At least 24 people pose for a group picture, their arms raised in the Nazi Sieg Heil salute in an April 2025 post on the social media site X. Behind the crowd, a large wooden swastika burns, illuminating the forest around the crowd. The picture has been edited to include the words “Wish you were here,” in large red letters. Black dots cover the faces of each person in the photo, except one.
Standing to the right of the picture, his hand raised with his compatriots, is Billy Roper, the same man who shared the picture online. Founder of the Shieldwall Network and what he calls the “Ozarkia Project,” Roper is building a whites-only community of like-minded people in Arkansas and Missouri.
Born into a family of Klansmen, Roper has spent his entire adult life dedicated to the cause of spreading hate and white supremacy. A contemporary of some of the most influential names in America’s extreme right-wing scene of the past 30 years, Roper has emerged as a powerful voice for Christian Identity (CI), a fringe, separatist, religion, created and embraced by the American white supremacist movement.
An image posted on X by Christian Identity adherent Billy Roper April 2025. (Source: X)
Rooted in the belief that white people are the true Israelites, that Jews are demons descended from Satan, and other races are simply “mud people” without souls, CI has a diminished but enduring influence on US extreme right-wing movements to this day.
Racist, antisemitic, and steeped in conspiracy theories, CI once boasted compounds and churches around the country. Since its height in the 1980s and 1990s, CI has declined in numbers and in its brick-and-mortar presence around the United States.
Despite this decline from its heyday, Christian Identity remains influential among far-right communities on and offline, through discussion forums dedicated to the “faith,” publishing houses distributing the movement’s literature, and outposts and groups scattered throughout the country. It has penetrated accelerationist movements and found a home in racist forums.
Born from a fringe interpretation of Christianity birthed in Great Britain, and taking root in America, CI evolved into a racist and deadly scripture whose fingerprints stain some of the most tragic events of violence and domestic terrorism in the United States’ recent history.
British Israelism Takes Root In America
While being one of the most prominent American extremist belief systems of the late 20th century, and a significant influence on the extreme far right of the early 21st century, Christian Identity was born from a movement in the UK. “British Israelism,” (BI) was a belief that Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and German people comprised the true lost tribes of Israel.
Theories about the connections between Western European peoples to the biblical “Lost Tribes of Israel” had existed for centuries, but BI, also called Anglo Israelism, codified the concept into a movement, sometimes offering misunderstood and/or misrepresented linguistic evidence as proof of an ancient connection to the Hebrew language. One of the most popular theorists, John Wilson, authored a book detailing the core tenets of BI in the late 19th century. While not the founder of the movement, he became one of its most influential proponents.
As the movement evolved, BI follower Edward Hine, a contemporary of Wilson, narrowed the scope of beliefs, and soon, only Anglo-Saxons were the true Israelites.
“That we [the British] only, of all the nations of the earth, are doing the works of Israel, therefore [we] must be Israel,” Hine wrote in 1874. Adding late in the text, “Yet this question has to be approached ethnologically and anthropologically, both of which sciences declare language to be a principal agency in the tracing of peoples. The declared opinion of eminent scholars is that the English language contains the roots of no less than eight hundred Hebrew words.”
Hine travelled to the US to spread his message and toured the country for two years in the 1880s.
As different theorists’ work began to appear in the United States around the end of the 1800s, where it was sometimes referred to as “Anglo-Israelism,” BI remained largely free of overt antisemitism. It did exclude Jews from joining and proposed that Anglo-Saxon people are a more divine race compared to others, arguably white supremacist views. The movement never grew beyond a few thousand members inside the UK, though had more popularity in the UK’s colonies.
America was of particular interest to many BI theologians, who saw it as a potential new Israel and possible gathering place to unite their tribe. This interpretation would evolve to see the United States as not just a potential refuge for the budding religion, but the homeland promised to the Israelites.
As Hine and his interpretations traversed the Atlantic to spread the word, they found a receptive audience in the New World. After the turn of the 20th century, and particularly during the Depression, Americans were primed to accept a nativist world view that identified an outside group as the source of the struggles of the era.
