Hypocrisy Of Evangelicals In Supporting Right Wingers
For Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, the series of indictments against trump are “an attempt to … inflict enough political wounds on this man to where it will be impossible for him to run” for president in 2024.
Tony Suarez, a pastor and the chief operating officer of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said the latest charges against Trump are “games” played by Democrats to try to block his presidential bid.
And Richard Land, the former president of Southern Evangelical Seminary and executive editor of The Christian Post, labeled the latest indictment a “jihad” by the Department of Justice against Trump.
The three are just a sampling of the evangelicals who call themselves Christian nationalists and who are lining up to back trump to join in the right wing’s longstanding crusade against so-called, left wing subversives.
Evangelical support of right wing causes has taken many forms over the years, from outright backing of politicians to furtive cooperation with the government’s long and continuing history of illegally spying on and infiltrating activist groups. Underground cooperation has included using informants to penetrate groups like the Black Panthers and plant misinformation. Such campaigns have inspired killings of Panther leaders. Other targets of misinformation circulate to discredit everyone from Muslim leaders to environmental activists.
Support has not always led to violent ends but the results have been just as devastating. One of the most egregious examples of clandestine support involved the “Happy Am I” turncoat minister, and the FBI’s attempts to demonize the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The time was the mid-1960s, during the heat of the civil rights movement and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover vowed to destroy King in the belief that the leader of the growing movement was a communist. At one point, the FBI sent a disguised letter exposing King’s sexual exploits and urging King to commit suicide.
“There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation,” the letter said.
King was not deterred and later criticized the FBI for not doing enough to protect the civil rights workers in the south from threats of violence from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. Hoover was infuriated and publicly labeled King “an enemy to the country” and in November 1964 told reporters that King was “the most notorious liar in the country.”
The FBI bugged telephones in offices, motel rooms and the home of King in an effort to collect incriminating information, including King’s sexual liaisons. The National Archives is expected to release unheard FBI audio tapes on Jan. 31, 2027.
As part of its drive to ruin King and the movement, the FBI turned for help to civilians who were critical of King. One was a popular, African American evangelist, Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, who was a fierce critic of King and wanted to discredit him in the eyes of African Americans. The enmity was in no small part a result of King’s repeated criticisms of black clergy members, like Michaux, who did not embrace the civil rights movement.
Michaux became the FBI’s perfect undercover backstabber.
The revelations about Michaux were first exposed in 2018 by Lerone A. Martin, a professor of Washington University in St. Louis. Martin discovered FBI files on King while working on a book on religious broadcasters.
The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture reported in 1967 that Michaux first began visiting the FBI during World War II, when he worked with the government “to extol the FBI as a paragon of Christianity, patriotism, and racial progress while discrediting and slandering a number of ‘subversive’ black civil rights advocates from the National Negro Congress and the Regional Council of Negro Leadership.”
Michaux, known as the “Happy Am I” minister, founded the Church of God Movement in 1917. He launched his radio show, the “Radio Church of God” in 1929, a program that continued broadcasting to a national audience through 1960. In the late 1940s, Michaux also became the first minister to host a weekly show on the fledgling medium of television.
As proof of his popularity, Michaux offered invocations for President Franklin Roosevelt at public events. The Roosevelt administration in turn granted Michaud a large loan to build segregated public housing in Washington, D.C.
Michaux also was a favorite of President Harry Truman, visiting the White House several times, and was friends with such black luminaries as heavyweight boxing champion Jersey Joe Walcott. Michaux also was a frequent guests at the White House under President Dwight Eisenhower.
But Michaux had business in addition to his evangelism. His closest relationship in the executive branch was with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In the early 1960s, the popular minister began colluding with the FBI, using his media ministry to publicly scandalize King as a communist and defend the Bureau against King’s criticisms. Michaux was known as one of the FBI’s special correspondents, who had a so-called “Special Service Contact” and was listed on the Bureau’s “Special Correspondents Lists.”
Professor Martin found that Michaux laundered counterintelligence for the FBI.
“So for example, the F.B.I. would pass along some information to him on King about, perhaps, King being a communist, and then Michaux would, of course, scrub that intelligence and present it in some of his broadcasts or sermons,” Martin said in a 2018 interview with the N.Y. Times. “In all, what he does is he colludes with the F.B.I. to preach sermons that discredit Martin Luther King and also even engage in a protest of Martin Luther King that was cleared by the F.B.I.”
On Aug. 28, 1963, King led the famous “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” also known as simply the March on Washington or The Great March on Washington, in Washington, D.C. At the same time, the FBI labeled King “the most dangerous Negro in the world.” The bureau contacted Michaux and urged him to preach against the march.
