This chapter tells the story of a group of alienated individuals who joined a religious fellowship in rural Arkansas. After the leader received a “revelation” that the Endtimes had begun, the cult began “fusing together in one body” as directed by a prophetess living on the compound. They burned family photographs, sold their wedding rings, pooled their earnings, and destroyed televisions and other “reminders of the outside world’s propaganda.” They also began stockpiling weapons to prepare for the “enemy’s” anticipated invasion. But the Apocalypse—and the battle between good and evil forces—failed to materialize on the appointed hour. Each failed prophecy was followed by a revised forecast. Instead of giving in to despair that their dream of the Endtimes might not materialize, cult members’ confidence grew stronger. They intensified their military training, acquired more powerful weapons, and purified themselves to prepare to vanquish the forces of evil.
By examining this cult, we learn how leaders develop a story about imminent danger to an “in group,” foster group identity, dehumanize the group’s purported enemies, and encourage the creation of a “killer self” capable of murdering large numbers of innocent people. This chapter focuses on the evolution of a cult member named Kerry Noble. We observe how the leader cunningly capitalized on Noble’s need to feel important inside the group, and how, over time, Noble was transformed from a gentle but frustrated pastor seeking transcendence to a terrorist prepared to countenance “war” against the cult’s enemies—blacks, Jews, “mud people,” and the U.S. government.
On April 19, 1985, two hundred federal and state law-enforcement agents staged a siege at a 240-acre armed compound in rural Arkansas inhabited by a Christian cult called the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA).1 The cult had long been expecting an enemy invasion, and members had laid land mines around the periphery of the property. They had stockpiled five years’ worth of food. James Ellison, the commander of the cult, wanted to shoot it out with the feds. Danny Coulson, head of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, eventually persuaded Ellison that the cult would lose such a battle. Coulson said he had a Huey helicopter, just over the hill, which would level the place if a cult member fired a single shot. He also said that an aircraft circling the property was equipped with heat-seeking devices. “We can watch your every move, day or night,” he said. He told cult members that he had an armored personnel carrier around the bend, and weapons so advanced and new that the military didn’t have them yet. “Your organization is considered by the government to be the best-trained civilian paramilitary group in America. That’s why we’re here. We’re only sent against the best,” he told the cult’s second-in-command, Kerry Noble, who had been sent to negotiate with the enemy.2
The FBI asked the Reverend Robert Millar, a leading cleric of the American racist right, to help negotiate with the cult. Millar reports that he saw 150 men in camouflage, plus FBI and ATF agents, a SWAT team, and “a few Mossad agents,” scattered in the woods around the compound, whom he blamed for provoking a “tense and dangerous confrontation.”3 “If it comes to a fight, hand me a gun, show me how to use it, and I am with you,” he says he told Ellison.4
Three days after the siege began, the Covenant’s “Home Guard” surrendered. The Reverend Millar was disappointed. “It ended with the whole group walking out, the womenfolk carrying their Bibles and singing, the men handing over their carbines.”5 When government officials searched the compound, they found a large cache of weapons, including fifty hand grenades; seventy-four assault weapons; thirty machine guns; six silencers; an M-72 antitank rocket; a World War II–era antiaircraft gun; three half-pound blocks of C-4 plastic explosives; an unfinished, homemade armored personnel carrier; and a large drum of cyanide, which cult members intended to use to poison major-city water supplies.
The cult hoped to hasten the return of the Messiah by “carrying out God’s judgments” against unrepentant sinners.6 They believed that humanists, communists, socialists, and Zionists had taken over the U.S. government. They knew for a fact that Jews, Satan’s direct descendents, were working closely with the Antichrist, whose forces included the United Nations, the IMF, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Illuminati, and the “One-Worlders.”7 They had discovered, through their intelligence channels, that the aim of this cabal was to create a world government, a clear sign that the forces of Satan were at work.8 The cult planned to poison residents of major cities—far more people than any modern terrorist group has killed before. They had joined forces with other right-wing groups in the hope of destroying what they called the Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG). Cult members and their coconspirators were eventually tried for sedition, but in the end, the government lost the case.9
Kerry Noble was a “God-anointed elder” of the cult and, by the end, its second-in-command. I first contacted him by telephone in March 1998. He was living in Texas, now released from prison. He told me that the group had started preparing for “war” because there were signs of Armageddon. “We believed that once those signs were there, it was time for us to act, to make judgments against those who were doing wrong or who refused to repent,” he says. “The original timetable was up to God, but God could use us in creating Armageddon. That if we stepped out, things might be hurried along. You get tired of waiting for what you think God is planning.”10
Kerry said he regrets his involvement in leading the cult, especially its paramilitary activities. He is active in anticult programs and helped the FBI investigate the Oklahoma City bombing. He tells me he got involved in CSA because he listened to God, and that God encouraged him to stay with the cult even after it became violent. He told me, “God directs us in everything we do. God is in control of everything.” He believes that God speaks to individuals and provides direction, although individuals can misinterpret what they hear. I am instantly reminded of the famous warning that anyone who believes God speaks to him directly should be careful—it might actually be the devil speaking.