During the 1930s, Detroit prohibitionist Howard Rand, considered a central figure in the transition of BI to Christian Identity, spread the message through a BI group in the US, called the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America. Rand partnered with automotive pioneer and notorious antisemite Henry Ford’s press director, William J. Cameron, also a rabid antisemite and British Israelite. Cameron was responsible for publishing numerous articles in The Dearborn Independent newspaper condemning the Jews and helping spread the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a false publication claiming to give the details of an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world. The Protocols was first published in Russia around 1905 by an unknown author who plagiarized much of the contents from other texts.
The pair used their influence to not only attack Jews, but claim they were not actually the descendants of the original Jews, viewing them as “imposters” and pretenders. By the end of the Second World War, their thinking was even darker in the US, viewing Jewish identity as not only false, but the people who claimed it as the descendants of Satan.
During the post-war period, a man named Wesley Albert Swift ultimately transformed BI into Christian Identity. Following his father, Swift was ordained as a Methodist preacher at age 18 and spent the 1940s in Los Angeles working for various Anglo-Israelite organizations and religious institutions. It was also during this time he attempted to revive the Ku Klux Klan and organized the Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation in Lancaster, California. Later renamed the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian, Swift spent the rest of his life spreading “Identity.”
Penning dozens of articles and leaving hours of recordings, Swift’s writings and sermons are still shared and discussed online by CI’s followers. His influence was the primary divider between British Israelism and Christian Identity, as Swift infused the religion with a militant eschatology.
An Ideology of the Sword
Christian Identity spread in the United States in a decentralized fashion. Adherent churches and their flocks would often organize behind influential preachers who spread the word locally and through publications, creating an idiosyncratic interpretation of scripture. Many CI branches and sects have formed beliefs separate from one another, while maintaining the common beliefs that animate CI as a theology and justify the use of violence against ethnicities and races it views as inferior, particularly Jews.
CI adherents believe that only white people are the descendants of the biblical first man, Adam. Jews are part of a separate lineage where, often it is believed, Eve was seduced by the serpent in the Garden of Eden, often thought of as Satan. Therefore Abel’s father is Adam and Cain’s is Satan. A core of CI belief is the divine parentage of the white race, and the white race only, and Satan is the father of the Jews.
“The Serpent is none other than Lucifer. And when Eve said, ‘the serpent beguiled me,’ this was the seduction of Eve by Lucifer to try to destroy your [white] race by his evil mongrelisation,” Wesley Swift wrote in a November 1963 pamphlet titled Snake Pit.
Developed and proselytized by Swift, this division is referred to as “Dual Seed Line Theory” or the “Serpent Seed Line” by Christian Identity’s followers. Other races, particularly Black people, are viewed as less than human, and believed to have existed before Adam. This is reflected in their discussions of the “pre-Adamite races,” where it is often suggested that Black and brown races were formed out of mud, hence“mud people” in CI literature.
Through the distortion and selective interpretation of Christian doctrine, CI preachers have constructed biblical justification for an anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ+, and antisemitic world view. Race mixing is similarly cautioned against, with the crime warranting divine retribution. Some CI congregations learn that the daughters of Cain mixing and having children with the Adamites led to the great flood discussed in the Book of Genesis.
Christian Identity takes an eschatological view, meaning they believe in the foretold end of the world, based on their interpretation of the Christian tribulation described in Revelation in the Bible. Rather than a passive role, where the Second Coming of Christ occurs on an unknown divine timeline as a war between good and evil, CI maintains the apocalypse will bring about direct militant action between the races. Swift particularly espoused this view and called for violence against Jewish people.
“You are not going to get out of this without fights. You are going to fight all the hordes of red China, and all the Soviet Union, and all the pagans of the earth before you are thru [sic]. But instead of being destroyed or hurt by it, you are going to bring a hundred percent crushing defeat on the powers of darkness,” he said during a 1963 sermon.
Less significant theories of Swift’s did not manage to permeate CI beliefs, including that Lucifer brought dark-skinned, curly-haired people from outer space to be his “ax-men [sic] and sword men.”
