Christian Identity thinly disguised anti-Semitism (2)
Dr Richard V. Pierard, Scholar in Residence and Stephen Phillips Professor of History at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts (2000-2006), concludes his exposé of racist ideas that have been infiltrating right-wing evangelicalism.
There are three strains of racial anti-Semitism building on British-Israel ideas, although the mixture of these varies among Identity writers and preachers. One theory focuses on interracial marriage. This argues that Esau, who turned away from the worship of Yahweh, fathered, through his Canaanite wives, the Edomite people.
It maintains that when the remnant of Judah and Benjamin returned to the Promised Land after the Exile, they began intermarrying with the Edomites of Idumea and became a mongrel people. They were known as Jews and lived in a territory called Judaea.
During the Cold War years many Identity figures tried to link Jews to communism through Esau’s ‘red’ character and Edom’s red landscape. Another version of this holds that Judah married a Canaanite woman, whose son Shelah produced a line of half-breeds of mixed Canaanite and Edomite blood.
Mongrels
Yet another variation is that Esau married Hittite descendents of Cain and Ham, and eventually the Jews had Hittite ancestry as well. So the Jews who lived in Palestine at the time of Christ could in no way be the chosen people. The amount of Israelite blood in them was next to nil and they were a corrupt, mongrelised people.
A mixture of Canaanites and Edomites had taken over the geographical location of Judah and called themselves Jews. Many of them practised a version of the historic faith of Israel, and when Christ came to show them a more perfect way, the counterfeit Jews rejected him. In turn, God cast them out of the land for ever. Thus Zionism is a fraud, Israel an illegitimate state, and true Christians have no business identifying these with divine purposes.
A second racial hypothesis is that Jews are really Asiatics. This holds that the Ashkenazic Jews who populated western Russia and Poland, and immigrated to western Europe and particularly the United States in large numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were really not Europeans at all.
This explains why (in accordance with racial stereotyping of the time) they were disease-ridden, engaged in political radicalism, fostered unethical business practices and were in effect unassimilable as immigrants. The Jews in Tsarist Russia were in fact descendents of the Khazars, a Turkic people who lived north-east of the Black Sea.
There is credible historical evidence that the leadership elite and an undetermined portion of the Khazar population did indeed convert to Judaism in the late seventh century and were in contact with Jewish figures in Muslim Spain. However, this only seems to have lasted about 200 years and then they slipped into historical obscurity. It is reasonable to assume that the Khazars like most other Caucasian/southern Russia peoples eventually adopted Islam.
Khazars
However, the extreme right maintained that the Ashkenazic Jews were not refugees from western and central Europe allowed by Polish kings to settle on relatively empty lands during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – something which all reasonable historians accept without question – but rather were Khazars.
Identity writers readily attributed ‘Asiatic’ features to these Jews, namely, that they were ’round-headed’, and had squat faces and the ‘typical Jewish nose’. One variation held that the Khazars had originally come from Edom, where Jewish intermarriage with them further defiled these people.
Southern Methodist University English professor John Beaty’s Iron Curtain over America (1951), an influential Cold War era book widely read on the right, did much to popularise the Khazar hypothesis.
Beaty argued that the ‘Judaised Khazars’ succeeded in infiltrating and corrupting Russia as a whole, and were responsible for the development of communism, and for fomenting the Bolshevik Revolution, growth of Zionism and transferal of large numbers of their people to the United States, where they set out to undermine American civilisation as well. Thus, Jews were carriers of tainted blood masquerading as a biblical people, but their real intent was to subvert God’s plan for the ages and conquer the world themselves.
The third and most virulent strain of Christian Identity racism is the idea that Jews are the direct biological offspring of Satan. This was promoted by most of the post-1960 generation of Identity writers and preachers – Conrad Pascoe Gaard, Wesley Swift, Bertrand L. Comparet, William Potter Gale, Dan Gayman, Gordon Winrod, Jarah B. Crawford, James K. Warner, Richard Girnt Butler, Gordon ‘Jack’ Mohr, Thom Robb, Peter G. (Pete) Peters and Sheldon Emry.
Their argument comes in a variety of forms, and I will follow that set forth by Bertrand Comparet in his rambling tract The Cain-Satanic line.This teaches that when God created Adam, a race of human beings was already in existence. These pre-Adamites were dark-skinned peoples – Asiatics and Africans. The earth was under the dominion of the chief angel Lucifer (also known as Satan), but after his rebellion against God, he forfeited his right to rule.
