Two weeks ago I was but an innocent babe, totally unaware that there was a vast Satanic conspiracy at the heart of my own religion. But then I stumbled upon a wildly anti-Semitic blog post — entitled “Judaism and the Religion of the Anti-Christ” — that clued me in. Then I found some more blog posts. So, of course, I did a little bit of research to find the roots of the doctrine that claims that Eve had sex with the serpent, that their union produced Cain, that the children of Cain are a separate race of Satanic beings, and that these Satanists infiltrated the Jews, presumably around the time of Moses, and that they are currently somehow in control of Israel.

Please enjoy:

Murray preaches often about a race of evil people, descended from Cain, borne out of “the Serpent Seed” of Eve’s sexual union with Satan in the Garden of Eden. He calls them the “Kenites” and identifies them in his 1979 Shepherd’s Bible as people “who slipped in among the Jewish people in Jerusalem and claim to be God’s chosen people, when in fact they are of Lucifer.” He also mentions that “in 1967 … Jerusalem fell to the Kenites during the 6 day war”; the Israelis, in fact, won the Six-Day War. In one sermon, Dennis Murray speaks of “the Kenites, who are responsible for the slaying of Christ.” (In most Judeo-Christian traditions, the Kenites are a nomadic clan of Midianites and a tribe into which Moses married.)

The Serpent Seed is a belief ripped straight from the pages of “seedline” or “two-seed” Christian Identity theology, the hard-line version of the theology that holds that Eve was impregnated by Satan and gave birth to his son, Cain, described as the first Jew. That is, Jews are seen as biologically descended from Satan, and are allegedly hard at work preparing the earth for his rule. Identity adherents also argue that whites, not Jews, are the real Hebrews of the Bible, and that non-whites are sub-human “beasts of the field” created without souls.

While Murray doesn’t outright endorse these hardliner views, by promoting the “Serpent Seed” doctrine on 225 broadcast stations he’s gone further than any Christian Identity preacher in pushing what seem clearly to be anti-Semitic Identity teachings into the mainstream.

“This is certainly Identity theology, inasmuch as he presents a two-seedline argument, identifies the [present] inhabitants of Israel with the descendants of Cain, and calls the mating of the Serpent with Eve the primal sin,” Michael Barkun, the leading scholar of Christian Identity and a political science professor at Syracuse University, told the Intelligence Report.

The whole piece, lovingly put together by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is illuminating.

Honestly, it’s hard to know how to respond to this stuff … apart from shaking my head and feeling sad about humanity.