Christian extremists pose threat: Column

Just when it seemed as if Nevada deadbeat rancher Cliven Bundy had ridden off into the news media sunset, he has come trotting back with a challenge to Attorney General Eric Holder to debate the existence of racism in America.

In an ad supporting Independent American Party candidate Kamau Bakari's challenge to Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., Bundy — white horse and all — chats with Bakari, who is African American, about the problem of black "political correctness," and how "black folks think white folks owe them something."

Bakari calls Bundy — who in April surrounded himself with armed supporters to avoid paying more than $1 million in grazing fees and penalties he had accumulated over two decades — "a brave white man." Then comes the challenge to Holder.

This could be dismissed as yet the latest, and perhaps strangest, episode in Bundy's self-created patriot saga, were it not for a recent report by the federally funded National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

Drawing upon surveys of law enforcement and intelligence experts, the report cited the sovereign citizen movement — Bundy's law-defying, government-denying crowd — as the most potent U.S. terrorist threat: more threatening than Islamist jihadists, who along with militia/patriots, racist skinheads and neo-Nazis rounded out the top five.

Threat to homeland

Now, factor the Islamists — the usual default terrorist suspects — out of this list, and a striking pattern emerges. Contrary to the popular opinion that radical Islam is the primary threat to homeland security, Christianity provides the other four groups with their extremist rationale. All are in one way or another affiliated with the Christian Identity movement, a hodgepodge of anarchist and white supremacist politics dedicated to white Christian activism. It's all about God vs. government, and shoring up the rights of Anglo-Saxon Americans.

Since Bundy's armed standoff against federal agents in April, he has played this theme to the hilt. He recently told an audience in Utah that the almighty told him to fight a "civil war" against the federal government. His is, Bundy said, a spiritual battle.

In reporting this speech, the Associated Press noted that Bundy is a Mormon. But his God sounds a lot less like the Father/Mother God of Latter-day Saints than Christian Identity's Creator God, who made only white men in his image, and thus theologically justifies the kind of racism reflected in Bundy's widely reported musing as to whether "the Negro" was better off under slavery.

It's no coincidence that many factions of the Ku Klux Klan affiliate with Christian Identity. Nor that Christian Identity believers make up a rogues' gallery that includes the likes of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, serial bomber Eric Rudolph and Scott Roeder, the Montana Freemen member who killed abortion provider George Tiller. Roeder proudly bore the "sovereign citizen" banner.

Christian Identity

So, too, do the mélange of individuals and groups broadly identified as militia, Aryan, skinhead and neo-Nazi who construct their ideology from the Christian Identity toolbox. Many of them showed up at Bundy's standoff. One of them — Jerad Miller — was judged to be too much of a loose cannon and apparently was told to leave. Two months later, he and his wife, Amanda, staged a mass murder in Las Vegas.

The mainstream news media have been remarkably slow when it comes to zeroing in on the pervasive reality of hate-based Christian extremism. It is easier, after all, to blame the un-American other. In 2012, six Sikhs were killed and three wounded in Milwaukee by Wade Michael Page, a neo-Nazi skinhead. The "dangerous other" isn't always Muslim or Muslim-looking. The Millers affixed a swastika to the body of one of the two police officers they killed.

Nevada journalist Jon Ralston told MSNBC's Ed Schultz that the really scary thing about the sovereignty movement is its members are beginning to think they are mainstream. Meanwhile, members of the movement are adopting Christian rhetoric, "evoking Scripture ... and equating the Constitution with Scripture."

The Bundy standoff — initially presented as prairie populism by popular media well beyond Fox News — reflects violent currents far deeper and older in American, and Christian, history. It needs to be seen for what it is — religious extremism taken to potentially lethal ends. To the extent that we as a society fail to grapple with the religious element in extremist violence, the blood is on all of our hands.

Mary Zeiss Stange is a professor of religion and director of the religion program at Skidmore College. She is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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