A briefcase full of C-4

There are people on this earth who are out to do evil. They cannot do good. They want to put out more drugs into this earth, they want to put out pornography, the humanistic junk that’s in our teachings today. Those types of people are going to have to go—one way or another, whether it’s fire from heaven or fire from a barrel, they’re going to have to go.

— Kerry Noble, 1983

Kerry Noble had a pistol with a sound suppressor and a briefcase packed with military-grade C-4 plastic explosive wired to a timer.

The plan was to drive from Arkansas to Kansas City, Mo., cruise the park where the queers met, and shoot as many of them as they could. Then Noble would leave the briefcase in an adult bookstore. Boom.

The plan was to jump-start the inevitable revolution. The plan was to fire the first shots in the inevitable civil war.

But while cruising through the park on a Saturday evening, Noble and a friend found it mysteriously deserted. There was no one to shoot.

So they drove to the bookstore, where the clerk told Noble he’d have to check his briefcase. He couldn’t figure a way to set the timer and walk out of the store without drawing undue attention to himself, and with a wife, he was not ready to become a suicide bomber. So he walked out, and he and his friend decided to repair to a motel to spend the night and consider their options.

On Sunday morning Noble’s friend, who had grown up in the city, suggested they attend services at a church his family had belonged to when he was a child. When they got there, they discovered it was no longer a Baptist church. It was now called Spirit of Hope, a Metropolitan Community Church with a congregation made up mainly of gays and lesbians.

Now Noble understood why there had been no one in the park, and why his attack on the bookstore had been thwarted. It was obvious that God had bigger plans. The church was jammed; if Noble set the timer and walked away he would likely kill hundreds of sexual deviants. It was as though God nodded. His path was clear. He would bomb the church. The congregation started singing. They weren’t singing the same hymns Noble and his family sang, but the sounds were familiar. As was the way they closed their eyes and lifted their hands, as though the spirit was moving through them.

“These people were like me,” Noble told me. “No different.” So he walked away with his briefcase.

It wasn’t so easy to walk away from his position as high priest and propaganda minister in the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord. He had invested years with the group, and after the feds shot Gordon Kahl to death in Smithville in 1983, he’d become convinced there was no way forward without violence.

He’d come up with the motto “War in 1984.” His heart might have changed, but leaving the group was impractical and dangerous.

Noble understood that CSA leader James Ellison was ruthless and probably unhinged. Ellison likened himself to the prophet Elijah and espoused an apocalyptic racist vision. It was the duty of godly white people—“elect by grace and elect by race”—to survive the coming purge and help purify the world. Noble decided to put aside his doubts about Ellison and re-dedicate

himself to the cause.

So he was there in April 1985 when nearly 300 law enforcement officers, led by the FBI, surrounded the CSA’s compound near Bull Shoals with a warrant for the arrest of the group’s leader on weapons charges.

As second in command, Noble negotiated with the FBI, who treated the siege like a hostage situation since the CSA had many children on the property. By the end of the second day, Noble was certain he would die in a shootout with federal agents.

But he developed a rapport with the FBI hostage negotiator, and after four days the CSA members walked out of the compound, surrendering their weapons (which included an anti-tank rocket, more than 30 machine guns, a World War I-era anti-aircraft gun and an unfinished tank).

That was pretty much the end of the CSA. Most of the men—by doctrine, women had no role in the group—went to prison. When they got out, they rejoined their families, and most turned their backs on the Christian Identity movement.

The prophecies hadn’t come true. No other right-wing paramilitary group or act of God had swooped in to save them. There was no purge, no civil war. A few hard-shell true believers held on, but most felt embarrassed to have thought themselves so special.

Noble spent 26 months in prison thinking and praying. He’d gone from the president of his high school math club to a married Southern Baptist minister at 21 to a would-be domestic terrorist who nearly committed what at the time would likely have been the deadliest bombing in American history.

And he realized that he hadn’t undergone some dramatic Kafkaesque metamorphosis, and was pretty much the same guy he had always been.

You don’t have to be wild-eyed or demon-possessed to do evil; you just have to listen to the wrong voices, to fall under the influence of persuasive charismatic people who are mad or cynical or both. You can rationalize almost any notion, reconcile yourself to it as logical and inevitable truth. You wake up one morning with a briefcase full of C-4 and murder in your heart.

I wrote quite a bit about the CSA (a deliberate echo of the Confederate States of America) and other paramilitary/survivalist Christian Identity groups who opposed the American government (they usually referred to it as the ZOG—Zionist Occupation Government) in the ’80s. It wasn’t until 2008 that I met Noble during a panel discussion at the Little Rock Film Festival after a screening of Little Rock native Michael Wilson’s “Silhouette City,” a documentary about the CSA.

Noble came across as a gentle, vaguely academic man, a grandfather who credited the LGBTQ community with helping him to transcend the avenging role he’d imagined for himself, for helping him to recover empathy and humanity. He’d written a couple of books about his time with the CSA and spent years talking about how he and others were seduced by a hatefulness that argued for their white Christian superiority.

I’ve been thinking about Kerry Noble these past few weeks— about how people lose themselves in the weeds of cryptic theologies and conspiracy theories and how they might find their way back into our community where dissent is not blasphemy, where reasonable people can agree to disagree about important things and maintain a repository of agreed-upon facts.

We have to be brave to face our own ordinariness and the general indifference of the universe to our rage. It takes courage to be humble. And it is never too late for love.

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