Brad speaks with Dr. Lerone Martin, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University and Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Institute at Stanford. They discuss his new book - The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover.
"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."
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175119/the-gospel-of-j-edgar-hoover
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
To Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundy You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
Oh, oh.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I am joined today by just an incredible guest, an interview I've been looking forward to for a long, long time, and that is Dr. Lerone Martin.
So, Dr. Martin, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me.
It's really a blessing and a privilege to be with you.
Let me tell folks about you.
You are right up the road for me at Stanford, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Martin Luther King Jr.
Centennial Chair and Director of the Martin Luther King Jr.
Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
Also somebody who is part of a great project called the Crossroads Project, which is actually housed at Princeton and run by just a preeminent group of scholars, including Judith Wiesenfeld and Anthea Butler and yourself.
You are The author of Preaching on Wax, the Phonograph, and the Making of Modern African-American Religion.
But today we're here to talk about your brand new book, which is The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover, How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism.
I posted this when I was reading it for the interview on Instagram and The response was just immediate and immense.
People were just like, cannot wait to read that book.
So, so excited to talk to you about J. Edgar Hoover today.
You, some listeners might've heard you on the WNYC's The Takeaway this week.
So do you feel like that was really good practice and you got the nerves out and now you're a straight white American Jesus and you know, this is a big stage.
So you feel like that was maybe a good test run?
I think, I think that's right.
I think that's right.
I think that's exactly right.
Yeah.
From the WNY studios, NYC studios in Manhattan to Brad's Storage Closet where he does this podcast.
So, all right, here we go.
Let me just ask about Jade Gerhoever.
Jade Gerhoever is somebody that I think most Americans know.
They will be familiar with that name and they will have in their mind the first leader of the FBI who is known to have just been aggressive, invasive, and ubiquitous.
Somebody that was everywhere and always interrogating anyone he felt like.
But they won't know much about his faith.
I mean, honestly, I don't think anyone listening here will have any kind of in-depth knowledge of J. Edgar Hoover as a human being in terms of biography and religion.
The book is all about this.
Would you mind giving us just, you know, a minute on J. Edgar Hoover in terms of his upbringing and faith?
Yes.
Hoover was raised in the Presbyterian church and he talked a great deal in his childhood diary and his adulthood about how his upbringing was in the Presbyterian church, especially a young youth minister that he was really especially a young youth minister that he was really taken with.
And he described him as a vigorous athletic Calvinist.
And he played baseball with Hoover and other young boys in the community.
And Hoover really looked up to him.
And because of this gentleman, Hoover actually considered going into the ministry.
Hoover taught Sunday school from the time he was He rose through the ranks of Sunday School to rise to be the secretary of the entire Sunday School at his Presbyterian Church.
And he was so adamant and committed to this kind of muscular idea of Christianity that he even wore his cadet uniform.
He was part of the cadets at his high school and he was the captain of the cadet He wore that uniform on Sunday morning to teach his Sunday school classes.
And so you get a sense that as a young man, Hoover's committed to a kind of muscular idea of Christianity, that Christians are to be soldiers and we are to protect America's Christian soul.
And that is the orientation Hoover takes with him throughout life and even into the FBI.
So Hoover becomes the founding director of what is known as the FBI in the middle 20th century, stays in that role for 30 something years.
And one of the central claims of your book is that Hoover and his FBI should be seen as central to the building of Christian nationalism in the middle 20th century.
I think that's a claim that many people will Sort of understand intuitively when they read it, but not one that they would have ever thought of themselves and expected.
Hoover's FBI, you write, 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.
One of the founding pillars of Christian nationalism during this period was the new magazine Christianity Today.
And if anyone listening has, you know, read about Middle 20th century Christianity in the United States and the rise of Christianity Today, perhaps Kevin Cruz's work, perhaps the work of John Compton or Gerardo Marti or others.
You'll know that Christianity Today was in bed with big business and had a lot of wealthy funders, but I don't think a lot of people would have known that the FBI was joining forces with Christianity Today and Carl Henry and Billy Graham and folks like that.
How did that work?
How did they join forces in order to spread the gospel of the FBI and its Christian Nationalist worldview?
Hoover led the FBI for almost five decades, so 1924 to 1972.
And he announced to his agents at one point in time that their job was to perpetuate and defend, this is a quote, to perpetuate and defend America's Christian endowment.
