Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason
Justine Sharrock, Mother Jones
HE .50 CALIBER Bushmaster bolt action rifle is a serious weapon. The model that Pvt. 1st Class Lee Pray is saving up for has a 2,500-yard range and comes with a Mark IV scope and an easy-load magazine. When the 25-year-old drove me to a mall in Watertown, New York, near the Fort Drum Army base, he brought me to see it in its glass case—he visits it periodically, like a kid coveting something at the toy store. It’ll take plenty of military paychecks to cover the $5,600 price tag, but he considers the Bushmaster essential in his preparations to take on the US government when it declares martial law.
His belief that that day is imminent has led Pray to a group called Oath Keepers, one of the fastest-growing “patriot” organizations on the right. Founded last April by Yale-educated lawyer and ex-Ron Paul aide Stewart Rhodes, the group has established itself as a hub in the sprawling anti-Obama movement that includes Tea Partiers, Birthers, and 912ers. Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Pat Buchanan have all sung its praises, and in December, a grassroots summit it helped organize drew such prominent guests as representatives Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun, both Georgia Republicans.
There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution—but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey “unconstitutional” orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government.
Pray (who asked me to use his middle name rather than his first) and five fellow soldiers based at Fort Drum take this directive very seriously. In the belief that the government is already turning on its citizens, they are recruiting military buddies, stashing weapons, running drills, and outlining a plan of action. For years, they say, police and military have trained side by side in local anti-terrorism exercises around the nation. In September 2008, the Army began training the 3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat Team to provide humanitarian aid following a domestic disaster or terror attack—and to help with crowd control and civil unrest if need be. (The ACLU has expressed concern about this deployment.) And some of Pray’s comrades were guinea pigs for military-grade sonic weapons, only to see them used by Pittsburgh police against protesters last fall…
(March/April 2010)
‘Christian Warriors’: Who Are The Hutaree Militia And Where Did They Come From?
Chip Berlet, Religion Dispatches
n Monday, the nine members of the Hutaree Militia were charged with, among other things, ‘seditious conspiracy,’ which carries a maximum of a life imprisonment if convicted. The incident has raised concerns over domestic terrorism and left many confused about Christian apocalyptic belief, which requires some basic history to sort out.
The Hutaree [hoo-TAR-ee]—which means “Christian warrior” in the group’s secret language—were preparing “for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive.” They believed that “one day, as prophecy says, there will be an Antichrist. All Christians must know this and prepare, just as Christ commanded.” And they obliged by forming a citizens’ militia underground cell and arming themselves. Their plans, according federal officials, began in August 2008.
In order to explain why the Hutaree militia was arming itself to battle the Antichrist and federal law enforcement we need to explore the intersection of Christian fundamentalist apocalypticism with citizen militias, the Patriot Movement, and right-wing populism.
Something Old and Something New (World Order)
Conspiracy theories date back many centuries, with a major outbreak in the late 1790s of plots by Freemasons to smash both church and state. These plots were rewritten in the latter part of the 1800s to target Catholics; then by a sector of the Populists who saw the perpetrators as a giant octopus of plutocrats and bankers; and again in the early 1900s to scapegoat Jews. Talk radio pioneer Father Coughlin railed against the ‘banksters’ and Jews working behind the scenes in the Roosevelt Administration.
Since the early 1990s, a sector of the political right in the United States has embraced a specific set of conspiracy theories revolving around government plans to impose tyranny through the United Nations or some such international body. These conspiracy theorists, egged on by groups like the John Birch Society, claimed that George H.W. Bush was planning a New World Order before attacking the Clinton administration for political assassinations and drug running. The storyline morphed in recent years into fears that the government of the United States planned to destroy national sovereignty by merging with Mexico and Canada to form a North American Union. That theory first surfaced among right-wing opponents of President George W. Bush. Along the way, right-wing media demagogues and Republican Party activists and elected officials fanned the flames.
