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Religion and the Racist Right:
The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement
by Michael Barkun
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From Library Journal
While the Christian Identity cult is numerically insignificant, its ideology
informs and influences American racist powers of every stripe. Identity's
bizarre conceptual stew stirs together peculiar interpretations of biblical
scripture to "prove" inherent Caucasian superiority. Its literal demonization of
Jews fuels not only white racist groups such as WAR but also Louis Farrakhan's
Nation of Islam. Barkun (political science, Syracuse Univ.) here proffers the
first sustained study of Identity from its origins in 19th-century British-Israelism,
which held that the Anglo-Saxons were the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. While James
Aho's fine Politics of Righteousness (Univ. of Washington Pr., 1990) addresses
Identity's political activity, this work remains the only complete analysis of
its more pervasive religious teachings. Essential to every academic collection
concerned with racism, anti-Semitism, and American religious cults.
From Kirkus Reviews
A fascinating and terrifying account that is at once a work of academic
scholarship and a startling expos‚ of a particularly virulent form of religious
extremism. Barkun (Political Science/Syracuse Univ.) examines the origins and
ideology of the so-called Christian Identity Movement. This small movement
(upper-range estimates figure its adherents at no more than 50,000 and lower
guesses say they number only 2,000) has nevertheless succeeded in dominating the
discourse of the extreme right--even among groups not even distantly related to
it. White supremacist and anti-Semitic, the Christian Identity Movement
(composed of groups like the Aryan Nation, the Posse Comitatus, and David Duke's
element of the Ku Klux Klan, among others) has three core beliefs--whites are
the true descendants of the biblical Israelites and as such have a providential
role to fulfill; Jews are unrelated to the biblical Israelites and are instead
the spawn of Satan; and the world is on the verge of a fiery apocalypse in which
the Aryans must battle the Jews and their allies to redeem the world. In this
last regard, the Israel of the traditional apocalyptic accounts becomes
identified with the United States rather than the ancient land of Palestine.
Barkun convincingly demonstrates the direct roots of these Christian Identity
groups in an obscure school of 19th-century thought in England known as British-Israelism.
This philosophy saw Britons as the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel,
and thus linked to the Jews, with a role as a chosen people. Unlike its violent
American progeny, however, the previous movement was not anti-Semitic and, in
fact, recognized a kinship with Jews. Compelling and well presented, this volume
deserves to be read by anyone concerned with Christian or political extremism in
America.
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