NINE Anatomizing White Rage: “Race is My Religion!” and “White Genocide” Kate E. Temoney Introduction Listing a few notable exceptions,1 Michael Minkenberg avers that “in academic debates, religion remains conspicuously absent in concepts of the radical right; instead, it is usually treated as a strategic ploy or superficial issue.”2 The radical right is a self-described political movement, but this alone does not seem to account for the scholarly inattentiveness to the role of religion. The answer may lie in the “notable exceptions” Minkenberg lists, which are treatments of the radical right in a European (and in particular, western European) rather than a North American, and more specifically, U.S. context. In this context, the radical right is often discussed as an iteration of a white supremacy movement with a legacy that has both embraced racialized Christianity and eschewed it.3 Nonetheless, Minkenberg does hit the mark when he writes that religious beliefs may not be a core element of the radical right . . . however, religion functions as a relevant context factor and frame for political mobilization . . . even in secularized societies, against the perceived threat of rapid sociocultural change and its (alleged) agents and protagonists.4 What Minkenberg’s framing provides is an opportunity to wrestle with, but not be mired in, definitional arguments about “religion” and “genocide.” Moreover, this framing also enables an analysis of how and why these terms are an important part of the discourse of white nationalism—a racist, separatist movement that aims to create a territory for the “white race.” Therefore, we need not be primarily constrained by whether the radical 150 / The Religion of White Rage right’s or white nationalists’ references to religion and genocide are consistently faithful to particular definitions in order to pursue the larger question of the tactical value that the invocation of “religion” and “genocide” seem to provide. Put another way, we need not be preoccupied with whether whiteness should or should not “count” as a religion or whether religion can be meaningfully disentangled from other spheres of life for study. What is most important is “what types of things are authorized by either saying [something] is or saying [something] isn’t [a religion],”5 and analogously, what is or is not a genocide. The form of analysis in this chapter is both phenomenological and hermeneutical. It is phenomenological insofar as rigorous description will be in the form of direct quotes from white nationalists that espouse “my race is my religion” and reference “white genocide.” It is hermeneutical in that I attempt to interpret these quotes in order to discern their strategic value to the white nationalist agenda and their centrality to white rage. For the purpose of this chapter, “radical right,” “extreme right,” “white supremacy,” “alt-right” and other various groups will all be subsumed under the term “white nationalism,” even if spokespersons and affiliates of these groups and movements do not self-describe as such. The reason for this is that all of these groups, regardless of their stated aims and religious affiliations, share a common aspiration: racial segregation through the establishment of an ethnostate. Per the Anti-Defamation League: “Extreme right” is used to describe right-wing political, social and religious movements that exist outside of and are more radical than mainstream conservatism. In the United States, the extreme right consists primarily of two large, slightly overlapping spheres. In one sphere is the white supremacist movement, including its various submovements, such as neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, and the alt right, among others.6 One way of unpacking the religion of white rage in North America—the animus of whites against non-whites, including black people in the United States, due to the perceived correlates of white disenfranchisement and black progress—is to historically and conceptually situate the project of modern white nationalists. As an avenue for parsing out the interrelationships among whiteness, religion, and labor that underpin contemporary white rage, I propose anatomizing the project of white nationalists as epitomized by two banner phrases: the assertion that “my race is my religion” and the claim of an ongoing “white genocide.” This approach provides an opportunity to address, from a historical perspective, 1) the circumstances that forged religiosity, supremacy, and labor as constitutive of white Anatomizing White Rage / 151 identity, and 2) a chronology of developments among white supremacist movements that contextualizes the uses of “religion” and “genocide” in contemporary racist discourse. This approach also 1) affords an examination of the rhetorical efficacy of the invocation of “religion” and “genocide” by white nationalists and 2) provides a working framework for decoding how and why immigration, shifting demographics, and the uplift of people of color are experienced as an existential crisis. Guided by Charles Long’s understanding of religion as a “comprehensive and orienting outlook” and Paul Tillich’s conceptualization of religion as “ultimate concern” accompanied by an “ultimate fulfillment,” I conclude that the constructs of “white” and “religion,” and their elision, functionally allow “whiteness” to stand as a single and singular group consciousness for negotiating the world and creating ultimate meaning