Damon Berry, Professor of Religious Studies, was chosen to write a chapter for the book “The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy”, by Hugh B. Urban and Paul Christopher Johnson. Below, please find the abstract to the chapter titled Varieties of Religion and Secrecy in American White Power Movements. Photo by GGK Photography.
Abstract
This chapter explores the role of various kinds of secrecy and religious symbolism in American white power groups from the early twentieth century to the present. To frame this historical review, I refer to a 2013 article by Kathleen Blee and Amy McDowell in which they describe the 1920s Klan’s negotiations between secrecy and publicity to maintain white Protestant demographic superiority and control over major institutions of political and social power. The Klan, too, borrowed heavily from Freemasonry to construct secrecy in a fraternal order steeped in religious symbolism. Though Blee and McDowell’s article focuses on the Klan of the early twentieth century, they speculate that their study provides lessons for further study of later white power movements. I will provide further discussion of religious symbolism and fraternalism in the case of the Brüder Schweigen, otherwise known as “The Order,” a white nationalist terrorist organization that operated in the 1980s. The Order used ritual and secrecy to bind the members together as a group but also for maintaining internal security in furthering their war with “the System.” Such is also the case with the more recently active white power terrorist organization Attomwaffen, which operates much more as a cellular organization than a strict, hierarchical organization like the Klan or The Order. However, this rather literal treatment of secrecy within white power organizations is only part of the story. Each of them in some way, too, deploys esoteric elements in how they define their ideology, including how they define race itself and the role they play as the often covert and elite vanguard of a coming racial world order. In this chapter, I propose to look at the varieties of secrecy deployed in white power movements in American history to understand better the role of religious discourses and symbolism in the creation of the movements, their political and terroristic activities, and their racialist ideologies.