As a historian of religion and culture I have long been firmly convinced that we can understand a great deal about the present by studying the past. The conviction holds true, I believe, for the study of extremism, and therefore I today will attempt to shine some light on contemporary extremist movements by examining a select group of their historical predecessors.

My own research focuses on the groups that have embraced communal living. I believe that communal groups are especially valuable for our investigations because their members embody such a high level of commitment. It is relatively easy for a casual adherent to some cause or other to profess deep conviction, whether truly deep conviction actually exists or not, but it is a much stronger statement of the depth of one’s feelings when one actually moves in and lives with others of like mind, devoting not only occasional words but one’s whole life and being to the movement in question. Since communal groups thus tend to be populated with persons whose commitment levels are unusually high, they provide fertile ground for the study of the beliefs in question, in this case ultraconservative extremism.

This presentation, therefore, examines some of the communal groups of the past, hoping to retrieve information of value to the situation at hand today. My own research has been focused largely on American groups, and those will form the basis of my examples here today, but the lessons these groups and their members provide are as useful to Europe as they are to the United States. Extremism, particularly across the North Atlantic, knows no national bounds.

The largest and most numerous of the ultraconservative communal groups have had some relation to the Latter Day Saints movement, and it is with LDS-derived groups that I begin. Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon Church, is better accepted than it once was, dozens, probably hundreds, of groups have splintered from the main church, in most cases in the name of seeking to restore lost conservative orthodoxy.

One of the largest of the Mormon splinters has been what is now generally known as the fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, headquartered at Colorado City, Arizona. Disaffected by the main Mormon church’s abandonment of polygamy in 1904, polygamists began to settle in this remote desert area, far from any established legal authorities, in the late 1920s. They established a commune that owned all the land. The fundamentalists’ rather open practice of polygamy, however, did not escape the notice of the authorities, distant though they may have been. Major raids took place in 1935, 1944, and 1953.

Did the raids change the behavior or commitments of the Colorado City faithful? Hardly. Indeed, they were if anything counterproductive. The government could not change the polygamists’ behavior. Eventually, with no better outcome in sight, the government released the captives, and by and large they went back to Colorado City and took up life as before.

Eventually the community relaxed its barriers. When I visited with a group of scholars in 1999, we were personally provided with a guided tour by the mayor, himself a polygamist, and were allowed to take pictures at will. However, at just about that time a new controversy over polygamy was growing Mormon country. Colorado City responded to the pressure mainly by reverting to a posture of exclusion. Today the church and communal town are again relatively isolated. Official pressure has not eliminated or even reduced polygamy, and the chance for further conflict remains great.

Another commune of note founded a few years before Colorado City seems similarly to provide a good rationale for nonintervention. In 1918 William E. Riker founded Holy City near San Jose, California, as a place to work out his convoluted version of Christianity, which espoused bitter, outright racism as a major part of its convoluted social and political philosophy. Eventually hundreds of Riker’s followers lived at the commune, whose racist extremism was well advertised on large billboards. Although Riker did have some scrapes with the law and had to defend lawsuits by disaffected former followers, by and large the authorities did not intervene at Holy City, rather letting the distasteful experiment run its course. The most important outside interference came in 1942, when Riker was arrested for sedition because of his admiration for Hitler, but he was acquitted. Otherwise the hands-off policy of public officials worked well, because gradually Riker’s followers grew disenchanted and the commune finally became extinct on its own. The threat that Holy City seemed to embody never materialized.

On the other end of the political spectrum, an American commune established as a paramilitary leftist haven has also played out harmlessly. Black Bear Ranch was founded in an extremely remote location in northern California in 1968. The founders of Black Bear wanted a place of asylum for radical leftist political refugees and also a place where weapons practice could be conducted. Black Bear was remote, with no human neighbors within ten miles.

But the radical vision, although strong, was never fully implemented. For one thing, the commune did not screen its members carefully, so many not fully committed to the commune’s ideals were taken in. Also, given the commune’s remoteness, members had to spend a great deal of time simply dealing with their own survival, providing their own medical care, killing wild animals for food, schooling their children, and cutting firewood, for example. And thus it has been ever since. A small, largely self-sufficient commune continues today, but no one regards it as any kind of threat to any prevailing values.

