This chapter contains a series of conversations with members of the save-the-babies movement, the name I use to refer to the part of the pro-life movement that supports murdering doctors and attacking abortion clinics. The chapter opens at a fund-raiser for the movement, where ex-convicts are celebrated for their antiabortion crimes and attendees bid on handmade items produced by currently incarcerated activists.
After attending the movement’s annual banquet, I visit two major leaders: Michael Bray, the movement’s leading intellectual, and Paul Hill, now on death row for murdering a doctor and his escort. In addition to exploring the save-the-babies movement, the chapter assesses the nature of leadership in a virtual organization, referred to by American right-wing extremists as “leaderless resistance.”
In the winter of 1999 I decide to attend the White Rose Banquet, a charity dinner held every year to honor the “saints of Christ,” violent antiabortion activists who are now in prison. The banquet has two purposes. The first is to promote esprit de corps among proponents of “defensive action” at “baby butcheries,” which means, in plain English, killing doctors and their staff and bombing clinics where abortions are provided. The second is to raise money to help support the families of the “martyrs.” You have to send your forty dollars in advance to the Reverend Michael Bray, the organizer of the banquet, so he can decide whether you are worthy of attending.
The Reverend Michael Bray is the intellectual father of the extreme radical fringe of the antiabortion movement, which engages in terrorism rather than nonviolent protest. Bray spent four years in prison for conspiring to bomb ten clinics near Washington, D.C., but now sees his role as inspiring others through his writings, sermons, and events like this.
Bray is a postindustrial-style leader of a virtual organization, which has no headquarters, no established hierarchy, and no regular planning meetings. Members are likely to learn about the organization and its mission over the Internet. Some establish friendships by e-mail long before they meet. Bray and other leaders of the save-the-babies movement mobilize rather than supervise their followers. They do not get involved in day-to-day management issues (in this case, planning attacks at clinics, the product this virtual organization produces) or providing tangible rewards such as salaries to their followers. This style of leadership involves what James MacGregor Burns calls a “transforming relationship,” in which leaders and followers influence each other’s thinking and actions, with the purported aim to make the world a better place. In the process, followers become leaders, and leaders may become moral agents.1
Bray sees himself as a moral agent, and he aims to convert many of his followers into leaders in their own right. To this end, he and other inspirational leaders in the save-the-babies movement motivate their followers through their writing, their Web sites, their sermons, and most importantly, the White Rose Banquet. The banquet has been held nearly every year since it was established in 1996.
The fourth annual banquet, which the Reverend Michael Bray permits me to attend, is held at a Holiday Inn in suburban Washington, the evening before the twenty-sixth anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. It’s raining hard, and I get lost. Eventually my research assistant and I make our way to a nondescript hotel, where we drive around to a parking lot for the ballrooms in the far back corner. I park my white Volvo among a profusion of pickup trucks. People have driven long distances to get here—including from Alabama, Ohio, Florida.
At the entrance to Ballroom B you have to pick up your ticket. A woman in a black, sequined gown checks me off: Jessica Stern, fellow, Harvard University. I am obviously somewhat exotic. There are people milling all around—in the ballroom, and in the rooms outside it. Refreshments are served. I look through the literature on a table. In the White Rose Banquet program I read:
Some of them are dead by having their small, soft bodies literally wrenched apart and pulled through suction tubing; others are neatly cut here and there by a knife-like instrument—an arm brought out first or maybe a leg with other appendages and organs to follow…. Among the pieces is a heart that was warm and beating only moments before. Tiny fingers and thumbs that once sought the comfort of this baby’s mouth lay gently curled and discarded next to what was a liver and a foot. The face of this infant has been nearly shorn from the rest of his head, the eyes open and dark with sudden terror…
Joseph Grace, quoting Cathy Ramey
Somewhere in a Virginia jail since 1983.
I tell myself I must not be shy, I must talk to these people. Many seem to know one another from past actions at “abortuaries” or from banquets held in earlier years. None of the people I approach seems hesitant to talk to me, even though I tell them I am writing a book about religious militancy and terrorism.
The first person I meet is Katherine Horsley, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Neal Horsley, the man who is best known for the “Nuremberg files,” a Web site that lists physicians and clinic staffers who allegedly provide abortions, including, in some cases, their office and home addresses. The names of doctors and personnel who have been killed are crossed out, and those that are wounded are grayed out. When Dr. Barnett Slepian’s name was crossed out within hours of his death, Planned Parenthood and a group of doctors filed suit, and Horsley’s Internet service provider took the site down.2 But Horsley relaunched the site on his own server and has expanded it since then.3
Katherine is a daughter of royalty in this setting. She is beautiful and sweet and obviously excited to be here, among the most important people in the violent antiabortion movement. She is talking to Jonathan O’Toole, a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old who works for her father.
I ask him how a nineteen-year-old man would get involved in the movement. “To begin with,” he says, “I am a Christian, and therefore opposed to abortion. Unborn babies are dying by the millions, and I feel compelled to help.” He shows me a grisly picture of an aborted fetus. It is horrifying, and I understand why it moves him. He informs me proudly that he is a member of the Army of God, a shadowy organization that advocates killing abortion providers as “justifiable homicide.”4 A number of attacks on clinics and personnel have been carried out in its name, but it is best described as a virtual network, or in the language of the movement, a “leaderless resistance” network, rather than an actual organization.5
The Army of God manual explains that it is “not really an army, humanly speaking…. God is the General and Commander-in-Chief. The soldiers, however, do not usually communicate with one another. Very few have ever met each other. And when they do, each is usually unaware of the other soldier’s status. That is why the Feds will never stop this Army. Never. And we have not yet even begun to fight.”6
A leaderless resistance network—with no central office and no known leaders involved in planning operations—is almost impossible for law-enforcement authorities to penetrate and stop. It has been adopted by a number of Christian and Jewish extremist groups in America.7 Despite the name, the network is not actually leaderless.