I want to know more about this faith. Kerry defines faith as “believing and obeying God when He tells you to do something or when He leads you into a situation. When you believe that God is directing you, it also follows that He will provide [for] and protect you.”11 He says that faith in God is key to every action he has ever taken, “whether relocating, living communally, casting out demons, or having a baby by natural childbirth.”12 Faith must also have played a role, then, when he drove to Kansas City with plastic explosives and a .22 pistol to shoot some “queers and niggers,” bomb a pornographic bookstore, and blow up a church frequented by homosexuals.13 In the end he discovered that he didn’t have the stomach for killing at close range, but other cult members did. That same God also leads him now, he tells me, in his efforts to help deprogram youth who have joined violent cults.
We spoke a number of times, but I was dissatisfied, irritated, and, frankly, confused. This was early in my study of religious terror, and I was still of the view that faith in God makes people better human beings. How is it possible that Kerry could retain faith in a God that he believes directed him to do things that were evil? Things that he now sees as morally wrong?
I e-mailed Kerry to ask him more questions. He wrote me back, “Hi, Jessica. It always blesses me when someone asks questions concerning spiritual matters, as you did, in trying to understand people. I can’t tell you how much our last conversation meant to me. I will be glad to help you any way possible.”14 He also told me, “You are welcome to come down to visit; we would be honored to have you here. Just let me know when.” I decided to take him up on his offer in June 1999.
Kerry lives in Burleson, Texas. The Burleson, Texas, Web site calls the town “more than a whistle stop. It’s a visitor’s delight!” But there are no hotels in Burleson, so I stay in a Holiday Inn in a neighboring town.
Kerry invites me to dinner. After mulling it over awhile, I conclude that one should bring a gift to one’s dinner host, even if he is a former terrorist. A box of chocolates? A cake? Finally I settle on a bottle of wine. On a whim, I select a substantial merlot, which a flyer hanging from the shelf informs me was highly rated by Mr. Robert Parker. It is the most expensive bottle of wine I have ever bought.
I follow Kerry’s detailed instructions, eventually finding my way to a quiet neighborhood consisting mostly of mobile homes. Kerry, his wife, Kay, and their children live in a mobile home behind his parents’ house. Kerry’s grandparents bought the mobile home for Kay and the children when Kerry was in prison. The mobile home has four bedrooms. It is twenty-eight feet wide and seventy-six feet long.
Kerry meets me at the door. He is a big man, six feet tall, and stout. He has puffy, unhealthy-looking skin, and a neatly trimmed gray beard. The crown of his head is covered with a thin, gray fuzz. Tracks of worry are visible on his pale brow. Former minister, penitent neo-Nazi, regretful attempted bigamist, repentant terrorist. Convicted of conspiracy to possess unregistered weapons and of receiving stolen property. The prodigal son, now living on his parents’ land. Six children, three granddaughters. He moves slowly, apologetically, as though weighed down by a childlike shame, and perhaps an embarrassing resentment at having gotten caught. He wants to please, to be forgiven. Is that my role? I wonder whether I am the first Jew to have entered this mobile home.
He thanks me for the wine, which he immediately takes into the kitchen and puts in the refrigerator. I notice through the kitchen door that the table is already laid. Everything is ready. Everything is neat and clean.
I ask to use the bathroom. It is spotless.
Kerry invites me into the living room. He sits on a recliner, where he tells me he sat for nearly three days straight reveling in the quiet and space of the mobile home after his release from solitary confinement. I sit on a couch. In front of me is a glass of iced tea sitting on a dust-free coffee table. I notice the mingled smells of “fresh scent” antibacterial soap on my now very clean hands, lemon Pledge, and something like fear, someone’s fear, but I’m not sure whose. Kay joins us. We make small talk. How was your drive? Hot weather in Texas. Hot weather in Washington too. I hear locusts humming out the window.
Kay invites us to sit down to dinner. Kerry takes the wine out of the refrigerator. He offers some to me and pours a tiny amount for himself. This is the first time they have had wine with dinner, Kerry tells me. Kay pulls a perfectly white Corning Ware casserole out of the oven. She has made us Kerry’s favorite dish, she says, Mexican chicken: taco shells and precooked boneless chicken pieces baked in Campbell’s cream-of-mushroom soup.
What was it like living on the compound? I ask Kay. “There was a secure, Christian atmosphere,” she says. “We helped one another—taking care of each other’s babies and children. Canning, gardening. It was a big communal thing. It was nice.”
“Back to basics, living in the woods,” Kerry adds. It was “heaven” for the children, he says—no worries, lots of other children to play with, and peaceful surroundings. Many of the children had a hard time adjusting to life after the cult dispersed. Kerry’s eldest daughter had nightmares for several years after the siege, having to adjust to a society she didn’t understand, Kerry says.
Cult members built their own houses, each one equipped with a bunker or a nearby foxhole in preparation for the enemy’s imminent invasion. James Ellison, the leader of the cult, lived in a stone house. But the Nobles lived in a wood-frame house with no insulation, no electricity, and no running water. Kay washed the family’s laundry by hand. Their out-house was on the porch, and in the winter they could see their breath even while standing right next to the woodstove.