One other controversial American commune also seems to be receding as a potential social threat. The Church Universal and Triumphant, a wing of the Theosophical movement, began buying land in Montana in 1981, and in 1986 moved its headquarters there. Neighbors began to worry that a highly threatening armed camp was being established in their midst.

The church’s rhetoric has long had rather ominous overtones, and in Montana the church began to prepare for cataclysm in earnest, building large, well-equipped underground bomb shelters with extensive survival supplies as well as gathering at least a modest arsenal. Any threat that the church might represent, however, seems to be declining today. Prophet based much of her apocalyptic vision on a global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, and obviously that vision is not as powerful as it was ten years ago. More recently Prophet’s leadership has been sidetracked by her development of Alzheimer’s disease. The current collective leadership has toned down the urgent rhetoric considerably.

And so goes the story, which can be repeated in many other settings. The Aryan Nations enclave in Idaho seems to have become less threatening with the aging and illness of its founder, Richard Butler. The Almost Heaven settlement founded by prominent American right-wing activist Bo Gritz has experienced internal turmoil and charges of financial irregularities. One thing to keep in mind is that these communities, individually and collectively, are tiny, with such a low population as to constitute not even a blip on any demographic radar screen.

The evidence seems to suggest that relatively little violence and relatively few overtly hateful acts come directly from the ultraright communes. It is harder, however, to measure the larger influence that such communes have on the outside public. For example, an academic participant-observation study led by a faculty member at the University of Montana found the noted rightist commune called Elohim City relatively benign. However, Elohim City’s ties with violent rightists are hard to overlook. Leading a troubling list of connections is one with Timothy McVeigh, who had visited the community before he planted his bomb in the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Influence is tricky to track, and while it seems likely that communal groups would not be more vital at fostering hate crimes than noncommunal groups, in an age of instant communication and easy publicity the possibility that a visible, physically established enclave could have undue influence is hard to ignore.

One question of great importance to those gathered at this assembly is that of the influence American groups may have on European groups. That question is, unfortunately, impossible to answer with precision. That American groups do have some influence in Europe cannot be doubted; for better or worse, American culture in all its forms has a heavy worldwide impact, and in the world of ideas, including hateful ideas, American ideas are easily dispersed because of America’s unusually high level of commitment to freedom of speech and of the press. One reason American influence on Europe is hard to track precisely, however, rests on the fact that the communication involved is often not public. Americans operate a number of hateful websites, but outside investigators cannot easily tell just what level of traffic such websites bear. We also do not know what volume of private mail, including email, might be involved.

We do know that private communication does take place; we know, for example, that one specific case in which American racist ideas were communicated to Swedes involved a series of letters from James Ellison, head of the radical Covenant, Sword, and the Arm of the Lord commune in Missouri, to Tommy Rydén, the Swedish racist. We also know of some personal contacts between Europeans and Americans in which American extremist ideas appear to have been influential on the Europeans, as in the visit of the German Andy Strassmeir to Elohim City, one of the longest-lived far-right American communes and a place where Strassmeir met a number of notable American radical-right leaders. Such contacts are probably more substantial than any of us can prove with actual evidence, but in any event the phenomenon of America-European contact is difficult to grasp fully. Modern electronic communications media make tracking such contacts exceedingly difficult; even if we monitor a person or group’s telephone lines, email, and websites, it is simple for someone trying to evade detection to use a different internet or telephone line (perhaps one at a public library), open multiple email accounts, and open mirror websites.

Where the authorities have confronted American communal extremist groups violently, the results have often been disastrous, as we saw so dramatically at Waco. Left alone, they typically seem to become absorbed in meeting the necessities of life. Eventually they tend to fall victim to internal conflict, or to weariness on the part of members of living a Spartan lifestyle, or perhaps to aging and the moderation of extreme views and potential actions that sometimes comes with advancing age. Although of course criminal acts against outsiders must be countered and prosecuted vigorously, society would seem to have little to gain by trying to overthrow an extremist commune in any direct and forceful manner.