Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

106 • CHRISTIAN-PATRIOTS DEFENSE LEAGUECHRISTIAN-PATRIOTS DEFENSE LEAGUE (C-PDL). TheC-PDL was a nonstate group of right-wing survivalists who sought tocreate a militia and fortified encampments to preserve white, ChristianAmericans against a coming Communist invasion and racial war. Althoughthe group’s aims appeared to be limited by the remoteness ofthe imagined future holocaust, insofar as the group formed part of thenetwork of white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups, such as theAryan Nations and Ku Klux Klan, it held the same revolutionarygoals of resisting and destroying the U.S. government, or what suchcircles refer to as the “Zionist Occupation Government.”Despite the similarity in names, the C-PDL was not directly relatedto the Identity Christianity preacher Wesley Smith’s Christian DefenseLeague; rather, it was the brainchild of John Robert Harrell,“Johnny Bob,” a former mausoleum salesman who devoted himselfto the Identity Christian message after experiencing an apocalypticvision during an illness in 1959. Convinced that a Jewish conspiracywas leading to a Communist invasion of the United States as wellas to a racial war, Harrell sought to train militia to defend a Mid-America Survival Zone. He became an associate of Robert dePugh,founder of the Minutemen, and became a frequent contributor to theMinutemen’s tabloid On Target.Harrell gave refuge to a Marine who had gone AWOL after embracingthe Identity creed, and in August 1961 federal agents overranHarrell’s fortified Louisville, Illinois, estate, where they found fourunderground two-man bunkers and stockpiles of food and ammunition.Harrell and his followers did not resist arrest, and Harrell was sentencedto four years in prison for harboring a federal fugitive and on various taxevasion charges. After dePugh was imprisoned in 1968 on a conspiracyconviction, Harrell created four organizations to fill the void left by thedefunct Minutemen. The religious organization was the Christian ConservativeChurch of America, which teaches a synthesis of Christianity,nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Communism; the political branchwas the Christian-Patriots Defense League; the military branch was theCitizens Emergency Defense System, a private militia; and the fundraisingbranch was the Paul Revere Club. One could be a member of thereligious branch without having to belong to the other branches, whilemembers of the military and political branches were not required to believein the group’s Identity Christian doctrine so long as they otherwisesupported its white supremacist and anti-Semitic agenda.