man’s
burden”. With citations from the biblical book of Psalms and the prophetic book of
Micah, Rand built an argument that Anglo-Saxon Israelites were destined not only to
form a “great nation” and “a company of nations”, but to rule the entire world, with the
coming of a king of Israel in the not-too-distant future.
His vision was decidedly martial, and the pages of Destiny are consumed with imminent,
apocalyptic war, a new element in the British Israelist worldview. Citing the prophetic
Book of Daniel and the words of Christ in the New Testament, Rand claimed that Anglo-
Saxon Israel had to endure a time of punishment, which was concluding as part of
World Wars I and II, an era in which “Gentile” or “Babylonian” empires would stand in
opposition. The time for purification lay directly ahead and subsequently, Israel would
rise:
78
The people of this generation will not only be spectators but actors as
well in a titanic struggle involving all nations, the outcome of which will
decide for all time world rulership [emphasis in original].
79
The enemy, Rand wrote, was also discernible in biblical prophecy concerning the evil
ruler Gog and his land of Magog – cast here as Communist Russia, avowed enemies of
Christianity, destined to face off against an allied British and American Israel. War with
Russia, and Russia’s eventual destruction, would awaken Anglo-Saxons to the
realisation that they are the rightful heirs of Israel, Rand explained, tying the prophecy
to Armageddon, understood by many Christians as the final battle between good and
evil before the end of history.
80
The intermittent introduction of such apocalyptic
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
26
themes in Rand’s body of work tracked with parallel currents elsewhere in British
Israelism that will be discussed in the next section.
Racial awakening comes only after the situation becomes unimaginably desperate, with
the racial nations of the world aligned against the Anglo-Saxons.
81
Rand incorporates a
scriptural view of race throughout the pages of Destiny, following biblical genealogies
in the style of Wilson in Lectures on Our Israelitish Origins, but significantly different in
the details. Arabs are said to be descended from Jokshan, a son of Abraham. The
Chinese are said to be descendants of Moab, and the Japanese descendants of Ammon,
and Rand hypothesises both countries will be set against Israel in the final battle, with
other enemies including Afghanistan, Arabia, Armenia, Egypt, France, Germany,
Mongolia, Persia, Tibet, Turkey, and, of course, the Soviet Union.
82
Despite having been weaned on Allen’s Judah’s Sceptre, Rand is more emphatic than
many of his predecessors on the topic of distinguishing Jews from Israelites, employing
many familiar proofs of Anglo-Saxon heredity as disqualifying Jews from participation
in Israel.
83
He oscillates between religious and racial definitions, arguing that the
emergence of a distinct Jewish racial identity was a late historical development, the
result of race-mixing with outsiders after the Babylonian Captivity (around 540 BCE).
84
Because of these complications, Rand struggles at length to refute Christ’s Judaism,
declaring that the only Jew among the apostles was Judas.
85
Rand was openly anti-
Semitic,
86
but he still—grudgingly—allowed for the eventual reconciliation of Judah and
Israel on the condition that Jews accept Christ.
87
Rand referred to the Soviets and Communists and Bolsheviks interchangeably, the
latter term echoing the American edition of the Protocols, which laboriously
documented the supposed Jewish origins of Bolshevism and its link to the book’s titular
conspiracy.
88
Despite the clear intrusion of anti-Semitism on his worldview, Rand
repeatedly names Communism and the Soviet Union as the apocalyptic enemies
referred to in prophecy in the texts examined here, rather than Jews.
Rand escalated his linkage between Communism and Judaism as the years progressed,
accusing the Soviets of advocating for Zionism in Palestine at the expense of the British
Mandate.
89
Later, in 1948, the establishment of the modern state of Israel would drive
Rand deeper and deeper into anti-Semitism.
On its face, the declaration of a nation of Israel grounded in Jewish identity was the
most dramatic rebuke to British Israelism that could be imagined. Calling it an
“abomination” and an “incredible hoax,” he firmly tied these developments to a Jewish
conspiracy as outlined in the American edition of Protocols and amplified and expanded
in Ford and Cameron’s Independent articles.
90
Later, in the 1950s, Rand would build
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
more extensive bridges between the Protocols and British Israelism, but by then the
movement had largely left him behind, as Christian Identity came into its own.
91
In all of the above, Rand is introducing something that had been absent in previous
iterations of British Israelism – a “crisis construct”. According to Ingram:
Perceptions of crisis may not only contribute to identity construction
processes but tend to act as an important push factor behind why
individuals support extremist groups and engage in politically
motivated violence (i.e. radicalise).
92
As described by Ingram, the crisis construct contains three interrelated factors: the
presence and influence of “Others”, uncertainty, and the breakdown of tradition. Rand
is a decidedly alarmist writer. His thesis incorporates all of these elements, including a
more extensive out-group description drawn from The Protocols, an alarmist
description of global chaos and uncertainty, and the failure of Anglo-Saxons to
acknowledge their traditional Israelite racial heritage.
In a full-blown extremist movement, following Ingram’s formulation, the crisis construct
is paired with a solution construct – a formulation of what the in-group can do to solve
the out-group crisis. Here, Rand falls short, lacking a vision or call to action beyond
racial awakening, after which apocalyptic events of an unclear nature take place with
the guidance of God. It would fall to the next generation to propose a violent solution
to the out-group problem, an evolution that is described in the following section.
93
Two final notes of interest pertain to Rand’s advancement of British Israelism toward
the realm of racialised extremism. First, Rand frequently responded directly in his texts
to inquiries from the readers of Destiny, and those readers were not necessarily inclined
to take his claims at face value.
94
Reader queries often led him to articulate more
complex justifications for his beliefs. This dynamic will be explored further in section
three of this paper, The Elements of Extremism.
Second, Rand hints in the pages of Destiny at his interest in or acceptance of a racial
theory that some form of sentient humanoid life existed prior to the creation events
described in the book of Genesis. Such “Pre-Adamite” theories existed long before
British Israelism, but by the 19
th
century, they had taken on racist dimensions,
specifying that prior to the events of Genesis, God created inferior races, who were the
progenitors of modern non-white races.
Rand posited the existence of a pre-Adamic race of evil men who were wiped out prior
to the events in Genesis by atomic weapons, or something very similar. This science-
fiction tint would merge with more elaborate and sinister pre-Adamic theories as
Christian Identity finally began to emerge as a distinct ideology.
95
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
28
Destiny Magazine: Linkage Analysis
Linkages established in Destiny magazine. Green lines relate to in-group identity construction, red lines
relate to out-groups.
The era of the Anglo-Saxon Federation was in many ways the peak of British Israelism,
both in its popularity as a distinct ideology and the integrity of its original concepts. Yet
Cameron and then Rand, the custodians of the movement on an organisational basis,
the British Israelist worldview darkened considerably, introducing new and dangerous
concepts that set the stage for the progression from nascent anti-Semitism into full-
blown violent extremism.
A few things become apparent in the link chart above. First, Rand spends considerably
more effort than his predecessors on defining and marginalising out-groups. Second,
Rand has not fully and definitively named Jews as the out-group, but rather he has
bundled Jewish identity into a more clearly articulated enemy identity – the Soviet
Union – significantly advancing an anti-Semitic train of thought while still qualifying it in
various ways, most notably the expectation that Jews will eventually return to the fold
of Anglo-Saxon Israel by accepting Christ.
Rand’s racial out-group theory is underdeveloped and his religious out-group theory is
overdeveloped. Thus behavioural changes still offer an avenue to bring the out-group
in. His scenario has not yet escalated to the point that intrinsic and insurmountable
obstacles prevent unification.
Third, the conceptual connections in Rand’s work are far more complex than in the
earlier texts. This is the result of the escalating need for justifications of the in-group’s
legitimacy and the out-group’s illegitimacy, sparked in part by direct challenges from
Rand’s readers, but even more by complications on the global stage, most notably the
establishment of the modern nation of Israel, which presented an existential challenge
to the legitimacy of the British Israelist identity.
In addition to the increasingly complex network of linkages, Rand also creates a series
of overlapping bundles (see chart below), conflating the previous bundle of history-
folklore-scripture with conspiracy theory (primarily in the form of the Protocols), and
creating multiple overlapping bundles of out-group identity (Jews, Communists, Gog)
drawn from various sources (scripture, current events and the historical-conspiracy
bundle).
These complexities lead to a much wider range of solutions to the now fully articulated
threat presented by out-groups. Rand’s solutions ranged from assimilation to custodial
rulership to war, introducing the first spectre of potential violence to a movement that
had previously been dominated by quietists.
While the staggering scope of British Israelist textual output over the years is too large
to fully capture here, the dramatic shift toward the apocalyptic is notable. British
Israelist texts had at times flirted with out-group dynamics, but Rand’s formulation is a
marked change from the previous generation, albeit deflected somewhat from Jewish
identity in favour of Communism.
Finally, Rand’s work takes on an increasing sense of urgency amid predictions of
imminent war and the immediate onset of prophetic times. He is greatly concerned
with the calendar, building elaborate frameworks to argue that Armageddon and other
consequential events are near at hand. Although Rand’s tone and prescribed solutions
still fall short of the extremes that Christian Identity would soon embrace, all the
ingredients of looming disaster were finally in play.
30
Bundling of concepts in Destiny are more complex and overlapping than in previous British Israelist
writings.
All the landmarks of in-group identity-construction (detailed further in section three)
are found in the works of Cameron and especially Rand, including:
Defining shared beliefs (religious)
Defining shared practices (religious mores, although the authors also find their
peers lacking in this respect)
Defining shared history (heredity, Anglo-Israel)
Defining intrinsic, non-negotiable identity (based on racial elements elevated
from the preceding generation)
Defining shared expectations for the future (self-realisation, rulership)
In addition, Cameron and Rand have fully engaged with the process of defining an
out-group:
Defining perceived beliefs of out-group (Communist, atheist)
Defining perceived out-group practices (deception, manipulation, race-mixing)
Defining perceived out-group history (scriptural, Protocols conspiracy)
Defining intrinsic, non-negotiable out-group identity (racial and religious)
Defining expectations for out-group’s future disposition (oscillating between
assimilation on the low end, and Armageddon on the high end)
In Rand’s writings, anti-Semitism had forcefully entered the world of British Israelism,
but his more toxic contribution was, arguably, a well-developed apocalyptic and
millenarian narrative. Rand introduced a view of prophecy that foretold an imminent
and cataclysmic conflict between Anglo-Israel and the combined forces of Communism
and international Jewry.
