In the parlors of rural Iowa, during the darkest days of the farm crisis, David Ostendorf got a look at his evil twin. What he saw chilled him.
Ostendorf, ordained as a minister by the United Church of Christ, had come to Iowa in 1982 to organize farmers. He created a non-profit organization called Prairiefire, devoted to saving the family farm by training landowners to work together in their common interest.
Ostendorf’s work was secular, but it was based on his Protestant Christian faith and his understanding of his calling in the world.
By 1984 and 1985 he began to see that he was not alone. Others, professing their belief in God, were also organizing farmers in the Heartland.
The difference was that the gospel these other organizers were preaching had mutated into white supremacist cant. They blamed Jews, blacks and the government for economic devastation of rural America. Often, the response they demanded was armed violence.
Ostendorf says the racism, anti-Semitism and violent language would have disturbed him in any case. But the fact that so much of this hate proclaimed itself as righteous and Christian, appealing to his Bible and his God, shook him to the core.
It also convinced him that he and the entire religious community had a special responsibility to fight hate groups, a mission that remains part of his work today.
“They start with Genesis, with Adam and Eve, and it goes downhill from there. They build off every reading they can, both in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament,” said Ostendorf. “It’s extremely disconcerting to see biblical and theological teachings and beliefs that I hold totally manipulated and twisted. . . . A lot of what they espouse are essentially heresies.”
The “they” Ostendorf is talking about is a collection of groups not easily categorized. It is a spectrum that includes everything from the Ku Klux Klan to modern militias, the Posse Comitatus to the “Christian Identity” movement, survivalists to cultists.
Much of the hate, such as the beliefs that prosecutors allege motivated Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to plan the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, seems purely secular.
But religion is often woven into extremist politics, sometimes in ways that people do not suspect.
“We’ve tried to emphasize particularly with mainstream churches that in many areas this movement has infiltrated their pews,” Ostendorf said.
That is why he and his Oak Park-based Center for New Community are gathering 70 religious and community leaders together this weekend in the Chicago area to study hate groups, especially far right-wing, Christian-oriented hate groups.
Some argue that it only legitimizes hate groups to treat their religious views seriously. Ostendorf counters that the only way to make sense of hate groups, the only way to distinguish them from legitimate religious movements, is to understand the theological foundations of what they preach.
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“I think, in their own way, they are sincere in their beliefs,” he said.
That is not a pretty thought. Most believers would rather not dwell on the notion that hate-spewers claim God and the Bible as their own, invoking prayers that sometimes sound too familiar.
For that matter, America as a whole has not been as anxious to make the connection between right-wing hate groups and Christianity as, say, between the assassins in Luxor, Egypt, and “Muslim extremists.”
But the most dangerous movements in human history have always had an ideology of some sort fueling them. Understanding how that ideology evolved, how it twisted away from mainstream beliefs, is more than self-justification. It is the only way to fight the hate before it begins killing people.
“Finally, in the end, it’s a violent movement,” Ostendorf said of the white supremacist hate groups that have flourished, primarily in the rural Midwest and West. “But you can’t let it get to that point.”
There is plenty of evidence that homegrown hate is as active as ever, from recent skinhead beatings in Denver to a Ku Klux Klan march scheduled for Saturday in Beloit, Wis., to the hate of every flavor that can be found on the Internet.
And as Ostendorf has discovered in recent travels, it’s still on coffee tables and bookshelves around the Midwest, in charming homes in soothingly average communities, in places that look a little too much like the places we live.
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