The doctrine of leaderless resistance was developed by Louis Beam, who calls himself ambassador at large, staff propagandist, and “Computer Terrorist to the Chosen” of Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group.8 Beam writes that hierarchical organizations are extremely dangerous for insurgents. This is especially so in “technologically advanced societies where electronic surveillance can often penetrate the structure revealing its chain of command,” such as the United States. Those who oppose state repression must be prepared to adopt a new organizational style, he argues. Success will depend on the following factors: “avoidance of conspiracy plots, rejection of feeble-minded malcontents, insistence upon quality of the participants,” and “camouflage,” which Beam defines as the ability to blend in the public’s eye with mainstream associations that are generally viewed as harmless. In the leaderless form of organization, “individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central headquarters or single leader for direction or instruction, as would those who belong to a typical pyramid organization. Organs of information distribution such as newspapers, leaflets, computers, etc., which are widely available to all, keep each person informed of events, allowing for a planned response that will take many variations. No one need issue an order to anyone.” Beam’s goal was to develop a more effective means to resist the “tyrany” of the U.S. government.9
David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla argue that groups organized this way need an operational doctrine, and the most potent one, they argue, is what they call “swarming.” Swarming involves widely dispersed but networked units converging on their targets from multiple directions. Networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on the target and then disperse. But they must be ready to recombine for a new pulse almost immediately. “The Chechen resistance to the Russian army, the rush of NGOs into Mexico to support the Zapatista movement, and the Direct Action Network’s operations in the ‘Battle of Seattle’ against the World Trade Organization (WTO) all provide excellent examples of swarming behavior,” they explain.10
For virtual networks promoting terrorism in technologically advanced countries such as the United States, swarming operations may be an attractive fantasy, but not one easily carried out in the near term. The planners of the Battle of Seattle were not promoting assassinations, bombings, or mass-casualty attacks, and if they were, law-enforcement authorities would have stopped them. Until they get access to impenetrable mass communication systems (and they might), they will not be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on the target, and then disperse, as Ronfeldt and Arquilla envisage.11 Henry Felisone, a Florida-based minister involved in the save-the-babies movement, describes his vision of a swarming operation to end abortions: “So we have the Army of God, which in the future will organize and coalesce like those of Europe who had centuries of underground work, and there will be skilled assassins and skilled saboteurs after the abortion industry, which is not only the abortionists but also the people on top of them, including Supreme Court judges. Now Paul Hill has called for the Supreme Court judges to be killed and also for chemical and biological weapons, and we support this call, at least I do.”12 The prospect of swarming is not the most frightening aspect of virtual terrorist networks, in my view. It is, instead, the increasing availability of more and more powerful weapons usable by smaller and smaller groups, leading to the potential for mass-casualty attacks that require minimal coordination and communication.
Jonathan O’Toole and I move together toward the ballroom, where there is a cheerful din. The feeling of bingo night. He suggests that I talk to the Reverend Donald Spitz, another leader in the movement. Spitz is the head of Pro-Life Virginia. He seems determined to communicate something important to me. He tells me that the world system is becoming worse and worse. “Evil is increasing, iniquity abounds,” he says. “Just look in Matthew 24.” When I do, I find it refers to an apocalyptic period preceding an imminent return of Jesus Christ:
“And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake…. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.”
Spitz continues, “Peter says evil means shall become worse and worse. Pontius Pilate slaughtered the unborn children.”
I ask him how he ended up focusing his life on stopping abortion.
He tells me, “I was taught from a very early age that abortion is the worst thing a woman can do.”
Do you support violence against doctors or abortion clinics? I ask.
“That’s not how I would put it,” he says. “I support defensive action. If a born person were being murdered right here, it would be our duty to defend him. It would be wrong to allow him to be murdered in front of our eyes. It is also our duty to defend the unborn. An unborn person is no less a person than you and me.”
Defensive action sometimes influences doctors’ decisions. The movement specializes in applying psychological pressure on doctors and clinics and has in many cases intimidated doctors and other abortion providers to the extent that medical practices have been shut down. In late 1999, for example, Steven Dixon, a forty-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist, shut down his practice, telling patients that he was “terrorized by antiabortion activists.”13 In a letter to his patients explaining his move, Dixon wrote that “the ongoing threat to my life and my concern for the safety of my loved ones has exacted a heavy toll on me, making it necessary that I discontinue practicing OB-GYN.”14 According to the Washington Post, antiabortionists mailed threatening letters to his office and home and distributed “Wanted” posters with his photograph. In addition, his name was added to Neal Horsley’s Nuremberg files Web site.15 Other studies have shown that between 1992 and 1996, a time when antiabortion violence was particularly common, the number of abortion providers in the United States decreased by 14 percent. It is unclear how much of that drop is due to antiabortion violence or to other factors such as reduced incidences of unintended pregnancies.16
Waiters have been carrying steam trays to a buffet table at the back of the room and are now ready to serve us. The food is what you might expect in an elementary school cafeteria—overcooked, but comforting.
Jonathan suggests that we sit with a middle-aged friend of his sitting at a table in the middle of the room. The older man introduces himself as Bob Lokey. I notice two things right away: his muscled arms are decorated with tattoos, and he has the strangely bright eyes of a person who meditates a lot. Lokey tells me he spent twenty years in San Quentin for first-degree murder. I ask him how he spends his time now. He is a long-haul trucker. But his great passion is “saving the babies” and his Web site, which was linked at the time to Neal Horsley’s site.17
“Everything I found on the Internet looked wimpish to me,” he says. “I wanted to establish my own site that makes the evil of baby murder more clear. I indicted the Supreme Court for its support of baby murder. I explain it all on my Web site.”18
How did you get interested in this work? I ask Lokey.