This looming Armageddon dramatically escalated the perceived out-group threat. But
while Rand saw Jews as racially inferior, perhaps even subhuman, there were still lines
that he was not prepared to cross.
96
d) From Delegitimisation to Demonisation
Delegitimising Jewish Identity
The fallout of World War II, Nazi anti-Semitism and the rise of the Zionist state of Israel
created new and intense pressures on British Israelism. The emergence in Palestine of
a Jewish nation called “Israel” excited competing millenarian expectations among many
American evangelical Christians even as it posed a direct challenge to the legitimacy of
British Israelism’s claim that Anglo-Saxons were the heirs of biblical prophecy.
97
The fact that the Zionist movement sought to overthrow the British Mandate of
Palestine in order to establish its state of Israel rendered the conflict intractable to even
British Israelist thinkers’ formidable capacity for rationalisation.
This dynamic pushed British Israelists into a defensive mode, under existential threat
from the rival claim to Israel’s heritage and faced with a growing number of attacks
from both mainstream Christian theologians and serious historians. Dueling books and
pamphlets marked this new phase, with books such as Real Israel and Anglo-Israelism
seeking to “show the futility of British-Israelism”, and counter-punches such as Israel’s
Migrations: Or An Attack Answered.
98
Escalating hostility toward the Jewish project in Palestine brought racial elements
already present in British Israelism more forcefully to the fore. In 1948, second-
generation British Israelist C.F. Parker published A Short Study of Esau-Edom in Jewry,
which formalised different threads of previous thought dating back to Wilson into an
argument that “modern Jewry” had been hopelessly corrupted by race-mixing dating
back to the biblical figure Esau “also known as Edom,” who “proved to have been of
wayward tendencies and disobeyed the injunctions not to marry among alien stock”.
99
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
32
Moving further from what had been the mainstream British Israelist thought, Parker
disassociated “modern Jewry” from even the Tribe of Judah.
100
Prophecy required the
Jewish efforts to create an “Ersatz Israel … to be short-lived and doomed to failure”,
Parker wrote.
101
“History indicates that neither literally nor spiritually can modern Jewry
claim to be Abraham's heirs; and their claims to Palestine, as of right, are
groundless.”
102
A Prophetical Novel
Other, even more sinister variations of this racial theory entered the stream of British
Israelism. In 1944, the British Israel association of Greater Vancouver published When?
A Prophetical Novel of the Very Near Future under the pseudonym H. Ben Judah.
103
When? is a dystopian/apocalyptic novel about the End Times as seen from a nominally
British Israelist perspective, but in fact, “the work stands as one of the first statements
of what was to define Christian Identity doctrine, the belief that the Jews are the
offspring of Satan”, according to Barkun.
104
The book opens with a stipulation from the author:
Do not let the reader be deceived into believing that this book is anti-
Semitic. Actually it is just the opposite, the writer himself being of
Semitic Judah, and therefore wishing to point out that there are two
types of so-called Jews, the real Semitic Jew and the Ashkenazim so-
called Jew who is a convert to Judaism only, ostensibly by religion,
but not by blood.
When the reader understands these points, he will realize that this
book is not anti-Semitic, but rather pro-Semitic, as it warns only of
the Ashkenazim and their plans for world control, and endeavors to
point out that the true Semitic Jew is not responsible.
105
The protagonist of When? is Brian Benjamin, a British secret agent of Sephardic Jewish
descent, engaged in spying on Magog, an enemy state led by Gog, whose intelligence
apparatus has infiltrated the West and who is now preparing to wage war for the Holy
Land. Benjamin makes the mistake of asking his superior officer questions about who
the real Jews are, resulting in an epic amount of exposition that one of the characters
even concedes is a “long rigmarole and not very much to the point”.
In the style of other political dystopias, When? features lengthy Socratic dialogues at the
expense of plot,
106
in this case including extensive bibliographies from the voluminous
output of past British Israelists, as well as race theorists and anti-Semites.
Published in 1944, When? is overwhelmingly concerned with discrediting the legitimacy
of the Jewish claim to Palestine on the grounds of race, religion and politics. It does so
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
by citing a torrent of British Israelist authors – the characters at times literally read
books to each other – and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which moves here
from being an influence (as with Cameron and Rand) to being a primary source.
107
When? introduces a new and important thread. The author reiterates previous claims
that Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of Esau/Edom, but adds two crucial new elements
to the story – first, that the Edomites are descended from Cain, the Bible’s first
murderer, and second, that Cain is not the son of Adam, but rather the son of Eve and
the serpent from the Garden of Eden story – Satan himself. Thus, the author argues,
Ashkenazi Jews are the “seed of the serpent”, literally Satanic in their origin.
108
The author’s argument states definitively that Cain is “spiritually” the son of Satan, and
leaves open the strong implication that there is more to the story.
“…Who do you think was the father of Cain?”
“Why, Adam of course,” Brian replied.
“That is the generally accepted conclusion, I know,” replied his cousin,
“but I do not think that it is correct. Adam may have been the physical
father of Cain, but he was certainly not his spiritual father.”
109
The When? author stops short of unambiguously stating that Cain is the genetic son of
Satan, but he strongly implies it and documents biblical accounts of interbreeding
between “fallen angels” and Cain’s progeny.
110
Whether or not Cain was Patient Zero
for the demonic seed, the phrase “seed of the serpent” has literal, genetic meaning
here.
The theory that Cain was the son of the serpent (whether physically or spiritually) was
not new. It had originated in Jewish and Gnostic writings in antiquity,
111
and enjoyed
somewhat of a revival in the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries.
112
The When? author combines this
idea with British Israelist genealogies to create the foundational claim of Christian
Identity – that modern Jews are descended from Cain and from Satanic supernatural
beings. The author further claims Satan’s conspiracy against Anglo-Israel – explicitly
referencing the Protocols – originated with Cain, who is cast as the founder of the
“synagogue of Satan.”
The argument mounted in When? incidentally opened the door to designating all non-
white races as the progeny of Satan, but the author did not press that claim directly.
And despite their demonic bloodline, the author leaves open the possibility of
redemption for the serpent’s seed: If Jews accept Christ, they can still join the kingdom.
After almost 100 pages of dialectic exposition in the pages of When?, the battle of
Armageddon finally takes shape, as the armies of Gog take Jerusalem.
113
The forces of
British Israel formally pray to God for deliverance, and Gog’s forces are immediately
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
34
struck down at their moment of triumph by a supernatural “holocaust” that kills
thousands of enemy soldiers, swallows their leaders whole, and destroys the Dome of
the Rock and other Muslim structures.
114
The Second Coming follows. After the earlier success of prayer, the King of England
broadcasts a statement to the British Commonwealth and America acknowledging their
true identity as the nation of Israel, urging all subjects to give thanks and pray for the
return of the kingdom. Fire falls from the sky to destroy the “synagogue of Satan”, as
well as any Nazi, Fascist or Communist sympathisers.
115
Christ returns as king of an Anglo-Saxon empire on earth. This kingdom is explicitly
millenarian, again advancing ideas that had mostly been left implicit by earlier British
Israelist authors. When? concludes with the beginning of Christ’s 1,000-year kingdom
on earth, after which the Final Judgment would eventually be carried out.
116
This millenarian utopia is described at some length. Christ racially purifies the United
States and Canada by “removing” (through unspecified means) the “seed of the
serpent” races. These races are not exterminated, but they lose all of their military and
political might. Christ takes up the post of King of Israel and restores “Natural Law”,
while reforming man’s banking, currency and tax laws, which are discussed in some
detail. Many of these seemingly irrelevant details would become doctrinal tenets in
later iterations of Christian Identity.
117
From start to finish, When? reflects and illustrates the challenges facing contemporary
British Israelism. In addition to his primary focus on rebutting Zionism, the author
repeatedly lashes out at the historians and theologians who undermined British Israel
theories, bemoaning the fact that “British-Israel theory is scoffed at by most people”.
When Christ returns and smites the seed of the serpent, he also vengefully strikes down
“those who rejoiced the pride of their scholarship and had taught that the Bible was
not true”. Among those blamed for leading Israel astray are the Roman Catholic
proponents of replacement theology,
118
perhaps the oldest thorn in the side of British
Israelist doctrine.
119
Critically, the author reclassifies many Christian critics from being
misguided members of the in-group to vilified members of the out-group – dupes or
willing participants in the Protocols conspiracy, spreading the “Zionist scholarship” of
the “seed of the serpent.”
120
Those who reject the truth of British Israelist teaching are
repeatedly deemed “apostates”.
121
While presented as a work of British Israelism, When? is instead the start of something
new – a full-fledged extremist movement, Christian Identity.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Chart of Racial Origins, from When? A Prophetical Novel of the Very Near Future (1944)
36
When?: Linkage Analysis
Linkages in the text of When?. Green lines represent links defining the in-group; red pertains to out-
groups.
When? incorporates much of the British Israelist bibliography, summarising substantial
portions of preceding works in dizzying complexity. For the sake of readability, the chart
above simplifies some of the previously established bundles that When? simply
regurgitates (such as the prophecies of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh), in order
to highlight the new elements.
Foremost, these concern out-group formulation. When?’s most important innovations
reflect the ever-increasing syncretism of the movement. First, the author accomplishes
a complete integration of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion into British Israelism.
The Protocols conspiracy theory is now bundled together with scripture, folklore and
real history to produce a powerful and self-reinforcing pseudohistory, in which the
disparate elements are seen as a unified whole.
Second, the author implements the complete “seed of the serpent” scenario, literally
demonising the (Ashkenazi) Jews and escalating their threat to the in-group to literally
apocalyptic levels. This was again a concrescence of previous influences; nearly every
element of the “seed of the serpent” theory existed before When? was published,
sometimes within the British Israelist tradition and sometimes in other sources. But the
consolidation of these ideas into a sweeping, cohesive ideology represented a
watershed. Jews, once seen as the close cousins of Anglo-Israel, had now become
demonic enemies in an apocalyptic war.
The approach to Jewish identity in When? is much more comprehensive than in previous
works and encompasses five stages of out-group identity construction (discussed at
length in section three), while escalating the severity of each:
1) Defining perceived beliefs of out-group (anti-Christian, pro-science)
2) Defining perceived out-group practices (based on Protocols)
3) Defining perceived out-group history (derived from pseudohistory including the
Protocols conspiracy theory)
4) Defining intrinsic, non-negotiable out-group identity (racial and literally Satanic)
5) Defining expectations for out-group’s future disposition (prophetic, apocalyptic)
These elements had been individually creeping into British Israelism for a long time,
but together, they formed a powerful and prescriptive vision of a cosmic war between
the forces of God (Anglo-Saxons) and the forces of Satan (Jews).
