Branson, Mo. — It’s a long way to go to church, especially for a congregation used to watching its pastor on television. But the flock of Shepherd’s Chapel is like no other. Twice a year, almost 4,000 of its members will fly or drive from points across the country to this Ozarks tourist destination, best known for the neon kitsch and wholesome family entertainment of the Highway 76 Country Music Boulevard, to see Pastor Arnold Murray, host of the long-running TV Bible study program, “Shepherd’s Chapel.”
The strapping, 6-foot-4-inch octogenarian, known as “The Sarge” to his followers, has gained an audience that numbers in the millions. “Shepherd’s Chapel” has been on the air for at least three decades and is broadcast in nearly every major and mid-size U.S. city.
At Passover this April 5 (Murray calculates the date for Passover according to his own interpretation of the Jewish calendar), the 81-year-old Arkansas pastor is all smiles as the packed audience in the Grand Palace country music hall rises to give him a long standing ovation before he’s even said a word. His son Dennis introduces him as a man who is “taking names and kicking dragons.” One woman can’t contain herself. “We love you, Pastor Murray,” she yells out. Murray jokes that he should get her number before pushing back his sleeves and opening his King James Bible. “Let’s get to work,” he commands. And they do. The audience is so rapt that throughout the 45-minute sermon the only sound they make is the onionskin rustle of thousands of Bible pages turning. But there are some things they’re not being taught.
One of them is the fact that Murray’s 1958 minister’s license was signed by the late white supremacists Roy Gillaspie and Kenneth Goff, two early ideologues of Christian Identity, a racist theology that’s been popular among Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white nationalists for several decades. Most Identity adherents believe the Bible is the history of the white race, who are seen as the real “chosen people.”
Gillaspie was the pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ, a seminal Christian Identity operation — headquartered at Gillaspie’s Bellflower, Calif., church — with a handful of congregations in California and Arkansas, one of which was led by Murray. (Murray’s Church of Jesus Christ in Gravette, Ark., was the precursor to his Shepherd’s Chapel, in the same location.) The Intelligence Report has obtained Church of Jesus Christ newsletters dated 1978 that are signed by Murray.
Goff, for his part, was the founder of the Colorado-based Soldiers of the Cross Training Institute, a school that trained Christian Identity leaders including Dan Gayman, a well-known anti-Semitic leader during the 1980s. In 1958, Goff’s pamphlet, “Reds Promote Racial War,” claimed the Bible supported racial segregation. A 1969 Soldiers of the Cross newsletter penned by Goff describes black civil rights protesters as seeking “to submerge our culture and religious heritage under a flood of cannibalism, voodooism and beastly jungle sex orgies.”
Arnold Murray is still connected to something called Soldiers of the Cross. According to Arkansas public records, a corporation by that name is doing business as Shepherd’s Chapel in Arkansas, and Murray is registered as the corporation’s agent. Murray’s home, his church property where the TV studio and satellites are located, and several parcels of land in Gravette, Ark., are all listed as the property of Soldiers of the Cross.
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