This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the Ku Klux Klan’s sweep of political power in Colorado. In 1924, voters elected numerous Klan supporters, including Governor Clarence Morley and U.S. Senator Rice Means. Senator Lawrence Phipps won reelection with Klan help. “The Klan also won a majority of positions in the state House of Representatives and the state Senate as well as multiple other positions all the way down to various school boards,” Northern Colorado History reminds us. Denver’s Klan-friendly mayor, Benjamin Stapleton, won his seat the year before.
The Klan and like-minded organizations continued to influence the region even after the Klan’s political machine fell apart. Now in theaters is “The Order,” starring Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult, about the rise of a white supremacist group with Klan ties that murdered Denver talk show host Alan Berg in 1984. Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center included white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups in its list of hate groups active in the state.
The main explanation for the rise of such hate groups as the Klan is the persistence of racism in America and the scapegoating of racial and ethnic minorities. People drawn to hate groups often also express more general concerns about economic trends, crime, and government. To the lonely and disaffected, such organizations can provide a tight-knit community and a sense of purpose, however corrupted.
Hate groups such as the Klan also often draw inspiration from various religious ideas, usually variants of Protestant Christianity. Mainstream adherents of religion regard such interpretations of their doctrines as a perversion, even a cynical manipulation to provide cover for fundamentally corrupt views. Critics of religion might point out that, insofar as “faith” means belief without evidence, the unreasonableness of religion lends itself as a framework for other unreasonable ideas, including white supremacy.
Regardless, to help disrupt the ideological underpinnings of hate groups, we should seek to understand how leaders of such groups often draw on religious doctrines, texts, and imagery to motivate their followers. Many followers of hateful ideologies hold supportive religious beliefs, however much they pervert religion relative to mainstream views.
People long have turned to religion to promote the cause of racism. Many Puritans saw Native Americans as “actors in the supernatural drama, the minions of Satan who would wage savage war against” the colonists, writes Robert Alan Goldberg in Enemies Within. Many people who supported slavery in the Americas cited the Bible’s various endorsements of slavery, including Paul’s admonition to slaves to obey their masters. (Paul also asked masters to treat slaves more kindly but did not demand freedom for slaves.) Many Abolitionists also turned to Christianity for inspiration, illustrating that different people can interpret the same broad religious doctrines in wildly divergent ways.
The Klan was self-consciously a Protestant Christian organization that promoted what in the eyes of Klansmen were Christian aims. This makes the religious beliefs of the Klan well worth exploring, even as we remember that most Christians reject racist interpretations of their doctrines. Here I am reviewing only select facts; a comprehensive treatment would require a book.
The Creed of the Klan
The inaugural issue of Colorado’s Klan newspaper, published in 1925 out of Boulder, describes the “creed of the Ku Klux Klan.” The top item: “The tenets of the Christian religion.”
Another article discusses how Denver’s Stapleton-appointed chief of police, William Candlish, spoke at the Frederick Christian church. The topic (in the newspaper’s words): “The duty of a Christian as a citizen to see that our laws are enforced.” The article goes on to describe how the KKK visited the church and “left a substantial donation.”
“We shall never rest until the Bible will be read in every school in America,” the Klan paper quotes a local reverend. Another article, titled, “Why Bible Should Be Read in Public Schools of Nation,” states, “The Bible will help to make 100% red-blooded Americans, 100% defenders of our country and 100% Christian people to rule the earth.”
Most adherents of Christianity take the central message of their faith to be that all people are created in God’s image and all people are eligible to claim eternal gain through Jesus. So interpreted, Christianity can be a powerful force against racism. … Yet at least tens of thousands of Coloradans have over the decades embraced a sort of Protestant Christianity that openly tolerates if not outright promotes racist views.
One article from the paper relates some of the Klan’s local history: “Thus Boulder Klan grew from a mere handful of sturdy Christian, patriotic men until today it has rapidly increased the membership to nearly a thousand. It is here for a purpose and is conscientiously trying to do the will of God as revealed in the tenets of the Christian religion. It has benefitted many by its obligation to uphold the law, and in bringing about a much needed reform by ridding the community of objectionable characters.”
An advertisement for joining the Klan describes the organization as “a Protestant Christian order of Caucasian citizens who do not appropriate unto themselves any privilege they do not freely accord to others” (obviously not a self-reflective view), and as a group “dedicated to the Government of the United States of America, Its Constitution and Constitutional Freedom, and the Protestant Christian Religion upon which our Government is founded.”
One article announces, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan stand for ‘America First’—first in thought, first in Affection, and first in the Galaxy of Nations. The spirit of Americanism as set by our forefathers must be preserved and cherished and kept alive by the burning intensity of patriotism and Christian manhood.”
