At Religion Dispatches, Bill Berkowitz interviews Leonard Zeskind, author of Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream:
How do the religious beliefs of the movement’s different constituencies—the Christian patriots, neo-Confederates, survivalists, white power skinheads, Holocaust deniers, scientific racists, and others—manifest themselves?
For some, religion is simply a way of expressing group identity. That is most obviously true among the pagans and Odinists in the skinhead scene, where the invocation of the old Norse gods is not about theology or even ethics, but about style and promoting their subculture. In a similar sense, there are neo-Confederates and white nationalists who believe that “Christian-ness” is one aspect of their Western civilization—along with respect for tradition, authority, and whites-only citizenship rights. For this wing of the movement, best exemplified in my book by a now-deceased Washington Times columnist Sam Francis, opposition to abortion is less a theological imperative and more a program plank alongside support for gun rights and opposition to immigration.
[…]In this belief system, whites from northern Europe—the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Teutonic and Lombard peoples—are the real descendents [sic] of the biblical people of Israel. As such, Jews are fakes and considered either satanic by nature or Satan himself incarnate. In this schema, black people and other people of color are considered “pre-Adamic,” that is before Adam: not fully human in the way white people are. In this telling, interracial marriage is a sin akin to bestiality, and the presence of Jews in their Christian society is a crime against their God. While such ideas may seem ridiculous on their face, Christian Identity followers derive their entire belief system from their Bible.
Read the full interview here.