Understanding the Racist Right’s Affection for Violence

 

            Nearly twenty years ago I was invited by Brock University to give the annual Christ and Culture lecture sponsored by the chaplains there. I was going to speak about the racist Aryan Nations and, in Canada, Heritage Front. This was one of the subjects of my PhD research. A panel of professors as well as the Canadian chair of the B’nai B’rith would respond. 

An Aryan Nations Rally

            Just before I began, three men walked in and sat near the front. They wore Nazi-like insignia, Doc Martens, chains and crosses. They were members of Canada’s Heritage Front, a group not unlike the United States’ Aryan Nations. As I began my lecture, I was somewhat intimidated. I stumbled over some of my words. I wondered what was going to happen.

            My talk especially focused on Richard Butler, the racist leader of the Aryan Nations. He espoused a doctrine called Christian Identity, which taught that white, “Aryan,” peoples were the true descendants of Israel and that modern Jews were imposters. Butler made this claim on the basis of a complete—and idiotic—reinterpretation of the Bible. He also taught that Black persons were subhuman descendants of ape-like people who lived before Adam and Eve. 

Aryan Nation Members and Their Hate on Display

            These sort of claims by so-called Christians were not new. Many can be traced back to the Protocols of Zion, a book written by anti-Jewish propogandists during Tsarist Russia. It is a collection of racist myths of that era, and falsely describes a Jewish plot to take over the world through kidnapping and killing Christian children and using their blood to cook with. Today’s QAnon conspiracy theories are deeply influenced by the completely fictional Protocols. 

 

            Butler’s sermons constantly goaded his followers to look forward to a time of great violence against all non-Aryans. It would be a race war to rid America—or at least the Pacific Northwest—of anyone who wasn’t white. The movement fell apart after Butler’s death, and after it was successfully sued for all its assets by two First Nations people. They had been badly beaten up by Aryan Nation foot soldiers near their compound in Idaho. However, equally racist Aryan Nation splinter groups still exist and influence the Racist Right to the present. 

 

            Do they think they can actually win? Yes. But their strategy isn’t ever going to be a frontal assault against today’s established order. It will be an apocalyptic battle that surprises and amazes.

 

            The worldview—the central story—that motivates the Aryan Nations and others of their ilk is one of extreme lack. They are focused on what is wrong with the world, and especially what is wrong in their own lives, and how little they can do with a deep state in charge to actually change things. Theologian John McClure suggests that with this sort of narrative style: 

 

spiritual warfare is not fought in the sky with human subjects contributing prayers and offerings. It is fought in the arenas of history and human experience, with God contributing self-commitments, promises and priests for the process. 

 

            In other words, the Racist Right’s constant focus on how the whole world conspires against them leads to the notion that divine violence here and now, violence that makes the news, is the only answer. This holy violence will lead—through suffering and sacrifice—to a new world guaranteed and approved by God.

 

            So, to achieve this new world, the Racist Right wants to light the fuse that will blow the powder keg of racism and spark a spiritual race war. They are dangerous because their spiritual motivation doesn’t depend on success as the world would count it. They look to God to ultimately bless such violence and provide the reward. Their terroristic asymmetrical violence will be the spark that moves God to intervene for white deliverance. 

 

            After the insurrection in Washington on January 6, the press was full of head-scratching—or anger—at Evangelicals who were so visibly involved. There are many reasons why Evangelicals have fallen for QAnon and the Racist Right. But surely one of those reasons has to do with the wide-spread, pre-existing apocalyptic belief in a return of Jesus. This belief is often associated with themes of judgement upon and punishment of today’s world, its culture, and its mores.

            

            The Racist Right is not uniformly or perhaps even mostly evangelical, of course. But the secular Racist Right—more along the lines of Canada’s now defunct Heritage Front—also tend to a kind of apocalypticism, though of a different sort. They also have a worldview characterized by an emphasis on their lack and suffering and the indignities they endure. They believe that deliverance might come (as it did in Hitler’s day) from a vanguard of people who see the value in making Jews and people of color scapegoats for white ills. Punishing such scapegoats—first through intimidation, then through terror, will in turn, spark its own kind of apocalyptic final judgement, as in Hitler’s final solution. Such violence, properly staged and celebrated will lead to widespread appreciation for White Power among the masses and spark the race war the secular Racist Right also wants. 

 

            In the end, these “spiritual” approaches to getting your historical way, by sparking violent opposition to the powers that be, is no different than Al Qaeda’s use of terror throughout the Middle East and world. The Racist Right is ideologically committed to terrorism as a means to spark something, rather than as the actual means for achieving it. 

 

            The Racist Right can, sometimes at least, be stared down. That’s what happened on the day I gave my lecture at Brock. 

            

            As I began, I tried pushing their presence out of my mind. They listened quietly. When the B’nai B’rith president got up to speak, however, they begin whispering ridicule and laughing out of turn. Finally, feeling embarrassed—after all, I had spoken about how we needed courage to confront far-right racism—I turned around, held my finger to my mouth, and shushed them. 

 

            And, for some reason, that shut them up.

 

            After the lecture, though, I was told by a Brock official that anonymous threats had been received before the lecture. Undercover CSIS agents (Canada’s FBI) were in the audience, just in case. When I left, outside the hall, the police presence was quite visible. Maybe that was the real reason the Heritage Front was so easy to quiet that night.

 

            I don’t know, for sure. It does seem, to me, though that if we are going to meet the challenge of QAnon and wide-spread Evangelical support for racism and strongmen, we are going to have to do more than walk our talk of faith, hope and love. We are also going to have to understand their talk and where it comes from. And be ready with an answer.