The bishop of the Pillar of Fire church in Westminster, the KKK paper reviews, Alma Bridwell White, spoke on the topic, “The Klan Under the Searchlight.” The bishop’s “addresses were instructive and enlightening as they presented the great cause of Christian Citizenship which is the very soul and foundation of the Klan organization,” the paper continues. “The Klan movement represents a new Reformation in America,” the paper relates, recognizing “the great need of preserving and safeguarding [America’s] Protestant Christian ideals without which this nor any other democratic form of government could not exist.”
In a pair of articles, Meg Dunn of Northern Colorado History provides details about Bridwell White and about the role of the KKK in Colorado churches.
At the Longmont Klavern, the Klan paper reviews, a reverend “remarked that the tenets of the Christian Religion was one of the corner stones of the Klan; that one could not be a Klansman without believing in Christianity and that to be a real Klansman one must among other things, support in every way some Protestant church.”
In his book “Hooded Empire,” Goldberg finds that “thirty Denver churches, almost 20 percent of the Protestant total, are tarnished [by ties with the Klan]. One-third of the Methodist, one-fourth of the Baptist, and five of seven Disciples of Christ churches had Klan links.” Yes, Goldberg reviews, various religious leaders denounced the Klan. Still, he writes, “The Klan built strong bases of support in the Reverend T. C. Collister’s Northern Avenue Methodist Church near Bessemer, the Reverend George Lowe’s East Side Baptist Church, and the Broadway Christian Church. Lowe was especially influential, serving as the local klavern’s Exalted Cyclops.”
In sum, a sort of Protestant Christianity was central to the identify of the Colorado Klan and an important force in motivating members.
The Religion of the Silent Brotherhood
To shift eras, “The Silent Brotherhood,” the 1989 book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt that is the basis of this year’s film “The Order” (the book has been rereleased under that title), tells of the rise and fall of a violent, racist gang that murdered Berg, stole millions of dollars, and committed various other crimes.
These gangsters were strongly motivated by racist propaganda, most centrally “The Turner Diaries.” Several of the gangsters also were motivated by their religious beliefs, Flynn and Gerhardt make clear, and racist religious movements created the social context in which the gang leaders could network and seek recruits.
In the 1970s, Richard Girnt Butler, originally from Colorado, built an explicitly racist “Christian Identity” church in Idaho under the banner of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Flynn and Gerhardt, describing Butler’s approach, write, “Once a man believes his fight is for God and country, he becomes invincible. It’s impossible to limit what he can accomplish if he believes his quest is righteous and his death a martyrdom.”
Butler developed his views when he met Wesley Swift at Swift’s Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation in California, Flynn and Gerhardt write. Butler was inspired to read an old tract by Edward Hine. I’ve often wondered how anti-Semitic white supremacists can claim to worship Jesus, a Jew. Flynn and Gerhardt explain Hine’s absurd theories: “The crux of the doctrine is that European Jews are not descended from ancient Hebrew stock at all but from Khazars, residents of a warlike nation of southern Russia who converted to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century. They cannot claim lineage from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and are not the covenant people, according to Identity genealogists. On the contrary, today’s Nordic-Anglo-Saxon-Teuton whites are the descendants of the lost tribes of the Biblical Israelites, making white Christians the true people of the covenant.” As the Church Lady might say, how convenient.
David Lane, a KKK activist in Colorado, became Butler’s “information minister” in Colorado, write Flynn and Gerhardt. Robert Matthews, who would go on to lead “The Order,” hooked up with Lane and others through Butler’s church.
Through the like-minded LaPorte Church of Christ outside of Fort Collins (which to this day spouts racist propaganda), Lane introduced Matthews to various others, including Matthews’s future girlfriend, whose mother conducted surveillance of Berg used in his murder.
Matthews was drawn to Christian Identity but did not draw solely from it. Flynn and Gerhardt write, “Matthews believed in God, but he assembled his own teleology by borrowing selected tenets from a menu of faiths and from Odinism. He wasn’t very impressed with Butler, but those 20 acres under the pines made a good place to meet young men who believed as he did.”
In his final manifesto, Matthews wrote within the Christian Identity framework. Flynn and Gerhardt quote him, “We declare ourselves to be in full and unrelenting state of war with those forces seeking and consciously promoting the destruction of our faith and our race. Therefore, for Blood, Soil, and Honor, for the future of our children, and for our King, Jesus Christ, we commit ourselves to Battle.” We can speculate how much Matthews’s nod to Christianity reflected his own religious views and how much they were intended to encourage his followers.
The Racist Perversion of Religion
Most adherents of Christianity take the central message of their faith to be that all people are created in God’s image and all people are eligible to claim eternal gain through Jesus. So interpreted, Christianity can be a powerful force against racism.
Yet at least tens of thousands of Coloradans have over the decades embraced a sort of Protestant Christianity that openly tolerates if not outright promotes racist views. This was true of the Klan that for a time dominated Colorado politics, and it was true decades later of the members of the racist gang that murdered Berg. This history should serve as a warning to people today about how religious doctrines can be twisted to serve hateful ends.