While the threat evaluation in When? is apocalyptically extreme, the proposed in-group
solution stops short of a “final solution”. Although the British wage war against Magog,
these efforts are largely fruitless, and God’s direct intervention is required to solve the
situation. Although war is waged, the effective solution is two-fold – awakening to
identity, and prayer. As Christian Identity finally emerged from the seeds of British
Israelism, further escalation lay ahead.
Wesley Swift
Wesley Swift was a former Methodist minister and early adherent to the nascent
Christian Identity movement that succeeded British Israelism. He was not an
intellectual ideologue; rather, he was a fiery preacher based in California, who was
involved in British Israelism and a variety of right-wing causes before becoming
perhaps the most influential voice of Christian Identity, as the ideology solidified.
As Barkun observes, Swift was not a “systematic” interpreter of the ideology, but he was
one of its most effective proponents, preaching prolifically in person and over the
radio.
122
Many of his radio broadcasts have been preserved and transcribed. Still widely
available on the internet, they represent his most important body of work. Swift’s
relatively unstructured approach to exposition was reflected in the wild mix of tenets
and claims he presented in his sermons.
Most notably, relative to When?, Swift’s ideology widened the in-group from Anglo-
Saxon to “white” (including previously marginalised ethnic groups such as Teutonic
Germans, Nordic races and the Basque) and expanded the out-group dramatically from
Ashkenazi Jews to all non-white races.
123
Similar to Rand’s theory of a pre-Adamite civilisation destroyed by nuclear war, Swift
described a vast war in outer space between God and Lucifer, preceding the events of
Genesis. Satan “brought Negroes in from out of the Milky Way” to Earth in spaceships,
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
38
to fight in his war against God’s angels. Survivors of that army were stranded on Earth
at the war’s conclusion and became the progenitors of ancient Africans, populating the
earth before the creation of Adam.
124
According to Swift, non-whites were “created species” (or “Enosh”) and thus lesser
beings. Whites, in contrast, were descended from God through Adam and Seth.
125
Mixing between white Adamites and these space alien races was mongrelisation –
perhaps Swift’s favourite word – and an obscene pollution of God’s Holy Seed.
126
Swift took the serpent seedline argument established in When? and made it explicitly
literal and biological. Cain was the son of Satan, he preached, and he further
“mongrelised” with the pre-Adamic races, resulting in a race of Jews – a term Swift
applied to all non-white races and white-appearing “mongrels”. “There’s black Jews,
yellow Jews, white Jews, but there are no Christian Jews”, he said in one sermon.
127
Jews had perverted the religion given to white Israel in the Old Testament, Swift
preached, and this “organized Jewry” was the driving force behind Communism (and
the rising threat of “hippies”). He also charged that Jews had taken over non-Christian
religions such as Buddhism and the “demon devil worshipers” of the Yazidi (later to
become the target of genocidal hate from the so-called Islamic State).
128
In addition to syncretising UFO culture into Identity, Swift also drew on a much wider
range of sources than his predecessors, lifting when convenient from Hindu and
Egyptian mythology (arguing, for instance, that the name Krishna was an etymologically
derived reference to Christ), and integrating pseudoscientific or New Age ideas such as
vibrations and energy wavelengths.
129
Swift lacked the pseudo-scholarship of his British Israel predecessors and was far less
reliant on even biblical citations. Indeed, he frequently mischaracterised or entirely
fabricated content supposedly found in the Bible.
130
A favourite tactic was to take an
esoteric line from Scripture and expand and reinterpret it through wild leaps that Swift
presented as direct quotes. For instance, in the passage below, Swift introduces a single
line from the Bible and then adds a paragraph of racial edicts:
Jesus turns and says to these Jews, “Ye believe not because you are not
My Sheep as I have said unto you”. This is in the tenth chapter of John
and the 26
th
verse. Jesus said, “You’re a different species. I come for
the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but I reject you because you’re a
different species and do not have the capacity to do the job I am calling
you to do. So I am not an integrationist, for I am a segregationist”, Jesus
said. He said “The first thing I will do if I enter into human affairs, is to
separate the nations on the basis of their race and their
background”.
131
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Many – although certainly not all – of Swift’s claims were supported by British Israelist
texts, but he was mostly content to deliver them as flat assertions, without citation. This
marks a shift from the carefully deliberative arguments of most British Israelist authors,
who encouraged readers to study and consider their claims, and toward a call to
automatic thinking. Swift expected listeners to adopt his positions based on their
instinctive biases and on his force of personality.
However, like Rand, Swift also appeared to react to internal and external challenges.
His lectures frequently mentioned reader letters, and his rhetorical style often invoked
imaginary critics to whom he could respond with the verbal tic “someone said”, as if
speaking to someone in the room. “Someone said, ‘that’s not all Jews.’ Well, it’s all I ever
met”.
132
“Someone said, ‘Oh, you can’t advocate that, Dr. Swift.’ Let me tell you
something. There are a lot of things we can advocate and a lot more that we are going
to”.
133
“Someone said, ‘I don’t like this.’ Well, maybe not, but this is your history”.
134
This rhetorical approach resembled the deliberative arguments of British Israelism, but
in fact, Swift was presenting a rapid-fire series of automatic cues. This effect will be
discussed at more length in Section 3.
Finally, Swift’s rhetoric elevated violence as a solution against the out-group. In When?,
Anglo-Israel fought a defensive war, but the ultimate solution came from divine
intervention. Even God’s wrath was relatively limited; the serpent seedline armies were
struck down, but their nations and races were not exterminated. Swift put forth various
visions for the fate of the Jews under white supremacy, ranging from segregation and
deportation (“Someone said, ‘But you wouldn’t deport [the Jews], would you, Dr. Swift?’
Yes, I would deport every last one of them”.
135
) to killing (“I want you to know that it is
the job of the soldier to fight the enemy. … You have to start to think BIG for the BIG
task that is ahead of you”).
136
This culminated in a world view in which the Holocaust was fully justified; something
even anti-Semitic British Israelists like Rand had studiously avoided. In Swift’s view, the
Germans had been destroyed by a Jewish conspiracy bent on punishing the Third Reich
for its efforts to maintain white purity.
Someone said: “But it was because of the persecution of the Jews that
brought down Germany”. Tonight I am going to say that I believe that
Germany never persecuted the Jews, but that the Jews just received
justice for their deeds. We want you to know that when America wakes
up and moves against Communist and conspirators that they will go
into concentration camps or be deported, or even executed for their
crimes.
137
In Swift’s later sermons, the call to violence would be even more explicit, endorsing the
use of nuclear weapons against non-white nations, and more squarely aimed at
mobilising listeners. Swift scoffed at what he saw as the pacifism of mainstream
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
40
Christian churches, attributing the nonviolence of the early Church leaders to the fact
they did not have “numbers sufficient to carry out an armed resistance”, citing Paul’s
epistle to the Hebrews, “You have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin”.
138
[Jesus] didn't call for His disciples … to go forth as pacifists when the
enemy was going to destroy them and persecute them and was going
to hound them and lead them into all areas of catastrophe and
trouble. … Jesus also cited that the church was to resist when they were
waylaid on the highway, or when members of His disciples were
waylaid they were to utilize the best they could their armament against
the enemy. … [Jesus said] “When the hour comes that I am about to
bring in My Kingdom, my servants are going to fight and the kingdom
is not going to be given to the Jews”.
139
William Gale
It would fall to William Potter Gale, a former U.S. Army colonel and contemporary of
Swift, to wrestle Christian Identity doctrine in a more comprehensive and coherent
form, in his 1963 book, Faith of Our Fathers.
140
Although Gale was a less inspiring voice
than Swift, he was more directly tied to group organisation and violent activity within
Christian Identity and related movements during the 1970s and 1980s,
141
and his work
provides a more systematic exposition of Identity’s ideology.
142
Faith of Our Fathers opens with a discussion of UFO sightings and space battles
described in the Bible. Attributing his narrative to biblical sources with few specific
citations, he describes a war in outer space between the angels of God and Satan’s
army of 200 million “Enosh”, beings created on distant planets, who became corrupted
when taken from their natural environments. Satan and the Enosh are cast down to
Earth after God’s victory in this primordial war.
143
After the fall, he writes, the Enosh divided Earth into regions under the command of
Satan’s “captains”, including “Voodah”, who ruled Africa and instituted the religion of
Voodoo, and Beezelbub, placed over Asia, who later became known as Buddha.
Lucifer’s mistress, “Khali”, took charge of India. All of this has been “proven” by “scientific
discoveries of archaeologists”, Gale writes.
144
God decides to “plant his seed” on Earth to contest Satan for control of the planet,
including his “son and daughter”, Adam and Eve, who are commissioned to procreate
and populate Earth with God’s family. But Satan seduces and impregnates Eve, and she
gives birth to Cain and a twin sister, Luluwa (a character lifted from the Apocrypha).
145
After Cain murders Abel, Adam and Eve have sex and produce a race of “Celestial
Beings,” the Adamic race. Cain and Luluwa are banished to the regions where the Enosh
live, further polluting the Holy Seed through race-mixing with the Enosh.
146
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Adam and Eve later conceive Seth, the forebear of an unpolluted white racial lineage.
Gale writes that Seth’s descendants strictly observed God’s injunctions against race-
mixing with the descendants of Cain. The Adamites, who have access to “space ships”
and “atomic power,” then build the pyramids and establish the Freemasons.
147
After several generations, the evil mixed-race descendants of Cain and the Enosh (who
had become polygamous cannibals) eventually seduce members of the white bloodline
(with the assistance of “jungle rhythm” music and “alcoholic drinks Satan had taught
them to make”).
148
God wipes out the race-mixers in a limited area with the Great Flood, preserving the
pure white seedline on Noah’s Ark. But the flood only affects the area in which Adam’s
descendants live; the descendants of Cain and the Enosh live on in other lands. In Gale’s
version of the racial genealogy, which differs substantially from British Israelist
narratives, Noah’s sons are all white, but only Shem resists the temptations of race-
mixing, becoming the sole ancestor of the pure white race.
149
Gale identifies a line of mixed-race Edomites descended from Esau, similar to Parker,
who invade the lands formerly occupied by Israel and supplant the true, white Israelite
line with a Satanic/Babylonian religious and economic system, becoming known to
history as the Jews and falsely claiming an Israelite heritage.
