Kentucky wrote:I have a prison ministry with about 100 inmates and some of them don't even read what I send them; at least that's what other prisoners tell me. I spend one day a week doing correspondence and it's time consuming.
Clifton's experience has been that many prisoners just like to GET mail. I saw that same thing in prison. They don't DO anything with the mail they get, but they like to get it because it makes them feel important at mail call, when they get attention.
For that reason, Clifton began asking for ten stamps a year from prisoners, if they would like to continue receiving his mailings. It is not that he wanted to charge, but rather he wanted to weed out the ones who just liked to get mail for the sake of getting mail, and were never really interested in the message. His prisoner mailing list dropped in size about 75%, if not more. Ten stamps is not a lot for six of Clifton's mailings (he only mails every other month). Ten stamps a year is not difficult for even poor prisoners to come by (I should know).
Kentucky wrote:I hear a lot of promises about when they get out, they're going to set up a church, and when they get out I never hear from them again. I could be discouraged, but I think that if just one of these guys turns out like Bill, then it will have all been worth it.
Well, thanks, Mark, I am humbled. But there is a difference, I think, between what I have done and what most prisoners do. A lot of men in prison simply need an identity. ANY identity. They hook up with others out of their own insecurity. Sometimes they have to hook up with a group, for protection from the alien masses. Whether it be CI or Asatru, or Aryan Nations or Aryan Brotherhood, they need to belong to something. That is also why so many men leave prison covered with tattoos. As soon as they get out, they move onto whatever new opportunity they have, and forget what they were (or THOUGHT they were) in prison.
I was not of that sort. I did not seek out Christian Identity. Rather, it found me. But once it did, I felt as though I had to prove it out. The results of that proof is why I am here. I was already 20 months into my CI studies before Clifton finally acknowledged one of my letters, the second time I wrote to him to correct him on the identity of the Phoenicians.
Kentucky wrote:It's like being a missionary to our own people who don't want what we have to give them, whatever station in life they have. We merely plant the seed or give them a legal notice (that ignorance is no excuse of the law) and God does the choosing of when it is the appointed time for their calling in life. When somebody rejects the Good News of the Word, there's always somebody else who hasn't heard it yet and we move on.
After I learned enough, I offered CI truth to just about every White man I met in prison. For a few years I held a Bible study in the library or on the rec yard. I probably spoke at length to hundreds of guys, most of whom are now on the outside. Of all the men I knew in prison who spoke to me regularly, only 3 or maybe 4 stuck to the message. One of them is on this forum. He and I learned about CI at the same time, from another man whom neither of us have heard from since shortly after he got out. One other is often in the program chats, but he is not signed up here. Two out of two thousand is about the right ratio, when one considers some of the Old Testament accounts, such as Gideon's 300 out of 30,000, or the 7,000 men of Elijah's time.
To get back onto the topic at hand, at least in some degree.
The biggest problem I found in years of talking to the Asatru crowd is
morality. I am not saying that all of them are immoral. But for almost all of the guys I spoke to who were Asatru and who could not accept CI, the hurdle was morality. They could not accept that they should not sleep around, or be able to sleep with someone of another race if they chose to. They could not accept a standard of sobriety. (I don't see a problem with drinking a couple of beers or a couple of glasses of wine, but I have a huge problem with those who become intoxicated.) They could not argue with me about history or the veracity of the Bible, but they refused it on this basis alone: that they would not accept Christian morality.
