Christian Identity is a religion based on race. It believes that the historical Jews of the bible, the Israelites of the old testament, God’s Chosen People, were the white Aryan race. According to Christian Identity, it is the white race that God created in [his] own image. It holds that other races are so-called "mud people" – descended from a race God created before Adam and Eve…I suppose as a test. The mud people are the ancestors of all the people of color of the earth. The people we now call Jews are another story however. Christian Identity holds that the Jews are an entirely separate race, created when Eve had sex with the devil in the Garden of Eden.
In short, Christian Identity holds that Jews are, literally, the spawn of Satan.
This came to mind last night, as I read (via Andrew Sullivan) the following Wikipedia entry on Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind stories…
Born in the county of Cluj in Romania, Carpathia’s birth is the product of genetic engineering. His mother Marilena Carpathia, is convinced by parties who are followers of Satan, although she is kept unaware of this, to become the mother of a child who they assure her would change the face of the world. Marilena’s husband, Sorin, and his gay lover, Baduna Marius, provide genetic material to facilitate Nicolae’s conception.
Dig it. LaHaye and Jenkins are telling their readers that the Antichrist is, literally, the spawn of a gay male couple.
And some days I sit here at my computer and wonder if this is what it was like to be a Jew in 1920s Germany, watching the horror coming on the horizon. This is the kind of stuff that gets people killed. Someday, it might well get me killed. Someone with a baseball bat or a gun comes along and takes my head off, because he thinks that gay people are going to deliver the world to the Antichrist.
And LaHaye and Jenkins are hardly alone in this. Variations on this theme are popping up all across the kook pews. The Gays are in league with Satan… Just last week James Dobson was telling his listeners on the Focus on the Family radio broadcast, that same sex marriage was an attack on the family by the very forces of hell itself (via Ex-Gay Watch):
…as you all very well know marriage is under vicious attack, now I think from the forces of hell itself. Now it’s either going to continue to decline, and as I told you in my office a few minutes ago, I believe with that destruction of marriage will come the decline of western civilization itself.
What was soft peddled before the re-election of George Bush is coming out of the closet, free, free at last to dispense with the loathsome hypocrisies of Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin. Now the message is clearly and unambiguously that homosexuals are in league with Satan. Not mere sinners, we are destroyers of the world. We will give birth to the Antichrist. Next thing you know, we will be all four horsemen of the Apocalypse too. Whatever it takes, to make everyone hate us, as much as they hate us.
And then watch them wash, wash their hands of our blood…