in that world and beyond it. Created from this group consciousness is an imagined community whose fragility, victimhood, and ideological heterogeneity are subsumed under the pressing imperative to collectively combat “white genocide” or the extinction of white culture as the dominant and normative American way of life. The chapter is organized into three sections. First, I briefly trace three ideological shifts in white supremacist movements in order to provide a context for why religion and genocide are functionally important and potent in white nationalist discursive practices. These shifts are the construal of whiteness from a geographically bound identity to a global identity; transition of white supremacy from a Christian movement to a religious but not a JudeoChristian faction to a religiously tolerant movement; and the transformation of the violent, hate group of white supremacists into a non-violent, victimized group of white nationalists. Second, in both scholarly treatment and the vernacular of white supremacists, race as a religion has multiple meanings. I outline three interrelated notions of “whiteness as a religion” or “the religiosity of whiteness,” which I capture with the language of the historical origin of whiteness as both religious and industrious, features and practices of whiteness as religious, and whiteness as functionally and foundationally religious (with an emphasis on the third). In the last section, I aver that the trigger sentiments “my race is my religion” and “white genocide” serve the same three strategic purposes in the campaign of white nationalists. The invocation of religion and genocide concretize an imagined group through the promotion of tribalism (unification); legitimize and mainstream their message through familiar, resonant, and reasoned arguments (standardization), and raise the stakes and significance of the endangerment of whites in order to motivate them to act to defend their embattled group (mobilization). Using Charles Long’s conception of “religion” as a comprehensive and orienting outlook and Paul Tillich’s definition of religion as an “ultimate 152 / The Religion of White Rage concern” with a correlative “ultimate fulfillment” elucidates that “whiteness as a religion” is tantamount to believing that what is uncritically accepted as markers of whiteness—such as privilege, work, and numerical and cultural dominance—are constitutive of a white life world. Hence if the hegemony of whiteness is challenged, it renders white nationalists incapable of orienting themselves in the world in any meaningful way, and thus whiteness must be defended with all of the ferocity that religious zealotry affords—a defense that is akin to what Damon T. Berry coins as “racial protectionism.”7 Repeated references to religion and genocide have the rhetorical advantage of imparting the gravity of white imperilment, but more specifically, both terms are the bases for concretizing the abstract concept of “whiteness” as a homogenous victim group and motivating inured whites to band together and work to secure their rightful place in the present and eschatological world order. Three Ideological Shifts in White Nationalism A Rebranding of White Supremacy: White Nationalism and a Global Identity Damon T. Berry refers to the writings of Michal O’Meara—a white supremacist and scholar of the European New Right who “has written one of the most thorough descriptions of white nationalism from within the community”—and notes O’Meara’s observation of a “terminological change” in the 1990s among his ilk. 8 In Toward the White Republic, O’Meara writes that “many who previously identified themselves as White Power advocates, segregationists, separatists, supremacists, survivalists, neo-Confederates, biological realists, etc. started calling themselves ‘white nationalists.’”9 According to O’Meara, this shift began with an acknowledgment by Francis Parker Yockey—an American fascist, Nazi sympathizer, and Holocaust denier—who lamented the failure of the post-1945 project to “maintain the integrity of America’s racial character and prevent alien races from intruding,” forcing racist advocates to reconsider the binary approach of rescuing the United States from impurity or abandoning it.10 The failed attempt to stave off the invasion of non-whites resulted in a name change to “white nationalists,” and despite what the name implies, the focus of white nationalism then became the preservation of the “white race as a global identity” based on an “imagined biological and cultural connection” that was not circumscribed by national borders.11 This conjured community would prove indispensable to the movement in its evolution from geographically isolated groups of white people to a pan-whiteness that Anatomizing White Rage / 153 could corporately come under assault anywhere in the world. “Imagined” or “conjured” are not the same as “unreal,” however, but denote a sense of community among people who, as Benedict Anderson writes, are members who “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”12 The years that followed the end of World War II and the Holocaust ushered in a bevy of human rights instruments and conventions designed to protect Jewish communities and other vulnerable groups—most notably the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, in the same year, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Ironically, fifty years later, neo-Nazis would first claim to be victims