“In 1973 I had a powerful vision,” he says. “I was in a forest. A great power came to me and instructed me to paint an image of Uncle Sam, dragging a baby by its neck with handcuffs. You can see the image on my Web site now.”19
He tells me he has two children. A look of pain comes briefly into his eyes.
Lokey is a vegetarian. Jonathan is obviously very much in awe of him. Jonathan asks him, “How do you maintain your bulk on a vegetarian diet?” Lokey describes his weight-lifting regimen in some detail. “I’m still bench-pressing at fifty-eight,” he says. He tells Jonathan, who looks frail sitting next to Lokey, meat is bad for you, you shouldn’t eat it. Jonathan smiles sheepishly. I don’t want to hurt anyone, Lokey says. Not even animals. Lokey does yoga and meditates every day. He learned in San Quentin, he says, from a teacher who was allowed to visit them in prison. He tells me he can make an om sound on his guitar. He often plays the guitar with a young girl in the neighborhood. When they play, birds start acting oddly, he says.
I ask Jonathan how he ended up working for Neal Horsley.
“My dad is a Southern Baptist preacher,” he says. “I’m the oldest of five children. My whole family was involved in the antiabortion movement in Kansas. Most of the elders from our church got involved in rescues, and I got involved too. Participating in rescue missions was my Sunday school.”
In the late 1980s Operation Rescue began staging “rescue operations” outside abortion clinics. The rescuers would surround clinics and attempt to prevent patients from gaining entry. They would terrorize the women with photographs of bloody aborted fetuses, with the goal of making them reconsider their decision to have an abortion. In a competition of horrors, pro-choice activists, also likely to be on the scene, would carry placards illustrating abortions performed with coat hangers to emphasize the dangers women would face if abortion was made illegal. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested as they tried to block entrances to abortion clinics. In 1994, Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Law, which made it a crime to block access to abortion clinics and mandated stiff penalties for harming anyone during demonstrations. After the law was passed, blockades dropped off precipitously, from a high of 201 with 12,358 arrests in 1989, to 2 blockades and 16 arrests in 1998. But the number of violent incidents rose. Since 1993, antiabortion activists have shot and killed seven people and attempted seventeen other murders since 1991. They have set fires at clinics and exploded bombs, sometimes with lethal results. They have placed a noxious chemical, butyric acid, inside clinic doors, hoping to nauseate or burn the skin and eyes of building occupants. They have sent letters to clinics purporting to contain anthrax, temporarily halting activities at the clinics and terrorizing their patients. Some of the clinics and the people within them have had to be decontaminated, at great expense to city governments.20
“I saw his Web site and assumed that he was somebody closely connected to the terroristic kind of, real radical antiabortion crowd,” Jonathan says, explaining what initially attracted him to Horsley.21
I ask what he does for Horsley. “I help him on the Web site,” Jonathan says. “I didn’t have a lot of computer experience, and I wanted to learn. Also, I sort through hundreds of letters and e-mails daily.”
Horsley started the Nuremberg files Web site in 1995.22 The site provides information about personnel at abortion clinics all over the country, and about judges and politicians “who pass or uphold laws authorizing child-killing.” Visitors are urged to send names and birth dates of abortion providers’ family members and friends; social security numbers; license plate numbers; photographs and videos; affidavits of former employees, former patients, or former spouses; or “anything else you believe will help identify the abortionist in a future court of law.”23 Horsley added President George W. Bush to the Nuremberg files in August 2001, after the president announced that he would allow federal funding for fetal stem-cell research under certain conditions.24
I ask Jonathan about his schooling. He tells me he was homeschooled until about sixth grade. After that, he says, he attended a small Christian school, then public high school. “I’ve been to three colleges,” he says, “William Jewell in Liberty, Missouri, Ross Hill in Aiken, South Carolina, and Maple Woods in Kansas City. But now I’m taking a sabbatical leave from school.”
Later I learn that homeschooling had left Jonathan feeling ill equipped for public school, especially gym class. He had never played team sports. He had a dream in his sophomore year in high school about killing his classmates with an automatic rifle. He felt no guilt about it, he said. He just mowed them all down. When Jonathan went off to college, he brought a pistol. His classmates grew so alarmed hearing Jonathan talk about his desire to attack abortion clinics that thirty of them held a meeting to decide what to do. Jonathan decided to leave and returned to his parents’ home.25 Jonathan learned about Neal Horsley from his Web site, just as he learned about Bob Lokey from his. After Jonathan dropped out of school, he showed up on Neal Horsley’s doorstep, offering his services for free. Now that he has met Bob Lokey in the flesh, Jonathan seems uncertain about which man to admire more: the muscle-bound ex-con sitting with us now, or the Internet agitator he works for.
It is hard to explain certain kinds of leader-follower relationships without considering the possibility that, in Barbara Kellerman’s words, “some persons, under some circumstances, experience the need or wish to look up.”26 In many cases the leader may be responding to subconscious needs. Freud saw leaders as “great men” who tapped into the majority’s “strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them.”27 This need to look up seems to apply to Jonathan. The leaders of the save-the-babies movement don’t mistreat their followers in an overt sense, but they may try to dominate them spiritually and emotionally.
According to Abraham Maslow’s famous work on human motivation, human needs can be arrayed in a hierarchy, from the most fundamental ones such as the need for food and shelter, to more abstract ones, such as the need to feel part of a community or to be esteemed for one’s work. The urge to belong to a group comes immediately after the need to satisfy basic physical requirements for life and security.28 But today, people are largely free to choose their identities. Just as nations are largely imagined communities, to use Benedict Anderson’s well-known phrase, so too is individual identity.29 Identity and identification are thus two separate concepts.30 Individuals must identify their identities. As we discussed in chapter 3, too much choice regarding identity can be overwhelming.
