Hate Groups Diversify Message, Clergy Told Racist Beliefs Can Creep Into The Mainstream, Group Warned

FOR THE RECORD: 1/23/99; Id No longer at job: Susan Decamp no longer works for the Montana Association of Churches as was reported in the Jan. 20 edition of The Spokesman-Review. She worked there for four years, leaving in 1997.

An expert on the Christian Identity movement lectured North Idaho clergy members and residents Tuesday on how to recognize those racist beliefs when they surface in a community.

“It’s a theological problem. It’s up to the theological community to respond,” said Susan Decamp, human rights coordinator for the Montana Association of Churches.

During two meetings Tuesday, more than 100 people including clergy from the Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Unitarian, Episcopal and Mormon churches signed statements saying that the Bible should not be used to promote racist beliefs.

Decamp said Christian Identity, which is followed by the Aryan Nations, has been diversified to appeal to a wide array of people. It has become a complex social movement, she said, that attracts people who don’t want to pay taxes, don’t like gun control and don’t like property laws.

The movement is intermingled with conspiracy theories and hatred toward gays, interracial couples and Jews.

Members of the movement have discovered, Decamp said, that their ideas have greater appeal when they talk about the Constitution and wave a Bible than if they wear brown shirts adorned with swastikas.

“How can someone take the Bible, that we know and love, and turn it into something so foreign to us?” she asked.

When economic times are hard, she said, and people are looking for someone to blame, members of the Christian Identity movement are eager to supply those answers. They blame the hard economic times on a “Jewish banking conspiracy,” Decamp said, and in many places, the ideas take root.

Decamp’s job with the association of churches is to develop programs to help people understand what they’re hearing when they hear it.

During Tuesday’s meetings at St. Pius Catholic Church, members of the Aryan Nations covered a table near the front door with their own literature. That confused some people, who expected to find human rights literature upon entering, instead of in the next room.

Richard Butler, leader of the Aryan Nations, attended the meetings and said his group did not promote hatred toward Jewish people or those of other races. However, he refused to sign the statement saying that the Bible should not be used to promote racism.

The Rev. Ronald Hunter of the Church of the Nazarene said a Christian Identity family had attempted to become part of his church in the late 1980s. The family was nice, intelligent, and “they knew their Bible.” They bided their time, Hunter said, then tried to persuade others to accept their beliefs. Eventually, said Hunter, they left the church, but not before they convinced one young man that theirs was the path to follow.

“One young man was deeply influenced and went in that direction,” Hunter said. “These things have been a part of this community in the past and you never know when it’s going to crop up next.”

Bill Wassmuth, director of the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment, said the goal of the forum was to alert people of faith to the “misuse of faith to promote bigotry.”

If somebody is looking for a theological rationale for justifying a position of discrimination, “they’ll find it in Christian Identity theology,” Wassmuth said.