The guest on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Sunday TV show has exposed the massive role that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI played in fostering white Christian nationalism.
Lerone Martin is the Martin Luther King Jr Centennial Professor and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. He’s the award-winning author of a previous book called Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion. He’s co-director of the Crossroads Project — Advancing Public Understanding of the History, Politics and Cultures of African American Religions. Martin’s newest book, out this year from Princeton University Press, is called The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism. He is currently working on an adapted graphic novel about the young Martin Luther King to be published by HarperCollins.
“He believed that … America itself was a Christian nation and that America would only survive and thrive if it continued to be a Christian nation,” Martin says, in describing to “Freethought Matters” co-hosts Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor how Hoover was a white Christian nationalist. “And for Hoover, that notion of Christianity was very much so centered upon certain ideas about society — that society should be led by the Ten Commandments. In fact, he believed that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were founded upon the Ten Commandments. So, he saw these founding documents as sacred. He also believed that society was meant to be run by white men— and solely by white men who were Christian. And he believed that all other races of people and all other genders were subordinate to white men and would have to always be led by white men.”
If you don’t live in the quarter-plus viewership of the nation where the show broadcasts on Sunday (see below), you can already catch the interview on FFRF’s YouTube channel. New shows go up every Thursday.
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Upcoming guests include writer Christine Kenneally, who has a new book out on the horrors of Catholic orphanages, secularity sociologist Isabella Kasselstrand, former TV correspondent Jon Ward, author of Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation, and Freethought Equality PAC Director Ron Millar, among others. You can catch interviews from past seasons here, including recent ones with Gloria Steinem, Ron Reagan, “Daily Show” co-creator Lizz Winstead, author John Irving, actor John “Q” de Lancie and award-winning columnist Katha Pollitt. Past interviews include Julia Sweeney and Reps. Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, Hank Johnson and Eleanor Holmes Norton, among many other notable authors, activists, musicians, actors and freethinkers.
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