For a person living in a closed, ethnically homogenous, rural society, there is a limit to the number of identities he might choose. But today, individuals are exposed to many possible identities. Cities are multiethnic. Businesses are globalized. We are flooded with images and ideas from around the world on television and the Internet. One job of a leader like Bray is to present a narrative about the mission of the movement that helps a person like Jonathan find an identity and a sense of purpose in life. Part of the appeal of militant religious groups, as we have discussed, is the clarity they offer about self and other.
Transforming leaders, as Burns defines them, tend to focus on followers’ psychological and spiritual needs rather than their physiological ones. In a relationship based on transforming leadership, “leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality…. Transforming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leaders and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both,” he argues. This kind of leadership is to be distinguished from what Burns calls “transactional leadership,” which involves an exchange of things: jobs for votes or subsidies for campaign contributions or money for work.31 Both leaders and followers get something out of the relationship. Many of the leaders of the save-the-babies movement are clergy with tiny congregations. Bray’s congregation consists of seven families, for example. At the White Rose Banquet and on their Web sites, these leaders become important. They get the satisfaction of feeling that they are doing the right thing, and they also get the satisfaction of being leaders.
Many scholars now accept the idea that leadership, as distinct from management, involves a transforming relationship as Burns defined it, in which influence runs both ways, but reject the notion that it always involves the promotion of moral action.32 Most people would consider Hitler and Stalin leaders, for example, although they promoted evil rather than good. It is also important to recognize that one leader’s conception of moral action may be another’s conception of evil action.33 The moral dilemma, and the possibility of just terrorism, is probably most obvious in precisely the case examined here. If we take the view that abortion is not murder, then those who kill abortion providers are guilty of murder themselves—in a moral as well as a legal sense. But if we accept the prolifers’ premise that “ensoulment” (or potential viability) begins at conception, attempting to force doctors to stop practicing abortion could be justified as the defense of innocent persons who are under attack. Still, as we discussed in the introduction, even if we accept the doctor killer’s ends, if only for the sake of argument, his means are morally indefensible because, among other reasons, murder is not a last resort.34
Lokey wants to tell me more about his visions: “In 1968 I awakened from sleep. I heard a lot of clanking noises. Suddenly I realized those clanking noises were actually in my head. My head expanded, then my whole body. My covers seemed to be inside my skin. As I moved my arm, I realized there were billions of stars between my arm and my body. I was at one with God at that moment. There were stars all around outside me.”
Were you on drugs? I ask.
“Awareness is greater than any LSD high,” he scoffs. “I felt power—it was God’s power. It’s primitive—you know it when you feel it. Time did not exist. I said, ‘I want to go home.’ I saw a tiny dot. I began rushing toward that tiny dot. Then I realized that that tiny dot was the earth.
“I also had the experience of remembering my birth. I’m in the joint, in the typewriter repair shop. I felt a tight band around my head. My friend the foreman called me, ‘Lokey!’ I turned sideways. The band was proceeding down my body. I fell out into space. I tried to breathe—I knew I had to fall down and cry. I felt someone spanking me—the pain was incredible. I heard a baby crying—I heard the words of the doctor, I heard my mother travailing. Satan embodied himself in the man I had been talking to—my friend. I knew I was looking straight into the eyes of the devil himself. I heard the voice of an angel. Satan said, ‘This child is mine.’ The angel said, ‘Deliver him from evil.’ I was being delivered from evil and into life. This happened in 1968.”
Lokey tells me excitedly that all doctors that provide abortions will be killed, and all the women who have had abortions will be killed. He then modifies his statement to make clear that women who had malice aforethought have committed first-degree murder, but if they only have malice in their hearts, it’s second-degree murder.
How do you know which ones have malice aforethought versus malice in their hearts? I ask. Lokey seems not to like this question. I sensed his muscles tensing. Perhaps he hadn’t thought this through. He says something unintelligible, then tells me, “If we don’t bring this to a conclusion soon, everyone on earth is going to die.
“You know I’m celibate,” he adds, as if that were something that everyone knows. “I’ve been celibate since 1984.” He tells me he was “vaginally defeated,” but now he’s “free.” Later he explains this concept of vaginal defeat in somewhat more detail. “I’ve been vaginally defeated all my life,” he told Neal Horsley while the two were being filmed for a television documentary. “Finally, God said to me ‘Son…you have got to leave this thing alone.’ I was so attracted to women, at one time I thought women were gods. And he made me quit women then and there…. I quit smoking, quit drinking, quit meat; I even circumcised myself. All those things that I’ve had to do…. women were the toughest…. I have to be the only grown man to have circumcised myself.”
Sociologists argue that the first requirement for mobilizing a group that feels oppressed is the identification of a common enemy. “Without the identification of an adversary, or another social actor in conflict with the group for control of certain resources or values, discontent and protest will not engender a movement,” sociologist Alberto Melucci argues.35 Religion is thus the ideal mobilization tool for violence because the Other is often inherent. “Whatever universalist goals they may have, religions give people identity by positing a basic distinction between believers and nonbelievers, between a superior in-group and a different and inferior out-group,” Samuel Huntington observes.36 Defining “us” automatically entails defining “them.” In this case, the “abortionists” and their clients are “them.”
Leaders of the save-the-babies movement identify “us” versus “them” through stories of heroes and villains, martyrs and saints. The right story, Ronfeldt and Arquilla explain, can help keep people connected even in a network whose looseness makes it difficult to prevent defection.37 Bran Ferren, a former Disney executive, argues that the ability to tell stories, to articulate a vision and communicate it, is a “core component of leadership.”38 The stories strengthen group identity.