What did break through was the belief that not only are the End Times coming, they have already started. While some branches of CI do not believe that they will be required to fight during the inevitable holy war, other CI followers believe they will be. Still, others promote the idea of a pre-emptive strike against an unnamed enemy they view as being soulless, inhuman, and in service of the Antichrist.
Communities, Compounds, and Crime
Followers of Christian Identity (CI) have been responsible for militant and violent action as far back as the 1950s. Wesley Swift incited violence multiple times in his sermons, and the militant branches of believers prepared for the inevitable coming holy war. A report by the Counter Extremism Project shows links to an organization called the National States Rights Party whose members were convicted for a series of bombing attacks against Black and Jewish institutions in 1957 to 1958, intending to ignite a race war. Most of the senior leadership believed in what in two decades would be called Christian Identity.
In the 1980s and 1990s, CI was one of the most influential voices in the white supremacist movement, providing an ideological justification for militant organizing across the country, with connections to numerous white nationalist groups, communities, and militias active throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
One of the most infamous and deadly white nationalist organizations connected to CI was without a doubt The Order, known as Bruders Schweigen (Silent Brotherhood) to its members. Founded by Robert Mathews in 1983, The Order used counterfeiting and robberies to fight and finance the war on what they saw as a corrupt Jewish-controlled state.
Besides CI, the group drew inspiration from the book The Turner Diaries, which tells a fictional story about a man waging a guerrilla warfare against society for the white race.
Members of The Order targeted multiple locations for bombing, including a synagogue, garnered millions robbing armoured trucks, and used the proceeds to purchase guns, ammunition, surveillance equipment, and computer systems. The money was for funding their organization, and eventually, the race war.
After killing one of its own members for talking too freely about The Order’s activities, the organization eventually set its sights on controversial Colorado Jewish radio host Alan Berg. Berg used his microphone to criticize hate movements, and found himself on a hit list curated by Mathews. Other names on the list included television producer Norman Lear, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Baron Elie de Rothschild, a co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the executives of three television networks.
An assassination team gunned Berg down in his driveway on June 1984, shooting him more than a dozen times.
The killing was the beginning of the end for The Order.
Members made deals with authorities to attempt to escape legal consequences for the group’s extensive criminal activity. A manhunt for Mathews ended in a firefight between him and the FBI on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound in 1984. The more than 30-hour stand-off ended when flares shot by federal agents set fire to the house Mathews was holed up in. He died in the blaze and many of his followers were arrested and imprisoned.
Mathews had attended the branch of the Church of Jesus Christ – Christian inside a compound controlled by a white nationalist group, Aryan Nations, in Hayden Lake, Idaho. Aryan Nations was the political arm of CI preacher Richard Butler’s church.
While Butler was apparently unaware of The Order’s criminal plans, Mathews did recruit members from Aryan Nations.
Butler had taken over a large CI congregation in California, after the death of its leader, Wesley Swift. He was unable to hold these followers together, eventually moving to Idaho where he sought to turn a 20-acre property into the “international headquarters of the white race.” Butler dreamed of forming a breakaway National Socialist state in the Pacific Northwest, offering training in guerilla warfare tactics. By the 1980s, the compound attracted members of various neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups through its annual Aryan World Congress, and eventually a youth festival intended to unite the disparate and factional white power movement.
Aryan Nations suffered extensive public and legal scrutiny as a result of its connections to The Order and other members’ illegal activities, including their former head of security Elden Cutler. Cutler attempted to hire an undercover agent to kill Thomas Martinez, a member of The Order who testified against the group.
Another group with ties to Aryan Nations, Bruders Schweigen Strike Force II, formed in 1986, attempted to pick up where The Order left off with bombings used as distractions for bank robberies, but were quickly rounded up. By the end of the 1980s, attendance at Butler’s Aryan World Congress had dwindled, members left in droves, and Idaho passed a bill prohibiting paramilitary training. While he continued to try to unite the various factions of the white power movement, even arguing a case for similarities between the Norse paganism popular among neo-Nazi skinheads and CI philosophy, the compound suffered from a lack of funds to pay for repairs, weak group cohesion, and an aging leader.