of a white genocide coordinated by the conspiratorial Jews of a Zionist Occupation Government. The Dynamic Relationship between Religion and White Nationalism Another shift in the white nationalist movement is treated by Berry in his 2017 book Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism. At times driven by chronology and at other times by critical biographies, he delineates the attitudes of white nationalists toward Christianity in particular and religion more broadly.13 White nationalists and scholars of white nationalism alike, albeit in different ways and for different purposes, draw metahistorical and historical links, respectively, between white supremacy and Christianity. Seemingly forgoing this well-trodden material, Berry does not rehash the well-knit relationship between white supremacy and Christianity, or more specifically Protestant Christianity, but instead begins with a pivotal figure in white nationalism who would eventually reject Christianity. Berry opens his book by excavating the life and works of Revilo Pendleton Oliver, who Berry notes is beloved by white nationalists and embodies the transition “of the old racist Right during the height of the Cold War into a new racial activist Right after World War II.”14 In the 1950s and early 1960s Oliver supported both American conservatism and Christianity as central to the preservation of Western (read, “white”) civilization; however, by 1969 he rejected both as “equally detrimental to the cause of white racial survival.” 15 Oliver also noted the problematic and intolerable connection between Christianity and Judaism, as captured by the increasingly popular use of the liberal term “Judeo-Christianity” at that time. 16 Ben Klassen, author of Nature’s Eternal Religion, first published in 1973, also personifies this shift from embracing Christianity to rejecting it for the same reasons enumerated by Oliver, writing that “many religions have been notoriously bad for the races that have embraced them, as for example the 154 / The Religion of White Rage White Race having embraced Christianity . . . Yes, we are cursed with the Jewish religion of Christianity, whether we like it or not.” 17 Even while expressing his contempt for Christianity, Klassen disagrees with Oliver’s atheism as a solution and asserts “that religion and the affinity of mankind for religion is an inborn trait with which Nature has endowed us, and is inbred in our genes.”18 In this vein, Klassen founds the Church of the Creator, later the Creativity Movement or Church of Creativity and now the World Church of the Creator,19 and other racialized religions that are critical of Christianity emerge, such as Cosmotheism and Odinism. In the changing religious landscape of white nationalism, from being intertwined with Christianity, followed by a disavowal of Judeo-Christianity but not religion per se, the last and still evolving phase now seems to be an identification of the modern alt-right with non-belief supplemented by a policy of toleration of Christian and non-Christian religions in the interest of white solidarity.20 The Road to Non-violence and Victimhood We end where we began, with a brief treatment of the third ideological shift among white power activists pertinent to the discussion of the intersections of whiteness, religion, and genocide, by revisiting the rebranding of white supremacists as “white nationalists.” In a 2018 interview with Terry Gross of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, Derek Black, the heir apparent of Don Black—a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who created the white nationalist website Stormfront in 1995—disavowed his father’s beliefs and commented on how Don Black catapulted the term “white nationalists” into common, public discourse. Derek Black explained that his “dad popularized . . . the term ‘white nationalism,’” and that in their quest for ethnostates the white nationalists really did believe they were not doing bad things to other people, that the accusations of violence and hatred and racism were just insults put towards them and that they really did just want what’s best for white people and then, by extension, other people.21 This ideological shift in white nationalism facilitated a transformation from violent white supremacists that lynched black people to beleaguered white separatists facing extinction who advocated segregation for the betterment of all races. Black divulges that the creation of white victimization “was a long process,”22 and the promulgation of the inflammatory white genocide narrative was less dramatic than it sounded, pointing more to an “attack on whiteness” and loss of “white privilege” than to a loss of life.23 Nonetheless, Anatomizing White Rage / 155 viewing whiteness as a religion or as the focal point for interpreting and navigating the world reveals that an attack on whiteness and a loss of white privilege are commensurate with a social death of existential proportions. Three Conceptualizations of Whiteness as a Religion Whiteness as Ineliminably Religious and Industrious The “religiosity of whiteness” or construing “whiteness as a religion” seem to emphasize different aspects of religion for both white nationalists and the researchers who study them: 1) the historical origin of whiteness as coarising with the invention of religion and incubated in religious institutions, 2) the sociological and performative features of whiteness as manifest through common belief