But here, language is as important as narrative. The words abortuaries, butchertoriums, or baby butcheries are used for abortion clinics; defensive actions or justified homicide for violence against clinics or personnel; saints, martyrs, or prisoners of Christ for those who break the law on behalf of the movement. No crimes will be committed here at this meeting, but the language itself is thrillingly illicit. The words are like a drug. Uttering them aloud heightens the mood of self-righteous insurgency. The story is also told through images on the movement’s Web sites, through pictures of bloody, mutilated, aborted fetuses and streaming-video close-up shots of women’s genitalia and abortions actually taking place. The Internet is a critically important part of the network’s strength.
Lokey goes back to describing his visions: “I saw a vision of a perfect woman. Next thing I knew I was looking through a hole and the woman was old and wrinkled. And then she was dead. Her eyes were open. They were filled with vengeance, loathing, disgust. She said over and over again, ‘Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!’ ”
Whom did she want you to kill? I ask.
“I don’t know,” Lokey says sadly. “After that, when God woke me up that time in Georgia, when I wrote ‘Holocaust II,’ I took it to the print shop. There was a woman there at the print shop, her back was to me, she backed into me. She was collating my document. I told her, ‘I only paid you to copy that material, not collate it.’ She said to me, ‘I do stuff like this for my kids all the time. I’m happy to do this for you.’ I knew then and there that she was the very one—I had met the perfect woman of my vision—my vision had come true.”
What is a perfect woman? I ask.
“A perfect woman is a good mother. Most women are vile,” he says politely.
At 8 P.M. the official program begins. First we sing a hymn, “Rise Up, O Men of God.” Michael Bray comes to the podium and tells us, “We know that government agents are in this room. But we know who you are.” He peers around the room. I also look around the room, wondering which of the activists is actually working for the FBI. “Some members of the media are also in this room. You don’t have to talk to them. You make up your own minds. But we’re not in here to hide. Remember that Cheryl Richardson spent some time in jail, and the media helped get her out. Their goal is to use us. But our goal is to use them. It’s a contest of wills.”
Bray provides updates on all the prisoners of Christ now serving time for violence against abortion clinics. The prisoners have written short letters for the banquet, and the aforementioned Cheryl Richardson, now released from prison, reads them to us.
The Reverend Donald Spitz now comes to the podium to tell us excitedly that the auction of relics will now begin. The saints in bonds have donated the items that will now be put up for auction. Proceeds of the auction are for the benefit of the families of the prisoners. Well-known activist Shelley Shannon has knit a number of items to be auctioned off, all in camouflage: a pair of mittens, a pair of gloves, a hat, a scarf, and a pair of baby bootees. Shannon is serving time for attempted first-degree murder. She shot and wounded Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, in August 1993. Spitz jokes that if you wear these items, the feds won’t find you. “Eric could use one of these things in those woods,” he says, referring to Eric Rudolph, wanted by federal officials for a series of bombings at abortion clinics, a gay nightclub, and the Atlanta Olympics. Rudolph, who was captured in 2003 after six years on the run, is one of the movement’s major heroes. The mention of his name brings a frisson of excitement to the room and titillated giggles. The knit items go for $75 among them.
David Lane, serving an eighteen-year sentence for vandalizing an abortion clinic and a doctor’s office on March 18, 1995, has donated a video of gospel messages dictated in prison, various original artworks, a cross and pin worn by himself, and a prison ID card. These go for a total of $245.
The last item is a hooded sweatshirt with a prison ID number, donated by John Brockhoeft, who is in the room with us. He is introduced as an “ex-con for life.” Brockhoeft is a forty-seven-year-old truck driver. His face is gaunt and glowering. My assistant points him out to me, telling me she finds him “the scariest guy in the room. After Lokey, of course.” He is wearing black fatigues and a black beret and is known here as the Colonel. He served seven years for firebombing a Cincinnati clinic and attempting to blow one up in Florida. During his probation he had to wear an electronic surveillance bracelet and was forbidden from talking to anyone affiliated with the antiabortion movement. Tonight he is among his fellow believers, who treat him like a homecoming hero. The sweatshirt fetches an impressive $125.
His first wife divorced him while he was in prison. But he married a young antiabortion activist who had been writing to him while he was incarcerated. She is here by his side. She has long hair and a sweet, wholesome-looking face. She is watching over their little girl, a pretty blond toddler. She and John are great supporters of Paul Hill, perhaps the most important visionary leader in the movement, who was then on death row in Florida.
Bray now introduces two other ex-cons for life, John Arena and Joshua Graff. Graff is a twenty-four-year-
old who was incarcerated for bombing the West Loop “abortuary” in Houston. Arena is a seventy-seven-year-
old who spent four years in prison for his involvement in blockades and “covert rescue techniques,” including butyric acid attacks.
The evening ends with another hymn, “Jesus Shall Reign,” and another benediction.
Later, I visit Michael Bray at his home in Bowie, Maryland, to learn more about his philosophy.39 Bray lives with his wife and their ten children in a small tract home and runs the Reformation Lutheran Church in a nearby town. He invites my assistant and me into his office. He is utterly charming. He is handsome, intelligent, and intensely charismatic. I understand why people fall under his influence, now that I am seeing him up close.
I ask Bray why he believes that violence is justified, given Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the admonition to turn the other cheek.
“Christians tend to be opposed to violence,” Bray says. “Some oppose capital punishment. But there is nothing in the Scripture to support this view. Violence is amoral—its moral content is determined on the purpose of the violent act.”40
Some Christians argue that the New Testament reflects a progression in human understanding of God and His intentions, I say. The God of the Old Testament is harsh and violent, that of the New Testament kinder and gentler. Why do you focus so much on the Old Testament? I ask.