The death blow came in 2000 in the form of a $6.3 million judgment against Aryan Nations after its security guards, chased, shot at, and assaulted two people who had stopped nearby to look for a missing wallet. Butler declared bankruptcy and the property was sold at auction. The buildings where he had lived and preached were burned. He died four years later, still holding sermons out of a suburban home given to him by a follower.
Another community was a compound in northern Arkansas that belonged to The Covenant, The Sword, and The Arm of The Lord (CSA), a CI-inspired militia. CSA declared war on what it saw as a “Zionist Occupied Government” (ZOG) after the death of Gordon Kahl, a North Dakota farmer with ties to CI, who shot and killed two federal marshals in 1983. After Kahl was killed during a federal raid, he became a martyr for the hate movement.
CSA members’ war involved a conspiracy to assassinate government officials, arsons against churches with LGBTQ+ members, and attempts to blow up Jewish community centers. By 1985, CSA’s compound was surrounded by 300 federal agents and police, who believed a fugitive from The Order was hiding inside after killing a state trooper. The armed stand-off was eventually ended through negotiation.
From 1996 to 1998, Eric Rudolph carried out a series of bombings targeting abortion clinics, a lesbian bar, and the Olympic games. Rudolph spent time living in Schell City, Missouri, under the tutelage of CI leader Dan Gayman. Rudolph signed letters sent to media claiming the attacks as the “Army of God.”
Several compounds of CI adherents dot the country, made up of individuals and families organizing behind churches and influential leaders, some banded into closed communities. One of these communities is Elohim City in Adair County, Oklahoma. Founded by Christian Identity leader Robert G. Millar, it stands to this day though Millar’s sons, John and David Millar, who deny any connections to extremism. In 2015, John Millar told a PBS documentary crew that race mixing was a type of “genocide” for any race.
Satellite pictures of Elohim City taken in 2025. (Source: Google Maps).
Regardless of any claims, Elohim City has a well documented history of being a revolving door for extremists and criminals associated with the white nationalist movement. The most attention brought on the community undoubtedly came from the perpetrator of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Timothy McVeigh denied any connection between himself and the community, though he did place a phone call to a resident of Elohim City two weeks before he detonated a bomb housed inside a rental truck outside the Murrah building, killing 168 people. Andreas Strassmeir, head of security for Elohim City during this period, was the one who took the call from McVeigh.
Rumors and claims about larger connections between McVeigh and Elohim have circulated for decades, and a witness testified that they saw McVeigh in the village before the bombing, though this has never been firmly established. What has been confirmed is the frequent presence of violent adherents of CI passing through the community during the 1990s. This includes members of the Aryan Republican Army (ARA), a group of six white supremacists who robbed 22 banks over a two year period in the 1990s.
Dennis Mahon, a former imperial dragon in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, visited Elohim City from 1992 to 1995, where he kept an Airstream trailer parked. Mahon was sentenced to 40 years in prison after mailing a pipe bomb in 2004 that wounded a Black Phoenix, Arizona, city official.
In April 2021, a British Columbia man, Shane Sutherland, murdered his former girlfriend Amanda Black, and pleaded guilty to second degree murder in what the Justice called a “horrifically brutal, tragic, and senseless” crime. Sutherland was an active voice in the online CI community where he ran multiple social media accounts promoting the violent ideology.
That same month, the last of four men, all reported as followers of CI who made up a gang called the Phineas Priesthood, was re-sentenced for a spree of bank robberies and bombings carried out in Spokane, Washington.
The gang detonated a pipe bomb at the offices of a local newspaper in April 1996.
As police rushed to the scene, the Phineas crew used the chaos as a distraction to rob a bank, where they set off a second explosive.
The following June, another bomb went off, this time badly damaging a Planned Parenthood clinic. The gang returned to the same bank to make off with more cash. Despite a clean getaway, a confidential informant turned them over for a cash reward.
In court, two of the defendants, Charles H. Barbee and Robert S. Berry, were defiant.
Calling the judge a “shyster tyrant” and the court a “temple of Satan,” the men swore to follow “Yahweh’s laws exclusively” during their trial.