and ritual, and 3) the function of religion as central to building and navigating a life world. The first is a historical claim, that the very identity of “whiteness” from its inception in the United States was forged within an institutional, Christian (often Protestant) context. This origin-of-whiteness approach is paradigmatic of Eric Weed’s “theo-historical work,” Religion of White Supremacy in the United States; here “religion” refers to the institutional practices, dogmas, signs, and symbols that contributed to the formation and promotion of a white identity as a Christian identity. In addition, Jeannine Hill Fletcher, inspired by Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s concept of “racial projects”24—the idea that “race is not a concrete or static reality, but an imaginative construct always created in particular times and places with specific material influences and impacts”— discusses the fabrication of whiteness as a theological construct as a “religio-racial project.” 25 In The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, and Religious Diversity in America, Fletcher writes that “Christianity and Whiteness [were] bound together [in a] religio-racial project [linking] Christian Supremacy, White Supremacy, and Whiteness.”26 This project began with the “discovery” of the Americas by Christian Europeans in the fifteenth century and developed into the colonial practices of conquest and the religious conversion of inferior indigenous peoples, making whiteness ineliminably religious as well as elitist. A modern and typifying encapsulation of this heritage is succinctly summarized by a white supremacist who, in an interview conducted by Betty A. Dobratz, inverts the slogan my “race is my religion” slogan: While lots of organizations use that statement . . . Michael Teague, Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations Headquarters Staff Leader and head of security[,] stated, “I would say that my religion is my race. Instead of my race is my religion. Yahweh God is my race. We are sons and daughters of the 156 / The Religion of White Rage most high God . . .. As far as myself being Christian Identity . . . it’s the whole basis of my racial beliefs.” 27 It is also important to note here that another feature of “whiteness” that emerged as early as the fifteenth century was that of white industriousness in opposition to non-white fecklessness. For example, Europeans construed the environment-sustaining practices of native people of the Americas, such as limited hunting and coplanting—preventing animal extinction and the nitrogen depletion of soil—as evidence of a disinterest in raising animals and a haphazard, lazy approach to planting. Similarly, enslaved black people were stereotypically construed as lazy and usurpers. David R. Roediger’s thesis is that whiteness in the USA “was a way in which white workers responded to the fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of capitalist work discipline, with racial identity and definitions of freedom becoming intertwined in the forced contrast with a variety of other racial and ethnic groups.”28 In other words, the construct of “whiteness” was inextricably linked to work while other racial groups were associated with indolence, an association that persists in coded, contemporary language. Race and class politics interface and overlap in the U.S. Individuals and groups interpret their conditions of existence and their subjective experiences in ways which draw upon both racially based and class-based meanings . . . Thus the new right grafts together issues of race and issues of class. New right publisher William Rusher provides an apt illustration [in his criticisms of big government welfare systems by] blaming unemployment among minorities for parasitism at the expense of “productive” [white] workers.29 The seamless and unchallenged fusion of religious superiority and hard work as inherent to the advent of whiteness in the United States helps us better understand the invention of the white laborer and their attending white rage—whereby whiteness and white privilege as the American experience and cultural norm are challenged in the face of black uplift. Whiteness as Belief and Ritual Moving away from particular religious traditions and institutions toward a general and conventional understanding of religion more broadly, whiteness may be construed as a religion because exercises in asserting whiteness Anatomizing White Rage / 157 exhibit social features that are commonly understood as religious. Relying on a definition of religion proposed by sociologist George Ritzer, Stephen C. Finley and Lori L. Martin write: We argue that whiteness itself is a religion. A conventional definition of religion defines religion “as a social phenomenon that consists of beliefs about the sacred; the experiences, practices, and rituals that reinforce those beliefs; and the communities that share similar beliefs and practices.”30 Finley and Martin conclude that whiteness is a religion, for example, by citing the primacy of lynching black bodies as ritualistic reconstitutions of white superiority and the perpetuation of “sacred values” construed as peculiar to whites, in this case, “justice, freedom, fairness, and democracy.”31 This rendition of religion does not seem to necessitate that those who enact these rituals and hold these beliefs consider themselves as participants in religious praxis or members of a confessional