The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism

The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover

The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover

HOW THE FBI AIDED AND ABETTED THE RISE OF WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

Lerone A. Martin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2023 by Princeton University Press

Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected]

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

First paperback printing 2025

Paperback ISBN 9780691259659

Cloth ISBN 9780691175119

ISBN (e-book) 9780691244983

LCCN: 2022010826

Version 2.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Fred Appel and James Collier

Production Editorial: Sara Lerner

Text and Jacket/Cover Design: Heather Hansen

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: Kare Hensley and Kathryn Stevens

Copyeditor: Karen Verde

Frontis: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover shaking hands with noted religious broadcaster and revivalist Billy Graham at FBI Headquarters, May 1, 1969. Source: Record Group 065, Photos of FBI Personnel and Activities, 1935–1972, Still Pictures, Photo HN-9005, Box 17, National Archives and Records Administration, II, College Park, MD

For my parents—

Larry & Rose Martin

Who raised their children according to Matthew 7:12, In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

Contents

Prologue: Suing the FBIix

Introduction: J. Edgar Hoover’s Stained Glass Window1

Chapter 1 Hoover’s Faith12

PART 1 PROSELYTIZING FAITH: SOLDIERS AND MINISTERS—THE RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF HOOVER’S FBI29

Chapter 2 Soldiers33

Chapter 3 Ministers67

PART 2 PROMOTING FAITH: THE FBI AND WHITE EVANGELICALS117

Chapter 4 Christianity Today123

Chapter 5 Message to the Grassroots157

PART 3 POLICING FAITH: HOOVER, THE AUTHOR AND ADJUDICATOR OF WHITE EVANGELICALISM175

Chapter 6 Bishop181

Chapter 7 Champion200

Chapter 8 Crusader220

Epilogue: Stained (Glass) Legacy259

Acknowledgments273

Notes275

Abridged Archival Sources331

Index333

Prologue: Suing the FBI

I sued the FBI to write this book. On August 12, 2018, I filed suit against the US Department of Justice (DOJ) for FBI records on Billy Graham (Martin v. United States Department of Justice, 2018, Case Number 18-1885). I was convinced the preacher had an FBI file. No American in the mid-twentieth century could reach his level of fame, notoriety, and influence, yet manage to escape the vigilant, prying eyes of Hoover’s FBI. And no civilian was permitted into Hoover’s inner sanctum for a staged photograph without knowingly or unknowingly enduring a thorough background check. In one way or another, Graham was involved with the FBI, and I thought the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was the key to find out how. But I was wrong. The FBI played hardball, so I sued. It was my only recourse, a desperate attempt to force the FBI to abide by the FOIA.

Revelation is the purpose of the modern FOIA. President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law on Independence Day, 1966. LBJ publicly praised the bill, which gave Americans the opportunity to petition for records of US executive branch agencies. This legislation springs from one of our most essential principles: a democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the Nation permits, he proudly announced. Privately, however, the president despised the bill, allowing it to languish on his desk. Johnson finally signed the fucking thing, as he scornfully referred to it, after much persuasion, narrowly ducking its pocket veto. His reluctant attitude foreshadowed how executive branch agencies would execute the law.¹

My ordeal with Graham gave me firsthand experience with their approach. I made my original FOIA request on February 21, 2018. It was the day Graham died, and his legal privacy rights, at least in textual materials, went to the grave with him. The FBI acknowledged my FOIA request, yet failed to make a determination within the twenty-day statutory deadline mandated by Congress. The FBI did not bother to claim unusual or exceptional circumstances to excuse their malfeasance. They just ignored me. I heard from the Bureau almost two months later. The April letter was as bold as the typeface in which it was set. The Bureau did not concede breaking the law. They simply informed me they would not disclose or even acknowledge the existence of any records concerning Billy Graham and his relationship to law enforcement or national security. These were significant and ironic exclusions for Graham. The preacher had advised US presidents for more than half a century, advocating evangelical Christianity as the key to national security, yet there would be no disclosures. If the FBI determined there were files that resided outside of this broad purview, they pledged to make them public via their FOIA website at some undisclosed date in the future. Then, and only then, would I be informed. The Trump DOJ dug in their heels. This should not have been surprising. President Donald Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, was constantly lambasting the FOIA as a dangerous nuisance, that amounted to constant harassment of the DOJ. I decided to join the torrent of disturbance, filing suit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.²

