J. Edgar Hoover’s Stained Glass Window: The F.B.I., Domestic Security, and American Religion

“… church to make informed contemporary decisions concerning its posture towards the FBI and the role the church should play in the nation's security. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Lerone A. Martin Washington University in Saint Louis Contact Me

About this first book grant for scholars of color

J. Edgar Hoover’s Stained Glass Window chronicles how the FBI collaborated with clergy, faith communities, and parachurch organizations to shape a Christian America and preserve the nation’s security. For Hoover, Christian America was best expressed and embodied in a Christian led government that preserved the traditional American “democratic” values of white supremacy, rugged individualism, law and order, the patriarchal heterosexual family, and free market capitalism and enterprise. Critiques, challenges, and changes to this Christian society were deemed unchristian and therefore subversive. Hoover’s FBI then deployed religious rhetoric and partnered with noted religious broadcasters such as Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, as well as the evangelical magazine "Christianity Today" and organizations such as the National Religious Broadcasters and the KKK to help shape and further legitimize this notion of Christian America and marginalize and discredit any and all challenges to such ideals in the name of domestic security.

The project draws on the more than one hundred Freedom of Information Act requests I have submitted. They have yielded newly de-classified FBI Files of ministers, Christian publications, and organizations. Moreover, Hoover's personal papers, diaries, and correspondence with his pastor provide insight into a deeply held evangelical faith that profoundly shaped the activities of the Bureau. In all, this cache of fresh sources and overlooked documents includes personal letters, photographs, and material ephemera that shed new light on the FBI’s relationship to America’s religious landscape. The FBI was not only concerned with religion, it was also a significant force in the molding of religion and politics during the twentieth century and beyond. In the end, the project provides models for the church to consider as we face our own particular crisis of religion and domestic security.

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