Lasting Legacy and Influence
It is difficult to overstate the lasting legacy of Christian Identity and its impact on the white supremacy movement. Even outside the United States, CI has been a major influence on white nationalists’ world view. Many conspiracy theories central and popularized by CI have a global reach. A prime example is the Khazar-origin myth, the false belief that Turkish-speaking refugees adopted Judaism, becoming the ancestors of present-day Jews, and therefore Jews are not connected to the original houses of Israel.
Tactics deployed by current extreme right-wing networks rely on major philosophical underpinnings that began with CI decades ago and have since become ubiquitous within the militant branches of the much broader far-right movement. Particularly, the view of a coming and inevitable war between the races fits neatly into the modern theory of militant accelerationism. Defined as a strategy intending to pressure and exacerbate social divisions, often through violence, militant accelerationists believe this will speed up the coming societal collapse. This aligns with the CI belief that they must take an active part in bringing about the final, ultimate war that will bring the Christian End of Days.
Today’s CI followers use mainstream platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to share content related to their beliefs.
Websites such as the CI-focused web forum Christogenea, a longstanding hub for CI materials and followers, is one of the larger long-standing digital meeting places for the movement. Run by William Fink, a former prison guard, Christogenea is a place where curious individuals or spiritual seekers can go to find a wealth of information about CI. The site also had a close relationship with the white nationalist and Southern secessionist group the League of the South (LOS), of which Finck was a member. LOS stresses the importance of in-person organizing and was promoted on Finck’s site until early January 2023, when they split over apparent ideological differences.
Social platforms like Telegram, an encrypted social media application allowing the creation of channels and chat rooms, act as hubs for followers to refine and share texts, audio, and video from their movement.
CI also played a significant role in the ideological journey of individuals across the spectrum of the far-right in the United States. Jon Eugene Minadeo II, better known as “Handsome Truth” previously hosted individuals espousing Serpent Seed Theory on his stream. This includes a December 2023 conversation with Dustin Nemos, a follower of Identity who promotes numerous veins of conspiracy theories that allege what he calls a “seedwar” with Jewish people.
Among Nemos’ numerous claims on the stream was that “demons are dead giants or Jews.”
Jon Eugene Minadeo II (left) and Dustin Nemos (right) on a live stream together in December 2023. (Source: Goyim TV).
Minadeo has since abandoned his CI beliefs.
A member of the Atomwaffen Division (AWD) is alleged to hold Christian Identity beliefs. Notably, former leader of AWD, John Denton, was identified in a blog post by a former AWD member Ryan Hatfield as holding “Christian Identity adjacent” beliefs. A statement from an account using Hatfield’s moniker, Ryan Arthurs, on a separate fascist message board claims again Denton’s beliefs were “strange combination of perennialism, Gnosticism, and Christian Identity.” There has been reason to doubt the authenticity of these claims due to Denton’s leadership being credited with giving rise to Atomwaffen’s association with the occult group the Order of Nine Angles.
Researchers also identified a Telegram channel associated with the Boogaloo movement promoting Christian Identity resources under the guise of survival advice.
Due to its name, Christian Identity is often mistaken with hardline, but significantly less militant and radical branches of Christianity. It should be pointed out that many CI beliefs are distinct from ideologies like Christian nationalism, which can be described as the belief that America is destined for Christian rule, and is supported by a cavalcade of activists, lawyers, lobbyists, and political advisors who have buoyed Donald Trump’s ascendency to the White House.
Both movements are inherently anti-democratic, and in many cases antisemitic. CI has never achieved anywhere near the same level of power as Christian nationalist have obtained within the United States government, nor would many Christian nationalists look kindly on the theological liberties taken by CI’s proponents. That does not mean that the two do not contain overlapping views, as both believe in America being ordained by God, a coming or currently unfolding tribulation, and the need to wage “spiritual warfare.”
Unlike Christian Nationalism, CI has been relegated to the fringes of American society. Maintained by select churches, publishers, and websites, CI remains a potent force for radicalization among extremists that has proven itself a resilient strain of thought within America’s white supremacist networks.