And Hoover did that in a couple of ways.
The first thing that he did was he had agents sign what he called a law enforcement pledge.
And that law enforcement pledge said in part that agents would be committed to being soldiers, to defend America and wage rigorous warfare against America's enemies, and also to be ministers.
And Hoover does this and he makes sure that his agents are cultivated this way by putting his agents through a series of religious exercises.
Agents participate in a Jesuit spiritual retreat after sending Ignatius of Loyola, who was a soldier, but who was committed to turning over his sword to God.
And so Hoover's agents go through that spiritual exercise to cultivate themselves into soldiers.
He also initiates FBI mass and communion breakfast for agents to and their families to come to mass to hear sermons, especially for them, that point out how they are the defenders of America's Christian soul.
And also, FBI agents go through FBI Protestant Vespers services as well, where FBI agents hear Protestant ministers as well talk about the importance of the FBI, and they hear really important Protestant ministers, primarily in the D.C.
area, preach to them about their role in defending America's Christian soul.
So all of this, of course, takes place and really accelerates during the Cold War as America's trying to defend itself against Russia and defines its war with Russia as not just an actual physical war, but a Cold War and a war of geopolitics that involves ideology.
So American Christianity versus Russian communistic atheism.
And because of that connection, Hoover is able to connect with Christianity today.
Christianity Today is a new magazine in the 50s.
It's just starting out, and they're trying to connect with prominent individuals that they believe will help to bolster this new thing that they're calling neo-evangelicalism, or the moderate evangelicalism.
And they reach out to Hoover and ask him to be one of their contributors and one of their writers to the magazine.
And Hoover does that.
Hoover writes for Christianity Today, beginning in the 50s until his death.
And one of the things that's so fascinating about, not only does he write for them, Hoover has somewhere on staff who has a PhD from Washington University in St.
Louis.
And his name is Special Agent Fern Stukenbroker.
Say that a couple times, Bath.
And He, his job, he's a Methodist layman.
He has a PhD in history.
His job is to go to the office of Christianity Today, connect with Carl F.H.
Henry, figure out what J. Edgar Hoover should say or would say.
They negotiated.
Berne Stukenbroker writes, Hoover approves it, and then it's published in Christianity Today under Hoover's byline.
And then these essays are printed at the FBI printing office.
Stamped with the SBI emblem of approval.
And at the bottom it says reprinted from Christianity Today.
And so the FBI distributes Hoover's essay throughout the country to people who write in and ask for assistance or help.
And then Hoover also sends this to special agents across the country and to FBI field offices.
And so these essays for Christianity Today are not just essays, but they're distributed by the federal government, almost as if it's official government policy.
And then Christianity Today is bolstered by that because it shows that they, not the Protestant establishment, but Christianity Today and the evangelical movement it represents, is in lockstep with the federal government, especially as it relates to national security.
I want to pick up on that thread because you write about that.
Hoover really wanted to make the FBI and American national security something that was undergirded and supported and really buttressed by conservative Christianity.
He saw all of these as going hand in hand, that you can't have a secure nation without a nation of faithful Christians, and you can't have a nation that is free to worship God as opposed to godless Soviet Russia.
Unless you have the FBI and just a tremendous national security apparatus.
He became a kind of leading spokesman of middle 20th century conservative white Christianity, whether through his writing in Christian Today, the ways that he exponentially expanded the distribution of those writings by sending out the pamphlets you just mentioned.
I want to come back to all of this, especially as it relates to the white in white Christian nationalism.
Before we do that, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the FBI's involvement in local churches.
What does that look like on the ground?
How does Hoover not only encourage his G-men to I attend church, but what does it look like when the FBI agents show up at church?
Are they welcomed?
Are they celebrated?
I'm wondering if we could kind of paint a picture of patriotic Christian, white Christian America in the 1950s when these folks are involved.
Yes.
And, you know, the backdrop of all this that makes it relevant, both historically and in the present, is that Hoover is not an evangelical.
In my lawsuit with the FBI to try to get information on Billy Graham, which the FBI fought me about I was able to discover that at least Billy Graham's magazine and others have asked Mr. Hoover of Christianity Today to give his conversion narrative.
Tell us how you were converted.