The civil litigation produced a saga of hide and seek, lost and found. The FBI admitted a number of records on Graham had been destroyed in accordance with a 1986 court order. The ruling created the FBI Records Retention Plan, a rubric that assigns preservation schedules for FBI files based on their potential research value. More than three decades later, the same court informed me that records pertaining to the nation’s most famous evangelist had been legally destroyed by the FBI. What was valuable to me was deemed legally disposable by the FBI. Worse, the FBI testified that other files had been lost or were unable to be located. Judge Christopher R. Cooper, an Obama appointee, supervised the FBI as it located and turned over files on a rolling basis. The FBI produced a deluge of documents detailing investigations of deranged death threats targeting Graham, as well as an obsessive amount of newspaper clippings covering the preacher’s whereabouts and statements. However, there was nothing detailing Graham’s relationship to Hoover, the FBI, or any other executive agency.

The promised transparency of President Biden’s administration provided false hope. In July 2021, Kathleene Molen, Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, brought good tidings. AUSA Molen informed my counsel, Tuan Samahon, the FBI has located a file that it had previously been unable to locate. The FBI indicates that the file is related to Billy Graham.³ With no explanation, the FBI miraculously found a thirty-page file on Billy Graham. I did not care if it was the result of an actual miracle, political timing, or just the correction of incompetence: I counted it a godsend. But my joy was short-lived. The once lost, now found file was largely more of what I had already received.

But I refused to stop. The case was settled, with the DOJ agreeing to pay for attorney fees and other litigation costs. Upon turning my attention to Graham’s official archives, I quickly learned the FBI had a co-conspirator in its archival cover-up. Shortly after my public lawsuit, Billy Graham’s son Franklin Graham, a staunch right-wing evangelist, announced Billy Graham’s archival holdings would be moved from their original longtime home of Wheaton College to North Carolina. This may not have been a coincidence. The FBI has a practice of releasing High Visibility Memoranda, warning various government and civic entities of a proposed release of high-profile files and the possible fallout.⁴ The Bureau denied the existence of such a memo in my case. However, the result was the same. Billy Graham’s family took cover, protecting Billy Graham’s legacy as the figurehead and proxy of modern white evangelicalism at all costs. Now Graham’s archival holdings, dating back to 1940, are under the complete control and supervision of the Graham family, specifically Franklin Graham, and cannot be accessed without his blessing.

The younger Graham is the latest in a long line of white evangelicals vying to protect and police the legacy of modern white evangelicalism and its complicated relationship with white Christian nationalism. Pioneering white evangelical institutions such as Christianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the National Religious Broadcasters have scrubbed detailed references to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI from their respective archives. The deafening silence led me to seek FBI files on the white evangelical world that surrounded Billy Graham—the clergy, churches, magazines, and organizations the evangelist helped to establish—the foundational entities of modern white evangelicalism.

My labor was not in vain. The pages that follow draw upon thousands of newly declassified and released FBI files. The revelations therein are enhanced by my interviews with FBI special agents who worked for Hoover. Together, they show that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were central to postwar religion and politics. Hoover’s FBI joined forces with the founding architects of white evangelicalism to aid and abet the rise of white Christian nationalism as a legitimate force in American politics. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover moves this partnership out of the shadows and into the light.

This discovery illuminates the past, helping to explain twenty-first century US religion and politics. Following a string of white Christian nationalist violence, most notably the January 6, 2021, attack on the nation’s Capitol, the FBI announced renewed efforts to squarely deal with the domestic security threat of white Christian nationalism. The Bureau’s mission will be hampered if it does not trace the multiple origins, dwelling places, and institutional expressions of the threat—even if that trail leads all the way back to FBI headquarters and field offices. Likewise, many prominent white evangelicals have stated a desire to better understand when and how white nationalism came to possess a large portion of the movement. They believe this quest will help exorcise the demons. This book calls them to reconsider the very foundations of modern white evangelicalism, to reckon with the fact that the groundwork was laid, in part, by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI.

