Robert Edward Miles In 1970, he founded the Mountain Church of Jesus Christ the Savior on his property in
Cohoctah Township, becoming a major "
dualist" religious leader, and allied himself with various groups that constituted the
racist and
anti-Semitic political-religious movement known as
Christian Identity, including
Aryan Nations. Miles saw Earth as the site of a battle between a true God and a
false god, with
Jews acting as agents of the false God against the true "chosen people" that would be "white Aryans". According to the political scientist
Michael Barkun, his dualistic theology was important despite its idiosyncrasies, and "the avuncular Miles functioned as a kind of elder statesman of the racial movement". In 1971, Miles, former
Grand Dragon of the Michigan
Ku Klux Klan (KKK), was arrested for conspiring to bomb school buses in an attempt to stop the
forced busing in Michigan. The media billed it as a "Klan trial" even though Miles had not been associated with the KKK for some time. Miles and four others were later convicted and received sentences ranging from two to five years for this incident. In 1977, Miles received a five-year sentence for the bombing and concurrent 4-year sentences for the
tarring and feathering in 1971 of the deputy superintendent of Ann Arbor Public schools. Following the
Greensboro Massacre on November 3, 1979, where anti-Klan communist activists were killed, "a number of previously antagonistic White Supremacist groups, including the
Posse Comitatus and various
Neo-Nazi and Klan factions, began having discussions about how they could formulate a common ideology. These different groups also conducted joint activities and began establishing informal means of communication including
computer bulletin boards and cable TV programs. Many of these groups embraced
Christian Identity. Gradually, a White racist alliance emerged. Centers of this movement included Miles' Michigan farm, as well as the
Aryan Nations compound in
Hayden Lake, Idaho, the site of Identity Pastor
Richard Butler's Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. He wrote for
George P. Dietz's neo-Nazi magazine
Liberty Bell. In the early 1980s, Miles endorsed the
Northwest Territorial Imperative in his seminar
Birth of a Nation. According to him, White Americans constituted a separate racial nation and urged white nationalists to establish a separate white state in the Pacific Northwest. "Let us go in peace", he wrote, "let us be considered a Racial Nation of
Aryans." Coupled with his increasingly anti-US government position, he was referred to as a "Klanarchist". Miles had a history of heart problems and suffered a stroke before he died at McPherson Hospital in
Howell, Michigan in 1992. ==References==