We Are Living in the Klan's America Part I + Bonus Content
Brad speaks with Dr. Kelly J. Baker, author of Gospel of the Klan. In the first segment, Brad outlines how TPUSA is akin to the 1920s Klan. Then he speaks with Dr. Baker, who outlines how the Klan was seen as a patriotic Christian organization that put God and country first. Sound familiar? In its time, the Klan was not considered a beyond the pale White supremacist group. It was part of mainstream society. Part of churches. Part of the American way of life. And, as they discuss, we are repeating what happened in the 1920s in the 2020s
In the bonus content, Brad shares a recording of his lecture in Minneapolis where he answered questions about Trump's Mein Kamp references, Moms for Liberty, and how to speak to relatives who have gone down the MAGA rabbit hole.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Today we have a two-part episode.
I'm going to share with you part of my interview with Dr. Kelly Baker on her first book, Gospel of the Klan.
And then in the bonus content for subscribers, I have about 15 or 20 minutes of me answering questions at a recent event in Minneapolis.
And there was just great questions about Moms for Liberty, about how Trump voters can consider themselves religious.
I mean, there was just really good questions.
So I figured that some of you'd want to hear kind of the discussion there and my responses.
And so that'll be there for subscribers in the second part of the episode.
Before we get to Dr. Kelly Baker's interview, I want to just sort of preface it by talking about her book and why I think it's so important.
So the book is called Gospel of the Klan.
Some of you are familiar with it.
She's been on our show before.
And she really brings out in the book the really just foundational takeaway idea, something that I hope everyone listening will leave with today, and that is this.
The Ku Klux Klan of the 1915s, the 1920s.
The Ku Klux Klan that had between four and six million members in those decades, that had governors and legislatures and mayors who were all part of the KKK during those years.
The KKK that was marching down the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where some of you can see in your mind's eye the pictures of the KKK marching on Pennsylvania Avenue.
That KKK was not sold to the American public as a terrorist organization.
It was not pitching to people that you should join because you hate black people or you hate Jews.
It was pitched as a Christian American fraternity.
An organization that put God and country first.
An organization that wanted to restore America to the social order God wanted for it.
I know it's easy because we've all heard of the Klan so much and for so long as America's first terrorist organization, as a white supremacist outfit that teaches hatred towards black people, that lynched and put burning crosses on the lawns and property of black people, that as I talked about with Dr. Baker is known and should be known for its anti-Semitism and for its anti-Catholicism.
All of that hate That is part of what made the KKK.
There is no doubt.
There is no sense of denying that, and I'm not here to do that.
What I do want you to understand is that if you were sitting in a church or in a community center or somewhere in 1918, 1923, what you were going to hear about the KKK was not, hey, come join us because you hate black people.
Come join us because you hate Jews.
It was, do you want America to be God's country again?
Do you want it to look like it's supposed to?
Do you want to go back to the basic values that we uphold?
Now, I think in some ways what has happened with the Klan in the American imaginary is that it's so beyond the pale.
It's thought of as such an organization that, hey, if somebody were known to be part of the Klan, that would automatically disqualify them from Public authority, that you can't be part of the Klan and show up in 2024 or 2004 or 1994 and expect people to think that you're going to win the favor of a majority of Americans or a majority of voters or whatever.
To be part of the Klan has become, or at least it was, a disqualifying characteristic.
But here's what I want to point out before I go to that very first half of my interview with Dr. Baker, is this.
We have an organization in our country called TPUSA, led by Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk is, as all of you know, a young man who started this when he was young, and it has grown into one of the most influential and widespread student organizations in the country.
He, over the last couple years, has really made a concerted effort to reach out to ministers and pastors, and we've covered that on our show.
They've had pastor's conferences, and they are deeply embedded in thousands and thousands of churches across the country.
Charlie Kirk himself is somebody who has signed on to the Seven Mountain Mandate.
Matthew Bode is doing great work on this, as are others including Matthew Taylor and those who cover not only the New Apostolic Reformation, but Charlie Kirk.
