The Angry Road to Cultural Counterrevolution

From Father Coughlin, John Birch and Christian Nationalism to Donald Trump

As editor of The John Birch Society Bulletin, Robert Welch was a resilient, although repetitious advocate for racism and sexism decades before Donald Trump’s digitally fueled Reality TV reboot. He would probably be surprised by the current Republican flirtation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its allies. But he shouldn’t be. Like Evangelical churches in America, the Russian Orthodox Church has been Putin’s faithful partner in reshaping their culture and society, benefiting from his largesse and supporting his view of LGBTQ+ individuals as dangerous to society.

For many years Welch warned his readers about the conspiracy that was plotting to merge the United States and the Soviet Union. His big idea was that repeated exposure could ultimately stop the “socialist nightmare with its perpetual shortages of everything and with its regimentation of individual human lives like that of barnyard animals.” It turns out his prediction was partly accurate. His main mistake was connecting the outcomes with socialism rather than the authoritarian playbook being used in both Russia and the US.

Welch opened each issue of the Bulletin with his personal “reflections on the news” — usually an essay on how US leaders and people like Ralph Nader were destroying the family and civilization. The rest of the austere publication was devoted to reports like “United Nations – Get US Out,” priorities like a windfall profits tax and stopping the Equal Rights Amendment, and turgid notes from Birch Society meetings.

Welch couldn’t decide who he disliked more, anti-nuclear activists or Rockefeller globalists. As a result, he made them partners in a massive plot. It was a highly paranoid theory, wildly implausible, but by no means the only one polluting the political bloodstream well before Ronald Reagan’s rise. Such ideas have radically metastasized in the decades since.

Last week they inspired Vance Boelter, an anti-abortion Christian Nationalist, to go on a killing spree in Minnesota. Boelter posed as a police officer to shoot state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife on June 14, leaving them seriously injured. Then he moved on to former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman’s house, where he executed her and her husband. A manifesto found in his car featured a list of targets that included dozens of prominent pro-choice figures and Democratic politicians.

It took decades to get here. But by 1980 Bircher theories were already no longer the most extreme. Take the New Christian Crusade Church, which promoted unbridled racism in a tabloid newspaper, Christian Vanguard, or the U.S. Labor Party, which served up doomsday scenarios about “controlled disintegration,” orchestrated by agents of the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. Today they are called globalists and operatives of an Illuminati-like “deep state.”

And let’s not forget Moral Majority, an adept user and cynical critic of mass media, which saw the forces of evil everywhere, but masked its extremism by bemoaning the decline of the family and stoking resentment about its right to free speech. Anti-abortion, anti-ERA and pro-tax cut hallelujahs were artfully inserted into Moral Majority news releases that read like compassion-free sermons.

All this might be a topic of mere historical curiosity had these groups and others like them not grown into a mass movement, their ideas and agendas mainstreamed into the Reagan agenda and subsequent campaigns. Moral Majority Report did everything it could, short of outright political endorsement. “If turning back the clock means the restoration of some of the freedoms that Americans traditionally enjoyed,” announced one typical writer, “I’m all for it.” He was referring to the Republican platform.

Like Donald Trump, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his Christian fundamentalist movement also had an intense love/hate relationship with mass media. After all, it had flourished on TV with Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour. That movement’s tabloid paper turned Falwell’s radio and TV pronouncements into syndicated columns, while its reporters gloated about their growing influence. At the same time, however, they despised “immoral” television networks; that is, until they got one of their own, Fox News.

Through insistent propaganda, Moral Majority turned ignorance into strength and sexism into a virtue. This sounds all too contemporary in the post-truth era of bully boy politics.

For these pioneers of political fundamentalism, the “insiders” were purveyors of “smut” and degenerate lifestyles, a vast group that included most “non-Christian” media and members of the press. Their basic message, which read like a newsy catechism, was that the “moral” can clean up the media by exerting control over it. That meant boycotting specific outlets, while supporting and consuming mainly Christian media.

Still, the electronic fundamentalism of Falwell’s empire was almost moderate in contrast with the outright Aryan arrogance of Christian Vanguard. “Specifically compiled for the Elect,” this religious house organ was obsessed with one big enemy, the Jews. It was a bullish racism, punctuated with articles like “Sadistic Jewish Slaughter of Animals.”