And Hoover would always say, you know, no, I don't really, I don't really, I don't really vibe with that, but I was raised in church.
But yet, and still because of his power, as you just stated, because of his importance, evangelicals gravitated to him.
And even though he's not an evangelical theologically and morally, he fell short of evangelical stated moral claims, he still was considered their champion.
So Hoover would have agents at times for these FBI Vesper services.
Hoover would actually have them participate in worship.
And so they would read scripture, they would lead songs, they would do the opening prayer, and they were very welcome in evangelical churches.
They were seen as an extension of God's desire for America to be a chosen nation.
And in the midst of all of this, Where whiteness came into play is that the FBI was overwhelmingly, special agents were overwhelmingly white, male, Protestant, and Catholics.
And Hoover, despite the era of America having concerns about Catholicism being anti-Catholic, the FBI was very open to Catholics and welcomed Catholics because Hoover saw Catholics as being sufficiently anti-communist.
And he found many Protestant churches lacking in that area.
So it was welcoming of Catholics, but not welcoming of African Americans.
And when the FBI was forced by the Kennedy administration, 1962, to hire African-American special agents, because Hoover had thrown them all out when he became FBI director in 1924.
In my interviews with these African-American agents who worked under Hoover, they all told me they were never invited to these worship services.
Some of the agents I interviewed didn't even know these worship services existed.
It was kept from them.
So these worship services not only exalted the FBI as being God's soldiers defending the country, but also valorized ideas of segregation and racial inequality by excluding African Americans from these worship services, even though these African Americans were agents of the FBI.
So there was a moment of patriotic Christianity that valorized and authenticated the idea of racial segregation as being in line with God's order.
Yeah, you just said a word there that I really want to come back to, which is order and God's order.
You did mention your lawsuit and I didn't want to spoil it because I think it's just one of the most incredible parts of the book, of what is an amazing book.
But friends, if you buy this book, I'm not going to lie to you, the first line of the book is maybe The most poetic and badass first line of a book I've read in a long time.
So I just, I usually, Tim Horton talks about suing the FBI, basically, to write this book and to get access to the information about Billy Graham and others.
And I'm just, I won't read it because I don't want to spoil it, but I just want you to know if you buy the book and you open it, that first page will knock your socks off.
It's one of those lines you read as a writer where you're like, You're blown away and you're also immediately intensely jealous.
You're like, how did someone write this line?
It's incredible.
If we come back to Hoover's understandings of God and country, and we just kind of take his worldview, he really thinks of crime, communism, and fascism as manifestations of the Antichrist.
We talk on this show a lot about QAnon and others, the New Apostolic Reformation, who really engage in this worldview of spiritual warfare and Demonic forces.
Reading this book, you really get the image of Hoover as somebody who really thinks of the Cold War and the Soviet Union and so on and communism in this vein.
He thinks of, and this is where I think we can kind of zoom back in, he thinks of white Christians as kind of the American heroes who are fighting communism.
The Cold War is, as you write, a cosmic war that pitted Judeo-Christian civilization against the religion of atheistic communism.
This reminds me a lot of what Perry and Gorski write in The Flag and the Cross about how Christian nationalism is really about order and freedom.
And the idea there is that the white Christian has the sole authority to use violence to put the social order in its proper place.
And if the social order is in its proper place, then white Christians will be free and experience liberty.
If not, they'll use violence to put it back into place.
I'm wondering if that strikes you just in terms of like how Hoover thinks of the FBI as an extension of God and country and a way to make sure that the American social order looks and feels like it should so that white Christians can experience freedom and independence.
Absolutely.
One of the well-known lines Hoover wrote, and it's one of the most prolific because he had an entire division of the FBI, the Crime Records Division, that was primarily the FBI's propaganda division.
We had a host of folks who were writers in that division, and all of them were conservative Christians or Catholics.
And Hoover wrote for Sunday School Times, and one essay he wrote, the first line is, The criminal is the product of spiritual starvation.
Someone failed to teach him and lead him to God and to learn God's ways.
So Hoover always equated crime with a lack of spiritual commitment.
And so crime then becomes mystified.
For Hoover, right?
And that it's about sinful, evil, spiritual forces at work.
Hoover, despite modernizing the FBI, making it professional the way that he did and bringing science to it, In terms of solving crimes and evidence, he still always went back to this idea that crime was primarily something that was only spiritual.