INTRODUCTION

J. Edgar Hoover’s Stained Glass Window

On Sunday morning, June 26, 1966, the Capitol Hill Methodist Church dedicated a magnificent thirty-three-foot-tall stained glass window to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It was the congregation’s second worship service in their new million-dollar church (an expenditure of about $17 million today). The prominent 1,200-member all-white congregation, located just five blocks from the US Capitol, purposely built the new church precisely on the spot of the birthplace of Mr. Hoover. The church was erected as an evangelical shrine to J. Edgar Hoover, and the glorious window was consecrated: THE J. EDGAR HOOVER WINDOW.¹

With J. Edgar Hoover seated in the front pew, Protestants of all stripes praised him as a Christian champion. Hoover’s pastor, Reverend Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, spoke for the masses of white evangelicals. The Presbyterian clergyman was a founding contributor to Christianity Today—the literary mouthpiece of modern white evangelicalism. He told the congregation that naming the window after Hoover was eminently merited and highly appropriate. The pastor of the Methodist church, Reverend Edward Lewis, preached the sermon. The shepherd of the largest white Protestant church in Washington, DC, chose the divine calling of Samuel as his biblical text. His sermon drew a parallel between Samuel and Hoover. Samuel answered God’s call to turn Israel away from sin and idolatry, and toward God. J. Edgar Hoover had done likewise: he heeded God’s call to turn America away from subversion and back to God. The congregation received the sermon by offering thanks for Hoover’s service, followed by a plea that he would be the first among many white male Christian defenders. We honor today … a man of Christian stature and national leadership, they prayed, we offer our thanks to thee for such men as J. Edgar Hoover and pray that more like men will be forthcoming in our nation.²

FIGURE 1. A view from the pulpit. Source: Photographic History of the J. Edgar Hoover Window—J. Edgar Hoover Estate Collection of the National Law Enforcement Museum, Accession number 2010.11.

Methodist Bishop Wilbur E. Hammaker offered the prayer of dedication. After he confessed to being an unashamed hero worshipper of Hoover, the virulent anti-communist elder blessed the window. In the name of the Father, Almighty God, I dedicate the ‘J. Edgar Hoover Window’ at the Capitol Hill Methodist Church in the shadow of the nation’s capitol proclaiming to the throngs that will see it that Christian virtues produce great statesmanship. A large tablet was blessed and fixed on the interior and exterior of the window for all to see: THE J. EDGAR HOOVER WINDOW: Statesmanship Through the Christian Virtues. Dedicated on June 26, 1966 to J. Edgar Hoover Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who was born on this site January 1, 1895.³

FIGURE 2. A view from outside. Source: Photographic History of the J. Edgar Hoover Window—J. Edgar Hoover Estate Collection of the National Law Enforcement Museum, Accession number 2010.11.

The service culminated with a congregational prayer of nationalism. The faithful beseeched God for salvation not by supernatural means, but through Hoover and his federal agency. We are grateful for the consistent work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under his leadership, they prayed in unison, through their direction, make of us citizens who honor God.⁴

Why did white evangelicals look to J. Edgar Hoover to lead them to salvation when the FBI director was not a born-again Christian? Why did they crown him their political champion when court cases such as Coplon v. United States, 1950, revealed the FBI director regularly ordered his agents to conduct unlawful break-ins and unconstitutional surveillance, and to lie about it under oath? Why was Hoover deemed the aspirational model of white Christian manhood and the foremost protector of family values when he never married, but for more than three decades enjoyed a domestic partnership with the FBI’s second in charge, Special Agent Clyde Tolson? And, perhaps most important, what does this glorification of J. Edgar Hoover tell us about the FBI and modern white evangelicalism?

The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover answers these questions. It explains why white evangelicals—from the pulpit to the pew, from the local church to the international parachurch—honored FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as an anointed leader. Specifically, the book chronicles how Hoover built up the FBI as a white Christian force that partnered with white evangelicals to aid and abet the rise of white Christian nationalism.

This story is not a rumination of an evangelical outsider. I was saved in the evangelical tradition and educated in its white institutions. This is not a narrative of decline, in which a once pure faith was hijacked by disingenuous political operatives beginning in the 1970s. Rather, it is a history of the modern origins of white evangelical moral and political norms. What follows, then, is not a history of the white evangelical fringe, nor an accounting of white evangelical exceptions. It is a story that details how foundational figures and entities of mainstream white evangelicalism and the everyday faithful willingly partnered with J. Edgar Hoover and the extralegal practices of his FBI to bring America back to their God.