150
After a greatly abbreviated adaptation of the British Israelist argument for the current
identity of the Chosen People, Gale leaps past the historical proofs that dominated the
former ideology into a discussion of the special destiny of the United States as a
Christian nation. While the When? author introduced a significant number of financial
and political issues toward the end of the novel, Gale emphasises these themes more
strongly, introducing a mélange of novel interpretations of politics and finance that
owed more to the emerging radical right than to British Israelism.
Although he had left the content behind, Gale brought a British Israelist style of analysis
to American law, mixing extreme literalism with syncretic additions and outright
fabrications. Gale argued the pre-Constitutional Articles of Confederation and
“Ordnance [sic] of the Territories” (better known as the Northwest Ordinance)
represented “Organic Law” and were still in effect because of language in the text
suggesting they would apply “perpetually”.
151
Gale’s themes loosely tracked with When? but were more fully reflected by Swift,
including challenges to interest-based lending, federal taxes and the federal currency
system, with arguments appropriated from a slew of anti-Semitic financial conspiracy
theories popularised during the 1920s and 1930s.
152
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
42
Among those that rise up to fight the Jewish conspiracy, in Gale’s narrative, are the
“robed sons of Adam’s family,” the Ku Klux Klan, whose efforts are thwarted by Jewish
impersonators who discredit the Klan by donning white hoods and carrying out
mayhem.
153
Rather than adopt Swift’s endorsement of the Holocaust, Gale writes that
Jews fabricated the Holocaust by claiming the bodies of Germans killed in air raids were
Jewish victims, with the six million Jews supposedly killed in the Holocaust secretly
transplanted to Palestine by the conspirators.
154
In addition to directly controlling the Eastern bloc, Gale writes, the conspiracy plants
infiltrators and “agents provocateur” in Western governments “to stir up the Enosh” and
eventually establish a “super-government where [whites] could be out-voted and
controlled by the Enosh people”. Desegregation and global wars were part of this plan,
Gale writes, because they weakened white nations and caused them to become
indebted to Jewish banking interests.
155
As Gale nears the end of his disquisition, he states that the “midnight hour” is at hand.
The darkness of the night would slowly disappear and the daylight
hours were near. At what exact hour the daylight would strike, no one
knew except the Creator. Each hour of suffering in the darkness would
bring Ad-am's children closer to the time when they would all see the
light. When that daylight hour struck, Satan’s children would all be
revealed. … Ad-am's children of the flesh would have seen the ''light''
and would have done their work which He had sent them to Earth to
do. The blindness would be off them and they would know that they
were the Sons and daughters of the living God.
156
The book concludes with a call to awakening and violent action:
It is only for Adam's children to revive the word of their Father and
realize that they will not have peace until they have destroyed Satan's
children - as they have been ordained and instructed to do. They would
suddenly realize that they have been waiting for the Heavenly Father
to do the things that He had sent them into the Earth to do in His
Name. They have a legal “power-of-attorney” – written authority to act
in His Name. They were told to be His “'battle-axe” and to fight Satan
on Earth. They are to occupy the Earth and rule in righteousness with
Him at the head of their government. Until this is done, no peace with
Satan can be obtained. It has been fore-ordained that victory is to be
theirs but they must brave enough to “fight” and shed their blood in
sacrifice if necessary. When they do that, Victory is theirs!
157
Gale had now paired the crisis construct with a solution construct – violence against the
enemies of God and revolution to occupy and rule the earth. While Gale never
approached the realisation of his grandiose ambitions, significant extremist violence
would be carried out by movements and organisations his rhetoric inspired, including
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
tax protestors, the Posse Comitatus, The Order, the sovereign citizen movement and
less directly, acts such as the Oklahoma City bombing
158
(see Appendix B).
Linkage Analysis: Faith of Our Fathers
Linkages and bundles in the text of Faith of Our Fathers
Gale’s exposition of Christian Identity ideology shifts the bar substantially from When?,
most significantly by collapsing all arguments into a narrative pseudohistory as
extensive as it is unburdened by British Israelism’s careful thesis-building and source
citations. Gale here moves from the pseudoscholarship of the precursor movement to
full-blown mythmaking. While students of British Israelism can discern where his
concepts originated, the presentation is based on assertion rather than argumentation.
Gale, like Swift, hopes to inspire an automatic response from readers, presenting an
evocative story instead of a deliberative argument.
Gale built on shifts found in When?, which had retooled British Israelist genealogies in
an understated way to legitimise other “white” ancestries (such as German, Spanish
and Scandinavian) while still maintaining an overweening emphasis on the paramount
importance of Anglo-Saxon Israel. Gale nods to Anglo-Saxon primacy in The Faith of Our
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
44
Fathers, but his primary concern is the now fully conflated “Adamic race”, which is
stipulated to be “white”.
159
White racial purity and superiority is paramount to his argument, but he also spells out
a specifically American white racial aspect, derived from founding documents including
the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. These documents
are implied to serve as new covenants with God, an argument inherited from Cameron,
but further elaborated here as “natural law”, a concept that would have a profound
effect on many succeeding forms of American extremism.
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In a similar manner, Gale bundles non-white “races” into one Satanic continuum. Over
the years, British Israelist authors had expressed varying opinions regarding non-
Semitic non-white races, including some arguments that stipulated impure or sinister
origins, but almost none of them explored such ideas in any kind of detail. Non-Semitic
races were present but decidedly on the sidelines of the British Israel narrative.
While Gale devotes considerably less attention to the black “Enosh” races than to the
Cain-descended “Yehudi,” non-Semitic non-whites play a substantially larger role in his
narrative than in preceding works, as part of a dramatically expanded out-group. This
shift in focus is also reflected in Swift’s work. According to their shared cosmographic
history, the Enosh preceded the Yehudi as servants of Satan, and the two are
inseparably aligned in a Satanic conspiracy against the Adamic race.
Although less insistent than Swift, Gale also walks toward an imminent apocalyptic
scenario, although his poor writing style hobbled the message. The final three chapters
of the book take the form of a countdown to “midnight”, and the final war, within which
the “power of attorney” granted by God to carry out violence against the non-white
races reaches fruition.
Swift added that element more viscerally, preaching that Armageddon has already
begun. “It is later than you think”, he said repeatedly during a 1967 sermon. “We are in
the time of the final and climactic events which precede the Great Day of God Almighty”.
Finally, Gale fully endorses violence, not in the form of third-party divine retribution (as
in When?) but as a divine ratification of the violent actions of adherents – the “power of
attorney” he describes in the final pages of The Faith of Our Fathers, which he says is a
“written authority [for adherents] to act in His Name”, and to “shed their blood in
sacrifice if necessary”.
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3. The Elements of Extremism
Taken as a continuum, the progression of texts from the beginnings of British Israelism
to the full realisation of Christian Identity follows identifiable tracks in the process of
group radicalisation. Elements of this process will be familiar to students of a variety of
specific extremist organisations and their messaging.
While there are many possible ways to distill these tracks and their individual
components into a particular extremist ideology, processes of group radicalisation can
be viewed outside the prism of specific beliefs.
These processes and their components can aid us in developing an understanding of
extremism as a discrete phenomenon, rather than as the product of any singular
ideological orientation. They can also illuminate approaches to the problem of violent
extremism that may be obscured by a misguided focus on the identity in-group to
which extremists appeal. In the same way that we study political science as a discipline
distinct from its ideological subcategories, so too we should study extremism.
Identifiable processes in the evolution into Christian Identity from a non-extremist
origin to full-blown extremism are summarised below, with more detailed discussion
of each in the following sections:
Adherents demand legitimacy and support their demands with an ideological
justification. The new justification can serve as the basis for a subsequent
escalation of demand, which then leads to a need for new justifications. If
unchecked, this cycle becomes a destructive spiral culminating in a violent
prescription to protect the in-group identity from a perceived existential out-
group threat.
Frequent direct challenges to the legitimacy of the in-group or ideology can
accelerate this escalation, when ideologues feel pressure to respond with the
development of new and more assertive justifications.
As demand for justifications increases, additional supply is required. When the
movement’s canonical sources are not adequate to the challenge, it may turn to
non-canonical, derivative or entirely independent sources. In the case of
Christian Identity, this process took the form of the syncretic inclusion of folklore
at first, then apocryphal scriptures, followed by conspiracy theories, and
eventually expanding to absorb UFO cults and New Age philosophy.
As ideological texts evolve and mutate into more extreme forms, target
audiences are encouraged to do less deliberative thinking and more automatic
thinking. Previously litigated arguments are bundled into high-level constructs,
reducing complex ideas (such as British Israelist genealogies) to simplified
assertions of fact, sometimes attributed to scholarly origin. By presenting many
such constructs in sequence, ideologues can lead audiences to believe they are
engaging in deliberative thought, when they are actually experiencing a
sequence of automatic responses.
46
As the ideology is elaborated, a distortion of temporal scales is required to fully
describe both the in-group and the out-group identities. This produces a sort of
Doppler Effect – as adherents rush from an increasingly expansive history
toward an increasingly compressed timeline for a near-future upheaval of the
world order, imbuing the out-group threat with an apocalyptic sense of urgency.
a) Legitimacy: The Cycle of Demand and Justification
Extremist movements begin with a quest for in-group legitimacy and build worldviews
with the primary aim of enhancing that legitimacy. The quest for legitimacy
encompasses beliefs, practices, history and expectations for the future, sometimes
taking on an extremist character as it matures and in response to ideological
challenges.
The very act of embracing a collective identity, even when seen as positive may set the
stage for the seeds of negativity. Tajfel (1981), drawing on earlier authors, describes an
individual’s adoption of a collective identity as part of the “process of categorization”
and a “cognitive aspect” leading to the formation of prejudices.
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Individual
radicalisation is not within the scope of this study, but certainly the ideologues whose
work is described herein went through some process of individual radicalisation as they
modified their group’s ideology into more extreme forms. This is likely a fruitful avenue
for future analysis within the context of the material discussed in this paper.
Nevertheless, for purposes of this discussion, a starting assumption is that identity
collectives are not inherently extremist in and of themselves. There is nothing
fundamentally extremist about belonging to and identifying as part of a religion, a town,
a nation, or even a race.
Until the success of the in-group is tied to the detriment of an out-group, an identity
collective is not meaningfully extreme. But the construction of an in-group identity is
an obvious prerequisite to the development of an identity-based extremist movement.
Parameters of Identity
On its road to becoming Christian Identity, British Israelism had to construct and
protect an in-group identity. There are five components to this identity, which seek to
answer existential questions that identity collectives may face over time:
1) What do we believe? (beliefs)
2) How should we behave? (practices)
3) Why do we exist as a group? (history)
4) Who are we? (intrinsic identity)
5) What will we become? (expectations)
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To become an identity collective in the first place, a group of people must be able to
answer at least one of these questions.