Now as the Obama administration enters its second year, these conspiracy theories have led to aggression and violence and an alleged domestic terrorist plot. Why is anyone surprised? The widespread public dualist demonization of scapegoated targets has a sordid and violent history. It has happened here. Some fundamentalist Christians portray the government as in league with the Satanic Antichrist in the prophetic End Times.
Christian Apocalypticism and Fundamentalism
An “apocalypse” in its simplest generic sense is an approaching struggle between good and evil during which hidden truths are revealed and the course of history is dramatically altered. Major Protestant denominations, the Catholic Church, and the Orthodox Churches embrace a soft form of Christian apocalyptic expectation, which in many cases refers back to prior historic periods. Some, though not all, Christian fundamentalists are imbued with heightened apocalyptic expectation about upcoming prophetic events.
Before the Puritans became colonists, “Protestant apocalyptic tradition envisioned the ultimate sacralization of England as God’s chosen nation,” observes Avihu Zakai in Exile and Kingdom. We tend to forget that the shining “city upon a hill,” was a beacon for a patriarchal Protestant theocracy that executed recidivist dissidents. The goal was to sanctify a new nation as the proper place for the prophesied return of Jesus the Christ. And the Civil War? “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord?” See the narrative emerging?
Apocalyptic stories are an integral part of the American psyche, bleeding from theology into popular culture over the past two centuries: from Moby Dick to High Noon to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hal Lindsey (with C. C. Carlson) ignited the fuse of contemporary fundamentalist apocalyptic expectation with The Late Great Planet Earth published in 1970 by Zondervan.
Some 20-40 percent of the population of the United States tell pollsters that the biblical prophecies about an End Times battle between Godly Christians and the evil forces of Satan predict actual future history. About 10-15 percent of our neighbors say they hope to see the Second Coming of Jesus Christ in their lifetime. The numbers vary over time and due to the ways questions are structured. It is clear, however, that more people are excited by this type of apocalyptic belief than can be explained by counting the actual parishoners sitting in the pews in fundamentalist churches. Most of these folks, however, are not considering actual criminal acts or violence.
Brenda E. Brasher notes that apocalypticism can be constructive or destructive, pointing to the sustaining “role of apocalyptic Christianity among African slaves brought to the United States,” and in the “anti-slavery abolition movements and the Civil Rights movement.” However, if the scapegoated “other” is “constructed as wholly evil, then the ramifications are really horrendous,” warns Brasher.
“This is not a disagreement, but a struggle with evil incarnate, so there is no structure for a peaceful reconciliation” in which “people are cast in their roles as either enemy or friend and there is no such thing as middle ground,” Brasher explains, “In the battle with evil, can you really say you are neutral?”
The problem, then, is not Christian fundamentalism or apocalyptic belief per se but with forms of Christianity (or any religion) that condone or ignore scapegoating, fundamentalist movements that become totalitarian, or apocalypticism combined with dualistic demonization.
Where can we find this? I have a shelf of books published in the past 20 years in which right-wing fundamentalists warn of an impending apocalyptic battle pitting Godly Christians against sinful secular elites, those in favor of government social welfare programs, Muslims, New World Order internationalists seeking global cooperation, people working for peace, abortion providers, sinful homosexuals, and many more named scapegoats.
Militias, Tea Parties, and Right-Wing Populism
Why are there so many angry people? The Tea Parties are part of a broad Patriot Movement in the United States cobbled together from several preexisting formations on the political right:
- Economic libertarians who worry about big government collectivist tyranny.
- Christian Right Conservatives who oppose liberal government social policies
- Right-wing apocalyptic Christians who fear a Satanic New World Order
- Nebulous conspiracy theorists who fear a secular New World Order
- Nationalistic ultra-patriots concerned that US sovereignty is eroding.
- Xenophobic anti-immigrant white nationalists who worry about preserving the “real” America.