White Christian nationalism—the impulse to make whiteness and conservative Christianity the foundation and guidepost of American governance and culture—has received renewed attention in public discourse of late. Histories of its development in postwar America have rightly centered on the influence of white evangelical Christianity. Studies have identified clergy, politicians, captains of industry, Hollywood, the military, and suburbanization as driving forces of white Christian nationalism. White evangelicals confronted the New Deal, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement by merging their Jesus with American notions of whiteness, virulent anti-communism, capitalism, hypermasculinity, and political conservatism.⁵

The FBI was a major part of this landscape, yet it has been overlooked. President Franklin Roosevelt issued a series of presidential directives in the 1930s which morphed Hoover’s FBI from a small outfit investigating interstate crimes, to the nation’s largest domestic intelligence agency. As the bulwark of national security, the bureau was conspicuous in American anti-communism. Hoover and his all-white male Christian force of special agents served as the producers, directors, and stars of the ideological drama that was the Cold War. Hoover and his FBI set the table upon which white evangelicals feasted. The FBI also served as the clearinghouse of national belonging, defending the status quo, and regulating who should participate in the democratic process. Hoover’s white Christian nationalist worldview determined legitimate statecraft from subversion, and godliness from atheism.

Narrow definitions of evangelicalism have hindered us from perceiving Hoover’s evangelical significance. Scholars and journalists have largely relied on professionally defined theological commitments—ultimate biblical authority, Christ atonement, conversion, prayer, evangelism, social reform, and church membership—to determine who is in the white evangelical camp.⁶ However, salvation is a cosmic matter for white evangelicals, far too important to leave exclusively in the hands of theological and professional elites. White evangelical faith has never lived by theology alone, but by the very practices of the faithful. It is a lived faith, a religious identity that is constructed and maintained in daily practices—consumption habits, voting, political affiliations—that take place outside of official evangelical institutions. And the lived experience of postwar white evangelicalism has been marked by steadfast commitments to white Christian nationalism: a worldview and cultural framework centered on the fusion of American civic life and a particular Christian identity. This all-encompassing faith assumes the naturalness and righteousness of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchal authority, heteronormativity, gender difference, and militarism.⁷ These evangelical commitments made J. Edgar Hoover a white evangelical not by virtue of being born-again, nor by church membership or name, but by something far more important: his fight for a white Christian nationalist nation. As the editors of Christianity Today joyfully announced in 1962, J. Edgar Hoover was not only a part of the message of white evangelicalism, he was also part of its mission.⁸

Hoover was an important part of the evangelical errand. He did not simply ride the wave of Cold War evangelicalism; he helped to create it. He fused together virulent anti-communism with what would become the other political hallmarks of the movement: anti-statist statism, Christian traditionalism, subplot epistemology, and individual liberty. Hoover’s career embodied anti-statist statism. He bemoaned the rise of the New Deal liberal state, yet he owed his increasing power to the very same enlarged federal apparatus. He welcomed government involvement in American life when it enforced his traditional Christian notions of sexuality, gender, and race, yet he decried the tentacles of big government when state reforms ran counter to his beliefs (i.e., racial integration, school busing, voting protections). His subplot epistemology saw an existential crisis behind every political difference. Hoover did not view actions, ideas, or policies that countered his Christian worldview as simply differing opinions. Rather, Hoover saw such differences as subplots to a grand cosmic conspiracy to destroy the nation. Therefore, his commitment to individual liberty hinged upon virtue. Liberty was not licentiousness, but an ordered freedom in which government helped to cultivate virtuous individual souls. Virtue stood guard, protecting liberty. Statecraft had to be soulcraft. Hoover’s faith served as the foundation of it all: a white Christian nationalism that wedded conservative Christianity and American statecraft. The nation, he once told an NBC audience, had to have faith to be free. When postwar white evangelical conservatives heard the gospel of Hoover, they believed they heard the gospel truth.⁹

