Kingdom Identity Ministries

It functions primarily as a publishing house, churning out Identity Bible study courses, tracts and books, including foundational texts by early Identity leaders like Wesley Swift. The ministry teaches that Judgment Day will arrive in the form of a sanctified race war, a theory widely popular with prison-based racist gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood.

In Its Own Words

"Only inferior White women date outside of their race. Be proud of your heritage, don't be a race-mixing s---!"
— Kingdom Identity Ministries sticker

"The Hebrew word for Adam (Strong's Concordance #120) means ‘ruddy, to show blood, flush, turn rosy,' in other words, a White man."
— Kingdom Identity website

"We prefer the culture and abilities historically demonstrated by Christian White men over that of all other races. However, if you value athletic ability or some other trait above these achievements, you may consider another race (or even a species of animal) to be superior."
— Kingdom Identity website

"One day, some people will be hanging from the lamp posts in this country."
— Kingdom Identity leader Mike Hallimore, cited in the 2003 book Homeland: Into a World of Hate

Background

Kingdom Identity Ministries has played a key role in advancing the Christian Identity movement since the early 1980s. The group's founder and leader, Mike Hallimore, calls his operation a "politically incorrect Christian Identity outreach ministry to God's chosen race, true Israel, the White, European peoples." Hallimore supports the death penalty for idolatry, homosexuality, blasphemy and abortion.

In 1983, just one year after it was formed, Kingdom Identity received a huge boost in stature and profitability when it inherited the copyrights to the written works of Bertrand Comparet, one of the principal early thinkers of the Christian Identity, after Comparet died and willed the copyrights to Hallimore's fledgling ministry. (Comparet was an ideologue of what has become known as "two-seed" Identity, the hard-line version that describes Jews as literally Satanic.) In 2002, Kingdom Identity also inherited the exclusive rights to publish the works of another hard-line Identity ideologue, Wesley Swift, after Swift's widow died and passed on the copyrights to all of her late husband's works, dating back to the 1950s.

Hallimore leads a solitary existence on his 62 acres outside of Jasper, Ark. Most nights he stays up into the wee hours, working on sermons and writing to members of prison gangs. Hallimore corresponded with David Lane, an imprisoned member of the terrorist group The Order, from the mid-1980s until Lane's death in 2007. (Lane was serving a 190-year prison term for his part in the 1984 machine-gun assassination of a Jewish talk show in Denver, one of a series of spectacular attacks carried out by The Order before law enforcement officials smashed the group.)

Hallmore's fondness for Lane was no aberration. In 2001, he told British journalist Nick Ryan, "Why, in the Bible, it's permitted to slay race mixers." In this vein, Hallimore, once again drawing on and distorting the Old Testament to support violent racism, tells the story, taken from the Book of Numbers, of an Israelite called Phineas who kills a fellow Israelite for taking a woman from another tribe as his lover. The lesson that Hallimore (and many other Identity adherents) draws from this is that a "race warrior" can be divinely sanctioned to slay race mixers. (In fact, in Hallimore's racy version of the story, Phineas slew the couple in the midst of their coupling by impaling their genitals on his spear. It's a curious detail that doesn't often appear in Christian Identity accounts.) This story is also the basis for the idea of a "Phineas Priesthood," a fraternity that is joined by carrying out acts of racial violence on one's own initiative. The idea originated in the 1990s book by Identity pastor Richard Kelley Hoskins, Vigilantes of Christendom.

Although it's for the most part a publisher and promoter of Christian Identity doctrine, Kingdom Identity has in recent years periodically ventured into the distribution of more generalized white supremacist propaganda. This began in the winter of 2006, when Kingdom Identity printed and mailed just over 4,000 white supremacist pamphlets to residents of small communities in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. A letter from Hallimore arrived with each pamphlet. "In your area, it's my understanding that there are a number of white Christian people and there is a racial problem in terms of integrating of the races," Hallimore wrote. The towns that he targeted were 97% white.

The following year, 2007, Kingdom Identity funded the distribution of a white-power rock CD that was handed out by skinheads in public schools across the country. "I hate heavy metal as a form of music, but I realize those bands attract a lot of youth and so it works as a great outreach tool," Hallimore said at the time. "Kids can listen to this music, get the message and grow spiritually. I'd rather see these CDs being passed out in schools than condoms."

Early in 2008, Hallimore posted an advertisement on his website seeking a "white Christian lady" to join him at his Arkansas compound as both his wife and as Kingdom Identity's secretary. The ad, which also ran in several small newspapers, expressed Hallimore's desire for a woman who is "racially pure, honest and of high moral character." "Genuine sweet genteel feminine mannerisms (not a pretense) is required," he continued. "Government, Jewish, or other agents DO NOT qualify."

Although very difficult to quantify, scholars and others have estimated that as many as 50,000 Americans practice some form of Christian Identity, typically in homes and other relatively private venues. However, it's believed by at least some experts that the number of Identity adherents have been declining since the 1990s.