These grievances are interacting in a global economy often eager to accommodate corporate interests. And now we add in the fact that an economic downturn that has left millions unemployed or underemployed leaving the largely white, middle-class, Republican Tea Party activists scared that they may be kicked down the socioeconomic ladder next; the election of a “mixed-race” self-identified black man as president at a time when the demographics of the country reflect a growing percentage of people of color, all in the context of the unfinished conversation about race in America; and the disquiet among social conservatives who see abortion and gay rights through the lens of sin and immorality and anguish over the future of the family and traditional gender roles sometimes seen as mandated by God.
Spinning out of this broad Patriot movement that chronically appears throughout US history come armed citizens’ militias. The Militia Movement in the United States gained headlines in the mid 1990s. Like today, this earlier militia activism was part of a right-wing populist surge that ran from the Republican Party on the reform side to organized white supremacist groups on the insurgent side. This is not one unified movement, but a series of overlapping ones—think of the Olympic symbol of five interlocking rings. It’s quite plausible that sectors of the broad Patriot movement can work together on a common project without all of them actually agreeing on anything but stopping the secular liberal conspiracy to enslave America.
…The government has a legitimate law enforcement role in stopping domestic terrorism, though most dissidents on the political right and left are not breaking any laws and are protected by the First Amendment. The current and volatile right-wing populist movement spans from reform-oriented conservative black Republicans to recruiters for insurgent white supremacist groups, with the Tea Party activists and members of citizens militias falling somewhere between these ideological and methodological poles. It would be sloppy to lump all of these folks into one undifferentiated mass of potential terrorists.
The word “extremism,” which is tossed back and forth by both Republicans and Democrats, is a delegitimizing buzz word used by to demonize dissidents across the political spectrum. It was used in the 1960s, for example, to imply that the white segregationists and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were two sides of the same problem of “extremism.” King addressed being framed in this way in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Today the government uses the tem “extremism” to suggest dissident ideas on the right or left place people on a slippery slope toward terrorism. It’s time to stop using the term altogether…
(31 Mar 2010)
The Return of Christian Terrorism
Mark Jurgensmeyer, Religious Dispatches
ast week when Scott Roeder, the murderer of Wichita Kansas abortion clinic provider Dr. George Tiller, had his day in court, he spent much of his rambling self-defense quoting the words of another abortion clinic assassin, Reverend Paul Hill. In the 1990s my own research had brought me into conversation with others in the inner circle in which Hill and Roeder were at that time involved. So it was a chilling experience for me to realize that this awful mood of American Christian terrorism—culminating in the catastrophic attack on the Oklahoma City Federal Builiding—has now returned.
Christian terrorism has returned to America with a vengeance. And it is not just Roeder. Last week, when members of the Hutaree militia in Michigan and Ohio recently were arrested with plans to kill a random policeman and then plant Improvised Explosive Devices in the area where the funeral would be held to kill hundreds more, this was a terrorist plot of the sort that would impress Shi’ite militia and al Qaeda activists in Iraq. The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded by Morris Dees, which has closely watched the rise of right-wing extremism in this country for many decades, declares that threats and incidents of right-wing violence have risen 200% in this past year—unfortunately coinciding with the tenure of the first African-American president in US history. When Chip Berlet, one of this country’s best monitors of right-wing extremism, warned in a perceptive essay last week on RD that the hostile right-wing political climate in this country has created the groundwork for a demonic new form of violence and terrorism, I fear that he is correct.
Christian Warrior, Sacred Battle
Though these new forms of violence are undoubtedly political and probably racist, they also have a religious dimension. And this brings me back to what I know about Rev. Paul Hill, the assassin who the similarly misguided assassin, Scott Roeder, quoted at length in that Wichita court room last week. In 1994, Hill, a Presbyterian pastor at the extreme fringe of the anti-abortion activist movement, came armed to a clinic in Pensacola, Florida. He aimed at Dr. John Britton, who was entering the clinic along with his bodyguard, James Barrett. The shots killed both men and wounded Barrett’s wife, Joan. Hill immediately put down his weapon and was arrested; presenting an image of someone who knew that he would be arrested, convicted, and executed by the State of Florida for his actions, which he was in 2003. This would make Hill something of a Christian suicide attacker.