Studies of the FBI have also been slow to pinpoint this gospel. Scholars of the Bureau rarely consider the director’s faith, let alone its influence upon the Bureau and the nation. Yet, during Hoover’s lifetime, his faith and storied religious partnerships were central to how Americans understood him and his Bureau. Histories of the FBI have chronicled the FBI’s surveillance of clergy and its antagonism toward faith communities. This book narrates the Bureau’s embrace and promotion of faith. Previous histories have identified which religious folk Hoover deemed subversive—Dorothy Day, Father Berrigan, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X. Now it is time to focus on which clergy the FBI Boss branded as partners. The Bureau had many enemies, but it also had plenty of friends. History has shown us how the Bureau attempted to silence its enemies, hindering democratic debate, and ultimately push American politics toward an authoritarian far right. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover offers a new story, detailing how the religious commitments of Hoover and his FBI also ushered our nation’s politics toward the religious right.¹⁰

The following pages tell the story. Part 1, Proselytizing Faith, displays how Hoover—the longest-standing high-level appointee in US government history—made white Christian nationalism the bedrock of the modern national security state. US presidents came and went, as did ruling political paradigms, and crises, but Hoover remained. 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.¹¹

Hoover remade the FBI—the federal agency in charge of the nation’s domestic security—in his own image: a squadron of white men who viewed themselves as white Christian soldiers and ministers. They were spiritually and morally formed by the FBI’s religious culture, a suite of religious practices that took on both Catholic and Protestant forms. Hoover’s white Christian nationalism eschewed the rampant anti-Catholicism of the day in favor of a unified white Christian order. Maintaining a white Christian nation required that all respectable white Christian men join the struggle, regardless of ecclesiastical commitments or theological differences. As part of their training, FBI special agents pledged to be Christian soldiers and ministers, while also attending FBI spiritual retreats and special worship services run by leading white Catholic and Protestant clergy. 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. The FBI was the nation’s defense against the enemy within. And the Bureau’s religious culture fashioned the G-men accordingly, shaping them into an army of white male Christian nationalists commissioned to protect, serve, and maintain Christian America. The FBI had a Christian purpose, Hoover told his troops. Their federal duty was to "defend and perpetuate the dignity of the Nation’s Christian endowment."¹²

Part 2, Promoting Faith, explains how Hoover and white evangelicals partnered to authenticate and materially support white Christian nationalism. Both shared the same claims upon the nation-state. They firmly believed America was founded as a Christian nation, and the country would be destroyed the moment it ceased to be. Hoover called it Americanism, while Billy Graham and other white evangelicals called it Christian America. It was the same belief: a cultural framework that venerated and advocated for the fusion of white conservative Christianity with American civic life.¹³ They viewed one another as valuable partners for their shared crusade. As the majority of mainline white Protestants turned toward liberalism and the social gospel, Hoover saw white evangelicals as a vital means to save the nation and keep the country on the path of Americanism. White evangelicals, in turn, saw Hoover as a warrior, fighting to preserve Christian America. They were soldiers in the same army.

Every war has its propaganda. The FBI and white evangelicals teamed up to promote their shared nationalism through the pages of Christianity Today, all at the expense of taxpayers. The messages were a hit. White evangelicals lauded Hoover’s words as sacred gospel. In lieu of their own sermons, preachers preached Hoover’s epistles verbatim from the pulpit, making Hoover the ghostwriter of countless white evangelical sermons. Other clergy, such as Billy Graham, peppered their sermons with quotes from Hoover. The faithful in the pews loved it. Grassroots religious activists wrote Hoover for copies of his homilies to use in their Bible studies, political action groups, and evangelism efforts.

The strength of his writings and popularity led Hoover to become a lauded evangelical leader. The FBI Boss helped white evangelicals establish social and political authority. The Protestant Establishment—the network of white mainline churches, prominent personages, and elite organizations—exercised considerable social and political authority in the nation’s halls of power, and had for hundreds of years. However, as the leader of the FBI, Hoover’s presence in the white evangelical world helped to authenticate the newly established religious movement as the rightful custodian of national morality and security. The association with J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI put white evangelicals on the fast track to significant political standing, a status that is alive and well to this day.

