Reply #16: Religious fundamentalism and Rampant Racism [View All]

[IndyOp]

Southern Poverty Law Center includes "Christian Identity" in its list of hate groups (the others they list include Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Nazi). Here is a map of "Christian Identity" Hate Groups: <http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp?T=18&m=3>

From the SPLC website:

The Christian Identity religion asserts that whites, not Jews, are the true Israelites favored by God in the Bible. In most of its forms, Identity theology depicts Jews as biologically descended from Satan, while non-whites are seen as soulless "mud people" created with the other Biblical "beasts of the field." Christian Identity has its roots in a 19th-century English fad called British Israelism, which asserted that European whites were descended from the ten "lost tribes" of Israel and were thus related to Jews, who were descended from the other two Hebrew tribes mentioned in the Bible. But British Israelism, which was initially friendly to Jews, was adopted and transformed in the 20th century into a rabidly anti-Semitic creed by a number of racist preachers in the United States.

For decades, identity has been one of the most important ideologies for the white supremacist movement. In its hardest line form, it asserts that Christ will not return to earth until the globe is swept clean of Jews and other "Satanic" fluences. In recent years, deep doctrinal disputes, the lack of a central church structure, and a shift among white supremacists towards agnosticism and racist variations of neo-Paganism have weakened the Identity movement and reduced the number of its adherents.