organization. Rather, this construal of “whiteness itself as a religion” is an operative claim that assesses the sociological processes and effects of whiteness as religious in form and force—the enshrinement of an exclusive community and group consciousness resistant to external critiques of its internal logic. Whiteness as Orientation and Ultimate Concern Last, and the characterization of whiteness as a religion that most clearly elucidates the claim of “my race is my religion” and the urgency of a “white genocide,” is the interpretation of whiteness as an “orientation,” per Charles H. Long. In Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, Long writes: As a historian of religions, I have not defined religion in conventional terms . . . For my purposes, religion will mean orientation—orientation in the ultimate sense, that is, how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.32 Long’s reference to “ultimate significance” is reminiscent of Paul Tillich’s description of faith. Tillich asserts that faith is “the state of being ultimately concerned . . . [and this] demands the total surrender of him who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfillment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name.”33 Tillich himself uses this definition as an explanatory model for “extreme nationalisms,” whereby “all other concerns, economic well-being, health and life, family, aesthetic and cognitive 158 / The Religion of White Rage truth, justice and humanity, [must] be sacrificed”; otherwise, ultimate fulfillment, such as securing the “‘greatness’ of one’s nation,” will be denied.34 Analogously, the emphasis on whiteness as the single and paramount referent for ordering one’s life, and the tandem, unconditional loyalty that this demands of whites in order to achieve the most significant and destined goal that whiteness affords, is encapsulated by several tenets of the “Five Fundamental Beliefs” and “The XVI Commandments,” found on the home page of the Church of Creativity website, Creativity Alliance. The first of the Beliefs is “I. WE BELIEVE that our Race is our Religion,” 35 while three of the Commandments are “IV. The guiding principle of all your actions shall be: What is best for the White Race? VI. Your first loyalty belongs to the White Race [and] XVI. We, the Racial Comrades of the White Race, are determined to regain complete and unconditional control of our own destiny.36 Applying Long’s and Tillich’s concepts of religion and faith to the religiosity of whiteness reveals several crucial functions of whiteness. One function is that of whiteness as the primary and most significant referent from which all experiences are made intelligible; “everything is centered in” whiteness.37 Another is that, as an all-encompassing outlook, a religiosity of whiteness requires that all actions and aspects of life be subsumed under whiteness as a matter of teleology. “My Race is My Religion” and “White Genocide” Unification: Religion “Race is my religion!’”38 –Tom Metzger, avowed atheist, former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon, and founder of the White Aryan Resistance The sketch of several prominent ideological shifts among white supremacists and three notions of whiteness as a religion helps bring into relief how and why the mantras of “my race is my religion” and “white genocide” are effective tools for advancing the interests of white nationalists. The invocation of “religion” and “genocide” 1) concretizes an imagined group through the promotion of tribalism, 2) legitimizes and mainstreams their message through familiar yet resonant vocabulary, and 3) mobilizes whites as an embattled entity by raising the stakes and significance of their endangerment. Despite the loosely coordinated, and at times even antagonistic, North American white nationalist movements, an increasing number of contemporary white supremacists are claiming “their race is their religion,” downplaying the divide among the collectively racialized theologies of pro-Christian white Anatomizing White Rage / 159 supremacists and non-Christian religious movements and the atheistic bend of anti-religion alt-right members.39 Promoting “race as my religion,” despite the fact that race is constructed, reinforces the notion that whiteness translates to a criterion of group membership. This fosters group cohesion among various stripes of white nationalists by encouraging them to rally around, per Long, a common racial identity as the ultimate source of meaning, and per Tillich, the pursuit of an “ultimate fulfillment” that is valued above all other personal and group commitments, including adherence to Christianity. Furthermore, Dobratz avers: Some in the movement seem to be arguing that the statement “My race is my religion” should be incorporated in the master frame. William J. Murray . . . also saw religion as divisive and wanted religion to be an individual concern: “Because of the diversity of religious beliefs in this Movement, there has been a great deal of infighting. I believe we should all agree on one thing, and that is that our Race is our religion!”40 Not only does the appeal to “whiteness as a religion” convey the centrality of whiteness to the outlook and life world of white nationalists, but the call for absolute allegiance to the white race and the subordination of “individual concerns” to whiteness is also a practical concession in the interest of not alienating white supremacists who are conventionally