Bloodlines
God then created two new beings, Adam and Eve, who were to reclaim the earth for him, drive out Satan and his angels, and govern the planet wisely. Adam was the ‘Son of God’, the first member of a new, specially created race.
He was a different sort of person, with a ‘rosy, fair complexion’, unlike the existing Mongoloids and Negroids, and God ordered the first pair to have no sexual relationships with these creatures. That is the meaning of the command not to eat or touch the tree in the midst of the Garden of Eden. They were not to ‘mongrelise’ their race by contact with the pre-Adamite peoples and ‘bearing fruit’ with them.
However, Satan, who was an enchanter or magician, seduced Eve (that is the meaning of ‘beguiled’) and she gave birth to Cain. Her second son, Abel, was Adam’s child, but Cain murdered him and he was eventually replaced by Seth.
Now there were two bloodlines through Eve in the world – that of Satan through Cain, and of Adam through Seth. This is why God said in Genesis 3:15: ‘I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed’.
Cain found himself a wife among the pre-Adamite peoples and before long the descendents of Adam were marrying there as well. Cain established dominance over the pre-Adamites, and his descendents were in the direct line of Satan.
The flood was sent to punish the Adamites because their race had become corrupted by so much non-Adamite blood. In Genesis 6:2 it says, ‘The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all they chose’. This is a reference to the fallen angels, the ‘giants in the earth in those days’ (Genesis 6:4), cohabiting with the Adamite women and further corrupting the race.
The Flood, localised in nature because the pre-Adamite races continued to exist, wiped out all the disobedient Adamites except Noah and his family. Thus, there were ‘two seeds’ in the world arising from Eve. One was good, and had been implanted by God and transmitted from Adam through Seth; the other was the offspring of the serpent/devil and transmitted through Cain.
Two genetic strains existed in humanity: the ‘seed of the woman’ – Seth, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David and Jesus; and the seed of Satan – Cain, Ham, Esau and Judas Iscariot.
Herod
In Mount Seir or Edom, the area where Esau settled, lived the descendents of Cain and the fallen angels. And when he married two Canaanite women, his lineage was tainted with their bad blood and the result was mongrelised, half-Satanic children.
The Edomites were a constant source of trouble to Israel throughout its history (Amalek was from their lineage), and when the remnant of Judah returned from the Babylonian captivity, they were afflicted again by numerous, warlike Edomites. After defeating them around 120 BC, the Maccabeean king John Hyrcanus converted them to Judaism and gave them citizenship in the Judaean kingdom.
Then the Edomite chieftain Herod conquered the area and became the king under Roman protection. The Herodian Jews had control of the entire local and religious government, and were fearful that Jesus’ condemnation of the evils of their administration would lead the Romans to come in and throw them out.
Jesus in turn recognised the two seed lines. He told the Jewish leaders in John 8 that they were ‘the children of your father the devil’, and in Matthew 23 labelled them ‘children of serpents’. He said one of the disciples, Judas Iscariot, ‘is a devil’ (John 6:70). Paul called the Jewish sorcerer Elymas ‘you son of the devil’ (Acts 13:9).
1 John 5:10 mentions that the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest, while 3:12 states we should love our brothers and not be as Cain ‘who was a child of the evil one and murdered his brother’.
The end result, according to this theory, is that those who believe in Christ identify with the heritage and lineage of Adam. Jews, on the other hand, are not the people of God, but the offspring of that hybrid creature Cain, who was part devil, part man, or the devil in human form.
Virulent anti-Semitism
Cain’s line continued throughout the ages to manifest his diabolical character and constantly plot against God and the Adamic race. So the Jews are tied to Satan through paternity and biological descent and are the adversaries of God on earth.
They are responsible for all the Satanic conspiracies that have afflicted humanity up to this day, from their dominance of the international money system, to fomenting socialism and communism, undermining Christian nations by working for the separation of church and state, and pushing the world to the brink of war to preserve the illegal state of Israel.
As preposterous as all this seems, the false religion of Christian Identity can be seductive to evangelicals. Its exponents use Bible texts in superabundance to back up their contentions, while their explanations of contemporary problems have a ring of plausibility for those who are attracted by conspiracy theories.
Those who have fixed ideas about Jews, or utilise stereotypes about Jews, liberals, and such, may be tempted to give a second hearing to an Identity preacher. Also those individuals who do little or no independent thinking of their own and rely on preachers and Bible teachers to explain everything to them could be led unawares into the trap of Christian Identity.
In short, let us be informed about the movement and alert to its temptations.
© Richard V. Pierard
