The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism by Lerone A. Martin. Princeton University Press, 2023. 353pp. $29.95.
These are banner years for unveiling the ways in which US government entities served as “culture makers” during the Cold War. Many books have focused on the US government’s efforts to influence culture outside of the US–particularly the instrumental (or “ideologized”) use of culture for purposes of fighting communism. Some studies include: the CIA’s influence on postwar Western European intellectual circles,[1] or its clandestine distribution of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago inside the Soviet Union;[2] the multi-US agency role in overt and clandestine international broadcasting;[3] the State Department’s use of “jazz diplomacy” in decolonization-era Africa;[4] and an ostensible Cold War application of “dual use” anthropology.[5]
By comparison, religion has been under-assessed as one aspect of instrumentalized Cold War culture. Studies in this area are beginning to appear however, among them Lerone Martin’s The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, which tells the story of “the [FBI’s] embrace and promotion of faith” (7). The book begins with a look at Hoover’s very personal, early-to-mid 20th century Presbyterianism, and yet how, beginning in the early 1940s, Hoover found a combination of Catholic Social Teaching’s anticommunism and both the rigor of Easter Mass celebration and yearly Jesuit-run lay retreats effective in fostering a sense of personal spirituality, vocational pride, organizational cohesion, and civic responsibility among Catholic FBI special agents and their families. Martin then describes how a combination of the desire for denominational fairness within the Bureau, and growing public Protestant fears over “Catholic influence” in the FBI by the mid-to-late 1950s eventually precipitated the identification of Hoover-approved Protestant venues for a yearly FBI family event; a turn by Hoover to Protestant neo-evangelicals as a theologically acceptable route for Christian anticommunist public messaging; and, importantly, a three-part series of popular articles by Hoover himself in Christianity Today in the weeks preceding the 1960 presidential election.
The latter half of Martin’s book addresses how Hoover’s 1960 Christianity Today series led to regular socio-political-focused contributions to the magazine, and how Hoover and Hoover’s FBI became a religious content producer and theological watchdog of sorts–particularly for the growing number of white Protestant evangelicals worried about the anticommunist “soundness” of their own denominations and leaders. Martin describes how Hoover’s relationship to various FBI-friendly clergy, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), and the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) turned Hoover into “white evangelicalism’s revivialist-in-chief” and a “solider-saint” (219) against theological liberalization–whether perceived or actual. Martin then concludes with an extended look at how Hoover’s belief in himself as a key public religious figure, and how Hoover’s (and neo-evangelicalism’s) perspectives on race and social justice, affected the FBI’s actions during the civil rights movement, particularly in the theologicalaspects of the Bureau’s investigation of Martin Luther King.
“Hoover institutionalized Jesuit spirituality within the Bureau”
In Chapter Two and the first part of Chapter Three, Martin offers a detailed look at the introduction of Catholic spiritual disciplines and practices into the FBI during the Cold War. Through his longstanding, personal friendship with Robert S. Lloyd, SJ, and his appreciation for the “Americanism” (“love of God and love of country”) inculcated in Catholic higher learning, Hoover “institutionali[zed] Jesuit spirituality” within the Bureau (15; 34-35; 38). Martin initially describes the “officially voluntary but ‘encouraged’” FBI retreat at Mantesa, which was originally held around Easter, with a summer session added later. Starting in the early 1940s, the retreat was administered internally by the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division (now the Counterintelligence Division), and it compressed a standard thirty-day/four-week Ignatian spiritual exercises retreat into a single, FBI-branded and FBI-focused weekend (39-45). Starting with a Mass using the “FBI Chalice of Salvation” (48), FBI special agents not only received teaching about communism and materialism from a Catholic labor expert, but also spent time on casuistry, ordered and disordered loves, legitimate government authority, personal vocation, calling, and the financial costs of public service (49-59). The retreat’s popularity was such that the FBI’s cadre of non-special agent Catholics wanted something similar. This led to a yearly Lenten Mass and Communion Breakfast for employees and their families. Again organized by the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, the approved speakers for the Mass and the breakfast regularly emphasized the protective role of the Christian faith in democracy’s fight against communism (67-84).