Nevertheless, it is important to note all identity collectives that endure will eventually
require answers to all of the questions. The questions may arise at different times in a
collective’s development, and they may not occur in this order. By the time a group
embraces violent extremism, it will tend to have answers to all of these questions.
British Israelism began by defining Anglo-Saxon identity primarily by a shared history
derived from shared beliefs (both drawn from Christian scriptures). Early British
Israelists were obsessed with the history plank of the identity platform. As more planks
were added to the platform, the in-group’s demand for legitimacy increased.
Early adherents sought to establish their legitimacy by claiming that Great Britain and
the United States had already fulfilled relevant prophecies. Therefore, initially, the
movement was less concerned with the future. But two World Wars and the
establishment of a Jewish Israel rocked the complacency of a movement originally
content with being a “great nation” and a “company of nations”, leading to a growing
obsession with not-yet-fulfilled prophecies of an apocalyptic conflict that adherents
concluded Anglo-Israel was destined to win.
The question of “who we are” also shifted. Initial British Israelist scholarship traced the
“birthright and sceptre” of Israel through a series of decisions points involving God or
the Israelites. The racial implications of inheritance became more and more important
for subsequent generations, leading to the description and definition of intrinsic Anglo-
Saxon racial qualities, while emphasising the racial impurity of those figures excluded
from the Israelite line.
While aspects of racial purity and impurity were embedded in the basic concepts of
British Israelism, they were not a special focus in the earlier stages. But as the
movement evolved, these aspects began to rise in prominence, fueling the
development of an out-group identity that would loom ever larger in the ideology. The
components of out-group identity directly parallel those used for in-group identity
construction:
1) What do they believe? (beliefs)
2) How do they behave? (practices)
3) Why do they exist as a group? (history)
4) Who are they? (intrinsic identity)
5) What will they do? (expectations)
There are key differences in how adherents understand these components for the in-
group versus the out-group, most importantly at the level of beliefs and practices. In-
group members directly experience their own beliefs and practices in the most intimate
way possible, while they often (but not always) learn about the beliefs and practices of
out-group members from second-hand sources.
48
This divide is exacerbated when a group begins to move toward extremism, creating
barriers to direct contact with the out-group and preventing positive socialisation
experiences that might undermine negative perceptions. Despite all this, in-group
members usually absorb the components of identity construction as a mix of direct
experience and transmitted knowledge, and a mix of truth and fiction.
Members of the in-group evaluate the threat posed by the members of the out-group
based on real, false and distorted information sources. For British Israelists, the most
destructive information source was clearly The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,
which eventually became the de facto narrative about the out-group. The Protocols also
stipulated deception at grand scales and as a racial quality, further immunising in-
group members against potentially positive socialisation with out-group members.
In-Group and Out-Group Scaling
As the definitions of in-groups and out-groups evolved, the British Israelist in-group
construction of Anglo-Saxons remained fairly consistent for decades, but it eventually
expanded – starting with Cameron and culminating with Swift and Gale – to include the
greater “white race”, including groups (such as Teutonic Germans) who had been
specifically excluded in earlier iterations.
The expansion of the in-group correlated to an expansion of the out-group, as British
Israelism’s original focus on the sceptre and birthright became increasingly conflated
with theories about pre-Adamite races and the influence of a Satanic seedline. The
disenfranchisement of Jews became a denial of the Jewish role in Christian history, and
escalated into a literal denial that Jews were human.
As the racial theories continued to evolve, integrating ever more varied and
disreputable sources, the movement’s theorists extended their pseudohistory to
address the purity and legitimacy of other “non-white races”, most prominently
Africans, who were also eventually attributed to Satanic origins. Depending on the
ideologue, this can be seen as the introduction of a second out-group or an expansion
of the existing out-group. Such distinctions are important at various stages in the
analysis of an extremist movement and its prescribed actions against its respective out-
groups. For purposes of this discussion, the distinction is less important than the fact
of the expansion.
The racialisation of group identities also rendered the perceived conflict between the
in-group and out-group more intractable. Although definitions of race can shift (as the
meaning of “white” evolved over the movement’s history), racialised definitions have an
impact on prescriptions. The early British Israelist prescription for Jews was eventual
assimilation. When the definition of Jewish identity became racialised, assimilation
became an incomplete and eventually unavailable prescription, leading to calls for a
more violent solution to the challenge of the out-group.
Even a cursory examination makes clear that shifting group identities are part and
parcel of how extremist movements evolve, but it is also clear that different groups
approach the phenomenon in very different ways. Most obviously, racialisation of in-
groups and out-groups is not an inevitable outcome. Jihadists, for instance, are
studiously anti-racist (in ideological principle, if not in practice), but this has not
deterred them from arriving at extreme solutions for out-groups, such as their
genocidal attacks and enslavement of the Yazidis, because of their ethno-religious
identity.
162
The parameters of how group definitions change and how those changes
inform out-group solutions therefore requires a more detailed comparative study,
which will be explored in subsequent publications.
Threats and Solutions
Once an initial out-group identity is constructed, it begins to take on a dimension of
threat. In the early stages of British Israelism, Jewish identity was discussed as a matter
of historical record with only cursory references to their current or future disposition
and without meaningful framing of a threat.
Concurrent with the introduction of the Protocols conspiracy theory to the “practices”
component of out-group identity, British Israelists began to turn their attention to
prophecies that had not yet been fulfilled, particularly in the context of the Book of
Revelations and millenarian sentiments stoked by two world wars.
Jews were conflated with both Communists and the enemy forces of Gog, understood
to be Satan’s army in the looming battle of Armageddon. The Protocols conspiracy had
defined Jews as a threat to global order, and this threat escalated in potency thanks to
the combination of millenarian/apocalyptic expectations with the hysterical paranoia
of the first and second Red Scares
163
in the United States. All of these concepts were
bundled together to create a threat assessment virtually beyond compare.
As a result, by the late 1940s and early 1950s, the perceived out-group threat reached
existential and then cosmic proportions. Rand endorsed fighting the Communists, who
in his worldview happened to be Jews, within the context of a great power conflict. Swift
and Gale ultimately sped past Communism to what they understood as its root cause
and endorsed direct violence against Jews as a race, both at the state level and, finally,
at the non-state or even individual level.
Thus, the prescribed solution to an out-group threat becomes more severe as the
perception of risk is heightened, generally correlating with the move from analysing
past history and current expectations of the out-group’s behaviour to anticipating its
future threat. As the in-group radicalises, perception of the out-group threat
progresses from mild to existential, and ultimately cosmic and apocalyptic. The
prescribed solution likewise escalates from social dominance to assimilation,
discrimination, segregation, and, if unchecked, advancing to genocide.
Shifting Time Scales and the Doppler Threat Effect
The time frame necessary to describe in-groups and out-groups may correlate to the
perception of threat from the out-group. Current conflicts between collectives based in
immediate or obvious competing priorities or on differences in practices are not
automatically extremist. There are many reasons why one collective might come into
conflict with another collective.
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50
Conflicts with an extensive history can become bitter, violent and intractable. Similarly,
the extension of in-group and out-group identities over time can correlate to a rising
tide of extremism. By grounding in- and out-group differences in history, ideologues
make the case that conflict is not only precedented but ongoing. The perceived history
provides “evidence” that the conflict is unmitigable and reflective of a deeper and more
intrinsic clash.
In the case of Christian Identity, the in-group’s conflict with the out-group is dated to
pre-history – “possibly millions of years,” according to Gale’s chronology of the Enosh,
which sets the out-group’s malevolent origins prior even to the creation of the in-group
(the white, or Adamite, race). The number of years in the past timeline is scalable for
different groups. While the temporal element is pertinent, for some groups, it may be
more useful to think in terms of antecedents, precedents or causes. The greater the
number of events required to explain the in-group’s history, the more material is
available for extremist ideologues to access as “evidence”.
While history expanded to primeval scope behind British Israelist adherents, the
approach of prophetic times dramatically compressed the timeline before them.
Started with Rand and Cameron, an apocalyptic current entered the British Israelist
stream. Fueled by and centered on World War II, the start of the Cold War and the
establishment of Jewish Israel, the onset of prophetic times was not set in the distant
future; it was happening now and imminently.
Many religions and belief systems believe in an eschatological or “end times” scenario
which sees history culminate in a final event, but most expect that the apocalypse lies
in the unknowable (but likely distant) future.
Taken together, an extremist narrative that stretches into the past and the apocalyptic
foreshortening of the future timeline combine to create a sort of Doppler Effect, in
which settled past events are “red-shifted” – the fixed roots of a stabilising in-group
continuity – while the frenetic pace of current events and near-future expectations is
“blue-shifted” – careening ever faster toward adherents’ present day, resulting in a
sense of urgent instability that can provoke powerful automatic responses, such as fear
and aggression.
164
An extremist movement’s past timeline need not extend into pre-history, as it did in the
case of Christian Identity, but for maximum effect, the frame should be epochal – as
with jihadist movements, for instance, whose historical lens is closely (but not
exclusively) grounded in the life of Mohammed and his companions.
165
During times of significant change (as with the onset of World War II), the actual pace
of events speeds up, adding credence to adherents’ perception of the blue-shift, while
accentuating a sense of mounting distance from the past. When adherents finally come
to believe that eschatological events are literally imminent, they can experience what
Dr. Richard Landes refers to as “apocalyptic time”, in which normal restrictions on
behaviour (such as taboos against violence) may be loosened or entirely removed.
166
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b) Automatic, Deliberative and Simulated Deliberative
Thinking
As British Israelism morphed into Christian Identity, the movement’s texts shifted from
a focus on pseudo-scholarly argumentation to bald assertion. The correlation between
the mode of discourse and the extremity of the movement is not coincidental. In the
case of British Israelism, the transition point is fairly clear. It begins in When?, the
“prophetical novel” that introduced the serpent seedline concept to the movement’s
ideology.
Nearly 70 years of prolific British Israelist output had produced a massive body of
“scholarship” that the When? author incorporated by reference, creating an illusion of
rigour. The “proofs” laboriously devised by earlier authors were carefully cited and
catalogued, but few of them were explicated. Instead, the characters presented the
earlier authors’ findings and attested to the “scholarship” that supported their
conclusions.
