The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover
How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism
How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism
The shocking untold story of how the FBI partnered with white evangelicals to champion a vision of America as a white Christian nation On a Sunday morning in 1966, a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was not an evangelical, but his Christian admirers anointed him as their political champion, believing he would lead America back to God. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover reveals how Hoover and his FBI teamed up with leading white evangelicals and Catholics to bring about a white Christian America by any means necessary. Lerone Martin draws on thousands of newly declassified FBI documents and memos to describe how, under Hoover’s leadership, FBI agents attended spiritual retreats and worship services, creating an FBI religious culture that fashioned G-men into soldiers and ministers of Christian America. Martin shows how prominent figures such as Billy Graham, Fulton Sheen, and countless other ministers from across the country partnered with the FBI and laundered bureau intel in their sermons while the faithful crowned Hoover the adjudicator of true evangelical faith and allegiance. These partnerships not only solidified the political norms of modern white evangelicalism, they also contributed to the political rise of white Christian nationalism, establishing religion and race as the bedrock of the modern national security state, and setting the terms for today’s domestic terrorism debates. Taking readers from the pulpits and pews of small-town America to the Oval Office, and from the grassroots to denominational boardrooms, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover completely transforms how we understand the FBI, white evangelicalism, and our nation’s entangled history of religion and politics.
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Summary: J. Edgar Hoover's understanding of Christianity significantly influenced his management of the FBI, and in turn, the FBI impacted the broader development of what has become the Christian Nationalist movement in a modern sense.
If Kristen Kobez DuMez had not (multiple times) recommended the Gospel of J Edgar Hoover and had not been briefly on sale as a Kindle book, I would not have picked it up. I have a limited interest in the FBI or Hoover. But her strong recommendation of the book's writing made me pick it up. In the opening pages, two stories frame the book nicely. First, the introduction talks about the legal maneuvers required to get the FBI to honor their FIOA requirements and how they initially did not honor their legal requirements and suffered no real consequences for violating FIOA requirements. The second early story in the book that I think matters is how a church stained-glass window was dedicated to Hoover. I read that description as meaning that it was a stained glass window of Hoover, but instead, it was a window dedicated to Hoover. I did not realize my mistake until I read a review of this book on Goodreads. That review linked to an image of the windows, which is helpful for context. (J Edgar Hoover window) I think I was primed to understand the window as images of Hoover because of Southwestern Baptist Seminary's stained glass windows (artist site), which were of many of SBC figures, including the seminary president who originally commissioned the windows and who was forced to resign several years ago.
Lenore Martin's perspective is evident throughout the book. The following is as good of a thesis statement as any:
“As FBI director from 1924 until his death in 1972, Hoover was a political constant, paying lip service to the Constitution, but establishing white Christian nationalism as the actual foundation of his FBI. It mattered little who was in office or which party was in control of Congress. Faith helped him determine the nation's enemies and how they should be attacked and defeated. He saw national security in cosmic terms. Nothing was more existential than national security, the very salvation of the nation's soul.” (p7)
and
“The FBI made it very clear: a secure and safe America was a Christian America, one in which white evangelicals and conservative white Catholics worked together to maintain the levers of cultural and political power.”
“SA [Special Agent] John P. Mohr, the Assistant Director in Charge of the Administrative Division, laughed when a young law school student inquired about the legality of the Bureau's labor. “You're still in law school—which means you're still an idealist,” he told the neophyte. The Bureau's number four man was in charge of the budget and all personnel matters. The man with the power to hire and fire fully expected and instructed special agents to break the law. He told the future special agent to always remember: extralegal and illegal methods were completely appropriate, because “When it's for the right reasons, the end does justify the means.” There was no ambiguity in Hoover's FBI, the message coming from the top was clear: faithful special agents knew the Bureau's righteous ends justified any and all means. These moral ends were determined by the Bureau's Christian nationalism, not the US Constitution. “And if the moral values ran into conflict with the legal principles,” one special agent noted, “the legal principles had to give way.” (p57)
“The FBI's religious commitments influenced the decision to begin a direct investigation of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. For years, J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that atheistic communism, not religious fervor, was fueling the fight for Black equality. “The Negro situation,” he testified before Congress in 1958, is “being exploited fully and continuously by Communists on a national scale.” Hoover viewed this purported communist infiltration not simply as a political debate, but as an attack on America's Christian heritage. It was the duty of the FBI, he told his employees in 1961, to “reaffirm” the Bureau's “Christian purpose ... to defend and perpetuate the dignity of the Nation's Christian endowment.” Christianity was the bedrock of the nation's heritage and the FBI was “the main line of resistance against all enemies of our heritage.” (p229)
