Creativity Movement
Creativity Movement
The Creativity Movement is a religion that doesn’t believe in God, heaven, hell, or eternal life—only in the white race.
Although the Creativity Movement, whose motto is “RaHoWa” (Racial Holy War), proclaims itself a religion of race, Creators, as members of the group call themselves, do not believe in God, heaven, hell, or eternal life. If you are a member of the white race, according to the Creators, then you already have everything. You are, in fact, “nature’s highest creation.” The Creators’ version of the Golden Rule is: “What is good for the white race is the highest virtue; what is bad for the white race is the ultimate sin.”
The Creativity Movement was originally founded by Ben Klassen in 1973 as the Church of the Creator (COTC). Klassen, born in the Ukraine, reared in Canada, joined a number of far-right organizations, including the John Birch Society, which he later denounced. He served as Florida chairman of George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign and worked on a book, Nature’s Eternal Religion, which he envisioned would depose the Judeo-democratic-Marxist values poisoning contemporary life and supplant them with a new concept of race as a transcendent embodiment of absolute truth. By contrast, Christianity was a suicidal religion. That particular denouncement became ironic when Klassen committed suicide on August 6, 1993, at the age of seventy-five, by swallowing four bottles of sleeping pills.
Things had not gone well for Klassen toward the end of his life. He had gained a few converts to his new religion, but on May 17, 1991, one of the COTC ministers, George Loeb, murdered a black Gulf War veteran and was sentenced to life with no possibility of parole for twenty-five years. In 1992 the murdered sailor’s family, represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed suit for $1 million against the COTC for vicarious liability. Klassen desperately attempted to divest himself of all personal assets and to dissociate himself from the COTC. His first choice for someone to take his place as leader of the group was serving a six-year sentence for selling tainted meat to public school cafeterias. Choice number two was a pizza delivery man in Baltimore, but at the last minute, the position fell to a Milwaukee skinhead who ran COTC until January 1993. Shortly before his death in August 1993, Klassen replaced the skinhead with Richard McCarty, a telemarketer.
The COTC floundered under McCarty’s leadership. Less than a year after Klassen’s suicide, the Southern Poverty Law Center sued for dissolution of the Church of the Creator, and McCarty quickly rolled over.
Matt Hale discovered COTC in the early 1990s when he attended Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, but he exhibited no real interest in joining the movement until he saw an opportunity to assume leadership in 1995. Hale had become fascinated with Hitler and National Socialism when he was just a boy and had read Mein Kampf and racist organizations’ literature since he was in the eighth grade. On Hale’s twenty-fifth birthday, July 27, 1996, a group of COTC elders, known as the Guardians of the Faith Committee, named him pontifex maximus, “highest priest,” of the organization, which he renamed World Church of the Creator (WCOTC). Hale gave the group new energy and brought many young male followers to the WCOTC to become dedicated members.
In 1999 Hale earned a law degree from Southern Illinois University and passed the bar exam. The state bar denied him a license to practice due to his highly publicized bigotry. Subsequently Hale used this denial as another ploy in gaining publicity. He appeared on numerous radio talk shows and tabloid television programs, such as those hosted by Ricki Lake, Leeza Gibbons, and Jerry Springer. Tom Brokaw profiled him on an NBC report entitled “Web of Hate.”
In 1999 Benjamin Smith, one of WCOTC’s members, went on a two-state killing spree, beginning on July 4, that left two dead and nine wounded—all members of racial and religious minorities, including African Americans, Asian Americans, and Jews. At first Hale denied knowing Smith, but then, reflecting upon the carnage wrought by Smith, commented that the overall loss was only one white man.
In November 2002 the WCOTC lost a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against it by Te-Ta-Ma Truth Foundation, which had trademarked “Church of the Creator” many years earlier. Hale refused to comply with U.S. district court judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow’s order to cease using the name Church of the Creator on websites and all printed matter, and in January 2003, when he appeared in court for a contempt of court hearing, he was arrested for conspiring to have the judge murdered.
On March 7, 2005, Judge Lefkow returned home from work to find her husband, attorney Michael F. Lefkow, and her mother, Donna Humphrey, lying dead in pools of blood, seemingly executed with bullet wounds to the head. Immediately Matt Hale was suspected of orchestrating and ordering the murders from his jail cell as an act of revenge against the judge. Hale protested his innocence, and in this matter he was found not guilty when Bart Ross, who had been angry with Judge Lefkow for dismissing a malpractice suit that he had brought, left a suicide note confessing to the murders. But in the matter of conspiring to have Judge Lefkow assassinated in 2003 Hale received a forty-year prison sentence on April 6, 2005.
In 1981 Ben Klassen wrote The White Man’s Bible, required reading for all Creativity Movement members. Among the beliefs outlined in Klassen’s “Bible”:
- Nonwhites, the “mud races” are subhuman and the natural enemies of the White Race.
- Jews are the mortal enemy of the white race, seeking to “mongrelize” it and achieve their ultimate historic goal of totally enslaving all the races of the world.
- Christianity is actually a “concoction” of Jews that is used to frighten the childishly gullible with the concept of hell and to terrorize them into submission.
- White people are the creators of all worthwhile culture and civilization.
- Every issue, whether religious, political, or racial, must be viewed through the eyes of the White Man and “exclusively from the point of view of the White Race as a whole.”