Editors' Introduction

This issue of JSR introduces a new theme that informs not only these articles, but also many future articles: oppositional cultures. By "oppositional cultures," we refer to radical political and social movements that oppose aspects of mainstream society, to be sure, but that also begin to envision new forms of culture. The groups in this and in our next issue do not, at least on the surface, seem to have much in common, yet a closer look suggests underlying commonalities. Underlying many of these groups, across the political spectrum, is the expectation that if the right conditions were fulfilled, one might then see the more or less spontaneous awakening of a radically new form of culture.

We begin this issue with Joanna Taylor's and Martha Lee's article on the Christian Exodus movement and its exponents' millenarian ideas regarding a proposed evangelical Christian transformation of South Carolina, Idaho, and eventually, the United States as a whole. The underlying engine of this envisioned radical transformation of state and federal government is Christian millenarianism and, in particular, the idea that it is possible to imagine an antisecular future for the United States in which particular evangelical social values—anti-abortion, anti–gay rights, and so forth—can be imposed on the rest of society.

Various kinds of Christian millenarianism also underlie the subjects of our second article, Steven Woodbridge's study of the British National Party, and of our third article, Julius Bailey's study of media coverage of the Christian Identity movement. Woodbridge discusses the complex relationships of the British National Party (BNP) with Christianity, since some members identify with a "purer" form of Christianity, while others have historically been quite critical of mainstream forms of Christianity in England. Part of the oppositional culture of the BNP turns on anti-Islamification themes and, therefore, also on questions of personal and national identity. Similar themes are inherent in the Christian Identity movement analyzed by Julius Bailey, but whereas Woodbridge generally accepts prevailing media narratives about the BNP, Bailey calls into question mainstream media narratives about Christian Identity and raises some interesting issues about what a label like "hate group" really means.

All three of these articles—though they approach their topics from rather different angles—turn on questions of how white subgroups constitute themselves as oppositional movements, and on how they seek to enact an oppositional culture to replace what they see as a decadent mainstream social narrative. In these cases, the millenarian narrative underpins the hopes of social reconstruction, as adherents imagine a future in which their social vision is enacted so that it not only arrests but also transforms the existing society into one that imposes their perspective on the whole.

Not surprisingly, of course, a somewhat similar engine underlies the emergence of the Weather Underground movement out of SDS and the New Left, and informs a particularly quixotic episode in American leftist radical history: the plot (or "plot") to kidnap Henry Kissinger proposed by a Pakistani scholar, Eqbal Ahmad, in 1970 over dinner at a Connecticut farmhouse. Th is episode resulted in the trial of the Harrisburg Eight, and in "Kissinger's Kidnapper," Justin Jackson not only outlines and analyzes the original episode, but also provides a larger sociopolitical and intellectual context for it. In effect, the plot or "plot" to kidnap Kissinger reflects revolutionary aspirations that one also sees in the Weather Underground movement. For Ahmad, with personal experience of Th ird World revolutionary movements, an important revolutionary strategy was to set up popular organizations and institutions that countered and delegitimized the state. The formation of these parallel social and political practices was much more important than any acts of political violence.

Our final article in this issue, by Greg Seltzer, focuses on the Situationist International and the phenomenon of Situationism during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a very different kind of oppositional culture. Whereas the Weather Underground and related revolutionary movements sought to bring down the existing social and political order, the Situationists sought to transform it artistically: for them, art and politics were combined. Effectively, Situationism proposed that, through radical art...