Eventually, the FBI’s Protestant employees pushed for their own event, amid concern from church leaders about growing Catholic numbers and a possible “Catholic conspiracy” in the US government (91-95). The FBI started a Protestant Vespers Service in 1954, first hosted by National Presbyterian, Hoover’s trusted home church in Washington, DC. Like the Catholic event, its focus was on “Americanism” (97). Many Protestant churches vied for the honor of hosting, but Martin notes how Hoover determined who could be trusted with the yearly event. If Hoover viewed a church as remotely friendly toward the National Council of Churches (NCC) or if it was not seen to be holding the line on racial segregation, the chances were higher that the venue would move (88-91; 104-115).
This challenge of Protestant “soundness” was, Martin explains, a potent one for Hoover and the FBI, and precipitated Hoover’s friendly and productive relationship with Christianity Today and neo-evangelicalism. Hoover needed Protestants who were confidently non-NCC and unwaveringly anti-communist, or who would be most likely to trend in that direction, but who did not have an existing reputation of political stridency, intractability, or simply being considered too “fringe.” (124; 168; 192). The neo-evangelicals fit the bill, and beginning with the March 1958 book launch for Hoover’s Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It, Christianity Today became one of Hoover’s core go-tos for broadcasting the anti-communist message to America’s growing (and increasingly Sunbelt-located) conservative evangelical faithful. Martin describes the excitement surrounding, and the praise of, Hoover’s three-part CT series, and how the FBI continuously reprinted and disseminated those same articles across FBI field offices, to churches, social clubs, private anti-communist book studies, and in response to public queries throughout the 1960s (159-172). In the end, Hoover’s neo-evangelical investment paid solid dividends–it more than outlasted the 1958-1961 heyday of the right wing “fringe” crusades[6] and Hoover ended up contributing to Christianity Today up through his death in 1972. Indeed, from the late 1950s onward, all the while maintaining close Catholic connections, Hoover was regularly honored by a slew of Protestant churchmen and ministries (200-219). The FBI even worked with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to prepare college-age students for possible employment at the Bureau (223-225).
For all of the above, Martin’s concluding chapter on Martin Luther King is still his most controversial. The overall contours of the FBI’s early 1960s investigation of King are well known. Martin’s addition to this story is three-fold: first, he explores Hoover’s (and the FBI’s) identification and cultivation of a “friendly” Washington, DC-area conservative black clergyman–Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux–who could serve as a public counterweight to the more theologically liberal King; second, an explanation of how Hoover’s personal theology of race and social justice fit together with neo-evangelicalism’s so-called “moderate” stance and also with Michaux’s own positions; and third, the extent to which Michaux and the FBI cooperated to publicly criticize and delegitimize King’s efforts.
“Christianity Today became one of Hoover’s core go-tos for broadcasting the anti-communist message to America’s growing conservative evangelical faithful”
In 1946, when he was picked up by WTTG-TV, Michaux, up to then a well-known religious radio personality, became America’s first evangelist with a weekly televised program, and, as Martin adds, the first African American star of his own show (227). Elsewhere, Martin has described Michaux as an early religious media entrepreneur, a successful church planter, and a key revivalist.[7] Martin shares the story of how a white editor at the Washington Post “unhesitatingly” told Simeon Booker, the Washington Post’s first black reporter, in 1951, that Michaux was Washington DC’s “leading Negro.”[8] Hoover was a documented fan. He wrote to Michaux as early as 1950, claiming to watch him “whenever [he was at] home,” and in 1951, Hoover sent Michaux a telegram in celebration of his [Michaux’s] twentieth anniversary in Christian broadcasting (227).
Importantly to Martin, Hoover, Michaux, and the neo-evangelical movement shared parallel theological positions on race and social justice. He describes all three as “gradualist” and individualist–that is, the key to racial group harmony and equal civil rights between whites and blacks was to be found in the transformation, or the Christian regeneration, of an individual’s heart. To Hoover, there were extremist ditches on the right (the Klan) and on the left (King), and he saw civil disobedience–whether violent or not–as nothing but anarchy. (226) Hoover argued that, eventually, African Americans would attain the same civil rights as whites, but that African Americans would have to first “prove themselves worthy” (221). For neo-evangelicals, their “moderate” approach, Martin says, was an attempted via media between what they saw as extremist “full integration” and “full segregation.” Integration, neo-evangelicals asserted, should not be compelled or forced, and it was not necessarily in the best interest of either party due to the perceived threat of interracial romance, marriage, and children (221-222). Michaux believed similarly–God had providentially determined racial hierarchies, people of African descent were on an inferior level of “intellectual culture” than whites, and that slavery had, again in God’s providence, made African-American conversion to Christianity. Through individual spiritual regeneration, “self-improvement,” and white recognition of their gains over time, Michaux pictured eventual white acceptance and black mobility into the middle class. In the meantime, Michaux “[believed] everybody White, Black, Yellow, or Red [had] a definite place in life and that each should keep to their place” (226; 234; 242; 252).
