Justification by Race: Wesley Swift's White Supremacy and Anti-Semitic Theological Views in his Christian Identity Sermons

Abstract

This article explores the theo-political discourse of Minister Wesley Albert Swift (1913-1970), one of the first and main exponents of Christian Identity racial theology, borned in the United States after World War II. This analysis shows how his discourse was co-dependent with the American paranoid style and with the domestic anti-Communist rhetoric of the Cold War during the fifties and sixties. In this sense, Christian Identity must be understood based on the logic of its socio-historical context. Actually, nuclear anxieties together with the fear of Communist infiltration were present in a very deep sense within the white supremacist and anti-Semitic discourse of Christian Identity during its formative years. At the same time, the civil rights movement of African-Americans stimulated violent white supremacy politics and rethorics by the extreme right during those years. Combining the white hegemonical fear of red and black advances in American society, Christian Identity was created as a cult for the racist right. It legitimized white supremacy and the Judeo-Communist Conspiracy myth. Race as a biological issue that reflects the spiritual essence of a particular being is the central element of the anthropology built by Christian Identity, which understands the white race as literally created in the image of God. Therefore, it is the only one predestined for salvation. As an expression of an extreme Calvinist worldview, Wesley Swift constructed a Christian theology that provided the capacity to unify ideologically different political strategies of the postwar extreme right until today.