Christian Identity and the Politics of Religion

Abstract

Since the end of the Second World War, one form of religion has been especially evident on the American extreme Right. Tracing its roots to nineteenth‐century Britain, Christian Identity emerged in the USA in the 1940s. Anglo‐Saxons, it claimed, were the original lost tribes of Israel, and the Bible was written not for the Jews, but for the white race. Taking a wide variety of organisational forms, Identity has experienced a number of bitter disputes. While some adherents argue that the Bible justifies vigilante violence, others insist that it does not, and where the doctrine has long been associated with the claim that Jews are literally children of Satan, in recent years leading Identity preachers have insisted that this is a false reading of scripture. As with other disputes among Identity believers, these arguments do not disrupt the foundational anti‐Semitism of the doctrine. It draws our attention, however, to the centrality of religion for a movement which envisages the coming of a sacralised new order and which, in some forms, has argued that a divine state has already come to pass, in the twelve years of the Third Reich.