Okie Filth | Jesus Dirt Track

More than a year after voting in a city commissioner with white nationalist ties, residents of a city in Oklahoma will head to the polls to decide whether to remove him.

Judd Blevins is facing a recall election in Enid, Oklahoma, a deeply conservative city of 50,000 people, after residents discovered his affiliation with a white nationalist hate group. Blevins served as a recruiter for Identity Evropa, the local newspaper reported weeks before residents voted him into office for a four-year term. The white nationalist group later disbanded and rebranded as “identitarians.”

White Christian nationalist beliefs have infiltrated the religious mainstream so thoroughly that virtually any conservative Christian pastor who tries to challenge its ideology risks their career, says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of the New York Times bestseller, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.”

“These ideas are so widespread that any individual pastor or Christian leader who tries to turn the tide and say, ‘Let’s look again at Jesus and scripture,’ are going to be tossed aside,” she says.

The ideas are also insidious because many sound like expressions of Christian piety or harmless references to US history. But White Christian nationalists interpret these ideas in ways that are potentially violent and heretical. Their movement is not only anti-democratic, it contradicts the life and teachings of Jesus, some clergy, scholars and historians say.