religious. In this vein, “whiteness as a religion” is not a veneer designed to attract whites who are religious to the white cause, as such a tactic is highly unlikely to attract anyone who is not already sympathetic to the white nationalist agenda. Rather, it signals a softening of anti-Christian rhetoric and toleration for all current and potential white nationalists, regardless of religious inclination. For example, Dobratz writes that Matt Hale of WCOTC [World Church of the Creator], in reply to my question about the expression “My race is my religion,” said he believed that Ben Klassen had coined this expression. Hale proclaimed: “Our basic view is that a religion that promotes one’s people is a good religion and one that denies is a bad religion. Now there are some sincere Christians out there that believe that Christianity promotes the white race and certainly while we disagree with them, we can appreciate them.”41 Despite the increasingly atheistic trajectory of white supremacy as illustrated by the alt-right, as Murray and Hale’s statements exemplify, the use of the term of “religion” is still seen as rhetorically useful for building solidarity among white nationalists and as a gesture toward not estranging like-minded whites. 160 / The Religion of White Rage Unification: Genocide We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.42 –David Lane, white supremacist and member of the terrorist group the Order The shorthand reference to the above slogan is the “14 Words,” and it “is the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world,” reflecting the “primary white supremacist worldview in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: that unless immediate action is taken, the white race is doomed to extinction by an alleged ‘rising tide of color’ purportedly controlled and manipulated by Jews.”43 Despite any religious differences, white nationalists are united in the common causes of the defense of the religiosity of white privilege and the preservation of a dominant white culture in the face of extinction—a “white genocide.” Proclaiming that white people are facing a radical decline also encourages solidarity. It concretizes the racial construct of white or whiteness by defining whites as a group based on the collective threat posed by an increasing non-white demographic. In essence, this encourages anyone who identifies as white, regardless of whether they embrace white supremacist ideology or not, to view themselves as a fellow people besieged. Moreover, an accusation of genocide presupposes the existence of a “national, ethnic, racial or religious group”; the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide reads: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.44 Hence, the mere reference to genocide by white nationalists implicitly confers, or takes for granted as a social fact, that whites enjoy a racial group status, a status that defies geographical borders and is global in scope. Standardization: Religion What follows may not sound religious to those who are only familiar with traditional religions, but it is religious and also philosophical and plays a Anatomizing White Rage / 161 large part in the belief system of some of us and is how we view all of existence and all living things, including human beings and the different races.45 –Martin H. Millard, better known as H. Millard, white nationalist author, columnist, and frequent contributor to Council of Conservative Citizens, Western Spring, National Vanguard, and New Nation News websites Whiteness as a religion foments unity, but as Berry claims, “for white nationalists, even those who are atheists, religion plays an important role in how they are attempting to work together and mainstream their positions on immigration and other issues.”46 Rather than marginalizing religion, a range of beliefs and unbelief among white nationalists has forced a “rethinking [of] what ‘religion’ means to the movement”: The rise of the “Alt-Right” . . . may be seen as representing the explicit turn to the “political” and the effacement of the more recognizably “religious.” But I argue that this does not mean they are neglectful of “religion.” Rather, they are rethinking what “religion” means to the movement, especially as they try to rebuild long broken bridges back to the conservative mainstream . . . They are also trying to ensure that the history of hostility toward Christianity within white nationalism does not poison efforts to woo the predominantly Christian right. But religious diversity among the racist right is only one part of the challenge that white nationalists face in their efforts to influence the political mainstream.47 “Mainstream” is multivalent in this context, as it refers both to the religious right as a politically viable coalition of conservatives from mainline religious traditions and to the mainstream, or wider citizenry, that white nationalists are attempting to reach by influencing and infiltrating public discourse using religious language. This latter notion of “mainstream” is the subject of Carol M. Swain’s book The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration, as demonstrated by her comment on a tenor change among white supremacists’ leadership. In contrast to the older racist right, the new white nationalism seeks to expand its influence mainly through argument and rational discourse aimed at its target audience of. . . embittered or aggrieved . . . white Americans . . . Unlike the Klan and Nazi movements, white nationalism is aggressively seeking a mainstream audience . . . it is preeminently a movement of discourse, persuasion, and ideas.48 Reasoned argumentation is the hallmark of the alt-right, and former white nationalist Derek Black confirmed this an interview when he indicated he 162 / The Religion of White Rage wanted to prove he could win the majority of the vote in a local election using white nationalist talking points.49 The slogan “my race is my religion” keeps the importance of religion at the forefront of the white nationalist strategy. It is a conduit for communicating the importance of the white cause through using the familiar yet potent word “religion” as pointing toward the importance of a dedication to whiteness without necessarily being bogged down by the extremism of white supremacy and attempting to present that whiteness as a religion is a reasonable, and even scientifically sound, judgment. Standardization: Genocide ALL white countries are being flooded with millions and millions of nonwhites . . . This deliberate and obvious program to force blend whites out of existence is GENOCIDE under international law.50 –FightWhiteGenocide.com The tack of mainstreaming, in the sense of making claims credible and likely to find wider appeal, is also exemplified by attempts to substantiate the claim of a white genocide and to sanitize an ethnostate solution. This four-step approach involves citing data that the white population is declining in number in the United States, asserting that genocide is afoot in Africa, maintaining that these occurrences are orchestrated to deliberately destroy the white population—thus meeting the legal threshold of genocide per the 1948 Genocide Convention—and proposing homogenous states for all races as a banal, commonsense solution. White supremacists attribute the numerical decline of whites to various mechanisms, such as immigration, miscegenation, high birth rates among non-whites, and low birth rates among whites; and their cultural and economic decline to race-preferential programs and emphases on the value of multiculturalism. Empirical data supports white nationalist claims that the U.S. white population is shrinking; the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that the “nation will become ‘minority white’ in 2045. During that year, whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population.”51 However, white nationalists purport that this demographic shift is the culmination of a purposeful Jewish/ government conspiracy, in league with other current minority populations, to extirpate whites and their culture. In addition, in 2018 a white nationalist global campaign insisted that white farmers in South Africa “are being targeted and killed, that the government is seizing their land, they are being discriminated against by affirmative action programmes and that their language is being sidelined,” a repeat of the genocide in Zimbabwe.52 White Anatomizing White Rage / 163 nationalists believe these events portend future genocides and should be the concern of all whites everywhere. Aligning these events with the Genocide Convention furthers the portrayal of these events as genocidal. A petitioner, only identified as A.D., implored President Obama in 2012 to, as the title of the petition makes clear, “Stop White Genocide by halting MASSIVE third world immigration and FORCED assimilation in White countries!”53 The petition opens with the interrogative form of what has been widely proposed by white nationalists as the only ostensibly rational remedy to white genocide: “Africa for Africans, Asia for Asians, White countries for EVERYBODY?” Moreover, a grassroots movement, the White GeNOcide Project, cites the Genocide Convention to support its white nationalist claim: “Deliberately inflicting on the group . . . conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Under that definition, the White Genocide Project’s website states that a “combination of mass immigration (of different groups of people) plus forced assimilation would qualify as genocide.”54 Mobilization: Religion “Do not deny the eternal struggle; become a conscious and active director of it in your own small sphere of existence and you may survive and prosper in the here and now and beyond the grave.”55 –H. Millard Both Mark Juergensmeyer and Bruce Lincoln locate the potency of religion in its capacity to heighten the stakes of conflict and court violence because transcendent and sacred referents invite an extraordinary defense commensurate with the protection of a community’s most fundamental values.56 As Tillich reminds us, religion as “ultimate concern” includes the twin correlate of “ultimate fulfillment”; whiteness as a religion places whites at the center of all considerations in pursuit of securing a destined this-worldly and otherworldly existence, “in the here and now and beyond the grave.”57 Minkenberg and Berry recognize the motivating potential that the invocation of religion has, as a religion of whiteness “elevates whiteness itself as a transcendent mode of valuation, a means of identification, and a motivating moral trope.”58 Religious discourse is a powerfully resonating mechanism for amplifying the degree of danger a group believes it is facing, and can be parlayed into an obligation to act. Following Long’s definition of religion as orientation, a threat to whiteness is nothing short of an existential threat. 