The Seven Mountain Mandate is the idea that Christians should conquer every domain of human society, art, leisure, excuse me, art, economy, family, media, government, and so on.
It is a theology of conquest.
It's a theology of, as Matt Taylor says, colonizing the earth for God.
That is what Charlie Kirk believes in as a Christian.
He is closely tied to Jack McCoy at, excuse me, Rob McCoy at Godspeak in Ventura.
It's a very influential church in Ventura.
He's also tied to Jack Hibbs, who's a Southern California preacher who is vehemently anti-LGBTQ, is also part of somebody who adheres to the Seven Mountains Mandate.
Here's the point.
When hundreds, if not millions, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans think of TPUSA and Charlie Kirk, they think of a patriotic Christian organization.
They think of an organization that is trying to do things on college campuses and in churches to make America great again.
That's what they think.
And I dare say, if you ask the average person, On the street, not somebody like you who's listening to this podcast who might be a politics junkie or a researcher or someone like that.
Just your friend who kind of watches the nightly news, your friend who's kind of tuned in and definitely votes and definitely pays attention, but they're not out here listening to 10 hours of politics podcast a week or whatever it is you do.
I think if you said TPUSA, Charlie Kirk, they're like, oh yeah, that conservative like student thing.
Yeah, I don't know if I like that guy, but yeah, I mean, you know, the guy, he's always like, you know, he's totally for Trump.
That guy?
That response, I think, is indicative of where TPUSA stands.
That TPUSA is not Beyond the Pale.
TPUSA is not Nick Fuentes.
I think if you say Nick Fuentes to a lot of people, they're like, oh, the neo-Nazi.
The guy that had dinner with Trump.
The guy that hangs around with Kanye.
Now, don't get me wrong.
Unfortunately, Nick Fuentes has a lot of followers in this country.
But Nick Fuentes is not popular in as many, nearly as many pastoral corners.
He's not able to go into thousands and tens of thousands of churches and college campuses and gain the kind of listenership that Charlie Kirk would.
There are many people at neighborhood churches who gladly tell their friend at coffee hour after church, hey, did you hear what Charlie Kirk said this week?
Did you listen to the podcast?
Are you going to go to this conference and see him speak?
I don't think you can do that nearly as much about Nick Fuentes.
Charlie Kirk is thought of by many as a Christian, as a patriot, as a conservative.
But we are now at a place with Charlie Kirk and TPUSA where, as we've talked about on this show, Charlie Kirk thinks Martin Luther King Jr.
is a bad guy.
We have reached a place in the country where conservatives are not saying Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights icon, I wish that today's civil rights leaders were more like him and blah blah blah.
Nope.
Simply Martin Luther King Jr., the man that He fought for so many things, including the Civil Rights Act, the man who marched in labor strikes against Jim Crow in order to integrate the South in terms of buses and public spaces.
A man who preached and lived an ethic of pacifism, of non-violent resistance, is a bad guy.
That's Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk also saying, not feel safe if he gets on a plane with pilots who are people of color, because who knows, maybe they were just put there for diversity reasons.
So you can come out and say, hey, I'm not sure I want to get on a plane if the pilot is black.
That's where we are.
This is 2024.
You can say that.
Somebody who tells women, don't get married, or I'm sorry, don't have a career.
Go get married and have as many kids as you can.
And then finally, and this is the one that I think is really important because in my interview with Dr. Baker, you're going to hear one of the very first things we discussed is immigration.
Charlie Kirk, who was critical of Mike Johnson last week, because Mike Johnson was going to cut a deal with the Democrats to pass a bill and get aid to Ukraine in a swap for a kind of certain things concerning the southern border.
Charlie Kirk was critical of Mike Johnson for Mike Johnson's stance, and he said, how can you think that this is pro-life?
If you're leaving the border open and Americans, Christian Americans, are being replaced.
He was advocating for the Great Replacement Theory.
So we have a situation when it comes to immigration, Great Replacement Theory.
When it comes to race, not sure if I want to get on a plane with a black person.