In an important sense, this represented a turn of the corner. Early and middle-period
British Israelist texts are extremely deliberative in focus. They are concerned with
building the case for Anglo-Saxon identity, and they approach it using the trappings of
scholarship. Evidence is marshaled, arguments are advanced, and counter-arguments
are entertained. British Israelist authors did not require (or even conceive of) their
audience as a force to be mobilised toward action; they primarily sought validation,
especially from theological and scientific authorities. The nature of this goal required
deliberative arguments.
By the time When? was written, the goalposts were changing. The When? author was
deeply concerned with awakening his audience to their British Israel identity, which he
saw as necessary step in the looming apocalypse. Awakening is a dualistic
phenomenon; it pairs intellectual realisation with transformative emotional wonder.
To guide readers toward awakening, the author references previous deliberative
arguments but does not relitigate them. When?’s protagonist, Benjamin, walks through
a seemingly deliberative process in the Socratic dialogue format. But unlike previous
British Israelist authors, the When? author rarely mounts his argument directly. Instead,
he presents the outcome of the argument with a citation to its source. When Benjamin
asks follow-on questions, they are usually answered with further citations.
The novel thus creates a simulation of deliberative thought, experienced vicariously
through the character of Benjamin, but it rarely asks the audience to actually deliberate
any questions, contenting itself with a call to scholarly authority. Readers who
accomplished the (daunting) feat of reading the entire book likely felt they had been
educated, but they had not been exposed to real arguments.
It’s also worth noting that the genre of fiction is an appropriate pivot point for a shift
from deliberative to automatic responses. Most fiction inherently provokes automatic
reactions from readers in response to plot developments. This is one reason that
dystopian fiction has figured prominently among extremist texts over the last
52
century.
167
While When? is not a particularly well-written work of fiction, thanks to its
storyline, it is still more emotionally and automatically evocative than a British Israelist
genealogy.
It fell to Swift and Gale to complete the transition to automatic thinking. As British
Israelism progressed through the decades, the conflation of certain ideas (heredity and
scripture in the early phases, conspiracy and prophecy in the later stages) created
conceptual constructs that appeared sound, despite their questionable underpinnings.
Swift and Gale presented now-bundled concepts within a series of automatic cues –
phrases and statements that sought to trigger hope, fear and bigotry in the audience.
But they sequenced these cues in a manner designed to simulate a deliberative
process. A fiery and emotional speaker, Swift sequenced and structured automatic cues
to make his audience feel that they were following him through logical steps. The
dynamic can be seen in a fairly typical passage from a 1963 lecture:
We have pointed out to you that the content of the scriptures show
that there was a Celestial origin for the Children of God. That they
came down out of the Heavens and were embodied in earth, through
the miracle of birth and the Adamic race is the process through which
this was being carried out. … We recognize that as we get into the wider
horizon of what is involved in the background of history, especially as
it relates to the solar system and the Universe, that a great number of
people who think that it is all right to expand in every area of
knowledge that they can research (and we are for that), will stand back
and say, ‘but we should not probe into these areas of the unknown,
that we should not touch with speculation as to what has transpired
with anything as far back as before Adam’. But I want you to know that
this is just a little portion of time. And over the expanse of time, we are
already probing with the anthropologists and the Geologists into ages
that consist of thousands of millions of ages before Adam. Surely, we
can take the time to probe beyond Adam to see what transpired in the
relationship of existing beings and intelligence and understanding,
and the antiquities of the history of earth.
168
Swift engages the audience directly with the idea of deliberation with phrases like “we
can take the time to probe”, and bolsters his concepts with content-free references to
science and history. He refers to the existence of sources – “some of the oldest
documents and traditions” and “records in the British Museum” – but rarely names
them. Instead he offers progressive revelations. His language evokes the authority and
credibility of deliberative process, but his real agenda is gnosis and awakening.
As previously noted, Swift also engaged in dialogue with absent critics, raising and then
dispatching objections using the ubiquitous “someone said” formulation, followed by a
rapid-fire series of provocations.
And when they preach Communism and Zionism and Jewry then we
ought to lock them up also. Someone said, “That is the wrong step to
take”. But that is what they are doing down there, and certainly we
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
should be protecting the Kingdom of God with as much intelligence.
Let’s face it, we are facing Armageddon. This struggle of the Kingdom
of God on the face of the earth, is with and against the kingdom of
darkness, and we must learn that we must conquer every corner of
the earth with righteousness and truth with the strength and arms of
Christian civilization. We do not conquer to enslave, but we conquer to
set men free.
169
Gale, while a less intuitive and emotional writer, nevertheless adopts a similar
approach. The Faith of Our Fathers is simply the narration of a racist cosmography,
presented with virtually no citation of sources and with little appeal to logic.
As beliefs become more extreme, the value of deliberation declines. For instance, Swift
and Gale both asserted that the Bible contains evidence for a pre-historic race war
fought by dark-skinned aliens aboard interstellar spaceships. A truly deliberative
defence of this premise would result in significant audience defections, because the
case for this interpretation is extraordinarily weak by any metric.
Instead, The Faith of Our Fathers is a long, sequenced series of assertions intended to
trigger racial fear and paranoia. Each builds on the last, and the tract culminates in a
conclusion that non-whites are not truly human.
To conceive and advance a complex narrative requires a certain level of intellectual
ability, and for some audiences, such a narrative may take on an aura of credibility, in
part because they put the audience to work, whether or not they are well-grounded in
fact. When audience members absorb such complex narratives, they may experience
satisfaction and a sense that their understanding has been earned. Because of its
extensive and sequential nature (and perhaps unintentionally because of Gale’s
opaque writing style), readers may come away from the book feeling a sense of
accomplishment.
While beyond the scope of the present study, it is possible this effect could be better
understood by exploring research on the relationship between metacognition
170
(awareness of one’s own thought process) and self-confidence. If audience members
feel they have worked to reach a conclusion, they may be more confident about that
conclusion—even when the conclusion is not objectively provable.
171
c) The Ladder of Identity Construction
Armed with the concepts discussed above, we can sketch out a framework for
understanding how identity-based movements become extreme, by analysing the
contents of their texts as a linkage-based system. By mapping in- and out-group identity
components and linking them to sources of information, we find a ladder-like structure
in which temporal scaling correlates to the escalation of in-group legitimacy and out-
group illegitimacy. While the chart can be usefully read as a linear progression that is
generally applicable, the elements below may not necessarily be adopted by an identity
movement in the sequence shown. An identity movement may also qualify as extreme
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
54
(in which the in-group’s success is understood to be inseparable from negative acts
against an out-group) without incorporating all of the elements below.
As an identity collective defines itself, it begins with the current social grouping. As it
moves toward extremism, it expands to incorporate a timeline increasingly populated
with past events and future expectations, elements which are used to justify an
escalating demand for legitimacy. When an out-group is identified, it is subjected to the
same process, except with the goal of delegitimisation.
The top-level categories of identity definition are beliefs, behaviour and intrinsic.
Behaviour can be usefully broken down into past, present and future behaviour, with
each carrying different implications. Intrinsic identity refers to how a group member
answers the question “who are you?” and may include qualities decided at birth, such
as race, ethnicity, tribe, gender, citizenship or sexual identity. (It should be noted that
ideologies moving toward extremism tend to classify deviations from cisgendered
heteronormativity as behavioural rather than intrinsic.)
I
N
-
G
R
O
U
P
O
U
T
-
G
R
O
U
P
Each component of identity is shaped by information sources (the centre column),
including but not limited to history, myth, news, conspiracy theories, disinformation,
personal experience and scriptures. As groups move into extremism, the quality of the
information sources may deteriorate (for instance, drawing on myth rather than
historical fact). Reliance on low-quality sources does not necessarily indicate a group is
extremist, or in the process of becoming extremist. However, there may be reason for
concern when a movement substitutes lower-quality sources for higher-quality sources
(such as shifting from canonical scriptures to apocrypha).
A collective that begins with a geographical community, such as a town, develops a
history of how that town came to be and what existed before the town (tracing the
family or ethnic histories of the founders, for instance). It also develops a sense of what
distinguishes the collective apart from geography (“that’s not how we do things around
here”).
Once established with an identity, the collective may continue to flesh out its history in
more and more complex ways, while adding components of intrinsic identity. With
British Israelism, Anglo-Saxony became an intrinsically national (Israelite) and
eventually racial (white) identity, as categories related to past behaviour (scriptural
genealogies and folklore) became more and more developed.
Finally, an identity collective which has robustly developed the previous components
may turn to its expectations for the future, which can be secular, religious or a mix, as
in the case of British Israelism. Fear of war with the Soviet Union was conflated with
biblical prophecy into a heady and eventually apocalyptic brew.
When the construction of in-group identity does not satisfy the legitimacy demands of
the collective, it may choose to appropriate legitimacy from an out-group, which is a
critical pivot toward extremism.
The out-group is defined and constructed in a parallel but not perfectly concurrent
process. Initially, British Israelism shared commonalities in heritage and history with
Jewish identity. But the demand for legitimacy escalated, and soon the British Israelist
claim to biblical covenants required a more advanced justification, which eventually
excluded Jews from key parts of a previously shared pseudohistory.
After this exclusion, the introduction of elements from contemporary anti-Semitic
currents escalated to hostility and fear. Fear is inherently a forward-looking
phenomenon, opening the door to an analysis of future behaviour, which British
Israelists and Christian Identity adherents fused with apocalyptic prophecy. This final
escalation can happen quickly. British Israelism had been an active ideology since 1870,
but the escalation from the formal introduction of racialised anti-Semitism to full-blown
apocalyptism took less than 30 years.
Related to the escalation of an identity-based ideology are two additional lines of
development: the perception of the threat posed by an out-group and the prescription
to solve that threat. These two can be understood by mapping linked concepts, as
illustrated below.
56
As the in-group’s characterisation of the out-group becomes more developed, more
opportunities become available to link the out-group to a higher level of threat, and to
link the threat to a more violent solution.
Escalation becomes likely when the out-group identity begins to be seen as intrinsic,
and again when the out-group identity incorporates expected future behaviours. As the
threat perception escalates, so too does the range of possible solutions to the “out-
group problem”. A range of less violent options are available to deal with out-groups
perceived as a minor or major (but ordinary) threat. When the perception of threat
escalates to existential or apocalyptic, a much wider range of violent solutions becomes
available (including war and genocide).
4. Conclusions
Thanks in part to its profusion of texts, the progression of British Israelism into
Christian Identity provides a framework for understanding how non-extremist identity
collectives morph into well-developed extremist organisations. As previously noted,
this analysis produces several conclusions:
Identity movements are oriented toward establishing the legitimacy of a
collective group (organised on the basis of geography, religion, ethnicity or other
prima facie commonalities).