164 / The Religion of White Rage Mobilization: Genocide “Screw your optics, I’m going in . . . They’re [Jews are] committing genocide to my people.”59 –Robert Bowers, gunman who carried out what is believed to be the deadliest attack on Jews on American soil, killing eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018 Pointing to the vitriolic anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant rhetoric of white nationalists “coupled with demagogic anti-immigrant rhetoric from many ostensibly mainstream media sources and public figures,” the Anti-Defamation League website reads that “it is not hard to imagine that such hateful rhetoric may have played a role in tipping Bowers . . . into allegedly committing a violent and hateful act.60 A proclamation of a “white genocide” conveys the peril whites are facing and establishes their victimhood, reversing the image of whites as perpetrating violence against brown bodies and instead presenting them as a target of violence by virtue of the increased presence of brown bodies and eventual eclipsing of white privilege and cultural domination presumed to accompany the nation’s demographic landscape. Nonetheless, the mantra of white genocide conveys an urgency that does more than spurn petitions; it serves as a pretext for preemptive violence. Robert Powers, and others before him, such as Dylann Roof—who massacred nine black parishioners of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on June 17, 2015—whether they believed it or not, justified their murderous actions as necessary for the preservation of the white race. Kathy Gilsinan remarks that “what’s notable about the manifesto’s meditation on white victimhood [by Roof], and the spread of the paradigm and its vocabulary of self-defense, is their power to motivate violence, even as white-nationalist leaders insist they condone nothing of the kind.”61 Conclusion Three key shifts in the development of white nationalism chart a course for comprehending why “race is my religion” and “white genocide” are effective slogans for advancing white nationalist interests. These shifts are the expansion of “whiteness” from a U.S. identity to a global identity, from a Christian to a non-Christian movement to a religiously tolerant movement, and from an aggressive group that instigates violence to an embattled group that must defend itself against violence. The strategic employment of “religion” and “genocide” in white nationalist rhetoric encourages whites to see themselves, regardless of religious affiliation or non-membership, as a Anatomizing White Rage / 165 concretized, common people united by the group conscious of a religiosity of whiteness, whose duty is to combat genocide, regardless of where they reside in the world. Religion and genocide are familiar yet powerful ideas that are points of departure for mainstreaming a white nationalist agenda and mobilizing whites to act. White nationalists recognize the importance of not appearing antagonistic to religions and of presenting reasoned arguments—as opposed to promoting outwardly racist premises for their stances—as a practical matter of recruiting people to their cause and convincing others that, per the Genocide Convention, whites are victims of an unfolding genocide. Last, casting the decline of the white population and white dominance as of this- and otherworldly significance and proportions is designed to further motivate whites to stop white genocide and can be a pretense for preemptive violence against black people and other similarly marginalized groups. The elision of “whiteness” and “religion” as exemplified in the phrase “my race is my religion,” where religion is understood as an orientation or outlook, renders whiteness as the ultimate concern of the group and its primary identity marker for making meaning, being in the world, and fulfilling any telos or ultimate end. This conceptualization of the function of religion as elemental to a life world illuminates why white nationalists experience threats to whiteness—an increase in the minority population in the United States and real and perceived black community uplift— as constituting an existential crisis that manifests as terror and anger. However, the other two conceptualizations, understanding whiteness as religion as historical and sociologically performative claims, are both crucial to unveiling the content of white rage. The historical process of constructing whiteness consisted of defining whiteness over and against the black bodies Europeans encountered in the Americas and deemed shiftless and heathens, beginning the process of a racial project that would make work and Christianity, extrinsic to whiteness. Church institutions contributed to the endurance of white elitism by providing a theological basis for white superiority, and the performative acts of belief and ritual—conventional components of the sociological conception of religion, such as ritual in the form of lynching—confirmed and reaffirmed white privilege as an incontrovertible social fact. Hence, people of color numerically eclipsing whites as the dominant population and as a normative culture—through both the birth rates of non-white Americans and the influx of immigrants—and the perceived loss of employment and privilege to black people and other people of color do not translate to a fear of plurality or a mere change in status but to an intentional and organized assault on the very essence of what it means to be white.