When it comes to civil rights, yeah, Martin Luther King Jr., the guy that fought to end Jim Crow, get a Civil Rights Act passed, who did all of that non-violently, bad person.
And yet, Charlie Kirk and TPUSA are not beyond the pale.
They're not considered the neo-Nazi outfit.
They're not sort of seen and looked down on.
They're not, like, if you're at church, you don't have to kind of hide the fact that you listen to Charlie Kirk or you follow him or he's a big influence on you.
Like you might Nick Fuentes.
Charlie Kirk is trying to be both Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell Sr.
at the same time.
He's trying to tie those two threads together and be something that is bigger than Limbaugh in terms of his influence in churches and on college campuses, but who has that widespread cultural warrior feel like Limbaugh did.
I want you to keep all of that in mind as you hear Dr. Baker talk about the KKK of the 1915s and 1920s.
Because what I would argue, and this is what she says in the second part of our interview, which I'll air next week, is that we are still living in the Klan's America.
That even if it has dissipated and dwindled in comparison to where it was in the 1920s, that we're still there.
And I would argue that if it's hard to think of the KKK as a kind of, quote unquote, respectable organization that patriotic Christians would join, well, just think about TPUSA and Charlie Kirk.
All right.
You can hear her.
That's my baby in the background.
She's getting fussy.
So I'm going to say enjoy my interview with Dr. Baker.
This is part one.
We'll air part two next week.
And our bonus content after my interview with her is some just great dialogue in Minneapolis for me and others about Moms for Liberty, about Trump voters, about Trump citing Mein Kampf, about how to talk to friends and family who have fallen into the MAGA kind of traps.
So if you're a subscriber, stay tuned because that is coming your way.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Joined today by someone who I believe has been here two times before and is just an amazing person in terms of being a human being, but also scholar and writer, and that's Dr. Kelly J. Baker.
So, Kelly, thanks for coming back.
Thanks for having me back.
I'm excited to be here.
It's been a while, and I feel like it's been too long, but I'm so glad you are back.
We are kicking off a series here where we're focusing on one book per month for 2024, this election year.
And when I started outlining what I wanted that to look like, your book, Gospel of the Klan, was the first one I wrote down because I wanted to make sure folks know about it and are aware of everything that it kind of means for our current moment.
Let me tell people about you, though, before we start talking about your book.
You are an author.
You have a PhD in religious studies.
You're a fellow religious studies nerd with me.
You've written all over as an essayist and historian.
Your work is in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Religion and Politics, The Washington Post, and so on and so on.
Your latest book is Final Girl and other essays on grief, trauma, and mental illness.
And you're the host of a new-ish podcast, Pod Only Knows, which is very, very exciting.
So always busy, always doing many things.
And just want to say, friends, if you're listening, Dr. Baker is a huge inspiration for me to write for public audiences, to do this kind of work, and to do it as a scholar of religion.
So it's just always just a real honor for me to have Dr. Baker on the show.
Let me jump into your book and into your work.
So, we're in a weird political moment.
I'm not gonna explain why, if that's not self-evident.
I'm just gesturing wildly at everything right now.
Then, I don't know even why you're listening to this show.
I wanna go back to another sort of, I think, wild moment in American history.
Your book, Gospel of the Klan, in my mind is groundbreaking, and it's really just, for me, it blew my mind in terms of understanding the time period in the United States from, say, 1900 to 1930.
And what you outline is the formation and manifestation of the second Ku Klux Klan, the Klan that existed in the 20th century, the one that I think many of us picture when we imagine the Klan, you know, the kind of marching in parades, the uniforms, the burning crosses.
This is the Klan that people have in their mind.
This is the one that dominates the American imaginary.
And so, I want to get to what all that means and we're going to talk a lot about the religious elements, but there's a scene in your book of like the moment the second clan forms.
When the men get together and they're all out doing the men stuff and they do their little ritual and form their little club.
So, what does that look like?
Would you mind just painting us a little picture of who's out there making their little boy scout club when it's time?
Sure, I think the scene you're talking about is this theatrical scene where they decide to climb Stone Mountain with a cross, and this heavy wooden cross climbs Stone Mountain.