When the Nobles joined the cult, it was a “religious fellowship,” not a violent cult. The group believed in “clean” living: beer drinking, smoking, recreational drugs, and cussing were not allowed at the camp. “At the time of the siege,” Kerry says, “I had agents coming up to me during the stand-off saying you had such a nice way of living. I wish I could live in something like this. Too nice to mess it up. We knew that at our best, we worked hard, cared about people. Tight community, kids didn’t have to worry about drugs, kidnappings…”
Later, I speak with a former government agent who asked me not to reveal his name. I’ll call him Keith. Keith quit his job because he was so upset by what happened with CSA. He admired the cult, he admits. “I had a problem to start with when this case was first assigned to me because of my understanding of what CSA represented,” he tells me. “I came from a Baptist background so I was accustomed to fire and brimstone [and] I didn’t see anything wrong with what Ellison was saying or doing. I got some heat for holding these views. But then I kept hearing from informants that it was not just a religious organization. When you look behind [the religious facade], you realize that this guy is not really what he holds himself out to be.” It was almost as if James Ellison were two people, he says. A religious leader, but also a thug. He was extremely charismatic, Keith says: “I can tell you right now, if he walked from where he is into the next state, he would gather a lot of followers.” Terrorists often strike people who know them as two different people: the family man and the killer.15
In the beginning, the group held Bible meetings almost every night. Kerry was the main Bible teacher. At these meetings, members sometimes “prophesied” about fellow members’ “pride.” When this happened, the person guilty of pride would sit in a special chair, and the others would lay hands on him and speak in tongues to “cure” him. The chair was a “symbol in which to humble oneself in front of the group before asking for prayer, openly confessing what one needed,” Kerry explains.16 Public shaming of members is one of the hallmarks of a cult.
Sometimes the prophecies were about the group’s future path. At one session, a “prophetess” named Donna told the group that “we would have to be willing to sacrifice much for the good of the group, that only by our fusing together in one body could He accomplish His will in us,” Kerry recalls.17 Ellison instructed all the men to shave their beards and cut their hair short. Members would no longer receive payment for their logging work; the group would pool all its earnings. Members were encouraged to burn any remaining vestiges of their precult identities: photographs, keepsakes, and high school yearbooks. They destroyed televisions and radios and other “reminders of the outside world’s propaganda.” They sold their wedding rings. They received little or no information from the outside world.18
Cutting off information from the outside world and destroying personal possessions or anything that reminds members of their precult lives is another common practice among cults. A French fascist told Robert J. Lifton that he felt that by joining the SS (a cultlike organization), he was entering a religious order that required that he “divest himself of his past” to be reborn as a person capable of what Himmler called heroic cruelty.19
The creation of a new self, which Lifton calls doubling, helps to explain how “banal” operatives, in Hannah Arendt’s sense, come to kill innocent civilians.20 William James considered the potential for doubling to be inescapable, although he considered it most likely to occur in extremis, for example, when a person faces his own or a loved one’s death.21 Doctors report the need to develop a “medical self,” which is capable of slicing open a patient’s body while remaining relatively inured to the patient’s pain and even death.22
In a study of the psychology of killing, military psychologist David Grossman found that without desensitivity training, most soldiers will not fire at enemies at close range. Nearly 80 percent of riflemen neglected, declined, or omitted to fire at an exposed enemy in World War II, even to save their lives or the lives of their compatriots. He found a similar tendency in earlier wars. After extensive desensitivity training, however, the nonfiring rate in Vietnam was only 5 percent.23 Desensitivity training requires learning to see the enemy as less than human. Terrorists also employ this technique, partly by referring to the “enemy” as subhuman. Neo-Nazi hate groups refer to nonwhites as the “children of darkness,” and Jews as the “destroying virus.” Aryans are described as “pure,” “the Chosen,” and “the children of light.”24 As a terrorist’s assignments gradually become more violent, his capacity for moral revulsion is worn down. Psychologists find that even ordinary, decent people can be trained to do extraordinarily cruel things.25
People tend to find and stay in positions that satisfy their psychological needs, so there is probably some degree of self-selection in who joins and stays inside terrorist movements and violent cults. Lifton argues that Nazi doctors who worked in the death camps were more ideologically committed to the cause but may have had, in addition, “greater schizoid tendencies, or been particularly prone to numbing and omnipotence-sadism, all of which also enhance doubling.”26 But these characteristics suggest only greater susceptibility; “normal” people are also capable of extreme disassociation and inflicting great harm, under certain conditions.
It is also common for cult leaders to demand that adherents donate all earnings, and in some cases possessions, to the group or its leaders. Shoko Asahara, for example, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult best known for its use of chemical weapons on the Tokyo subway in 1995, demanded that members donate all their earnings to the group’s cause.
CSA came to accept the teachings of Identity Christianity, which sees Anglo-Saxons as the “true Israel,” America as a sacred land, and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as a God-inspired, Christian inheritance.27 Ellison told the cult that Christians had turned away from Old Testament laws and were allowing enemies of Christ to rule the land. It was time to take that sacred land back from God’s enemies, he said. As we will see, many religious terrorists imbue material objectives and objects (such as land) with a spiritual dimension, making it impossible to compromise because the land now has spiritual content.