“There has been a progression of understanding, but still there is judgment of sin,” Bray says. “The grace of God was manifested in his sending His son to earth. But God did not change His standards. Take a look at Pascal, at John Wesley, at Jonathan Edwards’s encounter with God, at Saint Thomas Aquinas. They all make clear that God still judges, even in the New Testament.”
You refer to obedience to God’s calling; that when Joan of Arc heard God’s call, nobody accused her of being psychotic. But if you as a pastor are going to encourage your parish to listen uncritically to the voice of God, how do you know that won’t be encouraging the mentally ill to listen to the voices they hear, possibly instructing them to murder innocent people? What if a serial killer hears a voice telling him to kill, and he believes he hears the voice of God? What if you encourage Islamists or Hindus to kill Christians? They are equally convinced they are killing in the name of God, as are antiabortion activists, I argue.
“You should only listen to the voice of God if the action called for is morally justified,” Bray says unsatisfactorily.
How should a pastor react to a modern Abraham who claims that God has instructed him to kill his son? I ask. Bray seems unprepared to answer this question.
Later I will learn that Paul Hill, one of Bray’s protégés, felt he was following Abraham’s example when he killed Dr. Britton. Hill knew he would be leaving his three children essentially fatherless. He felt that God would be pleased by his willingness to sacrifice the well-being of his own children for the good of countless children still unborn. “It occurred to me that I was making a sacrifice—thinking about the promise made to Abraham that if he was willing to sacrifice his son, that God would bless Abraham and grant to him descendants as numerous as the sands in the seashore and the stars in the sky.”41
We move on.
In your book A Time to Kill you draw a distinction between vengeance and protective force; that the activist who engages in “defensive action” does so not out of vengeance, but to save the unborn. In that case why would it be necessary ever to kill? Why not wound doctors like Shannon did—shooting them in the arms?
“Shannon intended to shoot Tiller in the arms,” he says. “She did that on purpose. But Tiller went back to work right away, so it shows that wounding doctors doesn’t necessarily work.”
We spend some time talking about Christian Reconstructionism, a movement to turn America into a fundamentalist Christian state with laws in accordance with the Old Testament.
I ask Bray, do you foresee a Christian revolution anytime soon?
“The necessary structures are not really in place at this point,” he says. “You have to consider the difference between a legitimate revolution and anarchy. The problem is that people like the status quo—they’re not ready for any kind of revolution at this point. There would have to be a war, an economic crisis. A plague. You can’t have a revolution when the president says I’ll give everyone free medical care and grow the economy. People are generally happy right now—the economy is doing well.
“Not everyone is called to be a missionary. The work entails sacrifice. Similarly, we wouldn’t expect everyone to become a prisoner of Christ—not everyone wants to, feels called to, or can afford the sacrifice. You must count the cost. But the truth is, I feel more fear of being charged with not encouraging activists more.”
It occurs to me that Michael Bray is managing to encourage contributions to the public good of “saving the babies” without providing typical selective incentives. Hafez Sayeed, for example, whom we discussed in chapter 5, provides his followers with food, housing, schooling, weapons, and in many cases, salaries. His organization punishes and, in some cases, kills disobedient operatives. But Bray persuades his followers to take action without threatening them and without giving them material things. Although he raises money for the families of the “martyrs,” the proceeds of the yearly auction do not amount to much—$615. It certainly does not rival the $10,000 to $25,000 that Saddam Hussein offers the families of Palestinian “martyrs.”42
Individual operatives can have their own reasons for turning to terrorist violence unrelated to the group’s purported goals. “Individuals are drawn to terrorism in order to commit terrorist violence,” Jerrold Post argues. They feel “psychologically compelled” to commit violent acts, and the political objectives they espouse are only a rationalization.43 Some of the people attracted to the save-the-babies movement may be more attracted to violence, for example, than they are interested in “saving babies.” (Dave Grossman estimates that 2 percent of soldiers actually take pleasure from killing.44) For these individuals, terrorism is an end in itself rather than a means to an end: it is consummatory or expressive rather than instrumental. Men who take pleasure from killing people may be relatively easy to recruit to terrorist movements, but they are also likely to be harder to control than those who are committed to the cause.
Although some of the people involved in the movement may fall into this category, more is going on here. Michael Bray is persuading people to take action by appealing to their values and needs without offering material incentives. He is displaying a kind of leadership that is different from Hafez Sayeed’s style.
When I began reading about leadership in an effort to understand Bray’s approach, I discovered that there is no general agreement about what leadership entails, let alone how it’s practiced. Leadership has become a popular area of inquiry in a wide variety of academic disciplines, but there is no consensus about what the word leadership means, even within disciplines.45 But none of the definitions I found in the literature accurately describes what Bray is doing.46
I will call the kind of leadership that Bray and his colleagues employ “inspirational leadership,” to distinguish it from other forms. Inspirational leadership involves a relationship between leaders and followers in which each influences the other to pursue common objectives, with the aim of transforming followers into leaders in their own right. But, unlike Burns’s transformational leadership, inspirational leadership may promote immoral action.47
Inspirational terrorist leaders are different from commanders, whom we will discuss in chapter 8. Bray and his colleagues do not punish or threaten wayward followers. They use moral suasion rather than cash to influence their followers, appealing to higher-order deficiency needs in the Maslow hierarchy, including the desire to be part of a community and to gain recognition for one’s achievements. Some of the leaders are charismatic, but not all. Commanders, as we will see in chapter 8, appeal to their cadre’s most immediate needs for food, shelter, and safety (although they also appeal to their higher-order needs).48
Inspirational terrorist leaders work best in postindustrial, virtually networked organizations. They inspire “leaderless resisters” and lone-wolf avengers rather than cadres. They run networks or virtual networks rather than bureaucracies, and they encourage franchises. Inspirational leaders rarely if ever get involved in breaking the law themselves. That is why this style of leadership can persist even in states where the law is generally respected. If Michael Bray started paying his “saints,” he would soon be incarcerated.
