A Conversation about Dr. Martin’s book, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism (Princeton 2023).
Posted April 27, 2023
Questions at the Crossroads with Dr. Lerone A. Martin
A Conversation with Dr. Megan Goodwin
Dr. Lerone Martin is Associate Director of the Crossroads Project. He is Associate Professor of religious studies at Stanford University and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. His second book, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, is now available through Princeton University Press.
What’s most important for readers to know about The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover?
It’s important for us to recognize and know [that] the gospel of J. Edgar Hoover is still with us – it's very much so alive and well today, especially in contemporary expressions of white Christian nationalism.
The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover emerged from newly declassified FBI files, and also from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that I filed with the Department of Justice for FBI materials on Billy Graham. The FBI has a well-documented antagonistic relationship with religious figures, surveilling everyone from Martin Luther King to Dorothy Day to Reinhold Niebuhr, to Fannie Lou Hamer, and the list goes on.
But what I was able to discover was that there's also a collaborative relationship between the FBI and certain religious groups – and one of those groups was the new evangelicalism (which we know today as just evangelicalism). The FBI saw evangelical figures and publications like Billy Graham and Christianity Today as really important partners to protect America, to save the soul of America, and to keep America a “Christian nation.” Of course what they saw as a Christian nation was very different from what Martin Luther King as a Christian would have seen.
What I'm trying to do is unearth some of the overlooked foundations of white evangelicalism. If those of us interested in making Christianity less racist, less committed to a certain kind of nationalist idolatry, we need to know some of American evangelicalism’s foundation – including the FBI. And if we're going to have a federal law enforcement that is actually executing justice, we've got to have an FBI that recognizes its past, recognizes the racism embedded into its structure. Once that is acknowledged, we can think on how we can make an FBI that is not racist and can actually handle a country that is increasingly more racially diverse and religiously diverse.
What are you arguing in The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover?
As the book’s subtitle says: the FBI aided and abetted the rise of white Christian nationalism. The FBI did this in three ways: proselytizing, promoting, and policing religion. J. Edgar Hoover really proselytizes the FBI when he becomes a director in 1924 and begins to shape the bureau to be a white Christian army fighting for white Christian nationalism. The FBI props up white evangelicals as the rightful custodians of America and American religion and statecraft and white evangelicals do the same thing for J. Edgar Hoover – thus promoting religion, with evangelicals and the FBI both collaborating and authenticating one another's claims upon the nation state. Finally, the FBI polices white evangelical identity: who's in and who's out of white evangelicalism, but also Martin Luther King and others fighting in the civil rights movement by working very diligently to cast them as atheists and communists and folks who are not working for the safety of America.
"The book helps us to see the different political viewpoints of African American Christianity. I think we often assume that all African American Protestants were, you know, out in the street protesting, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. But there were very many different ways of thinking about achieving equality. Martin Luther King is not the “norm” – he draws on the tradition of non violent protests within African American Protestantism, but in many ways, he really was unique."
What is at stake in this project? Why does this work matter?
Historically, what's at stake here is how we understand the foundations and the making of modern white evangelicalism – and also what went into the making of the FBI. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover helps us understand the way race functioned within the FBI, the way religion did, and that the FBI was formulated around white Christian nationalism.
This historical intervention is important for how we understand what's happening currently: for those of us who are interested in it, how we might go about both helping white evangelical brothers and sisters who are working on being antiracist or are working on understanding the perils of white Christian nationalism. This history matters for those who are interested in combating those ills.
The FBI has been slow in handling white Christian nationalism, in part due to the FBI’s origins in white Christian nationalism. But, as I argue, white Christian nationalism–legally and structurally–also prevents the democratic process from addressing, preventing, and prosecuting white Christian nationalist acts of violence. As America has become increasingly diverse, the FBI’s diversity has decreased. So we have an increasingly homogeneous force policing and adjudicating religion and politics upon an increasingly diverse nation. An FBI that can handle the kind of white Christian nationalist violence we're seeing popping up across the country needs to address and take seriously the inequities it fosters.
How does The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover fit within the broader field of Black and/or African American religions?
The book helps us to see the different political viewpoints of African American Christianity. I think we often assume that all African American Protestants were, you know, out in the street protesting, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. But there were very many different ways of thinking about achieving equality. Martin Luther King is not the “norm” – he draws on the tradition of non violent protests within African American Protestantism, but in many ways, he really was unique.
The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover also traces the long history of African American religious broadcasting. The last chapter focuses on an African American minister by the name of Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, who was a religious broadcaster. He was the first minister, black or white, to have his own TV show, which started in 1947. J. Edgar Hoover loved this guy, in part because Elder Lightfoot Michaux really believed in the Cold War, really believed that America needed a revival of faith to save itself from communism. And he didn’t question societal structures, especially around race, for the most part.
Michaux is representative of African Americans and their relationships to white evangelicals: theologically speaking, Elder Michaux was every bit as evangelical as Billy Graham; theologically speaking, they held the same beliefs. But because Michaux was African American, he didn't have a certain type of respectability that white evangelicals were looking for. Michaux was on the margins of white evangelicalism in many ways and ended up working with the FBI to help to discredit Martin Luther King Jr.
Race really becomes a wall of separation or an enduring distance that keeps black evangelicals on the margins of the movement of white evangelicals in many ways. Michaux’s experiences in particular show that there are many different viewpoints, many different theological frameworks for African Americans’ fight for freedom and equality. There are many different avenues; all African American religious folk don't have the same political viewpoints and political strategies.
Where do you see your work and the fields of Black and African American religions heading next?
I've contributed to conversations around religion and national security, white evangelicalism and Christian nationalism. I hope we’ll see more work on specific agencies within the federal government and seeing how faith shaped these agencies. I'm excited about folks getting interested in not just recasting the history of evangelicalism in the 20th century, but also other government agencies and how faith shaped those agencies. It'd be good to talk about modern conservatism not just as something that was being executed and pushed along by those outside the halls of power, but also those inside the halls of power as well. We need to continue to pay attention to the way that race and religion function within the federal apparatus.
I hope we think about what we mean when we say “American religion.” Does that include African Americans? We need to expand our sources for the study of African American religions. We often think about, for example, the ways in which the FBI was antagonistic to black religious vote. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover shows African Americans working with state actors and with elected officials and others to push for their cause. I hope this project will push us to start looking at FBI files to see a treasure trove of state sources – as evidence not solely of antagonism, but also as places of partnership.
Posted April 27, 2023