Like more mainstream Protestant fundamentalists, adherents of Christian Identity take the Scriptures literally and focus a great deal on the Endtimes. A key difference is the understanding of when Jesus appears during the tribulation. “Pretribulation” fundamentalist Protestants believe that Jesus will save them from experiencing the Apocalypse through a “divine rapture,” the simultaneous ascension to heaven of all good Christians.28 Followers of Christian Identity expect to be present during the Apocalypse. Christian militants who subscribe to “posttribulation” beliefs consider it their duty to attack the forces of the Antichrist, who will become leader of the world during the Endtimes. He will offer the people a false religion and a single world government. The strength of international institutions promoting world government, including the United Nations and the international banks, are indications that the Antichrist is already here, they believe. Identity Christianity has become the dominant religion of the racist right in America. Adherents include Gordon Kahl, a leader in the Posse Comitatus movement who died in a shoot-out with the FBI in 1983 and became the first Identity “martyr”; Randy Weaver, whose wife and son were killed in a government siege at his house in 1992; and Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for killing 168 people in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
Like other apocalyptic sects in the past, some Christian Identity adherents believe that they are now experiencing the tribulations as described in Revelation, that America is currently the equivalent of the corrupted and depraved Babylon. Others are not sure, nor are they certain how long the period of tribulation will last. I called up the Reverend Robert Millar, the leading cleric of the American racist right, to ask his views. “Armageddon could come anytime in the next thirty, forty, fifty years, it might come in 2160, or it might even be five years from now,” Pastor Millar tells me. “We are not really hung up on the date.”29
In late 1979, after Kerry Noble had been living at the compound for over a year, Ellison called the group together. “The Jews have declared war on our race, promoting race-mixing and thereby polluting the pure seed of God,” Ellison explained to cult members. “This ZOG, this Zionist Occupied Government, is killing our white babies through abortion! It is destroying white minds with its humanistic teachings of evolution! I tell you this—niggers may be descended from apes, but my ancestors never swung from trees by their tails. In order to preserve our Christian heritage and race, it is our right, our patriotic duty, to overthrow the Antichrist government!”30 He continued, “Prepare war, O Israel! Wake up the mighty men! Let all the men of war come near. Beat your plowshares into spears and your pruning hooks into swords. Let the weak say, ‘I am strong!’ ”31 Kerry says that the men, dressed in camouflage and armed with rifles and pistols, shouted, “I am strong!”32
Terrorists frequently invoke the notion that they are protecting the in-group from pollution by impure outsiders. Ellison’s speech also makes clear that he hopes to make his converts feel like new men—partly to foster the development of a killer self who wears combat fatigues, but also to make members feel strong inside the group, enhancing their commitment to the cult. Outside the cult, Kerry tells us, he felt weak and repeatedly humiliated. Inside, Ellison made him feel needed and strong.
The cult sold the pigs they had earlier raised for meat and, believing that they were the true children of Israel, started celebrating Passover. During their first Passover celebration, the men dressed in military uniforms. They prayed that the angel of death would come and kill the first-born of all the “Egyptians” still living in America. “We were disappointed when we awoke the next morning not to find a plague having struck the nation,” Kerry recalls.33
Ellison also subscribed to the “sonship” doctrine, which teaches that Jesus is only the head of God’s Christ, or Anointed One. The body of Christ is composed of a number of people—possibly the 144,000 people mentioned in the Book of Revelation. Eventually the people that make up the body of Christ will achieve spiritual perfection. Although they retain their mortal bodies, these prophets become incapable of sin.34
This interpretation requires “spiritualizing” the biblical text.35 To spiritualize a scripture is to see a deeper meaning than the literal meaning or the one commonly taught, Kerry explains.36
Cult leaders tend to create their own religions as they go along, freely “spiritualizing” texts, sometimes picking and choosing from a variety of religions, sects, or ideologies. The leader often has a “vision” that becomes an organizing myth, often related to hopes and fears about the end of the world as we know it, to be replaced by a new, fairer, better world. Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, mixed Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism to legitimate his autocratic rule and to inculcate total commitment among his followers. He chose Shiva the Destroyer as the principal deity for his cult, but he also emphasized the Judeo-Christian notion of Armageddon. He used his yoga skills to impress adherents and to establish schools, raising money for the cult. He used longing for the new, post-Apocalypse world to urge his followers to hurry it along through violence, including with weapons of mass destruction.
Ellison believed that he and other cult members were among the people that made up the body of Christ. When he felt himself to have achieved the requisite level of perfection, he took a second wife. He felt that whatever he chose to do, he was no longer capable of sinning, so nothing was off-limits. Kerry planned to do the same, but his fiancée broke off the engagement just before the marriage was to take place. Cults frequently engage in unusual sexual practices, whether abstinence, free love, or polygamy. Shoko Asahara also took on multiple sexual partners among adherents.
Ellison employed essentially all the techniques for enhancing commitment that cults traditionally favor. These include sharing property and/or signing it over to the group upon admission, limiting interactions with the outside world, employing special terms for the outside world, ignoring outside newspapers, speaking a foreign language or special jargon, requiring free love, polygamy, or celibacy, no compensation for labor, communal work efforts, daily meetings, mortification procedures such as confession, mutual surveillance and denunciation, institutionalization of awe for the group and its leaders through the attribution of magical powers, the legitimization of group demands through appeals to ultimate values (such as religion) and the use of special forms of address.37 Most terrorist groups employ at least some of these mechanisms.