And if you aren't familiar with Stone Mountain in Georgia, this is not an easy climb.
I've done part of this climb with small children.
This is not advisable by the way.
I think I did this with like a toddler and like a seven or eight year old which do not do this folks at home.
This is not a good plan.
But they decide to carry this cross up Stone Mountain and set it on fire as a way to mark the beginning of the 1920s Klan.
And to really set their tone, that this is what they want to do and that the cross, the fiery cross, is a mark of their beginning.
And as we know, the fiery cross is like one of their main symbols and it's kind of one of the symbols that we think about when we think of the 1920s Klan or the Klan in general.
But for them too, it's not a symbol that like we think of it.
So we would think of this as a symbol of terror, right?
Like they're trying to terrorize the countryside by doing this.
But they're really thinking of it as a symbol of a beginning and of a symbol of Jesus and setting the light of Jesus for the world by doing this as their beginning.
So it's this kind of wild moment in their early history where they're really like setting the tone like we are coming as a conquering force for Christ.
For this nation and we're going to set it straight in some sort of way by doing this.
But yeah, when I found this in the archives, I was like, no, no way.
Like, this can't be real.
And I was like, it is real.
Like, this is one of those moments as a historian where you're just like, how is this possible?
And how did I find this?
But.
Yeah, I mean, and it really shows that how into the spectacle they are of what they do and how theatrical everything they do is and how thoughtful they are about their self-presentation and the presentation of their order to you.
I really love that you used the word spectacle and the theatrical because that is so, like when you read your book, it's so clear there in terms of the garb, in terms of the symbols.
But I wanted to begin with that scene because I think what it shows is that when they climb that mountain, It was the cross that was the symbol they took.
And as I remember that scene, they pledge sort of allegiance to America and to Christ both, which I think illustrates for me the biggest takeaway from your book, which is the Ku Klux Klan was Christian nationalists in the sense that its goals were to be a conquering Christian force.
Mm-hmm.
To make America look like it was supposed to look.
Yes.
And that's so clear from that scene in the book and everything you write about it.
If we turn to the historical moment surrounding them, 1910, 1915.
Why then?
What is happening in the United States?
If I'm listening and I'm just not somebody who kind of can automatically picture the America of 1915, why would this organization that became such a seminal terrorist white supremacist force in the country arise at this moment?
Sure, they're reacting to a changing America, that they're really concerned with immigration.
Part of the story of the Klan, often what we think about is we think about the 1950s and 1960s Klan, which is really reacting to the enfranchisement of African Americans, reacting to civil rights.
This sort of thing.
When we're talking about the 1920s, Clayton, what they're reacting to is an influx of Catholics and Jewish people coming from Europe, and they're deeply concerned about a changing character of the American nation.
So what they're concerned about is race and ethnicity, but they're also deeply concerned about the changing religious character.
They're afraid that we're going to get Catholics and Jews in and they're going to change what it means to be an American on a fundamental religious level.
So that Protestants aren't going to be in control anymore, particularly white Protestants.
And so when the Klan arises, part of what they're portraying and what they're moving towards is that America is a white Protestant nation.
And has been a white Protestant nation since the Puritans, right?
They forget that there were indigenous peoples that were here previously, and they tell a story that's very much a white Protestant history that they want to keep in a very particular way.
And so that's what they're reacting to, is that they're afraid that we're on a cusp moment where white Protestants are no longer going to be in control and that they have to do something immediately for them to keep that control and stay in power.
What's odd about it, though, is that they also would acclaim to be like victims and saviors at the same time.
So that they're victims of this changing culture, right?
Like things are going awry.
At the same time that they want to claim that they still have some of this dominance, right?
That they're saviors and that they're soldiers and that they're going to be the ones that are going to be in power.
It's a really complicated narrative that they're working with.
They can't entirely decide if they are the dominating force in our culture or if they're the victims that need to be saved in some kind of way.
It's always kind of unclear about which character they want to be.
But the immigrants are the sort of enemy that they're always fighting against in this instance.
