Kill A Commie For Jesus!

The Reverend Mr. Billy James Hargis, 79, died earlier this week of complications associated Alzheimer's disease and a series of heart attacks at a nursing home in Tulsa, Okla., of unspecified causes. The 270-lb. Hargis was a televangelist who combined fundamentalism and anti-communism. I attended one of his rallies in Denver in the early 1960s. Hargis appeared with retired general Edwin Walker. Walker—commander of the troops sent to Little Rock during the school desegregation crisis in 1957—was newly retired and a convert to the bromide that racial integration was a communist plot. Walker and Hargis got a lot of standing ovations from the right-wing faithful that night. Walker ultimately faded into anonymity. Hargis was riding high until he was accused of sexually abusing at least one male and three female students at his American Christian College in Tulsa. Like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart who followed Hargis as prominent televangelists, Hargis faded into relative obscurity following the scandal by the late 1970s. Now, history professor Lori Bogle of the U. S. Naval Academy has established a linkage between the Pentagon and the anti-communist movement. If this is (fair & balanced) Cold War irony, so be it.

The Pentagon's Battle for the American Mind: The Early Cold War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).
by Lori Bogle

The U.S. military has historically believed itself to be the institution best suited to develop the character, spiritual values, and patriotism of American youth. Here, author Lori Bogle investigates how the armed forces assigned themselves this role and why they sought to create "ideologically sound Americans capable of defeating communism
and assuring the victory of democracy at home and abroad."

Bogle shows that this view of America's civil religion predated tension with the Soviet Union. She traces this trend from the Progressive Era though the early Cold War, when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations formulated plans that promised to prepare the American public morally and spiritually for confrontation with the evils of communism.

Bogle's analysis suggests that cooperation among the military, evangelical right wing groups, and government was considered both necessary and normal. The Boy Scouts pushed a narrow vision of American democracy, and Joe McCarthy's chauvinism was less an aberration than a noxious manifestation of a widespread attitude. To combat communism, America and its armed forces embraced a narrow moral education that attacked everyone and everything not consonant with their view of the world order. Exposure of this alliance ultimately dissolved it.

Lori Bogle, of Glen Burnie, Maryland, is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.

Copyright © 2004 Texas A&M University Press