Kay explains that cult members felt they needed weapons because they had obligations to take care of one another. It is common for members of terrorist groups to begin taking on a group identity and to feel that the need to protect group members is as strong—or stronger—than the need to protect their own lives. “We bought guns as protection—against people who wanted to come and steal our food,” she says. “Part of it was antigovernment.” The compound was supposed to be a place where God-fearing Christians could escape when the tribulation occurred. Ninety percent of the world’s population would die within the first hour of the Apocalypse, “leaving an elect people to rebuild society and usher in the millennial rule of Christ.”38 “We believed we were to house, feed, and clothe those who came to us,” Kerry explains.39
From the very beginning Ellison held out the possibility that, by joining the cult, members would receive early news about the coming Apocalypse. There are still prophets and apostles in the church, Ellison said, and God would warn those prophets before Armageddon began.
The cult received early intelligence about an imminent Apocalypse several times, but their disappointed hopes did not lessen their faith in the least. In 1978, they received word that the judgments of God would begin on August 12, the ninth of Ab on the Jewish calendar, when Jews commemorate the destruction of both the First and Second Temples. Their source, whom they considered reliable, warned them of natural catastrophes “beyond measure,” including flooding on all sides of the United States in a band two hundred miles wide. When the prediction turned out to be premature, Kerry says, “We were disappointed it didn’t occur, but still anticipated its arrival as being near.”40
The cult repeatedly prepared for the coming economic and social collapse, which was certain, Ellison told them again and again, to arrive the following season.41 When the judgments started, Ellison told them, “It will get so bad that parents will eat their children. Death in the major cities will cause rampant diseases and plagues. Maggot-infested bodies will lie everywhere. Earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, and other natural disasters will grow to gigantic proportions. Witches and satanic Jews will offer people up as sacrifices to their gods, openly and proudly; blacks will rape and kill white women and will torture and kill white men; homosexuals will sodomize whoever they can. Our new government will be a part of the one-world Zionist Communism government. All but the elect will have the mark of the Beast.”42 The deliberate inculcation of apocalyptic fears often precedes violence in cults that are cut off from society. It is also common for cults to believe even more strongly in the world’s imminent end after prophecy fails.43
To prepare, the men started practicing military maneuvers. Every male member of the cult was issued a rifle, a pistol, and full military gear.44 They started stockpiling food. Kerry says that at one point he had over three thousand pounds of food in storage.45 They raised money by stealing from department stores and committing arson for profit. They built factories for manufacturing grenades and silencers and sold weapons at National Rifle Association gun shows.46 They offered classes in “Christian martial arts” at a school they called the Endtime Overcomer Survival Training School. They charged $500 for the full course, which included shooting cardboard cutouts of blacks and Jews.47 Terrorist groups often raise money through criminal activities.
They published a series of books, including Witchcraft and the Illuminati, Christian Army Basic Training Manual, The Jews: 100 Facts, and Prepare War! They sold racist and survivalist literature as part of their official book list, including such titles as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, The Negro and the World Crisis, Who’s Who in the Zionist Conspiracy, The Talmud Unmasked, and A Straight Look at the Third Reich.48
How did you feel when the group turned violent? I ask Kay.
“Well, it came about slowly,” she says. “Over a couple of years. We got pulled into it, it became a way of life.
“One of the doctrines that was heavily relied on was that women submit to their husbands,” she continues. “That was what we believed. We didn’t question. And we weren’t directly involved. Acts of violence were usually kept among the men; the women really didn’t know much of what was going on.” Women called their husbands “lord” as a sign of respect, in imitation of the way the biblical Sarah referred to her husband, Abraham.
“End of times, I’ve heard of that for years as a child in the Baptist church. Everyone is left to fend for themselves,” Kay says. “And James [Ellison] was like a saint. I mean, he could just like hypnotize you.” She is crying now.
Ellison enters a trancelike state when he concentrates, Keith, the former government agent, confirms to me later. “There are not too many things he would not do to establish his goals, once he puts his mind to something,” he says.49
Do you still believe Armageddon is imminent? I ask Kay.
“I don’t worry about it now. If it happens, it happens,” she answers.
What was happening in your life before you joined CSA? I ask Kerry.
“I desperately wanted to be valedictorian of my high school class,” he tells me. “In my sophomore year, there was no doubt that I would be valedictorian, my grades were so outstanding,” but the family kept moving, so he was ineligible. Kerry then volunteered to go into the military, but was rejected because of an earlier illness. “I got disenchanted again,” he says. “At that point I had no direction and I was just going with the crowd. Then I got called to the ministry.”
What does it mean to be called to ministry? I ask.