If Billy Graham was America’s pastor, then J. Edgar Hoover was its bishop, adjudicating the faith and shepherding white evangelicals toward white Christian nationalism. Part 3, Policing Faith, examines how Hoover and his FBI took jurisdiction over white evangelical identity. White evangelicals overlooked Hoover’s very public lawbreaking, lies, and eschewing of evangelical theology and embraced his power and Christian nationalist commitments. They publicly honored the FBI chief as their political and religious standard-bearer, looking to Hoover to police evangelical politics, piety, and belonging. Evangelical churchgoers inundated the FBI with letters seeking Hoover’s religious guidance, advice, and blessing on matters of faith and politics. Beseeching a higher authority than their pastor, they asked Hoover to shepherd them toward which Bible they should read, which preacher they should listen to, what church they should attend, and even how to remain faithful. A small, vocal remnant of white evangelicals protested the movement’s glorification of Hoover, but their cries were ignored. The majority remained faithful to the FBI Boss to the very end. They feared for their country. They saw the future through the dark skies of Hoover’s tempestuous reign. The white faithful lauded him and his federal agency as the crusaders and adjudicators of the faith.

Clergy followed suit, writing to Hoover to request his pastoral guidance on all things religion and politics. These clergy, what I call Bureau Clergymen, gelled into an evangelical syndicate. They privately and publicly worked with the FBI to create the Christian America in which they jointly believed. Leading white evangelical clerics partnered with the FBI to hire white evangelical college graduates to get them within the halls of power, while also working in the streets and media to discredit and destroy the Civil Rights Movement and one of its most prominent figures: Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. White evangelicals put their trust in Hoover and his FBI to shepherd the nation into the Promised Land, by any means necessary.

The story of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and white evangelicals has consequences for our present and future. Bringing the gospel of J. Edgar Hoover to the fore is central to understanding the current state of white Christian nationalism and its relationship to white evangelicalism specifically and to the nation more broadly. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover details how the mutually beneficial merger between a federal agency focused on national security and a conservative white Christian religious movement helped to transform the landscape of contemporary American religion and politics.

Going through the FBI is the only way to fully grasp the historic relationship between white evangelicals and state power. Without this historical treatment, we lack a full historical explanation of why white evangelicals have readily blessed extralegal practices and embraced political figures that fall far short of the movement’s professed theology and morality. The general narratives fall short, charting a downfall from the respectable and moral foundation laid by Reverends Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry and Christianity Today. The decline, they argue, is marked by evangelical endorsements of politicians such as Donald Trump and the embrace of white supremacist organizations such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, as well as conspiracy theories such as QAnon, and Christian nationalist violence. The cause, they reason, can be found in the nation’s demography. A shrinking white population, a decrease in Christian hegemony and church attendance, along with the political gains of racial and ethnic minorities provoked a white backlash. Economic shifts—the decrease in the white middle class and the loss of manufacturing jobs—also shoulder the blame in these narratives. Accordingly, these cultural changes have forced white evangelicals to suddenly loosen their moral and theological standards. The fog of war clouded their moral and theological vision, giving way to the politics of pragmatism in order to bring America back to their God. White evangelicalism, they argue, essentially jumped the tracks.¹⁴

If we look at white evangelicalism through J. Edgar Hoover’s stained glass window, however, the train appears to be running right on time. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover shows us that white evangelicals are who they have always been. From the beginning, the founders of modern white evangelicalism preached that American politics needed Christian piety and traditional morality while their political practice was marked by the gospel of amoral pragmatism and abusive power in the name of Jesus. Their gospel labors went beyond partnerships with famous white Protestant clergy or bona fide evangelical elected officials, activists, and businessmen. If we draw back the curtain on the white evangelical attempt to take America back for God, we find a partnership with the infamous J. Edgar Hoover, who worked diligently behind the scenes and at the forefront for nearly five decades. Hoover deployed the sophisticated federal war chest, the notorious activities of his FBI, and white evangelicals in the battle for a white Christian America. White evangelicals sanctified his immoral, illegal, unconstitutional, and violent labor as the work of God. And they have followed his lead ever since.

The whole process began on the site of J. Edgar Hoover’s stained glass window, back when it was simply the boyhood home of a young Sunday school teacher by the name of John Edgar Hoover.

CHAPTER 1

Hoover’s Faith

There is … a deep spirituality and sense of justice in the essence of [Hoover’s] being, which informs his ideas and directs his actions. What you see in the man and feel in the whole structure and operation of the FBI began in the boy.

—HOOVER’S PASTOR, REVEREND EDWARD L. R. ELSON¹

The picture of a young Hoover says it all (figure 3). By the age of seventeen, John Edgar Hoover was the man he would always be. He stood at his physical apex, approximately five foot eight inches tall. His eyes were ever vigilant, watchful. His posture, stiff as the starched navy blue jacket and confederate grey slacks of his Central High School Brigade of Cadets uniform. His grip on the saber was as unforgiving as his opinions. The gold epaulets that gleamed from his square shoulders signified his leadership rank of captain. He was a soldier on guard, ready to do battle against anything and anyone at odds with his worldview.