And Catholics in particular are the ones that they're deeply, deeply concerned about.
These other Christians that they are, you know, not really that far away from, but are the sort of deep enemy that they have to be always on the lookout for and always have to be paying attention to in some kind of way.
I'm going to hold my questions about comparing this clan and time to our current one, but it's really hard.
I know.
I'm just going to really do my discipline to best here to just move on to the next question because, good Lord, Charlie Kirk This Week sounded just like this, but anyway.
One of the things that I think is really easy to imagine about the Klan, and I think this was especially true before the Trump years, was that if you go watch a comedy special from the 1990s or the 2005s, the Klan is treated as this sort of Outside the bounds, those are folks who clearly were at the very fringe of society, and if you're one of them, you're not going to be part of polite company.
The Klan is a way to sort of signal somebody who's so racist that they don't get to participate with everyone else in what we're doing.
That was sort of the way to kind of set it up.
Your book is so powerful for many reasons, but one of them is when you read it, you realize this group was built into everyday American life.
They were not on the fringe.
They were not people who were I'm wondering what it looks like if you can help us understand some of the ways the Klan was integrated into everyday American life in ways that were not fringe but were just sort of quotidian and mundane.
Sure.
I mean, one of the things that I really set out to do with this book is to work against that fringe narrative that kind of makes me bananas, is that the 1920s Klan was remarkably mainstream, that they were firmly middle class, that they were dentists and doctors and loggers and judges and police officers, and they were clergy, they were teachers, that they were
just bankers, you know, dentists.
One of the founders, not founders, but one of the leaders of the Klan was a dentist, H.W. Evans.
So these were people that were entrenched in American life.
They were part of the 49, no, 48.
Oh, I can't count.
48 continental states.
I don't know what happened there.
I was like, maybe Alaska is part of that.
There, my bad.
It's early still for me.
So they were a part of the 48 continental states.
There were Borders everywhere in this.
They were rural and urban.
They were everywhere.
They were educated.
You know, at one point they wanted to build their own Klan college and have this.
They were legislators.
Indiana at one point had what was called the Klan Legislature because they had so many Klan members in the legislature at a certain point.
So they were firmly entrenched in American life.
Historians who aren't me, who counted this up, think four to six million members in the 1920s at their heyday, which is pretty significant.
And that's the numbers that we can count, right?
That's not thinking about the influence of the Klan or who's reading their newspapers, who's attending their picnics or their marches, who's participating in their whisper campaigns against Catholic and Jewish businesses and getting of them in their towns, these kinds of things.
So they were pretty common and they were not on the fringes.
So it's entirely likely that the banker that you went to could be a Klansman and you would just not know it.
Or that your clergy could do a pro-Klan sermon or write for a Klan newspaper or be on the lecture circuit even for the Klan in this kind of way.
Because the Klan liked to come in and pay clergy to pay their churches.
Part of their benevolent work there was to give donations to local churches who were supportive, that sort of thing.
So So you just have this kind of mass support of the Klan in the 20s that you just don't have today.
You just didn't have in the 2000s or even in the 90s when they attempted to be respectable.
It just didn't pan out in the same kind of way, right?
Where the Klan becomes a joke or part of the Maury Kovik show.
Yeah.
It's not a similar way to think about it.
So they're remarkably mainstream, so much so that, you know, people are writing about them in the New York Times in a way that is somewhat favorable, is what I found in the archives.
So it's not that when they emerged on the scene, people were instantly critical.
It's like, oh, it's this kind of interesting order thing that they're doing.
And we don't entirely know how we feel about them, but it's not entirely negative in their coverage.
Thanks for listening today.
We'll have the rest of my interview with Dr. Baker next week, along with some more commentary and analysis.
If you're a subscriber, stay tuned.
Gonna have about 20, 23 more minutes of content coming your way.
Me answering questions about Moms for Liberty and Hitler's Mein Kampf references and so on.
If you're not a subscriber, Subscribe now so you can hang out with us in bonus content on Mondays, get our bonus episodes every month, and add free listening, access to the archive, and so on.