“I had a spiritual experience, I guess,” he says. “In March of 1972, I was living alone, and one night, after smoking a joint, I went to bed. During the night I found myself all of a sudden standing before God, even though all I could see was His arm and hand. Then He spoke; His voice seemed to echo throughout the entire place. Then I saw a book on a table about my life and why He had done what He did in those events. It totally changed my understanding about my life. God began to tell me what He had planned for me and what He wanted me to do. He said He had given me the gift of teaching and pastoring. The place I was in was so peaceful and so full of light, yet somehow dark at the same time. Anyway, I woke up and felt a power in my life I had never felt before. I went to a Christian bookstore and bought a pocket-size Bible to carry to work. Then I went to see a Baptist preacher at a church down the street and told him about my experience. He simply said I had been called to the ministry. It wasn’t until three years later that I realized I had experienced the baptism of the Spirit as well. When I got to work, I told everyone what happened. They said it was just the marijuana. But I ignored them and began to read the Bible every day, every chance I got. I read it through, underlining verses and memorizing scriptures, and then I would read it again, cover to cover, over and over. I couldn’t get enough of it.50
“Everyone I knew just stood back and said, ‘Well, Kerry’s a religious fanatic now.’ So, I decided to move to Lubbock. I started going to college. Needed some kind of degree to graduate with. My first class, religion class, was very liberal, main denomination. The very first day I go to class, this Baptist preacher got up and said, ‘There’s no devil or hell, no calling, no God, Moses didn’t part the Red Sea.’ I mean, he goes through the whole ‘spiel’ in the first class. Everything that we had been taught as Southern Baptists growing up, here’s this Baptist getting up and saying this wasn’t true. And I’m thinking, ‘Well then, what is true?’ I mean, how can you be teaching at this Southern Baptist school and saying it’s not true? That just threw me. I just had no vision for the college thing.” Leaders of new religions take advantage of people’s frustration with mainstream religions, which many people believe do not help them deal with the problems of contemporary life.
“Then I started working as a telephone counselor for the 700 Club with Pat Robertson,” Kerry tells me. People would call in to ask for prayers. At the end of the evening, all the telephone counselors would pray together and ‘believe for a healing,’ Kerry says. Kerry was curious about whether the prayers worked, so he suggested calling people back to see how they were doing. “That’s a big no-no. We were just supposed to proclaim our healing and believe it and then leave it. I don’t see that, I’m sorry. I saw this as a conflict at the time and I quit doing that,” he says.
“I was also working as an associate pastor. You don’t get paid. It’s more of a training thing.” But Kerry interpreted the texts in his own way, infuriating his superiors. “And then I find out that the deacons are talking about me.”
So you were in trouble with the church and you had this awful job you didn’t like, and then you heard that your friends were moving up to this place in Arkansas? I ask.
“Yeah,” Kerry says. “While we were in Dallas, we lived with our friends Tom and Barbara in the same house for a year. So, that was my first experience with community living. To me it was a high ideal. Two families living in a house and we never had a problem amongst us. Traditional patriarchal hierarchy where the women did all the chores and all that kind of stuff and the men went off to work. But to me, it was the best I had seen of what Christianity should be.”
The two couples had regular prayer meetings. They sometimes conducted healing sessions that included laying on of hands. During one of these sessions Kerry says he left his body. He was praying to be released of “religious pride,” and he suddenly found himself outside his body, watching the scene from above. “It was so powerful…. I can still picture it today,” Kerry recalls.51 “When we went to Arkansas to visit [Tom and Barbara, who by that time had joined the cult], it was just a bigger picture of what that community living could be.”
You told me once that Ellison liked to recruit people who were young and vulnerable, and that he was good at figuring out what they needed, I say. You told me he was somewhat rattled by people who are intelligent. What did he figure out you needed? I ask.
“He has a gift of knowing what people needed. He knew enough about me to know what I was looking for. That’s what makes for good cult leaders. You’ve got to almost be good at psychology, have to have that feel for what people want, what they are thinking, what is missing,” Kerry says. “Jim [Ellison] told me he needed me to be the Bible teacher, there’s this ego thing. He really needed me. He realized that he wasn’t that good at teaching, only preaching. He didn’t know the Scriptures that well. So he needed someone to teach.”
And the fact that God had appeared to Ellison “perked my attention,” Kerry adds.
You believed Ellison when he told you this? I ask.
“Yeah.” Kerry was skeptical of Ellison at first, he admits. “But as soon as I met him, it wasn’t like he had this huge mansion and everyone else was working and he was just sitting up there. He worked harder than everybody else. I saw him do things compassionate-wise with people when people had done him wrong and he would still show mercy to them, forgive them. I mean, he had a big heart.”
Kerry had suffered from chronic bronchitis as a child, and his mother had discouraged him from exerting himself. He was weak, he tells me, with little endurance. In first grade he was forced to attend the girls’ physical education classes because he couldn’t keep up with the boys. “I don’t know if I ever got over the shame and humiliation of not being able to keep up with the other boys—or even with some of the girls,” he says. “Other boys often picked on me or hit me. But I never fought back. My mother taught me that violence and fighting never solved anything.”
Kerry says that he desperately wanted to be a “rugged, hardworking man” with the confidence of his stepbrother and stepfather. He also remembers his brother-in-law telling him he would “never amount to a damn” because of his reluctance to exert himself and his physical weakness.52 Even his sister was more willing to fight the neighborhood bullies than Kerry was.