FIGURE 3. John Edgar Hoover at seventeen years old in Central High Cadet uniform, 1912. Source: J. Edgar Hoover Personal Estate, Photographs Box 3, Folder 9. Collection of the National Law Enforcement Museum, Accession number 2010.11.

But this man-child was no ordinary soldier—he was a soldier in the army of the Lord. The earnest teen wore his cadet uniform to bark orders at his fellow cadets, and to teach his Sunday school class at Old First Presbyterian Church. His peers thought it an extreme gesture, but Hoover believed it to be holy and appropriate. Sunday school was boot camp, the training ground in the battle for the soul of the nation, and Hoover dressed the part. It was 1912, and J. Edgar Hoover was his own man: a soldier and a minister fighting the good fight with military precision. It was a lifelong commitment, an unceasing crusade to keep America a white Christian republic. Hoover pledged to be its soldier and minister—its defender and custodian—until his dying day.²

J. Edgar Hoover was a white Christian nationalist. He believed America had divine origins. Throughout his career, Hoover reminded the public that The American ideal has its roots in religion.³ The nation was conceived by God and thus chosen for a special purpose. God revealed the sacred plan to the white Founding Fathers. Those men who laid the foundations … of the American Republic, Hoover consistently noted, had a vigorous, indomitable, all-encompassing faith … They believed in God … And they sought to create a government in harmony with those immutable laws by which He rules His universe. These faithful men sketched out this vision in America’s founding documents. The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were more than just political statements and blueprints of governance, they were holy writ, principles and ideas that were supernatural in origin and authority. They established America not just as a nation-state with physical boundaries, but as a sacred concept and calling. America’s covenant with God necessitated that conservative Christianity and narrow biblical literalism be the foundation of American governance, civil law, and societal arrangements. Failure to recognize and protect this fact, Hoover warned, would cause the nation to wither to extinction.⁴

Hoover’s white Christian nationalism was not concerned with theological purity or conformity. Nor did Hoover advocate establishing Christianity as the official state religion. He recognized the United States was comprised of many faiths. However, Hoover was convinced that the nation’s origins, as well as its natural customs, morals, and culture, made one thing clear: The United States is fundamentally a Christian nation. This Christianity was an all-encompassing worldview. It was built upon a set of American myths, traditions, symbols, and narratives that were interpreted through a particular reading of the Bible in which America’s natural order was white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, and authoritarian. Hoover’s Christianity was as religious as it was racial, gendered, and political.⁵

Hoover dubbed his conflation of nationhood, citizenship, religion, and political identity: Americanism. To obey American law and observe dominant social customs was to serve God, and to serve God was to obey the law and observe dominant social customs.⁶ Those who expressed dissatisfaction with traditional American values and customs were guilty of blasphemy and subversion. At best, their yearnings for change were the ramblings of misguided souls; at worse, plots by sinners to deliberately destroy America. There was no in between.

Hoover proudly admitted that his upbringing—his home, Sunday School, and church—nurtured him in Americanism. This trinity helped him to heed and accept his divine calling as a soldier and minister of his white Christian America.⁷

The Home

J. Edgar Hoover was born at home on New Year’s Day in 1895. The family’s modest two-story stucco home was whitewashed, just like the neighborhood. The house, 413 Seward Square SE, was located in Washington, DC’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, a racially segregated and exclusively white community, just five minutes from the Capitol. The call to federal service was the prevailing ethos of the neighborhood, it was the social oxygen he breathed. The rows of identical houses were all occupied by white Protestant civil servants, including Hoover’s dad. Dickerson N. Hoover was a Presbyterian and a civil servant for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey office, the oldest scientific agency in the federal government. He was a loving and doting father, as caring as he was anxious. Severe depression and hallucinations stalked him until his death in 1921.⁸

Hoover’s mother, Presbyterian Annie M. (Scheitlin) Hoover, was the head of the house. She was short in stature, but casted a large disciplinarian shadow over Edgar. Her bloodline was full of Swiss mercenaries, and she believed it