Christian Identity

Christian Identity is a label applied to a wide variety of loosely affiliated believers and churches with a white supremacist theology. Most promote a racist interpretation of Christianity.

According to Chester L. Quarles, professor of criminal justice at the University of Mississippi, some of the Christian Identity movement's followers hold that non-Caucasian peoples have no souls, and can therefore never earn God's favor or be saved. Believers in the theology affirm that Jesus Christ paid only for the sins of the House of Israel and the House of Judah and that salvation must be received through both redemption and race.

In many variations of Christian Identity thought, a key commonality is British Israelism, which teaches that many white Europeans are the literal descendants of the Israelites through the ten tribes which were taken away into captivity by the armies of Assyria. Christian Identity asserts in addition that these (White European) Israelites are still God's Chosen People, that Jesus was an Israelite of the tribe of Judah, and that modern Jews are not at all Israelites nor Hebrews, but are instead descended from people with Turco-Mongolian blood, or Khazars, or are descendants of the biblical Esau-Edom, who traded his birthright for a bowl of red stew (Genesis 25:29–34).

Modern Identity Christianity evolved from the nineteenth-century doctrine of British Israelism. The ideological transformations that would arise from a theology originally favorable to the Jews into the racist and anti-Semitic doctrines of Christian Identity took place in the interwar years of the twentieth century....While it is impossible to locate the precise moment at which modern Identity Christianity was born, several key events are particularly notable. A 1930 Bible conference brought together a number of leading American British Israelites, including Howard Rand, the head of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America.

The Christian Identity movement first received widespread attention by mainstream media in 1984, when the white nationalist organization known as The Order embarked on a murderous crime spree before being taken down by the FBI. Tax resister and militia movement organizer Gordon Kahl, whose death in a 1983 shootout with authorities helped inspire The Order, also had connections to the Christian Identity movement. The movement returned to public attention in 1992 and 1993, in the wake of the deadly Ruby Ridge confrontation, when newspapers discovered that former Green Beret and right-wing separatist Randy Weaver had at least a loose association with Christian Identity believers.

No single document expresses the Christian Identity belief system; however, adherents draw upon arguments from linguistic, historical, archaeological and biblical sources to support their beliefs. Estimates are that these groups have 2,000 to 50,000 members in the United States, and an unknown number in Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth.

Christian Identity believers reject the beliefs of most contemporary Christian denominations. They claim that modern Christian churches are teaching a heresy: the belief that God's promises to Israel (through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) have been expanded to create a spiritual people of "Israel", which constitutes the Christian "Church". In turn, most modern Christian denominations and organizations denounce Christian Identity as heresy and condemn the use of the Christian Bible as a basis for promoting white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Adherents of Christian Identity claim that Europeans are the true descendants of the biblical Jacob, hence they are the true Israel, and that it is those who are against the interests of European-descended Christians that are the true anti-Semites.