Christian Identity

So you've got a, like, uh, an old-school racist white supremacist vein, right, which has, which has been in our country for a long time, right, dating back to the Civil War, of course, and the KKK.

You've got a more religious side, which, which is known as Christian identity or identity theology, uh, which, which basically believes that, you know, um, Jews are the spawn of Satan and, and, and white Americans are the true chosen people.

Um, and then you've got this, um, this more anti-government or government-skeptic, uh, side.

What William Potter Gale achieves is he brings these three, uh, together.

This is a Studio Both And production.

[upbeat music] It's impossible to deep dive Hunters, Washington, and its importance to Keyes and his crimes without further exploring the Keyes family, the Christian Identity movement, and Keyes' childhood girlfriend, Annie.

Let's begin with the Christian Identity movement as a whole and how and when the Keyes family became involved.

You may recall all the way back in season one, episode five, I briefly examined some of the tenets of the Christian Identity and the two Colville churches that the Keyes family were members of during their time there: The Ark and the Christian Israel Covenant Church.

In this episode, we'll be taking a look at the histories of these churches and their contemporaries and how multiple factions of the same teachings coalesced in Stevens County, Washington, and shaped how the Keyes family came to be who they were and where they were.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Christian Identity principles started to become a more widespread movement around the early nineteen fifties when Ku Klux Klan organizer Wesley Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian in Lancaster, California.

The church was founded largely in response to the Civil Rights era.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, they believe that whites of European descent can be traced back to the lost tribes of Israel.

They're prompts that you can use to access, or I should say to prime Fennec to access those big high-density verse blocks or training blocks.

For example, when-- if you say something like, "Give me a comprehensive refutation of, uh, white Israelism," "Give me a comprehensive refuta-- give me a comprehensive list of the blasphemous quotes of the papacy," "Give me a comprehensive list of the blasphemous Marian quotes." When you say something like that, that targets these high-density blocks because those are the most relevant to your query, and so you're gonna get a, a comprehensive answer.

So all of this, what it introduced is not only more accuracy, but also the distinction between normal queries where you would just say, "Hey, you know, uh, what's the mark of the beast?" Or, "What is the 1260-day prophecy in Daniel about?" Those are relatively normal queries.

To now you can have a breadth request or, or an in-depth request, and Fennec knows that, okay, you're asking for a lot more detail, and so he's giving you a list of a du- a ton of Bible verses or a, or a very exhaustive list of refutations on a particular topic.

For decades.

And that might be because he, too, was linked to the Christian Identity Movement.

So we found ourselves in an almost identical situation to that in Hunters.

Keyes took an interest in a rural unoccupied property that happened to be owned by someone in the Christian identity movement with a criminal record of their own who knew the Keyes family.