Old/New Nazism in America
Like many of you, I have observed in horror the uptick of expressions of American Nazism over the last several months: American Nazis marching in Nashville, Elon Musk’s emphatic salute, Kanye West selling swastika t-shirts during the Super Bowl. These events have also shaken loose a dormant memory, that offers historical context for some of this, if no comfort.
Over a decade ago, in 2012, I conducted field research for my first book in Southwest Georgia. I rambled around quaint, mostly vacant downtowns, knocked on kind strangers’ doors, and, of course, went document hunting, mostly in city halls, libraries, and churches. In a Methodist Church on a fortuitous day, the church secretary directed me to a broom closet that contained a cardboard box filled with hundreds of letters. “1965” was scrawled in black Sharpie over the top. The letters had come to Reverend Robertson in that year in response to a “kneel-in,” a common demonstration during the civil rights movement in which integrated students would seek entry into segregated churches and, if rebuffed, would kneel in front in protest as a “moral spectacle,” to borrow Steve Haynes’s phrase. Most of the handwritten or typed responses criticized the church for its “unchristian” segregationism, but some cheered its courage against outside agitation or insincerity. They tended to be theological in nature, citing verses and doctrines, making them rich materials for my argument on theological crises posed by the freedom struggle.
No One Spoke Openly About Him
But there was one letter that was different. Postmarked from Houston, TX on August 4, 1965, I opened the thick envelope to first pull out a card size pamphlet with a beatific white Jesus on one side and on the other a mirror image, this one of a proud and regal Adolph Hitler. The caption read: “…and no one spoke openly about him for fear of the JEWS!” There was an explanation for the Anti-semitic exegesis, comparing Hitler and Jesus both of whom stood for “truth.” The cross was hated in the first century, just as the swastika in 1965. But, these “persecuted” white Nazis believe, they are willing to defend Hitler, unfairly maligned, to defend the truth.
Woke of Their Day
There were other printed materials in the envelope, from small tracts to lengthy unhinged explanations of political policy. Reading back over them this week, many of the ideas and words are chillingly familiar.
Some of the arguments made for Christian Nazism in America were explicitly religious in nature, but others invoked a more generalized masculine
civilization force. Conservatives in the United States were too weak, these polemics explained, cowing to “Communists” and “race-mixers” – the woke of their day. What was needed was strong white leadership to restore both Christianity and civilization. “People follow and fight for a leader who gets out in front and leads a dangerous ATTACK!” one reads. Bold use of the swastika to defend national and racial and religious identity was the way to shock and defeat their cultural enemies. “The cross is the symbol of the faith of our civilization, The Star Spangled Banner is the symbol of our great American Republic!—But,” the pamphlet concludes, “without the swastika, we would have no symbol for our RACE!!” It concludes: “Under the holy symbols of our faith, our nation and our race, the American Nazi Party will lead our people to complete and smashing victory over the Communists and race-mixers!” Much of this is explicitly grounded in gender, surprising no one who lives in America right now or has read Kristen DuMez.
“AMERICANS Who want to Save our WHITE RACE”
Opposition to Nazis, one of the pamphlets explained, was defamatory, misinterpreting strong defenses of people, faith, and country. “We are not gangsters or ‘hatemongers,’” a young white man presumably thinks as he stares valiantly and proudly in the distance, “just AMERICANS who want to save our WHITE RACE and our REPUBLIC [not a “race-mixing Democracy’ he later clarifies] from a gang of rotten communists and race mixers.”
Lock Up the Lying Press
Perhaps the most jarring to read right now, in March of 2025, is the policy platform, which includes among other things: ending birthright citizenship, eugenics, abolishing the UN for a new world order, ending the Federal Reserve Bank, restoring women’s place in the home and the “restoration of the father as the master of the home” and “eliminating from our civilization the disruptive doctrines of a false ‘equality’” of the sexes. They want to lock up the lying press, “deal ruthlessly and efficiently with habitual and natural criminals,” and– and this one stings– “make the pay of all government employees directly dependent on their efficiency, apply modern business methods to government operation, and ruthlessly eliminate the hordes of bureaucratic parasites who make our present government the world’s most wasteful, inefficient, and extravagant.” The whole platform is based on the first plank: “The Jewish Problem,” which presupposes the conspiracy that Jews are to blame for much of the rest.
Deeming Themselves Superior
Some of the Nazi paraphernalia trades in the worst of anti-Blackness. It’s too reprehensible to describe in much detail here but use of the n-word and other slurs are plentiful, utilized even in “comedic” depictions for their cause, including in the mid-1960s colonization efforts.
At the time, I didn’t really know what to do with it and set it aside, deciding it was not germane to the story I was telling. I was also–and this is saying something given all the segregationist diatribes I was reading –pretty sickened. I know this because my transcription of the documents stops short with a note: “ ____to be continued (can’t stand any more for now)____”. I never finished it.
But it’s horrifyingly germane now. And it was then, part of the broader story of American racism and the American Right, which I should have known. After all, I had just read J. Kameron Carter’s masterful book Race: A Theological Account, which sets out to understand how “the discourse of theology aided and abetted the processes by which ‘man’ came to be viewed as a modern, racial being.” Though it’s a deep and complex book, the origins of this racializing, Carter concludes, are in a heretical anti-Semitism. “The genesis,” he writes, was in “the theological problem of Christianity’s quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots” which required first casting Jews “as a race group in contrast to Western Christians”– a non-Occidental, later non- white, group– and then deeming themselves superior. It’s a stunning, deeply intellectual and theological history, but what’s clear from Carter’s telling is that all racism is first anti-Semitic, an anti-Jesus Christ heresy. It’s been there all along. And it’s still here right now a fundamental part of the American far Right.
Children of Darkness
In 1997, Michael Barkun wrote Religion and the Racist Right, a book lauded for its shocking explanations of the theological underpinnings of far Right politics, especially the Christian Identity Movement. Barkun painstakingly details how it emerged out of British-Israelism and then branched off, becoming a fragmented ideology in many churches and groups that centers around beliefs about white people’s chosen status as the true tribes of Israel, that Jews are false Israelites and actually children of darkness, and that these forces are engaged in a “final, apocalyptic struggle between good and evil,” justifying extreme violence. At that time of the book’s initial publication, Barkin noted, he could not directly document early links between Christian identity and American Nazis, though evidence has since confirmed it. Same with the influence of Reconstructionist theology. Certainly the existence of religiously inspired white power and neo-Nazi groups have surged in prominence and publicity.
Ridding the World of the Unfaithful
Thirty years later, Kathleen Belew took up the mantle of understanding. Her excellent 2018 Bring the War Home identifies both the political and theological motivations of white power in the wake of the Vietnam War. Adopters of the ideology then and in the present are skeptical of government corruption, disillusioned, conspiratorial, and vigorously anti-Communist. They are also eschatologically convinced that they, the faithful, will be tasked with ridding the world of the unfaithful, the world’s nonwhite and Jewish populations, before the return of Christ.” So they prep, amass arms, seek their own purity, and train for the coming rapture and race war. It’s coming for America, likely in the form of communists and Jews and government agencies and woke secularism, and then it’s coming for the world. This militant white supremacy, grounded in anti-Semistism, is and always has been part of the story.
That horrible envelope from Houston once sent to the First Methodist Church reminded me of that this week: of the long roots of religious racism, the full flower of which was, and is, Nazism, and the need for followers of Jesus to nonviolently oppose it completely, fully, and utterly.
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