Yet with few exceptions, the mainstream denominations have remained curiously silent in the face of these modern-day crusades. They have some sense these are renegade groups that often espouse a white supremacist doctrine, but I think they are unfamiliar with the theology in many cases and not equipped to take it on. And even when they are equipped and k now something about it, I think there is a tendency to regard it not as worthy of attention because it's repugnant or because the numbers of people involved are small and because the groups lack much in the way of public visibility. In his research Barkun ran across just one graduate student at a seminary studying Christian Identity. It strikes them that it is so unim aginably distant from the intellectual universe that they inhabit, I might as well be talking about a subject from another planet.
Nobody pays attention to the powe rless.
That's why they are blowing up things. There are some class issues here. A lot of them are young, white working class kids. In Identity these were people who weren't afraid to talk about race. The less fundamentalist denominations may also have weakened their ability to refute the Bible-based lore spread by Christian Identity because they have themselves strayed far from the practice of biblical study and interpretation.