A few weeks after visiting Bray, I decide to call Bob Lokey to see if there is anything else he wants to tell me.49
What fraction of the antiabortion movement supports killing abortion providers, what you call defensive action? I ask.
“A small core would actually carry it out in my view,” he says. “But one hundred percent of the people I talk to believe the things I say about it. I sometimes ask people, ‘Do you believe America needs a civil war?’ and everybody I talk to about that says yes. And I talk to a lot of people. A civil war would be pretty violent. Most people that I know and that I talk with agree with me on this—it’s just that they’re not as vocal as I am.
“People don’t tell you the truth in polls. But I have a knack for talking with people—I have a knack for getting them to tell the truth. The major part of America thinks there should be civil war…there will be a civil war. When would it begin? I don’t know about that. Everybody asks me that. Probably soon—within a few years. People are getting more upset and angry not just about abortion—it’s about all manners of things. Justice. There are racial overtones. People are fed up with affirmative action, immigration. The white male is being pressed real hard.
“When I’m out there with other truck drivers, I say we should have a shooting war and people say, ‘Yeah, we should.’ Most white people I talk to feel they’re being discriminated against. There’s a lot more of that on the Internet as well. I didn’t realize the movement was as large as there [sic] appears to be. When I was in prison, there were Nazi groups, but they seemed to be tiny splinter groups and the members were poor. Hardly ever did you see anyone who was middle-class. But now I see normal middle class people—married people—who are white supremacists or whatever you would call it. They are defensive about their race. They’re opposed to discrimination against the white male. People feel attacked. Everybody that I know feels attacked.
“I’ve been picking up on the Internet; people are talking about anthrax, poisons. I think that very soon that will be perceived as one of the modes of getting at Them…. When you are at the bottom, when you have no power at all…There was a time when I was thinking about these things.
“Paul Hill is a good example for people to follow…he’s a real martyr, no doubt about it. The people at a distance, they’re conservative. They say they oppose violence when you ask them in a poll. If you took a poll right now, ‘Do you believe in violence to stop violence?’—they’d say no. That’s hypocrisy speaking. Polls lie because people lie to the polls. I’m expecting it—I’m expecting civil war soon, and hoping for it. I’ve had everything in my life that I wanted. The tragedy is that I didn’t know what I wanted until it’s too late. I’m going to get it. Civil war will come.”
Paul Hill is a former Presbyterian minister. On July 29, 1994, he shot and killed John Britton, a doctor who provided abortions in Pensacola, Florida, and the doctor’s security escort, a seventy-four-year-old retired air force lieutenant colonel named James Barrett.
Hill argues that “the abortionist’s knife” is the “cutting edge of Satan’s current attack” on the world.50 He believes that anyone who opposes abortion on moral grounds is obligated to defend the “innocent unborn.”51 As citizens, we must always distinguish between what is legal and what is right, he says. “It is self-evident that a government may declare an act legal that is actually unjust according to God’s law. A slave owner prior to the Civil War may have abused his slave in a way that was legal, but ultimately unjust. The present abortion laws legalize the killing of unborn children, they are unjust in God’s eyes,” he asserts.52
“The Bible clearly teaches that we may protect our own lives from unjust harm with deadly force if necessary,” he argues, quoting Exodus 22:2, which says, “If the thief is caught while breaking in, and is struck so that he dies, there will be no blood guiltiness on his account.” “The Scriptures also clearly teach that as we should defend our lives with force, we should also do so for our neighbor,” he argues. “When the state or any other authority requires one to do what is contrary to God’s law, the child of God ‘must obey God rather than men.’ This was clearly the opinion and practice of Peter and the Apostles.” Prayer and fasting are not enough, moreover, because true faith “shows itself by good works.”53
Killing fetuses is the moral equivalent of Hitler’s killing of Jews in gas chambers, Hill argues, and those who don’t take action in the face of such atrocity are the moral equivalent to the acquiescent church leaders in Hitler’s Germany, who “also shrank from resisting the evils of an unjust, oppressive government…. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an example of a church leader who, as an individual, sought to protect innocent life by plotting the death of Hitler…. We are certain that the counsel of restraint today will be regretted by those who look back on it in the future,” he says.54
Hill has become an inspirational leader in his own right. He admonishes his followers not to remain at home, leaving others to respond to the “call from the womb.” “Death opens her cavernous mouth before you,” he says. “Thousands upon thousands of children are consumed by her every day. You have the ability to save some from being tossed into her gaping mouth. As hundreds are being rushed into eternity, other questions shrink in comparison to the weighty question ‘Should we defend our born and unborn children with force?’ Take defensive action!”55
It is difficult to visit Paul Hill. You need permission from the prison authority in Florida where Hill is incarcerated. And you need Hill to request that you come. Both the Reverend Donald Spitz and Michael Bray agree to write to Paul Hill, encouraging him to meet with me. I also write to Hill myself. Eventually I receive a letter from Hill. It is written in carefully lettered calligraphy. No errors, no smudges. Like a wedding invitation.
Dear Ms. Stern,
Thank you for your letter of April 15. I was glad to approve your request for an interview…. I am glad to hear you are interested in the Christian Reconstruction movement. My worldview is based on Reconstruction principles. I will, thus, be happy to answer your questions on the subject. Since I will, hopefully, get to meet you soon, and be able to discuss these matters in depth, I will not now descend into particulars. I am, however, looking forward to meeting you.
