Question: The "Christian Identity" movement is huge in the United States. It's a "conservative" sway away from Scripture...

October 1, 2011

TBC Staff

Question: The "Christian Identity" movement is huge in the United States. It's a "conservative" sway away from Scripture. They are using Scripture to say that the 10 "lost" tribes of Israel are the "Aryan race," though they don't use those words. They also state that racism is acceptable. Could you please discuss this?

Response: The idea that Jews are not "Jews" but are actually descendents of Russian Khazars was answered in the November 1992 and May 1996 issues of the newsletter (See TBC Reprints).

Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazis, and individuals like Timothy McVeigh and the Atlanta Olympics bomber, Eric Rudolph, share some common ideas that reflect the small but growing influence from so-called Christian Identity. The movement, or "Identity," as it is known, has no central doctrine, though a fundamental belief is that Europeans are the true descendants of the Hebrews of the Bible. This parallels the teaching of British Israelism.

Elements of Dominion theology (see TBC 2/87, 3/87) parallel teachings of Christian Identity. Kingdom/dominion or "reconstructionism" can be traced back several centuries, but its recent promotion comes from the Latter Rain, or Manifest Sons, movement that began in 1948 in Canada. Its relationship to the "positive-confession" and "discipleship" movements is clearly established. By teaching that we can get whatever we confess, it's a short step to confessing healing and immortality and peace and prosperity and salvation for the world. This is, in fact, where the name "Manifest Sons" comes from: the last-days overcomers must manifest total victory over all foes in these bodies without a resurrection, even over death.

Christian Identity "has concocted a bizarre theological infrastructure to support a militant anti-semitic white supremacism....According to the Christian Identity [teaching], Adam was the progenitor of the white race; only members of the white race have a spirit: members of the lower non-white races are the 'beasts of the field' of Genesis:1:24 and they only have a body and soul but no spirit" (Schultz, "A Review of Soldiers of God: White Supremacists and Their Holy War for America," August 1, 2003, http://vantiltool.blogspot.com/2005/06/christian-identity-its-beliefs-are.html).In stark contrast, the Lord says: "Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The Lord of hosts is his name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever" (Jer:31:35-36).