Movements become extreme when the in-group’s demand for legitimacy
escalates to the point it can only be satisfied at the expense of an out-group.
Escalating demands for legitimacy can be measured by shifting temporal frames,
expanding from present-day contexts to seek justification in history and set
expectations for the future (often in the form of religious prophecy).
In texts, the process of escalation can be mapped through linkages between
concepts and the bundling of multiple linkages into single conceptual constructs.
These mappings can inform efforts to counter extremist messaging.
The framework offered in this paper, centred on the “ladder of identity construction”,
offers an approach to analysing violent extremism that steps back from the specific
contents of any one ideology to examine a broader spectrum of motivations.
For understandable reasons, the study and analysis of violent extremism has long been
fixated on the specific content of extremist ideologies. But this cannot and should not
be the beginning and the end of analysis.
Ideologies change, sometimes within a consistent organisational structure, and
sometimes as one group or movement mutates into another. Variants of original British
Israelism continue to exist, independent of Christian Identity, and adherents were
among the vocal supporters of the Brexit movement in 2016.
172
British Israelism also
exists alongside many variants, some developed concurrently, such as Native
American-Israelism and African-Israelism.
173
When extremist adherents present their ideology, they frequently argue for its absolute
primacy and (in the case of fundamentalist movements) its immutability. But the
development of ideological movements is messy and non-linear, and the contents of
ideology are volatile, a phenomenon clearly visible in the evolution of British Israelism
and seen more recently in the emergence of the so-called Islamic State (IS) from its
precursor movement, al Qaeda.
174
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58
We should listen carefully to what extremists say they believe, but we should
understand that their explanations cannot be objective or complete. In identity-based
extremist movements, adherents have a patently obvious and deeply ingrained bias
toward understanding and representing their ideology as uniquely virtuous and
accurately representative of a wider social grouping.
In order to effectively design policies and programs to counter radicalisation into
violence, we must therefore approach the problem both individually and holistically, by
understanding the broader dynamics that shape specific beliefs.
Perhaps most importantly, we must understand that extremist ideology is the outcome
of a group radicalisation process, rather than being exclusively causal.
The framework and processes discussed in this paper raise a number of more specific
considerations for counter-terrorism communications.
a) Assaults on Legitimacy
Since September 11, a core message from Western governments has been that groups
like al Qaeda and IS are not legitimate in a religious sense. President George W. Bush
famously said that al Qaeda had “perverted” Islam. President Barack Obama’s
administration insisted on using the acronym ISIL or even the Arabic acronym “Daesh”
because they felt that referring to IS by its chosen name would legitimise its connection
to Islam. President Obama spoke more directly to the issue in 2016:
Groups like ISIL are desperate for legitimacy. They try to portray
themselves as religious leaders and holy warriors who speak for Islam.
I refuse to give them legitimacy. We must never give them that
legitimacy.
175
There are many reasons why elements of this rhetoric were positive. For one thing,
both administrations were speaking not just (or even primarily) to Muslims, but to non-
Muslim Americans who were confused about the reason for terrorist activity. Refuting
the link between terrorist groups and the normative practices of Muslims is both
important and admirable for wide audiences.
However, these attitudes leaked over into Countering Violent Extremism (CVE)
initiatives, an entirely different arena. In dozens of policies and papers, government
officials and non-governmental activists discuss the goal of using religious figures,
former extremists and other tactics to delegitimise violent extremism.
176
This approach
is eminently understandable, and this author has at times supported such efforts.
But the framework discussed in this paper suggests that attacks on the legitimacy of
extremist groups are likely to fail, as legitimacy is the central component of an extremist
in-group’s identity construction – the most-developed and best-protected asset that
any extremist group possesses.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Even worse, the progression of British Israelism suggests the very real possibility that
attacks on extremist legitimacy may worsen the problem. As we have seen, during the
key transformation of British Israelism into Christian Identity, starting with Rand and
continuing through Swift, external challenges were directly and repeatedly cited. When
challenged, the authors naturally responded with more complex justifications and an
escalation of hostility toward Jewish out-groups.
Additional research on this topic across ideological boundaries is necessary (and
planned), but this paper strongly suggests that direct assaults on the content of
extremist ideologies may be extremely counter-productive, as they contribute to the
escalation of legitimacy-seeking through more extensive and creative justifications -
essentially accelerating group radicalisation.
Finally, while direct attacks on legitimacy may be unwise, feeding an extremist group’s
sense of legitimacy and entitlement is also an obvious and grave error. Western
politicians who seek to conflate normative Muslim practices with those of the IS, for
instance, are sending a clear message that they believe IS does in fact represent some
form of intrinsically Muslim identity. Given that extremist groups will generally absorb
any information source that supports their claims, this is extremely dangerous.
Even more dangerous, however, is the fact that such rhetoric clearly occupies its own
place on the ladder of identity construction. Politicians and pundits who link concepts
in order to conflate normative Muslims with IS supporters are clearly and unequivocally
building an extremist out-group identity, as are politicians and pundits who contrive
linkages between refugees and violent crime. In both cases, the factual basis for these
linkages are weak, leading those who promote the linkages to seek validation from
weak information sources, including active disinformation campaigns on social media,
hyper-partisan news sources, and so-called “fake news” sites.
177
As seen in the example of Christian Identity, the escalation of a perceived out-group
threat combined with the integration of weak information sources is a key pivot point
in the development of a full-blown extremist identity. The prominence of these
extremist currents in mainstream Western politics is cause for grave concern.
b) Unbundling Constructs
As previously noted, the approach to analysing ideological texts in this paper takes its
lead from Ingram’s “A ‘Linkage-Based’ Approach to Combating Militant Islamist
Propaganda”. Ingram describes extremist propaganda as providing its audience with a
“’system of meaning’ which acts as the lens through which supporters are compelled to
perceive and judge the world”.
Ingram recommends targeting the “system of meaning” at the highest level, where the
out-group is linked to a crisis, and the in-group is linked to a solution (see chart below).
In this approach, counter-messaging can be designed to dissolve those links, as well as
to create new opposing associations, for instance linking extremist adherents to crises
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
ẞ
60
and linking non-adherents to solutions. These high-level linkages are almost always the
most efficient vector from which to approach a messaging campaign.
However if directly overturning a heavy table is problematic, sawing off one of its legs
may be a workable strategy. There may be instances in which unbundling the high-level
constructs is useful. This idea is not new in itself, although approaching it through the
framework in this paper may help refine the approach, particularly by de-emphasising
frontal attacks on extremist legitimacy and emphasising critical junctures in ideological
development.
As a simplistic example, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is fundamentally and almost
inextricably bundled into the definition of the out-group crisis in Christian Identity.
Therefore, for example, messaging that seeks to dissolve the high-level linkage
between out-group and crisis could be informed by concepts and language from
Protocols, refuting underlying arguments with or without direct reference to the text.
Significantly, attacking a non-canonical source document may be less likely to trigger
escalating demands for legitimacy as discussed in the previous section, since the source
itself is neither sacred nor intrinsic to in-group identity.
There are also benefits in directly attacking the legitimacy of secondary or syncretic
information sources such as Protocols, where there is significant documentation of its
forged and plagiarised nature.
178
The text is not used only by Christian Identity, but by
a variety of extremist movements with anti-Semitic elements. Undermining a text that
is central to many different extremist movements but canonical to none therefore
offers wide benefits, especially for diverting at-risk people at the curiosity and
consideration stages of individual radicalisation.
179
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This dynamic could be useful in messaging relative to al Qaeda and IS, for instance, by
undermining weak hadith – sayings of the Prophet Mohammed that can be challenged
based on technical features and provenance rather than on their merits – and
secondary sources such as medieval scholars cited by both groups. It should be noted
that this is far from a new idea,
180
and its effectiveness thus far is unclear, mostly due
to lack of programmatic evaluation. Additionally, it may be difficult for Muslim scholars,
especially in the West, to approach this topic without directly attacking the legitimacy
of IS and thus triggering escalation.
181
In general, it is not entirely clear that unbundling would be more effective than
targeting high-level crisis constructs, and such an approach would certainly take longer
to produce measurable effects since it is less direct. Nevertheless, it is likely worth
exploring such approaches and evaluating their results.
Messaging initiatives can also strengthen linkages that de-escalate group radicalisation
and reduce the propensity for violence, for instance by emphasising the legitimacy of
history over prophecy with respect to in-group or out-group perceptions; shifting a
perceived in-group vulnerability from major to minor; or emphasising negotiable
identity elements such as practices over non-negotiable elements such as race.
However, such approaches rapidly begin to resemble social engineering, and the
evaluation of messaging campaign success becomes more difficult when subtle
changes are introduced into small populations. There are also potentially negative
second-order effects which are considered in the next section.
With all this in mind, the unbundling of high-level constructs may have more utility for
individual CVE interventions than broadcast messaging. Bundling allows extremist
ideologues and propagandists to conflate weak and strong arguments into one
argument that appears stronger than the sum of its parts, especially when the
components are sequenced and presented as a simulated deliberative argument, as
described in section 3(b).
By unbundling constructs during engagement, an interlocutor may be able to trigger
deliberation about weaker component concepts, rather than the automatic response
that higher-level constructs often seek to inspire.
c) Incremental CVE?
The ladder of identity construction also dangles the possibility that messaging and
deradicalisation campaigns could be targeted to achieve incremental tactical gains
against violent extremist groups that have reached critical mass and pose serious
security challenges.
A “ladder” analysis of any given extremist movement’s evolution would show the steps
that led it to the justification of violence. Currently, messaging and deradicalisation
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
62
efforts aimed at radicalised supporters of IS and al Qaeda seek to engage across a wide
range of moral and political issues.
In principle, it should be easier to walk individuals and organisations one rung up the
ladder, relative to jumping several rungs back to some original non-extremist state. This
would involve identifying arguments from previous stages of the group’s development
and highlighting the superiority of those ideas over current, more violent principles.
Obviously, such an approach immediately triggers significant ethical and political
debates that cannot be easily resolved. One such approach was explored in 2015 by
the Brookings Institution in a series of articles examining whether quietist Salafism
offers an alternative to violent jihadism.
182
Quietist Salafis are already deeply opposed
to the IS and on their own initiative already produce messaging to discredit violent
approaches, which could form the template for additional efforts in this area.
183
But a number of difficult questions persist, including:
Is it ethical to encourage people to participate in a passive exclusionary or
extremist identity as an alternative to a violent extremist identity?
Is it practical to apply such efforts over a long period of time in order to gradually
walk exclusionary ideologies back to a non-exclusionary state?