He refused to engage in kind of sociological explanations of crime about whether it was about poverty or a lack of housing or urban design.
Always went back to If you commit crime, there's something wrong with you.
You are spiritually starved.
And all we really need to do is to have a revival to go back to America's supposed glorious Christian founding, and then crime would be solved.
But because we have forces at play in this country who don't want to go back to the founding, that's why crime persists.
So I want to extend this and ask how, in Hoover's worldview, segregation, desegregation sort of fit.
Because if crime is about spiritual starvation, as you write, he's also somebody who believes that segregation is kind of part of God's law and order.
That the proper way society is ordered is with a segregated society.
So when the FBI was confronted with racism, you write that they scoffed.
The real problem was, was communism.
However, it seems as if Hoover, the man, was sort of somebody convinced that the proper social order is one in which the races were separate.
Can you help us understand that a little bit?
Does that fit into his idea of crime?
I, you know, this this takes us so many places we won't have time to go, but like illegal surveillance, basically spying on people without justification, without legal warrants and so on.
But where does that fit in this this notion of segregation and in middle 20th century America?
Hoover has this amazing line that he gave to some reporters in 1965, right, in the midst of the voting rights campaign that Martin Luther King Jr.
was involved in.
And he says that despite all the violence that's going on in the South, right, he says, White people, for the most part, he says, are good people.
They're just afraid.
So he almost justifies the kind of violence that's happening because African Americans are asserting their right to vote.
And then he says, African Americans, for the most part, are uneducated, they're not smart, and they're not ready to vote.
In fact, he says that many of them, if they had the opportunity, probably wouldn't even vote.
So he says, what they need to do is to focus on their own piety, their own morality, and slowly but surely, then they will have rights equal to that of white citizens.
And so Hoover has this idea that African Americans are in the condition they are in, not for sociological reasons or because of legal segregation.
It's because of their lack of morality.
And they're trying to force their way into America's order, and they're not spiritually or morally fit and intellectually fit to do so.
Now, the FBI does, of course, investigate civil rights violations and the FBI does carry out some of its duties, but it does so primarily from under pressure from the White House.
Especially the Johnson administration, because of the way that America's civil rights tribulations are embarrassing the country globally, right?
America's in the midst of a Cold War and trying to convince other nations to side with the U.S.
over and against Russia because America's the land of the free and the home of the brave.
But as these images continue to build newspapers and early television news of African Americans being brutalized for just trying to exercise their rights, it's embarrassing the country and making America look very hypocritical.
And Russia and Cuba and other countries who are involved in the Cold War publicize this in their newspapers and say, look, America is the freedom home of the brave.
And look, they're using water hoses to spray little black girls or they're killing people who are trying to register to vote.
And so Hoover does engage in civil rights investigations and tries his best to preserve the sense of America as a land of the free and home of the brave, but he does so under pressure from the White House.
And Hoover's major concern is not, as I stated earlier, his resentment of black folk.
It's not racism per se, but Hoover finds violence that individuals Individual citizens taking the law in their own hands.
He's more offended by that.
Right?
Because he even has critiques of the Klan.
He says, you know, the Klan, he says about them, he says, they're white trash.
This is a quote, they're white trash.
You can smell them in the areas where they are.
And so he finds the Klan to be, to be an offense because they're taking the law in their own hands.
Only law enforcement, especially Hoover's FBI, they're the only ones who can take the law in their own hands.
These other people can't be trusted.
So he's not so much concerned about African-American life and African-Americans being beat.
He's more concerned about the lack of law and order that comes about from both the Klan and also civil rights protests.
This leads us to a place where I think many people, as they're listening right now, are having light bulbs go off in their head and they're thinking, oh, I've always heard about the FBI investing Martin Luther King Jr.
I've always heard about Martin Luther King Jr.
being painted as a communist by the FBI and others, religious leaders and others, during the civil rights movement.
We won't have near enough time to go into this issue and this whole relationship as you do in the book.
I'm wondering if we can just dig into that a little bit.
I mean, you write on page 167, I'm paraphrasing, but you talk about how in Hoover's mind, any black people who are organizing are communists.
And here's Martin Luther King Jr., one of the one of the leaders of the civil rights movement and somebody that was labeled a communist.
And it all starts to make sense.