Now he is ready to answer my question more directly. “So I’m disillusioned. I’ve got fears and insecurities ’cause my mom taught me to be antiviolent. I had a lot of fights when I was in school, a lot of bullies picking on me. I had a fear of man in me. In the paramilitary, for the first time I felt as if I could protect myself. For me, I needed this. I never had this growing up.
“But I also needed to know that there was somebody who walked with God, or at least who I perceived walked with God. This was in ’77; it’s been five years since I’d been called to ministry. And here was a group where everybody was seeking the same thing—hearing God, knowing God, and talking to Him and Him talking back. I had never seen this before. I had heard about it, but not seen it.”
I tell Kerry that I’ve noticed that one thing that distinguishes religious terrorists from other people is that they know with absolute certainty that they’re doing good. They seem more confident and less susceptible to self-doubt than most other people.
“Sure,” Kerry says. “They believe they are directed by a higher authority. They see themselves as chosen, anointed by God. So you’re in a group of people who understand the world the way you do, who see themselves as chosen to carry out a particular mission. And not only are you part of a group of people that understand you, but you think maybe you can do something.
“Out of all the multitudes in the Book of Acts, there were five hundred in the first part that follow Jesus Christ. Out of these five hundred, He chose twelve to be His disciples. Three were given more responsibilities than the rest: Peter, Paul, and John. One scripture says that Jesus loved John—with the implication that there was something deeper there, a special relationship. So, God loves a multitude of people, but only some are chosen. At a certain point, it becomes easy to believe you are chosen.”
Did any of you think you were a John? I ask.
“I think Ellison did. I saw myself as a John in terms of my relationship with Ellison, not God,” Kerry says.
Terrorists often suffer delusions of grandeur. They come to believe that their actions are of intense interest to everyone, especially their enemies. These characteristics, together with profound suspicion of the government and premonitions of doom, are symptoms of what psychiatrist Jerry Post calls “politicized paranoia,” which often leads activist organizations to turn violent.53
Ellison left the compound to attend a meeting of the Aryan Nations Congress in July 1983. At that meeting, a number of leaders realized they had a common goal—to overthrow the Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG)—and they decided to pool their resources.54 To facilitate communication they would establish a nationwide computer system linking right-wing organizations.55 They would assassinate federal officials, politicians, and Jews; sabotage gas pipelines and electric power grids; and bomb federal office buildings, including the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.56 And they would poison municipal water supplies with cyanide. The ultimate purpose was to spark the Second American Revolution, creating an all-white state.
The most violent members of the participating organizations were recruited to form a new group called The Order, named after a fictional terrorist cell in William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. This book, which inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, also describes the use of radiological, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Until he died in 2002, Pierce was the head of the neo-Nazi organization National Alliance, with headquarters in West Virginia. Timothy McVeigh was a fan of the book. He sold it at gun shows and reportedly slept with a copy under his pillow.
Kerry says that Ellison returned from the Congress with more energy and excitement than he had seen in him for a “long, long time.” Ellison called the Elders together and told them about plans to finance the right-wing movement through counterfeiting, robbing armored cars or banks, stealing from stores, or “whatever it takes.” “If the left wing could do it in the sixties,” he told the Elders, “the right wing can do it in the eighties.” They also talked about forming small cells, which would never meet with other cells, and “silent warriors,” who would operate on their own, to minimize the risk of leaks. Ellison told Kerry that he now understood that it was his destiny to become famous, “to go down in the history books in a major way.” He informed Kerry that he saw himself as a founding father of the Second American Revolution.57
Soon after the Congress, CSA paramilitary forces detonated an explosive device along a pipeline that supplied natural gas to much of the midwestern United States, ending in Chicago. The attack failed. The pipeline was damaged but natural gas deliveries were not interrupted.58 “It was winter,” Kerry explains. “We thought people would freeze, that they might start riots.”59 They also detonated an explosive device on an electrical transmission line at Fort Smith, Arkansas.60
In 1988, the U.S. government took the historically unusual step of accusing the fourteen people who had plotted to overthrow the government of sedition.61 Federal prosecutors argued that they had returned home from the Congress determined to “wage war” against the government.62 The government lost the case, but it succeeded in destroying The Order in a violent raid.63 A decade later, in 1998, another group named after Pierce’s fictional fraternity emerged in rural Illinois. The group, which called itself the New Order, was arrested for plotting a series of attacks, including bombing public buildings, assassinating several individuals, and poisoning water supplies with cyanide.64
I ask Kerry how the group “spiritualized” away the Sermon on the Mount, which extols the virtues of pacifism. Christians typically ascribe the qualities of “light” and “love” to God and try to manifest those qualities in their own lives, Kerry concedes. “But the Scriptures describe another aspect of God: ‘The Lord God is a man of war’ ” (Exodus 15:3). And in Deuteronomy, the Lord says, “If I whet my glittering sword, and my hand take hold on judgment: I will render vengeance to my enemies, and will reward them that hate me. I will make my arrows drunk with blood and my sword shall devour flesh” (Deuteronomy 32:41, 42). They wanted to mimic this more violent aspect of God, Kerry says, a practice common to Identity Christian groups.
