NEWS
Robert Millar founded Elohim City in 1973. After his death in 2001, his sons John and David have helped keep the community going. | Photo Gazette / File
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Murrah Building domestic terrorist bombing for the 1983-84 murders of a pawnbroker he thought was Jewish and an African-American state trooper, is still buried in Elohim City. Millar said that Elohim City is labeled frequently as a militant group or a hate group and it is often lumped in with the kind of people who have visited there, including members of the Aryan Republican Army, a group of white supremacists who robbed 22 Midwestern banks in the mid1990s. Millar said that journalists often misidentify his community as white supremacists and describe Elohim City as a “compound” (a term at which he bristles), and John and David Millar both fervently deny in the press that Elohim City is a hate group. Such terminology, David Millar said, amounts to what he calls “paper terrorism.” In concrete terms, many Elohim City residents are part of Christian Identity, a belief that the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Nordic people are the true descendants of the biblical Israelites and other races are barred from achieving salvation and will not take part in the Kingdom of Heaven. According to Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Alabama-based legal research organization devoted to the study and reporting of intolerance, Christian Identity rose to prominence in the 1980s as an influential philosophy among militant right-wing groups such as the CSA. “We get labeled white supremacist. We don’t think there’s anything supreme about us, but our God is supreme. And he chose our people to do particular work,” Millar said. “What we do believe in is racial purity. Kind begets kind, and it’s generally a better environment if white people marry white 8
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people and black people marry black people and Chinese marry Chinese,” he said. “We’re different not by a freak accident of evolution, but this is the creation that the Lord made. We all have unique abilities and a unique plan, so to confuse the issue and make one brown race — that’s all; just a little bit of everything, which I guess is the humanist view of this that would be politically correct — to do that would just add confusion. “We don’t have a problem with the other races, but the wonderful distinctions in our culture, our genetics are something that should be amplified.”
cording to his interpretation of scripture, the election of an African-American man as president of the United States flouted the word of God. “We’re still a predominantly white country; the majority in America would still be the Anglo-Saxon Germanic people. If that’s the case, then they ought to have somebody in the chief office ruling over them. I think that would bring more peace and tranquility in the nation,” Millar said. “The idea of having Barack Obama as president brought a downhill spiral to our nation’s economic growth and recovery after all the war spending that Bush did, the racial tensions have grown rapidly since he’s been in there, and it hasn’t brought peace. The scripture talks about that,” he said. “It says, ‘Don’t have a foreigner that is somebody from another race lead over you. Do not elect them into that office.’ It will not bring peace, tranquility or stability in the nation, right?” At this point, a shift toward “birtherism” should not be too surprising coming from one of Elohim City’s leaders, especially since Donald Trump, a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, popularized the concept. But it underlines how the ideas that originate from fringe groups can be so effectively mainstreamed in today’s political climate. “If you put an Arab … if you got one of them that believes in Islam in as president of the United States or in a place of power and they don’t really have any of the Western civilization thoughts on equity that most of America does, it’s going to be a problem. They can’t really relate in that way,” Millar said. “As a matter of fact, I think that’s why there’s a lot of racial tensions and it’s hard for the children to be brought up in an interracial family, because you have one heritage, African-American, they have a different way of looking about things; they have different way of eating
I think Cruz would be an excellent president. But when you get into genetics like that … really you have to get into the real genetics. David Millar
Race relations
Robert Millar died on May 28, 2001 and was buried near the final resting place of Snell, his friend and spiritual follower. He died three years before Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama gave his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention and seven years before that same man, the child of a white American woman and a black man from Kenya, became president of the United States, an obvious worst-case scenario for the leader of a community that believes in “racial purity” as a key tenet. David Millar said he thinks Obama’s election was an experiment by a young generation with noble intentions, but ac-
certain foods. It’s just going to be different than the average Anglo-Saxon man and his family in their house. “It’s not that one’s right and one’s wrong; it’s that they’re different, and then the child grows up and doesn’t really know where to fit in,” he said. “One of them likes the cornbread and one likes the Irish potatoes.”
The end
In 1996, Robert Millar talked about a future in which Chinese armies would descend on the continent, destroying American society and spurring on the “wars and rumors of wars” promised in Matthew 24:6 that presage Armageddon. In the end, Elohim City would remain to rebuild the
world in its image. When asked about his father’s endtimes scenario, David Millar said it remains true, but with 21st century updates. “I think some of the fundamental concerns are definitely the same today in 2016 as they were back in ’96, although the face of some of them takes different shapes,” he said. “I’ve had people talk with me about the Chinese invasion, and there were large concerns about that back in the ’80s. In a sense, they have been invading; they own a lot of the ports, and the market share in America has gone up, and we owe them a lot of money. “I think some of the ideas of how that’s going to play out have changed. It’s looking a lot different with Trump running now, isn’t it? Nobody knows what’s going to happen.” Millar is a supporter of Trump, though he quickly pointed out that Elohim City’s political stance on the Republican primaries is hardly monolithic. One niece told him she could not stand how Trump comports himself on the campaign trail with a level of crassness that occasionally gives Millar pause as well. But Millar said he approves of Trump’s international policies, including the Trump Wall along the U.S.Mexico border and playing tough with China’s army of commerce. “One thing that is refreshing about Trump is that he speaks his mind,” Millar said, closely approximating the sound bites that have come from the real estate mogul’s supporters since he began surging in the polls. “I don’t always like what he says, but at least he’s just saying whatever comes to his mind. With a lot of the other politicians, you don’t have any idea what they’re really thinking. “He’s not refined as much as Cruz, but at the same time, you sort of appreciate that because you think, well, you’re getting the real Trump. I think that’s one thing this nation’s had sort of enough of, this political correctness where you’re afraid to say what you think, you know, without being accused or frowned on or having to look around and see who’s staring at you.” Millar frequently paraphrases Daniel 2:21 in describing how politics work in his world view, saying that “the Lord sets up whom he will.” So, if Donald Trump were to be elected the 45th president of the United States, it would be God’s will, according to Millar. “Everybody thought he didn’t have a leg to stand on, and here he is, dominating the Republican Party,” Millar said. “We’re finding that pretty interesting.”
So, here is the end of the world, 2016 edition.
“Are you familiar with George Washington’s Vision?” Millar asked. “In the vision, which some people say is doctored or made up, he pretty clearly spells out all the different wars, major wars, we’ve been in. It talks again of a final, if we can say, Armageddon situation.” Again I heard the mysterious voice saying, ‘Son of the Republic, look and learn.’ At this continued on page 10