Martin pegs the beginning of Michaux’s collaboration with the FBI to late January 1956, about two months into the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when Michaux was approached by Louis Nichols, the FBI’s chief public relations officer. As Martin describes it, Michaux agreed to help “at any time” when Nichols asked if he [Michaux] could be “[called] into service” to help the FBI quash “the ungodly revolt” (228-229). Michaux’s service for the FBI kicked into gear following King’s speech at the August 1963 March on Washington, and again in the months surrounding King’s December 1964 acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. Martin describes how, in September 1963, the FBI approached Michaux and, as a consequence, Michaux gave a radio address critical of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, adroitly using King’s own phrasing, but nonetheless insistent that none of the pictures King painted in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial would come to fruition save through individual salvation and the parousia. Michaux then forwarded a transcript of his radio address directly to the White House, suggesting that King was not necessarily representative of all of Black America (232-236).[9]
“Hoover, Michaux, and the neo-evangelical movement shared parallel theological positions on race and social justice”
According to Martin, a one-day strategy session with the Domestic Intelligence Division at FBIHQ in late December 1963 determined that the FBI needed to show that King was “unfit to serve as a minister of the gospel,” and that one way to accomplish this objective was by identifying and deploying FBI-friendly ministers (236-237). Martin then describes how, between November 1964 and April 1965, Michaux had multiple meetings at FBIHQ. The first, in late November 1964, occurred in the immediate wake of the FBI’s infamous “anonymous package” to King, complete with hotel audio recordings of King’s affairs and sexual commentary, and a doctored blackmail letter from a purported Black Christian highlighting King’s religious hypocrisy and his ministerial ineligibility. This November meeting with Michaux was part of a larger campaign to get the FBI-intercepted material about King out to the general public. The second meeting with Michaux followed a “summit” between King and Hoover at FBIHQ in December 1964. Michaux offered to write an open letter to King, demanding King apologize to Hoover for how he [King] ostensibly acted towards Hoover during their face-to-face meeting, while also highlighting the FBI’s purported effectiveness in handling civil rights investigations. This open letter, based in part on official FBI documents secretly provided to Michaux, was released after King’s return from accepting the Nobel Prize in Oslo, and was published in tandem with an official, “strictly confidential” two-page report summarizing King’s immoral activity. The report, as Martin explains, was distributed widely across US executive branch departments and various government agencies (244-247). Following his open letter, Michaux pushed again for King to apologize to Hoover in a January 1965 Sunday service, brought letters of support to FBIHQ in late February 1965, and, lastly, brought church members to Baltimore in April 1965 to protest King and the SCLC. Martin highlights how, in this protest, the FBI sent special agents to protect and counter-surveil Michaux and his congregants–a privilege, Martin explains, Hoover never afforded to King and King’s associates (248-252).
To conclude, I believe it is important to address what many Ad Fontes readers are likely to have already balked at–the question of whether “the rise of white Christian nationalism” is an accurate and/or helpful description of the phenomena at the heart of Martin’s book. As one might expect, Martin is hearkening here to the current scholarship of sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry (3-6). Whitehead and Perry’s concept of “Christian nationalism” is not, they have emphasized repeatedly, a nod to any specific “doctrinal orthodoxy,” “personal piety,” or “theological-interpretive positions,” but is instead a stipulated form of ideologized culture or a “cultural framework” coded in discrete ways: namely, Protestant, white, nativist, and politically and socially conservative.[10] Whitehead and Perry have also cited Rogers Brubaker’s “civilizational Christianity” or “identitarian Christianism” as kindred concepts, both of which Brubaker describes as “[invocations of] Christianity as a cultural and civilizational identity, characterized by putatively shared values that have little or nothing to do with religious belief or practice.”[11] In Martin’s words, “white Christian nationalism” is “[the merging of Jesus] with American notions of whiteness, virulent anti-communism, capitalism, hypermasculinity, and political conservatism” (3) and “the impulse to make whiteness and conservative Christianity the foundation and guidepost of American governance and culture” (4).