Sincerely, Paul J. Hill56
Florida State Prison is located in Starke, fifty miles southwest of Jacksonville. The prison is surrounded by rows of chain-link fences, razor wire, and guard towers. A colleague who accompanies me and I pick up passes from the guardhouse, and a prison official directs us to the building where death row prisoners meet with visitors. We have to pass through a metal detector so sensitive that the steel in my heels triggers the alarm. I walk through in my stocking feet while a security officer inspects my shoes.
A guard walks us to the room where we are to meet with Hill, inmate number 459364. Hill is the only one of the fifty-four prisoners on death row who remains entirely unrepentant for his crime, the guard tells us, with a look of irritation and perhaps puzzlement.
Hill is waiting for us in a room next to the meeting room. He is wearing a neon-orange prison shirt that looks as though it would be visible in the dark, blue athletic pants, and sneakers. When he comes into our room, his hands are cuffed behind his back, but the guard recuffs them in front of his body. I expect to see shame or resistance or pain in Hill’s features when the guard locks the cuffs in our presence, but I see something like pride, or maybe glee, instead. Hill appears entirely at ease. I sense that his submission to the cuffs gives him the feeling that he has the moral advantage. Perhaps he finds life easier not having to worry about what to do with his hands.
I have come to the prison having read Hill’s manifestos, and I ask him about an apparent inconsistency in his work. If you favor defensive action rather than vengeance, why didn’t you try to incapacitate the doctor? I ask.
“If I wounded him, just shot him in the leg or shoulder, I knew there was an excellent probability that he would return to killing innocent children.” He pauses, then adds, “In my thinking, it just became: I had to kill him…. I was totally justified in shooting the abortionist, because he was actually the one perpetrating the violence.” Moreover, he says, it was an act of defense, not an act of violence. “I would not characterize force being used to defend the unborn as violence.”
We ask him whether the antiabortion movement will be successful. He says yes. “Christ’s kingdom and principles will ultimately prevail. God is in control—he will bring about victory—we must obey him. Sooner or later America will become a Christian nation. Only Christians will be elected to public office. No false worship allowed.”
Do you advocate killing Supreme Court justices? I ask.
“Killing Supreme Court justices, considering the majority of them favor mass murder…It’s hard for me to escape the conclusion it would be just for someone to kill them. But I’m not altogether certain it would be wise,” he says primly.
The Army of God manual promotes the use of chemical and biological weapons, I point out. Would you support their use?
“Yes, yes, I wouldn’t want to rule those out. I’d want, of course, to use them wisely to try to minimize unnecessary harm…. If you sent [the weapons] to an abortion clinic, I would think your chances of harming an innocent person would be greatly reduced.” It is only much later that I understand why he referred to sending weapons to a clinic; violent antiabortion activists have specialized in sending chemicals and biological agent simulants and hoaxes to abortion clinics through the mail. According to the National Abortion Federation, 2001 saw a sharp increase in the number of anthrax hoaxes. In October and November 2001 alone, 550 anthrax-threat letters were received by abortion clinics and other women’s health organizations.57
I ask Hill whether he sees himself as a martyr. “Yes,” he says, “I would be willing to die to promote the truth. I am glad to do so, standing for principles for which I stand.” His excitement causes him to speak in a slightly officious style. “I’m not resisting their efforts to kill me,” he explains, by which he means he is not appealing his death sentence. “The heightened threat, the more difficulties forced on a Christian, the more joy I experience if I respond appropriately.”
He tells us that he has sacrificed his life in the service of promoting good, and this knowledge has left him “experiencing more joy and inner peace and satisfaction” than ever before in his life. “I think it’s because of the increased adversity.” Knowing that what I do is “for Christ’s sake makes it an experience I can rejoice in. I can rejoice and give thanks for the privilege of suffering.” He claims to feel no remorse, professing he would do the same thing again. “I wouldn’t advise them to give me my shotgun back…unless they wanted a similar outcome. I feel what I did was right.58
“There are many things I go through that can legitimately be compared to what Jesus went through,” he says, summarizing his views on the topic of martyrdom.
You once predicted the emergence of a kind of pro-life IRA. Do you believe this terrorist organization has emerged? I ask.
“I would hope that a few people making symbolic acts such as the one I made would cause people to come to grips with the issue [of abortion]. And the thing could be resolved without causing undue chaos…. But as time goes on, there will be more and more need of war.
“There is absolutely no question that an example is one of the best teachers, and there is also no question that I hope others will act in ways similar to the way I acted. So, yeah, I hope to encourage others to defend the unborn as much as I did,” he elaborates in a subsequent interview. Hill hopes, through his example, to inspire “justifiable homicide at a butchertorium,” what most Americans would call murder.59
Jonathan O’Toole seems to be getting the intended message. Every time he thinks of Hill, he feels he’s not doing enough to stop baby murder. “It really puts me to shame,” he says.60
After spending time with members and leaders of the save-the-babies movement, I had a pretty good sense of how leaders inspire followers to take violent action, even when they cannot offer material rewards in return for participation. As we have seen, inspirational leaders create a narrative and a secret language, which they use to create a community of like-minded believers, very much like a “normal” religion or church community. But unlike most churches, the aim is to inspire followers to take violent action on behalf of the in-group in opposition to an out-group.
Some terrorists are even more “leaderless” than the individuals discussed in this chapter. Lone-wolf avengers are often inspired by strains of anomie expressed on the street or on the Internet, in addition to personal grievances. They may sympathize with the grievances expressed by particular terrorist movements, or they may choose complaints and goals from several movements, creating a kind of patchwork movement of their own. After studying the doctor killers and virtual networks, I turned to assess the problem of lone wolves, which we discuss in the chapter that follows.