What is interesting about Hill and his supporters is not just his political views, but also his religious ones. As I reported in my book, Terror in the Mind of God, and in an essay for RD several months ago, Hill framed his actions as those of a Christian warrior engaged in sacred battle. “My eyes were opened to the enormous impact” such an event would have, he wrote, adding that “the effect would be incalculable.” Hill said that he opened his Bible and found sustenance in Psalms 91: “You will not be afraid of the terror by night, or of the arrow that flies by day.” Hill interpreted this as an affirmation that his act was biblically approved.
One of the supporters that Paul Hill had written these words to was Rev. Michael Bray, a Lutheran pastor in Bowie, Maryland, who had served prison time for his conviction of fire-bombing abortion-related clinics on the Eastern seaboard. Bray published a newsletter and then a Web site for his Christian anti-abortion movement, and published a book theologically justifying violence against abortion service providers, A Time to Kill. He is also alleged to be the author of the Army of God manual that provides details on how to conduct terrorist acts against abortion-related clinics.
Recently Bray has publicly defended Paul Roeder, the Wichita assassin, saying that he acted with “righteousness and mercy.” Several years earlier, another member of Bray’s network of associates, Rachelle (“Shelly”) Shannon, a housewife from rural Oregon, had also attacked Dr. George Tiller as he drove away from his clinic in Wichita. She was arrested for attempted murder.
When I interviewed Bray on several occasions in the 1990s, he provided a theological defense of this kind of violence from two different Christian perspectives. In the remainder of this essay, I’ll summarize from Terror in the Mind of God some of my observations about these theological strands behind their terrorism in the 1990s—and which, amazingly, are surfacing again today.
Theological Illogic
The more traditional Christian justification that Bray used for his violence was just-war theory. He was fond of quoting two of my own heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr, in what I regard as perverse ways. Bray thought that their justification of military action against the Nazis (and an attempted assassination plot on Hitler’s life Bonhoeffer was involved in) was an appropriate parallel to his terrorism against the US government’s sanctioning of legal abortions. It seemed highly unlikely to me that Bray’s positions would have been accepted by these or any other theologian within mainstream Protestant thought. Bonhoeffer and Niebuhr, like most modern theologians, supported the principle of the separation of church and state, and were wary of what Niebuhr called “moralism”—the intrusion of religious or other ideological values into the political calculations of statecraft. Moreover, Bray did not rely on mainstream theologians for his most earnest theological justification.
The more significant Christian position that Bray and Hill advanced is related to the End-Time theology of the Rapture as thought to be envisaged by the New Testament book of Revelation. These are ideas related, in turn, to Dominion Theology, the position that Christianity must reassert the dominion of God over all things, including secular politics and society. This point of view, articulated by such right-wing Protestant spokespersons as Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, have been part of the ideology of the Christian Right since at least the 1980s and 1990s.
At its hardest edge, the movement requires the creation of a kind of Christian politics to set the stage for America’s acceptance of the second coming of Christ. In this context, it is significant today that in some parts of the United States, over one-third of the opponents of the policies of President Barack Obama believe he is the Antichrist as characterized in the End-Times Rapture scenario…
(8 April 2010)
Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.
“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.
Chomsky was speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, where he received the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship.
“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.
He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.
“Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said.
Their attitudes “are understandable,” he said. “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy.”
There is class resentment, he noted. “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels,” he said.
And Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained.
…He said “the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.”
“People want some answers,” Chomsky said. “They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.”
…No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are “reverberating” today, he said.
“These are lessons to keep in mind.”
(12 April 2010)
