ROY ADAMS
ne year ago this month I heard a report by Eric Westervelt on National Public Radio's (NPR's) Morning Edition.* It was chilling. Last year, it said, the 28-acre Idaho compound of the White supremacist group Aryan Nations was confiscated. Now they're looking for a new center of operation, and several former members or sympathizers have opted for Potter County in north central Pennsylvania.
It was there that Westervelt ran into Pastor August Kreis, a 10-year resident of the area, who once carried the title of information minister for the White supremacist group. Explaining why he'd decided to put down stakes in that rural paradise, Kreis did not mince words: "This county is 98.8 percent white. [It] belongs to . . . [God's] children, the white race. [And] . . . the nonwhites that are living here are going to have a choice of either leaving or dying, when the time comes." The aim of the group, as Westervelt reported it, is to establish "an all-white territory by exterminating Jews and sending Blacks, Asians, and Latinos 'back to their homelands.'"
Wow!
The last thing I want to do is give needless publicity to such bigotry in the pages of the Review. But no one who has paid attention to recent social history in the U.S. or elsewhere would dismiss such pronouncements as idle talk. According to former Ku Klux Klan member and one-time Aryan Nations spokesperson Lloyd Cochran (quoted in the report), that was the mistake of the local community during the first years of the Idaho Aryan Nations compound in the 1970s. The community's silence gave Nations time "to raise money, build structures, and recruit."
That done, he says, members took the show on the road. They shot and killed Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, firebombed synagogues, robbed armored cars, and staged shoot-outs with federal marshals. In 1999 Nations member Buford Ferrell shot up a Jewish day-care center in Los Angeles, filled with 4- and 5-year-old Jewish children.
So, to their credit, the local clergy of Potter County are taking no chances. Every week Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Methodist pastors are coming together to discuss, among other things, how to respond to the sinister new development.
Incidents such as these should serve as a wake-up call to Adventists, also. Some of us, far more adept at political correctness than Pastor Kreis of Potter County, have learned how to keep the lid on such ghastly sentiments. We find ways to couch similar thoughts in more dignified, euphemistic code language that gets things off our chest without leaving any "paper trail" behind. My impression is that the Adventist Church is not yet done with problems of race; that notwithstanding the giant forward strides we've taken in recent years, significant pockets of resistance remain among us.
So we need to find appropriate ways to engage in ongoing conversations about these things, ever mindful of our failures of the past, particularly during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. That's when, like many other institutions both religious and secular, we had to be dragged kicking and screaming to comply with civil rights legislation and U.S. Supreme Court decisions affecting the entire country. Given our theology, grounded in the three angels' messages of Revelation 14, we should have been ahead of that development. We should have led, rather than being compelled to follow.
The events of September 11 have unleashed toxic attitudes in many places and exacerbated the venom of traditional hate groups. The Potter County contingent, for one-linked as they are to their Nazi-worshiping ideological cousins throughout the U.S. and elsewhere-is determined. Says Pastor Kreis: "We want a piece of property with a church on it, barracks, places to stay for our people. . . . [We] believe that it's going to come down to violence. We're all armed . . . we have our weapons and our food put away. And we do believe that you're going to see a race war in this country."
However misguided, "sound bites" like these probably signal ugly days ahead. And if they come, we must not let God down this time around.
_________________________
* Morning Edition, Feb. 15, 2002. I'm indebted to that report for the bulk of this editorial.
_________________________
Roy Adams is an associate editor of the Adventist Review.
