The Assembly of Christian Soldiers is a Christian Identity church that was established in 1971 by former Ku Klux Klansmen. At its peak, the church had approximately 3000 members organized into 16 congregations in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi.
The Assembly of Christian Soldiers was incorporated in Alabama in August 1971 by Jessie L. Thrift, who was a former Grand Wizard of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a schismatic KKK group. Among the members of the church were a number of other well-known KKK members. The church was best known for its 1970s program of using its tax-exempt donations to subsidize private, all-white segregated schools in the southeastern United States.
Famous quotes containing the words assembly, christian and/or soldiers:
“A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“That is the great end of empires before God, to be Catholic and draw nations into their Catholicism. But our empire is less and less Christian as it grows.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“All men hesitate
Separately, always, seeing another year gone
Frockcoated gentleman, farmer at his gate,
Villein with mattock, soldiers on their shields,
All silent, watching the winter coming on.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)