A month later, Michaux sermonized against the march and questioning King’s religious commitments.
“The sermon basically says that King, his religious commitments are questionable, and this whole entire dream that Martin Luther King has will never ever happen and will never come about by marching and protesting. But it will only come about by sort of seeking the Christian conversion of individuals in America,” Martin said.
The sermon implies that King is motivated not by religion but by his support of communism.
Another situation developed after King questioned the FBI’s commitment to racial justice and told the press that the FBI could not investigate segregation if the FBI has segregationist agents.
Hoover later responded that King was “the most notorious liar in the country” and that King should not be trusted.
The FBI again called on Michaux who agreed to issue a statement that King was wrong and that Hoover was a good Christian working to ensure the morality of the nation.
In 1965, King led as many as 25,000 people to march from Selma, Ala., to the state capitol, Montgomery. It was a historic landmark for the civil rights movement. Soon after the march, King attended the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Baltimore, Md. With the approval of the FBI, Michaux and abut 100 supporters protested outside of the hotel, carrying signs such as “Communist termites are inside” and “God save America.”
King was not the first African American targeted by the FBI. In 1919, Hoover was director of the Bureau of Investigation’s general intelligence division when he targeted “Black Moses” Marcus Garvey for investigation and harassment because of his alleged association with “radical elements” that were “agitating the Negro movement.”
Garvey was a Jamaican political activist, black nationalist and Pan-Africanist. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League and had declared himself Provisional President of Africa.
Although Garvey had violated no federal laws, the FBI infiltrated the Universal Negro Improvement Association with informant provocateurs and undercover agents who searched for years for any charge that could justify his deportation.
Hoover’s crusade to destroy King was a key element in the FBI’s COINTELPRO, acronym for its Counter Intelligence program. The scheme of illegal surveillance and disinformation began in 1956 and was initially aimed at ferreting out alleged communists. It later expanded to include civil rights activists, anti-war activists, Native American activists, and New Left organizers. Guided by Hoover, COINTELPRO’s obsession with the Black Panther Party led to the murders and imprisonment of dozens of Black Panther Party members.
In 1967, COINTELPRO changed its focus to “Black Nationalist Hate Groups” and targeted King; Stokely Carmichael, the first president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Black Panther and writer, Eldridge Cleaver; Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam; and Malcolm X, a Muslim minister and human rights activist, among others.
Through COINTELPRO, the FBI compiled intelligence on more than 300,000 people, with individual files on more than 7,000 Americans.
COINTELPRO first came to public light in 1971 after a left wing group, Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI, broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania, seized documents and distributed them to media outlets. As a result, in 1976, COINTELPRO became the focus of the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly referred to as the “Church Committee” after its chairman, Senator Frank Church, D-Idaho. The result was the end of COINTELPRO.
Although COINTELPRO was technically disbanded after 1971, the government has continued a program of counterintelligence and surveillance of political dissidents and especially, African American activists. In 2017, The Intercept revealed that the FBI had compiled a list of “Black identity extremists,” including Black Lives Matter activists who have been monitored by the Department of Homeland Security since 2014.
Earlier this year, following criticism from elected officials, civil liberties advocates and some law enforcement groups, the FBI said that it had abandoned the “black identity extremism” label, substituting it with the term, “racially motivated violent extremism. ”
Here is a short list of those where were illegally targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO: The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, civil rights activist; Mumia Abu-Jamal, political activist and journalist; Muhammad Ali, professional athlete and activist; James Baldwin, writer and activist; Judi Bari, environmentalist and labor leader; H. Rap Brown, civil rights activist; Kwame Ture, civil rights organizer; Bunchy Carter, activist, Black Panther; Eldridge Cleaver, writer, Black Panther; Howard Bruce Franklin, historian; Fred Hampton, Black Panther; Tom Hayden, peace activist; Ernest Hemingway, writer; Abbie Hoffman, peace activist; Erica Huggins, writer, Black Panther; Jose Cha Cha Jimenez, activist, founder Young Lords; Muhammad Kenyatta, civil rights activist, professor; Clark Kerr, economist, academic; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights activist; Stanley Levison, advisor to the Rev. King; Viola Liuzzo, civil rights activist; Malcolm X, civil rights activist; Jessica Mitford, author, civil rights activist; Huey P. Newton, Black Panther; Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, Puerto Rican independence activist; Mario Savio, peace activist; Jean Seberg, actor, civil rights activist; Assata Shakur, political activist; Morris Starsky, social activist, professor; and John Trudell, author, political activist.