Pretending to intellectual rigor, one article attempted to prove that the enemy was plagued by a “devastating sense of inferiority.” In another report, covering an Aryan Nations movement conference, the publisher of a sister publication, Zion’s Watchman, came out strong against humanism, marxism and “the seed of the serpent.”

Yet the Aryans remained hopeful, according to another contributor, because “the various right wing movements will come together, and unite as never before once we understand the importance of rallying under the Law of God, making what we call Germany’s WWII ‘Nazism’ seem tiny in comparison.” It was scary stuff, whose echoes have crept back into public discourse.

Like many movement house organs of the pre-Internet era, Christian Vanguard had a mail order clearinghouse for books, with listings under headings like “secret societies,” “the money question,” and “the Jewish world conspiracy.” Another heading covered “self defense and survival,” and included books on explosives, combat and surveillance. This was an early warning of the armed and dangerous nativism and survivalism to come. Clearly, the “Elect” were prepping for future action. Reading their paper also offered solid proof that Nazism was alive throughout the south. Ultimately, it re-emerged publicly and violently in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Many far right groups still believe in some form of conspiracy aimed at destroying their “way of life.” Specifically, they are enthralled by a fanatical fortress mentality, “grerat replacement” theories, and the belief that their rights are under attack. Before Reagan’s election, the U.S. Labor Party, led by perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, was already predicting that economic “disintegration” was just around the corner. Meanwhile, Christian Vanguard warned about “race mixing” and Moral Majority emphasized a war on family values. Taken together, these threads provided a template for Trump’s MAGA movement, a paranoid nativist worldview that could be mobilized and exploited.

Various groups had their own crusades and specific enemies. Their modern equivalents are much the same. What they lack is hope, compassion and the vision of a better future. Instead, the paranoid style draws its power from alienation, resentment and cruelty, using prejudices and frustrations as catalysts for blind loyalty and mob-like reaction.

Almost 40 years ago, this view was exemplified in a pamphlet from Americans for Nuclear Energy, a so-called “citizens group.” Their pitch, in the main text and a fundraising appeal, concentrated on identifying the enemy. In this case, it was “coercive utopians,” led by easy targets like Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, a power couple exploited and demonized much like Bill and Hillary Clinton. Their goal, warned the group, is raw power “to control each of our lives.”

Each day, “the coercive utopians march closer to their repressive goals. The battle is for freedom in America.” And what was freedom? In that version, rather than a border wall it was abundant energy through nuclear power. Without it, America faced a “second stone age.”

That didn’t happened. But in 2016 a similar prophecy led to the rise of a power-mad fabulist, which in turn opened the door to the authoritarian cultural counterrevolution that is now in bloom. If the paranoid style festers and spreads for much longer, we could end up in a very dark time, whether we use nukes or not. Troops on the street, mass roundups and deportations, targeted killings, arresting political opponents; it looks like the start of something big and ugly.

Speaking on his own TV network back in the Reagan days, televangelist Pat Robertson made the long-term goal of his fundamentalist movement clear: “to mobilize Christians, one precinct at a time, one community at a time, one state at a time, until once again we are the head and not the tail, and at the top rather than at the bottom of our political system.” A multi-billion dollar empire, his 700 Club, along with the Family Channel, reached 92 percent of US homes through cable by the mid-1990s.

In a country founded on the principle of church-state separation, such a theocratic vision sounded unlikely at first. But Robertson’s allies and followers ultimately found a vehicle to redefine civic life and reality itself, while simultaneously promoting themselves as national saviors in a “final” battle between good and evil. In Russia, Putin makes similar claims, presenting himself as the defender of Christian and traditional values.

Robertson was just one of many religious broadcasters who have capitalized on mass insecurity to market extreme views. On a syndicated program in the 1990s, anti-abortion organizer Randall Terry spurred followers to aggressive, sometimes violent action against anyone who defended reproductive freedom. Vance Boelter certainly followed such advice. James Dobson, host of the pseudo-talk show Focus on the Family, amassed a $100 million war chest by the mid-90s.

