Historical Development

• The origins of Christian Identity

  • stems from virulent anti-Semitism
  • Silver Shirts in the 1930s
  • American Nazi Party
  • Henry Ford and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

Previous slide

Next slide

Back to first slide

The origins of Christian Identity intersect other far right organizations in the U.S. It can be traced directly to the Silver Shirts, an American Nazi group which openly supported Hitler during the 1930s. The founder of Identity in its current form was Wesley Swift. Swift was connected to Gerald L.K. Smith who was a member of the Silver Shirts. The Silver Shirts, in their open support of Hitler, undertook a program of extremely racist anti Semitism. The Silver Shirts fell into disrepute with American entrance into World War II but Nazi ideologies remained simmering underground.

Additionally, rabid anti-Semitism was also deeply ingrained in the American heartland by Henry Ford. In the 1920s and 30s nativist thought coalesced the "other," the "enemy," the supreme evil in American society, into the Jew. Ford published a newspaper called the Dearborn Independent. In it he published the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, an extremely rabid anti-Semitic tract that first emerged during Czarist genocidal pogroms against Jews in Russia in the late 1890s. The Protocols alleges that a secret council of Jewish elders is engaged in a conspiracy to control the world (and destroy the Anglo Saxon race and America) via manipulation of banks, economies, puppets in high political offices, and control of the press. The Protocols are important in establishing Identity ideas concerning Jews since it provides what they consider to be irrefutable "proof& of the evil Satanic Jewish conspiracy.

Wesley Swift was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan when he founded the Identity Church of Jesus Christ Christian in 1946. He spread the ideas of Identity into Klan and neo-Nazi groups throughout the 1960s. In 1963 he helped to recruit Richard Butler, an aeronautical engineer and committed white supremacist who had been associated with the Silver Shirts, to the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which became known as the Aryan Nations. Butler became the leader of the Church when Swift died in 1970. Butler and some of his congregation moved to Hayden Lake, Idaho in 1974 in order to establish a secure survivalist compound and hopefully a separate country for whites only. The Aryan Nations continues to operate in the region. Butler has been successful in attracting neo-Nazis, skinheads, and Klan members to his group. Butler’s version of Identity incorporates a world view that includes the use of violence to accomplish the goal of a pure white race and an America freed of the influence of Jews.

Kerry Noble, ex-member of the Covenant Sword and Arm of the Lord a violent anti-government group operating in the mid 1980s, describes the most recent developments in CI. He says that Identity is going mainstream. Replacing the title Christian Identity with the title Christian Israel, some believers are trying to divorce themselves from the more virulent racists among them. This is an attempt to make their message more acceptable to mainstream churches and the public. Then these organizations can begin to participate in political processes that they were excluded from before their change of heart.