They’re not Nazis pretending to be Christians, but Christians who adore Nazism. Today you’d have to be using methamphetamines to understand it, but from the Middle Ages to the early 20th Century it would have been regarded as normative Christianity.
The region of California where this synagogue shooting occurred is only about a thirty minute trip from some of the historic breeding grounds of the Aryan Nations-Christian Identity movement. Or, at least used to be until the traffic congestion made driving from Fallbrook, Temecula, and Hemet a longer ordeal.
If you’ve never heard of any of this before, well, I can say I have been eyewitness to seeing a handful of these troglodytes run off of FreeRepublic in my twenty years here.
Uh, no ...
Christian Identity (also known as Identity Christianity) is a racist, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist interpretation of Christianity which holds that only Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Nordic, Aryan people and those of kindred blood are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and hence the descendants of the ancient Israelites.
...
Christian Identity holds that all non-whites (people not of wholly European descent) will either be exterminated or enslaved in order to serve the white race in the new Heavenly Kingdom on Earth under the reign of Jesus Christ. Its doctrine states that only "Adamic" (white people) can achieve salvation and paradise.
And ... no ...
Sorry, you’re wrong. They’re not Christians. They may come from an ethnic group that was historically Christian and now secular (say, Germans, Scandinavians, etc.) but there is no way they can be considered Christian.
They’re possibly identified with one of these formerly Christian ethnic groups, usually Northern European, but they aren’t Christian and most of them have probably never even darkened the door of a church, or at least not since Granny died.
Thanks for the explanation. I have heard of the Arayan name before honestly didn’t realize they say they are Christian though.