Demagogues and evangelists have been using various media to do the same thing for generations. Fundamentalist Christians took early advantage of radio, jumping into broadcasting even before federal regulation could be developed. By 1925, more than 10 percent of all stations were licensed to religious organizations. Starting with radio evangelism, religious leaders subsequently perfected the use of each new technology to influence opinion, deepen divisions, win elections, and amplify their theology through constant repetition. One of the first was Aimee Semple McPherson, who pioneered the approach on a powerful Los Angeles' radio station. Broadcasting from her temple, McPherson styled herself a modern-day Joan of Arc in a titanic struggle against communism.

First appearing on CBS radio stations in 1930, Father Charles Coughlin built a similarly ardent following with his volatile mixture of populism, anti-semitism and nationalism. When CBS management insisted that he stop railing against “international bankers,” the evangelist appealed directly to his 30 million listeners. They sent more than a million letters of protest to the network.

CBS responded by replacing all paid religious broadcasts with Church of the Air, a show that provided free, rotating air time to speakers from the three “major” faiths. This didn’t deter Coughlin. He created his own network and became even more political, eventually embracing fascism. The movement gained ground not only in Europe, but across America. Until Coughlin lost favor in the run up to World War II, he suggested that “Christians suffer more at the hands of the Reds than Jews do in the Third Reich,” and that Nazi Germany had to protect itself from Jewish communists who were influencing radio, journalism and finance. Attempts to censor him were decried as “Jewish terrorism.”

A book on his speeches, The Fine Art of Propaganda, examined effective techniques he used that are employed by Trump today — name-calling, glittering generalities, mixing facts and falsehoods, a sense of identification, and Us vs. Them appeals. Many of these became part of the playbook used by politicians like Joe McCarthy. When Father Coughlin was forced off the air in 1939, he still had 10 million radio listeners.

Using everything that modern technology has to offer, many demagogues combine distorted appeals to religious convictions with pure disinformation to focus attention on "wedge issues" such as gay rights and abortion. Their ultimate objectives — evidenced by school prayer, anti-abortion, and other crusades to turn religious beliefs into law — include weakening the separation of church and state.

Groups like the 700 Club and Christian Coalition moved early and forcefully into cyberspace, posting anti-gay rhetoric on a huge number of websites. "It is distressing," wrote Loren Javier in Out! magazine, "when 'pro-family' quasi-religious groups like the American Family Association post articles and pamphlets in the form of educational materials which in fact threaten the existence of lesbians and gay men. Both produce the same results — fear, hatred, and intolerance."

Over time, such propaganda has created a distorted picture of contemporary reality which many people hungry for guidance embrace. As former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed explained several years before the election of George W. Bush, the short-term objective was to force candidates to endorse the Coalition's agenda, an effort that frequently proved successful. But the ultimate step was to turn the agenda into policy, a goal that came within reach when candidates for president, from Bush to Trump, inserted religious Right rhetoric into their campaigns.

The foundation was built over several decades. Although their candidates faltered at first, Christian Right "wedge" issues — school prayer, family values, opposition to abortion and gay "lifestyle" — skewed public debates, often eclipsing the competing views of progressive Christians and others who opposed an intolerant and paranoid theology. "Our time is coming," Pat Buchanan told the faithful during the 1996 presidential primaries. Having lost every race on Super Tuesday, he nevertheless predicted ultimate victory for the fundamentalist forces he had helped catalyze.

Buchanan's gospel of "cultural war" struck a chord with the Christian Right and Howard Phillips US Taxpayers Party, which wanted to restore a "Christian republic," end welfare, scrap the civil service and IRS, and withdraw from international organizations. In 2000, candidates like Steve Forbes, Allen Keyes, and Gary Bauer built on this foundation, linking jeremiads about political corruption and moral decay with calls to overthrow Roe v. Wade. Once Trump was in office and appointed three conservative Supreme Court judges, they did exactly that. During his second term, steps are being taken to move rapidly on the rest of the agenda.

Over the last century, we’ve gone from traveling Chautauqua tent shows and radio sermons to Tiktok, Truth Social, and X. Only the specific targets have changed. These days it can be practically anything associated with multiculturalism, progressive politics, reproductive rights, or social justice.

Fueled by Fox News and conservative powerhouses like the Koch brothers, christian nationalists and white supremacists have mass marketed an extreme, paranoid world view, immersing millions in a false reality. They present specious arguments and patent falsehoods as history, biblical truth or indisputable fact. Too often other “reality based” outlets let the disinformation slide.

Some material was previously published in Managing Chaos and on the Toward Freedom and Countercurrents websites.