Martin’s book, therefore, is about Hoover and the FBI’s participation in the creation of a Cold War ideology, or, as he phrases it, it is a “[chronicle of] how [Hoover’s white Christian forces] partnered with white evangelicals to aid and abet” that ideology’s rise (4). This theoretical-cartographical approach is, of course, retrospective, and, while valid, it has certain limitations. It is indisputable, for instance, that the FBI was a dominantly white organization in the early-to-mid-Cold War. It is also indisputable that Protestants, particularly evangelicals, were a dominantly white demographic in the same period. It is tricky, though, to discern from the evidence offered whether the subjects of Martin’s book themselves, at the time, saw their actions in terms of intentional ideology construction and promulgation (“white Christian nationalism”), or rather, as completely non-ideoloigized disagreements and fears over doctrine, piety, and theology–that is, the very things Whitehead and Perry’s approach stipulate as being outside of their definition. As discussed above, Hoover had strong theological views, as did a number of his ghostwriting and non-ghostwriting subordinates, and that theology mattered when it came to the churches and clergy the FBI considered friendly and “sound.” It also mattered for how Hoover and the FBI conceptualized race, social justice and the overall stakes of the civil rights movement. In the end, Martin’s case is, I believe, a very strong one when it comes to the fact and extent of Hoover’s and the FBI’s dissemination of Christian anticommunism in the intentional influence of domestic American culture; it is not as clear as to whether the intended goal of said influence was what Whitehead, Perry, and Martin have in mind when it comes to the cultural framework of “white Christian nationalism.”
Brian J. Auten is employed by the federal government and is an independent scholar of Cold War strategy, politics, and religion. He is the author of Carter’s Conversion: The Hardening of American Defense Policy (University of Missouri Press, 2008). All views, opinions, and conclusions are solely those of the author and not the U.S. government.
[1] See, for example, Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (The New Press, 2013); Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (The Free Press, 1989); Duncan White, Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War (Custom House, 2019)
[2] Peter Finn and Petra Couvee’s The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (Pantheon, 2014)
[3] Mark Pomar’s Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Potomac Books, 2022); Richard Cummings’ Radio Free Europe’s ‘Crusade for Freedom’: Rallying Americans Behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950-1960 (McFarland, 2010); Cummings Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989 (McFarland and Company, 2009); Cummings, Cold War Frequencies: CIA Clandestine Radio Broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (McFarland, 2021); Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (University Press of Kentucky, 2000)
[4] Keith Hatschek’s The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation (University Press of Mississippi, 2022); Lisa Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2013); Penny Von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2006)
[5] David Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (Duke University Press, 2016); Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War (Duke University Press, 2008)
[6] See Hubert Villeneuve, “Teaching Anticommunism: Fred C. Schwarz, the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade and American Postwar Conservatism (Ph.D. thesis, McGill University, August 2011), pp. 264 (for list of “fringe” groups), 355 (“As 1960 drew to a close, more than ten Crusade schools of anticommunism had been held since 1958”), 435 (“…the wave of anticommunism that peaked in Southern California in the last month of 1961.”) and all of Chapter 15 (“The Little Brown Scare”)
[7] Lerone Martin, “Bureau Clergyman: How the FBI Colluded with an African American Televangelist to Destroy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr,” Religion and American Culture (2018), Vol. 28, Issue 1, pp. 1-51.
[8] Ibid, p. 11.
[9] Martin argues that this latter move contributed to the overall environment that led to Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s approval on October 10, 1963 for technical surveillance against King, but his evidence for this is less direct and more circumstantial (236).
[10] Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), xix-xx, xxi, 10.
[11] White and Perry, Taking America Back for God; also see Rogers Brubaker, “Between Nationalism and Civilizationalism: The European populist moment in Comparative Perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 8 (2017), pp. 1191-1226. See version available online at https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/478958/mod_resource/content/1/Brubaker_Between_Nationalism_and_Civilizationism.pdf, pdf pages 13-14, 17.