Friends, if you're listening, you know that I've talked many times on the show about Jerry Falwell and folks like that labeling Martin Luther King Jr.
as anti-American or as not a real Christian.
The John Birch Society saying that Martin Luther King Jr.
is a Soviet agent.
Well, it all starts to click when you start thinking about Hoover thinking that anyone who is Organizing as a black person in the country is a communist.
So can you help us understand some of the interaction between Martin Luther King Jr and J Edgar Hoover in just a little snippet here before people get their hands on your book?
Absolutely.
The FBI is so important in what you just described in helping to set the table about peddling this image of King as a communist.
And the FBI did so in a number of ways.
They investigated King and his communist connections.
Even when the FBI realized that the Cummings connections were not there, Hoover says in a really important memo that he says, this is wrong and you all have just not looked hard enough.
And the Domestic Intelligence Division writes back and says, Mr. Hoover, you're right.
We've depended upon evidence that will stand up in court or congressional committees.
We can't limit ourselves to that type of data any longer.
So the FBI takes the law into its own hands and begins to not only just surveil Martin Luther King Jr., but engage in counterintelligence.
And they sent him a letter, an anonymous letter that was written as a former Christian, telling Martin Luther King Jr.
that he was immoral, he was a beast, that Satan could do no more.
And then in order to help to launder some of this counterintelligence, They connected with an African-American evangelical by the name of Elder Life, Solomon LeShaw, who had a CBS radio show across the country and was the first minister, black or white, to have his own television show.
He had his own TV show beginning in 1947.
And Elder Michal was in cahoots with the FBI and laundered some of the FBI's counterintelligence about King and put it in his sermons and put it in his broadcast and demanded that Martin Luther King Jr.
apologize to the FBI.
Put it in a sermon, put it in a public letter, also verifying the claims that King was a communist.
And so all this is being done, of course, is this.
Elder Mishal is doing this on his own.
But the FBI file that I was able to find shows that he was doing this in coordination with the Bureau.
So while the FBI will tell the White House The Office of Naval Intelligence and Army Intelligence.
The King was in cahoots with communists.
They would then time it so that the sermons of Elder Mishal would also air this publicly.
So it was an effort to authenticate and launder this information to create an entire narrative around Martin Luther King Jr.
And what we can tell is that it was successful.
In 1965 and 1966, the Washington Post and Gallup both did polls and show that King was overwhelmingly unfavorable in American life, and Hoover was extremely favorable in American life.
And then, of course, when King publicly comes out against the Vietnam War in 1967, I mean he's already considered unfavorable and that was just the straw that broke the camel's back for many people.
So the FBI was very successful in trying to paint King not as a minister who's advocating for America to live up to what it said on paper, but a minister who's bent on destroying America.
And I think what's important for us in our own moment is to learn from this is that How the FBI never really dealt with King's claims about African-Americans being treated unfairly.
It simply just used a label of communists, which then allows them to dismiss everything he says.
And I think that we can see that in our own politics today.
Instead of dealing with claims, political claims and efforts that people make, we just label them today as socialist, That was going to be my kind of concluding question.
I think a lot of folks listening will, again, I think there's a lot of light bulbs going on in their heads right now and they're putting pieces together and starting to see a big part of the puzzle.
Absolutely.
into play that if they've learned about Jerry Fallow, if they've learned about Billy Graham or Christiane today, if they've learned about the John Birch Society, or if they've learned about Paul Weirich, we could go on and on, Phyllis Schlafly.
Hoover just fits in right into that nexus in a way that they probably had not considered.
And yet they are probably nodding the head in the car right now saying, "Oh yeah, that makes total sense." And so my last question will be, this is just still the tactic today.
Everyone who is labeled a communist or socialist is dismissed as anti-American, and that could be the movement for black lives.
You know, that could be a candidate that you don't like.
Joe Biden, of all people, is called a communist.
It's laughable.
And yet that's an effective tactic.
And so I'm wondering if if there's any more reflection on that label.
I'm also thinking and I know that this may not this may not apply.
So if you just if this is a sort of wild goose chase that doesn't make sense, please tell me.
I'm thinking about James Comey and all of James Comey's self-satisfied, smug, Christian ethos as he went through the kind of 2016, 17, 18s.
He was always supposed to be in his own mind, I think, the second coming of one of the Niebuhr brothers.