If a person or population has de-escalated their views by moving one rung up
the ladder, are they more likely to re-escalate back into violent extremism at
some point in the future?
Could efforts to de-escalate individuals or groups incrementally lead to new
evolutionary pressures that produce more virulent forms of extremism at some
point in the future?
All of these questions are worth studying, and the results of such study may assist us
in evaluating the merits of such an approach. But in the real world, this approach may
never be feasible. A messaging campaign that favoured the Muslim Brotherhood, for
instance, as an alternative to al Qaeda, would almost inevitably have the effect of
drawing some entirely non-radicalised people into the Muslim Brotherhood. Even if this
was clearly determined to be a preferable outcome after all the pros and cons were
evaluated, such a policy would be politically toxic and likely unimplementable.
Similar woes would beset a messaging campaign that, for instance, encouraged violent
racist extremists to stop violence in favour of voluntary segregation. Such a campaign
would be burdened by ethical and political obstacles, and would incur a serious risk of
radicalising more people toward segregation than it deradicalised from violence. Here,
however, it is interesting to note that overtly violent white nationalism in the United
States has organically receded somewhat since the decline of Christian Identity in the
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
1980s and 1990s, in favour of voluntary segregationist movements seeking to build
white-only enclaves.
184
With more study and creative thought, there may be ways to exploit the insights of the
ladder framework in order to achieve incremental progress against extremist groups
without compromising obvious shared values and within the boundaries of what is
pragmatically achievable within political and social strictures.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
64
Appendix A: Bibliography
Note on sources: Several early British Israelite texts were obtained in PDF format from
Christian Identity websites and forums, as well as from Archive.org. In some cases,
these PDFs were print books that had been fully digitised and scanned, preserving the
original text. In others cases, the works were transcribed and reformatted. In a handful
of instances, the reformatted versions were edited by the person who created the PDF.
Key passages and quotes were cross-referenced with Google Books whenever possible
to verify the quotes against the original text. Where such verification took place, the
cross-referenced edition is cited.
Allen, J. H. Judah's Sceptre and Joseph's Birthright. Merrimac, MA: Destiny Publishers,
1902. Accessed as PDF and Kindle book of 19th edition, published sometime after 1918.
Barkun, M. Religion and the racist right: The origins of the Christian Identity movement.
Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 1997.
Ben Judah, H. When? A Prophetical Novel of the Very Near Future. British Israel Association
of Greater Vancouver. 1944.
Berger, J. M. “Making CVE Work: A Focused Approach Based on Process Disruption”, The
International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague 7, no. 5 (2016),
https://icct.nl/publication/making-cve-work-a-focused-approach-based-on-process-
disruption/.
Berger, J. M. “Without Prejudice: What Sovereign Citizens Believe”, George Washington
University, Program on Extremism, June 2016.
Bunzel, C. “From paper state to caliphate: The ideology of the Islamic State”, Analysis
Paper No. 19, The Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, March
2015, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/The-ideology-of-the-
Islamic-State.pdf.
Cameron, W. J. "The Covenant People." Merrimac, MA: Destiny Publishers. 1966.
Ford, H. The International Jew IV: Aspects of Jewish Power in the United States. Dearborn
Publishing Company, 1922.
Gale, W. P. The Faith of Our Fathers. Mariposa California: Ministry of Christ Church, 1963.
Goldenberg, D. M. The curse of Ham: Race and slavery in early Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. Princeton University Press, 2009.
Ingram, H. J. “A “Linkage-Based” Approach to Combating Militant Islamist Propaganda:
A Two-Tiered Framework for Practitioners”, The International Centre for Counter-
Terrorism – The Hague 7, no. 6 (2016), https://icct.nl/publication/a-linkage-based-
approach-to-combating-militant-islamist-propaganda-a-two-tiered-framework-for-
practitioners/.
Ingram, H. J. “Deciphering the Siren Call of Militant Islamist Propaganda: Meaning,
Credibility & Behavioural Change”, The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The
Hague 7, no. 9 (2016), https://icct.nl/publication/deciphering-the-siren-call-of-militant-
islamist-propaganda-meaning-credibility-behavioural-change/.
Jenkins, T. R. The Ten Tribes of Israel: Or the True History of the North American Indians,
Showing that They are the Descendants of These Ten Tribes. Houck and Smith, 1883.
Katz, Jacob. From prejudice to destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1980.
Nilus, S. The Protocols and World Revolution: Including a Translation and Analysis of the
“Protocols of the Meetings of the Zionist Men of Wisdom”. Boston: Small, Maynard &
Company, 1920.
Parker, C. F. A short study of Esau-Edom in Jewry. London: The Covenant Publishing Co.,
1949, Second Edition.
Parker, C.F. Israel’s Migrations: Or An Attack Answered. London: The Covenant Publishing
Co., 1947, Second Edition.
Poole, W. H. Anglo
‐
Israel or the Saxon Race Proved to be the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel.
Toronto, n.d.
Rand, H. B. Documentary Studies Vol. 1-3. Merrimac, MA: Destiny Publishers, 1950.
Schmid, A. P. “Radicalisation, De-Radicalisation, Counter-Radicalisation: A Conceptual
Discussion and Literature Review”, The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The
Hague 4, no. 2 (2013), https://icct.nl/publication/radicalisation-de-radicalisation-
counter-radicalisation-a-conceptual-discussion-and-literature-review/.
Swift, W. Selected lectures, 1963 to 1967.
Wilson, J. Lectures on our Israelitish origin London: J. Nisbet, 1876.
66
Appendix B: Chronology of British Israelism
The following brief chronology of the development of British Israelism is largely based
on Michael Barkun’s Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity
Movement (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 1997), which is the most comprehensive
scholarly work on the movement’s history. The book is highly recommended to anyone
interested in a more robust history of the movement.
The chronology also includes a partial list of violent incidents associated with Identity
adherents through the 1990s. People associated with Christian Identity have been
implicated in many more plots, often unsuccessful. Those interested in further research
on this topic can find more information in The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement
and the Radical Right (New York: Macmillan, 2004) by Daniel Levitas; and Right-wing
Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000) by Chip
Berlet and Matthew Nemiroff Lyons, among others.
1840: John Wilson publishes the first edition of Lectures on Our Israelitish Origin the
first formal statement of British Israel doctrine (Barkun, p 6).
1870s: Formal British Israel associations begin to form in England to promote the
general theory (p 9).
1880s: British Israel authors begin to publish and lecture in North America (p 30).
1900: Foundations of the Nineteenth Century is published, helping to popularise a
racialised strain of anti-Semitism.
1900s: British Israel associations begin to emerge in North America (p 14).
1902: Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright, an early mature rendition of British
Israelist ideology, is published in Portland, Oregon.
1920: The first American edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is published.
1920s: British Israelism as an organisational movement peaks in England, with
about 5,000 British members (p 15).
1921: William Cameron becomes editor of Henry Ford’s The Dearborn Independent,
which publishes many virulently anti-Semitic articles based on The Protocols.
1922: Cameron and Ford publish The International Jew, a collected edition of anti-
Semitic columns from The Dearborn Independent.
1927: The Dearborn Independent is shuttered after a libel suit related to its anti-
Semitic content.
1928: An American branch of the British Israel World Federation (based in London)
is organised by Howard Rand (p 30).
1930: Rand established the first branch of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America,
based in Detroit. Cameron joins soon after. (p 30).
1930s: Branches of the Anglo-Saxon Federation are established in several U.S.
states (p 30).
1933: Cameron gives a series of lectures in Dearborn, Michigan, that form the basis
of the later collected edition, The Covenant People.
1937: Rand begins to publish the British Israelist Destiny magazine.
1939: World War II breaks out. This, along with subsequent global events,
contributed to a growing millenarian strain within British Israelism.
1944: When? A Prophetical Novel of the Very Near Future is published. The book
introduces the major elements that would pivot British Israelism into
Christian Identity (p 51).
1945: The first atomic bomb is detonated, further contributing to the millenarian
tone of British Israel publications, particularly by Rand.
1948: The Jewish state of Israel is established, creating a fundamental crisis in
British Israelism’s ideological thesis that Anglo-Saxons are the legitimate
heirs to the covenants of God with Israel.
1940s: Wesley Swift founds the Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation church, later
renamed The Church of Jesus Christ Christian. He begins to preach Christian
Identity doctrine at the church and in lectures around the country (p 62).
1960s: Swift and William Potter Gale form the Christian Defense League, a short-
lived Christian Identity paramilitary organisation. The CDL was rumored to
be plotting acts of terrorism (p 67).
1960s: Swift delivers a series of radio lectures on Christian Identity.
1963: Gale publishes Faith of Our Fathers, a systematic exposition of Christian
Identity doctrine.
1970: Gale co-founds Posse Comitatus, an anti-government group with ties to the
tax protest movement and a firm grounding in Christian Identity doctrine (p
69).
1973: Richard G. Butler, a disciple of Swift, founds the Christian Identity
congregation Church of Jesus Christ Christian in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (p 69).
He subsequently founds the Aryan Nations, an Identity-based white
nationalist organisation.
1983: Gordon Kahl, a longtime Posse Comitatus associate, shoots and kills three
law enforcement officers.
185
1983: The Order, a white supremacist group linked to Butler and which included
Christian Identity adherents among its members, begins a year-long spree
of robbery to fund white nationalist groups and multiple murders.
186
1985: A Christian Identity group known as The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm
of the Lord is broken up after a standoff with federal officers who were
attempting to arrest members in relation to arson, bombings and unrealised
assassination plots.
187
1995: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols carry out the Oklahoma City bombing,
killing 168 people. The men were linked to a Christian Identity community in
Oklahoma known as Elohim City.
1995: A spree of bank robberies is committed by a white nationalist gang known
as the Aryan Republican Army, some of whose members and associates
were Christian Identity adherents and who also spent time at Elohim City.
188
1995: Christian Identity minister Willie Ray Lampley attempts to launch a serial
bombing plot.
189
1999: Buford Furrow, a former Aryan Nations member and close associate of
Richard Butler, killed one and wounded five in a spree targeting a Jewish
community center in the Los Angeles area.
190
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Extremist Construction of Identity: How Escalating
Demands for Legitimacy Shape and Define In-Group and
Out-Group Dynamics
J.M. Berger
April 2017
How to cite: Berger, J.M. "Extremist Construction of Identity: How Escalating Demands for Legitimacy
Shape and Define In-Group and Out-Group Dynamics", The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism -
The Hague 8, no. 7 (2017).
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