Informants, in some cases hoping to reduce their own sentences, told the FBI that the cult was kidnapping children, stockpiling illegal, military-style weapons, conducting paramilitary exercises, and burying land mines around the perimeter of the compound. They stole cars whenever Ellison felt they were “needed in furtherance of the Lord’s work,” then altered or disguised them.65 They said that Ellison had taken two wives.66 They warned the FBI that cult members had been assigned sniper positions in the event of a government raid. All of these allegations were eventually confirmed, with the exception of the kidnapping of children.
Kerry Noble was convicted of conspiracy to possess unregistered weapons in 1985 and sentenced to five years. Ellison was convicted and sentenced in September 1985 to twenty years in prison on federal racketeering and firearms violations charges. In return for a reduced sentence, Ellison told the government about other people in the movement and also provided details about the conspiracy to destroy the government.67 He completed his probation three days before the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He moved to Elohim City, another Identity Christian compound in Oklahoma, run by Pastor Robert Millar. By this time Ellison’s wives had divorced him or gone into government witness programs, and he married Pastor Millar’s granddaughter.68 Elohim City came to national attention when the FBI revealed that Timothy McVeigh had phoned the compound while plotting to attack the Murrah Federal Building—the same building that Ellison had wanted to attack a decade earlier.
Richard Snell, Ellison’s chief accomplice in the CSA plot to blow up the Murrah Building, was sentenced to death for killing a pawnbroker, whom he mistook for a Jew, and an Arkansas state trooper, who was black.69 His death was scheduled for April 19, 1995. Snell “repeatedly predicted that there would be a bombing or an explosion on the day of his death,” according to Alan Ables, a prison official.70 The day of Snell’s execution, ten years to the day after the siege that ended CSA, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City.71 One hundred sixty-eight people died. Snell was still alive when the building was bombed and reportedly spent his last day watching television coverage of the bombing and laughing to himself.72 Kerry believes that McVeigh was inspired by his contacts with CSA members, but the FBI has reportedly found no proof.
I ask Keith whether Ellison remains dangerous. He tells me, “If he envisions the Endtime rolling around again, there is no telling what he could do. He could easily become agitated or excited to the extent that he believes the Apocalypse is coming. Any sign that he sees could make him turn violent.”
Do you think that he might try to get his hands on more sophisticated weapons than cyanide if he were to become violent again? I ask.
“I don’t think there is anything anywhere at this point that he would not have access to, or that some member of a radical group would not have access to. They have such an intelligence network that would have knowledge about any kind of weapons of mass destruction,” Keith says.
What kind of intelligence network? I ask Keith. Over the Internet?
“The Internet and word of mouth. CSA had numerous ‘prophets’ that would drop by that would carry messages about technical matters related to weapons. Even before computer communication they were knowledgeable about all that stuff, even then. They know the intricacies of warfare. These prophets that travel around from one group to another are quite knowledgeable about any number of weapons,” Keith says.73
But it is not the people we hear about that we should fear, Kerry tells me. “The guys that are taking in the spotlight and giving speeches—they’re in it for the fame and glory. Leaders aren’t radicals—they have too much to lose.” It’s the people we don’t hear about who should concern us, he says.
Before talking to Kerry Noble, I had read that when prophecy fails, people can come to believe even more strongly in a false Messiah or that the prognosticated events will eventually come to pass. In the seventeenth century, for example, a handsome, charismatic young man named Shabbtai Tzvi was banished from Turkey for outlandish behavior. He came to Jerusalem. A well-known seer who lived in Gaza became convinced that Shabbtai Tzvi was the Messiah. Tzvi was prepared to play the part. He announced that the time of redemption had come and revealed a plan to rebuild the Temple. The Jews of Gaza fell entirely under his sway, and the movement spread quickly to the rest of the Jewish world. Word of the miracles performed by the prophet and his Messiah spread worldwide. The pope sent a delegation to Jerusalem to investigate. The two were expelled from Jerusalem and were gone by the time the pope’s emissaries arrived. When the sultan demanded that Shabbtai Tzvi convert to Islam on pain of death, he chose conversion, telling his followers that this was a stage in the redemption process. Many of his followers converted with him. Decades after his death, followers continued to believe that Shabbtai Tzvi was the Messiah.
It is one thing to read about how this happened among seventeenth-century followers of a charismatic false Messiah. It is another to hear the story from a person who himself fell under the sway of apocalyptic prophecy, who admits that his faith grew stronger when prophecy failed.
Learning about Noble’s evolution from a mild-mannered pastor to a “soldier” taught me how cult leaders can harness alienation and anomie to construct a group identity, eventually creating killers out of lost souls. The leader has to be a psychologist, Noble tells us. He has to have a gift for knowing what people need, what they want, what is missing from their lives. We will see many examples of leaders catering to followers’ needs in the stories that follow.
We also learn through Noble’s story about the importance of “sacred territory.” The cult came to believe that America is sacred land and that it was time to take the land back from God’s enemies. As we shall see, once material objects, such as land, are imbued with a spiritual dimension, it becomes impossible to compromise. We also learn from Noble about the importance of selective interpretation of texts to justify violence.
In the next chapter we continue to explore how leaders can harness perceived humiliation to create support for a terrorist movement. The humiliation that Noble talked about is personal, however. He alone was forced to take the girls’ gym class. In the chapter that follows, we explore the tragic effects of repeated humiliation of a whole people.