And he really held up this like, I'm the leader of the FBI, a great Christian man and patriot thing.
And we don't have time to do that in depth here today.
But after reading your book, I'm like, well, that makes total sense because he's just in a long lineage of folks who have sort of styled themselves as leaders of the FBI, as Christian patriots and masculine men.
So anyway, any final reflections on our contemporary moment as it comes to any of those themes?
Yes, absolutely.
Oh, as a as a Christian and raised in an evangelical background, I went to Oral Roberts University.
I, I know this world well.
And I'm still a Christian, and it saddens me to see how Christianity has been used to authenticate and to provide cover for a number of political tactics and policies that seem to be opposed in many ways to the life of Jesus.
And I think we can see this today with the FBI.
After Hoover died, the FBI continued with a number of their worship services.
The next leader who took over, permanent leader who took over after Hoover was a man by the name of Clarence Kelly, who was part of the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ.
And he loved these worship services.
He said that they were embedded into the fabric of the FBI.
And they continue throughout the 70s and 80s.
Pat Robertson from the 700 Club, he preaches twice for the FBI, would later go on to be a Republican candidate for president.
We found that in the year 2000, for several years, the FBI was inviting the Westboro Baptist Church to speak to FBI agents in their training classes.
Many of you know the Westboro Baptist Church is famous for a number of things, including their extreme anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, violent rhetoric.
The FBI has also continued with having worship services just recently of last week.
The Chicago FBI field office announced that they were not going to allow, for the first time in decades, a priest to come to FBI headquarters on Ash Wednesday.
The FBI agents were free to go to the church themselves to receive ashes on Ash Wednesday, but the FBI was going to stop allowing the priest to come to FBI HQ.
Now, I want to be clear about something as a Christian.
I and all understand that Christians are in all walks of life, and should be.
We don't want a public square that's free of folks who have religious convictions.
But it is a problem when an agency of government seems to authenticate one particular religious expression as the authentic one, as the patriotic one, as the one that is synonymous with being a citizen.
That's where it becomes a problem.
And that's what we're seeing today in our own politics with Congressman Jim Jordan and others who are launching an investigation against the FBI for supposedly purging conservatives.
And I think that this is absolutely false.
We know that there's still a long history in the FBI of Christianity.
The FBI is still overwhelmingly comprised of white men.
We've seen FBI agents like Terry Albury, who was spied for the FBI because he was really set up with what he saw as bias within the FBI, and he began to illegally leak materials to The Intercept, and he was arrested for that.
And, but that is something that's not been brought up within these investigations about FBI bias.
It's only being seen as FBI bias against conservatives.
And that just doesn't seem to bear out in the FBI's work today.
Whether it's January 6th, whether it's the rise of white supremacist violence, it doesn't seem to me that that goes with the reality of the world that we see.
But yet there's this narrative going on, right?
That Christians are being pushed out of the FBI.
And I don't, I think that that's a narrative that unfortunately is doing significant harm to our democracy and is not helping us to pursue our goal of a more perfect new.
Really does seem to be a case of if you don't privilege us, then you're persecuting us.
And your book just shows us so clearly the privilege that was given to white Christian men for decades and decades and decades coming into the contemporary moment.
And if that privilege is somehow threatened, it's not a matter of, well, yeah, it makes sense that we should all be equal and have the same rights of representation.
It is, well, we need to investigate why you are persecuting God and Christian people.
And that's, you know, you mentioned Jim Jordan and others, and to me, that's how that reads.
And so anyway, well, I have taken up too much of your time.
So I want to say friends, do yourself a favor.
Order the Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover, How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, which is out from Princeton University Press now.
And I'll just ask you, Lerone, what are ways that people might link up with you?
I have recently joined the world of social media thanks to my family.
So I am available on Twitter at DirectorMLK, which is reflective of my directorship of the MLK Institute at Stanford.
And I'm also on Instagram, so I would love to connect with folks there.
That's great.
My co-host Dan Miller, I've been, as his work husband, been trying to get him to join social media for like five years now.
So it has not worked.
So I need to get some tips from your family.
As always, friends, find us at Straight White JC, find me at Bradley Onishi, and always use your help on PayPal and Patreon.
All our links are in the link tree in the show notes.
We'll be back later this week with It's in the Code and the weekly roundup.
