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12203

Religion and the Radical Right in American Public Life

Leonard B. Weinberg and Eliot Assoudeh*
University of Nevada Reno

Abstract
Religious movements and religious ideas have played important roles in the United States almost since the
formation of the American republic. From those who sought to abolish slavery in the 19th century to the
civil rights and anti-war movements of the 20th, Christian clergy and laymen claimed religious inspiration
for their involvements. There is another side to this story, however. In addition to championing these
progressive causes, Christian, largely Protestant, religious ideas have also been central to the various radical
right-wing movements that have surfaced over the course of American history. Or, as the journalist H. L.
Mencken once put it in connection with the 1928 presidential election campaign: ‘the Ku Klux Klan is
really the secular wing of the Methodist church in the South!’ Xenophobic, Anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic,
and especially anti-communist, far-right organisations in the USA have employed religious sentiments to
justify their campaigns against important social changes in public life. We propose to tell their story.

Religious movements and religious ideas have played important roles in the United States since
the formation of the American republic. From those who sought to abolish slavery in the 19th
century to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 20th, Christian clergy and laymen
have claimed religious inspiration for quite a variety of involvements. There is another side to
this story, however. In addition to leading progressive causes, Christian, largely Protestant, reli-
gious ideas have also been central to the various radical right-wing movements that surfaced
over the course of American history. The journalist H. L. Mencken once put it in connection
with the 1928 presidential election campaign: ‘the Ku Klux Klan is really the secular wing of the
Methodist church in the South!’ Xenophobic, anti-Catholic, racist, anti-Semitic, and especially
anti-communist, far-right organisations in the USA have employed religious sentiments to
justify their campaigns against important social changes in public life and those promoting them.
This survey of religion and radical right proposes to suggest an explanation. But first, we need to
define our terms.
What do we mean when we use the term ‘radical right’? In our view, and in the American
context, we are really dealing with two phenomena. Both represent extremist ‘takes’ on our
public life. The first one consists of several elements. As Lipset and Raab put it many years
ago, radical rightists are those who are intolerant of ambiguity.1 Distinctions between right
and wrong and between true and false are clear-cut. Given this view, extreme rightists reject
the normal give and take of democratic politics. Instead, they are prepared to employ violence
or ‘Second Amendment’ remedies to prevent the wrong side from prevailing. They also per-
ceive the world in conspiratorial terms. A small conspiratorial elite, often an international cabal
of bankers or ‘insiders’, really controls the American government. It does so on behalf of racial,
ethnic, or religious groups at the expense of ‘real’ Americans who now regard themselves to be
aliens in their own land. The American people are what the late Robert Mathews, the neo-Nazi
founder of the Silent Brotherhood, described as ‘sheeple’, too ignorant and passive to topple the
conspiratorial elite. That task belongs to small revolutionary groups of the enlightened.

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 Religion and the Radical Right in American Public Life 177

Far-right populism provides a somewhat different narrative. Berlet and Lyons suggest that
populists are those who trust the people but believe their preferences are being ignored by a
small and largely self-selected elite at the top of the American political process, who manipulate
and pervert the political process. As they write: ‘One of the staples of repressive and right-wing
populist ideology has been ‘producerism’, a doctrine that champions so-called producers in so-
ciety against both ‘unproductive’ elites and subordinate groups defined as lazy or immoral’.2
The ideology tends to demonise and scapegoat various groups it links to current misfortunes:
Jewish bankers for example. The right-wing populists assert the existence of a massive deception
involved in the repression of the people’s will.
As these comments suggest, there is overlap between extreme rightist and far-right populist
ideas. At different points in American history, they seem to have converged, while at others,
they have become substantially different.
Before the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–1865), right-wing nativist views on
social and religious issues were of serious concern, especially to the native-born supporters of
Andrew Jackson, voters suspicious of foreign ideas and inf luences (French ones in particular).
Following the War, the USA was subject to waves of immigration from Eastern and Southern
Europe—along with the arrival of significant populations from East Asia. There was a significant
backlash against the country’s demographic transformation, particularly by those who felt
displaced by these changes. A long list of ‘patriotic’ societies was formed in reaction, such as
the Daughters of the American Revolution, Sons of the American Revolution, Guardians of
Liberty, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Sons of the Pioneers, Ku Klux Klan, and
American Protective Association—all aimed at protecting the native born Protestants from
Catholic, Jewish, and Asian newcomers, whose growing presence threatened what came to
be labelled the ‘American Way of Life’ and who posed a mortal threat to the latter.3
To quote Reverend E. H. Laugher, in his Call of the Klan in Kentucky, ‘the KKK is not a
lodge or a society or a political party. Rather it is a massive movement, a crusade of American
people who are beginning to realise that they have neglected their public and religious duty to
stand up for Americanism’. ‘This meant remembering that America was discovered by Norse-
men, colonised by Puritans, that the United States was purely Anglo-Saxon and Nordic.‘ It was
essential to preserve our racial purity’, he insisted, ‘to avoid mongrelisation’.4
Laugher’s comments and those of like-minded Protestant clergy hardly seem to have been
drawn from the Gospels and other biblical texts. If not the Bible then, where did these racial
supremacist theories come from?
To a large extent, they came from European scientists, anthropologists, and social historians
who developed allegedly scientific theories of white racial supremacy as, no doubt, a hardly sub-
tle means of justifying the imperialism of the major powers. In the United States, with its history
of slavery and armed conf licts with the indigenous tribal groups, these views became ascendant
in the years immediately preceding and following World War I (1914–1918). Eugenic theories
managed to cross the Atlantic and acquire a band of inf luential advocates. But, the body of
thought that drew the most widespread attention was social Darwinism.5
The basic question they sought to answer was how does human progress occur? Such aca-
demics as the English academic Herbert Spencer and the American William Graham Sumner,
along with numerous others, attempted to apply what they imagined to be the conclusions of
Charles Darwin’s mid-nineteenth century work to individuals and whole human societies
and thereby answer the earlier question. Put simply, these writers conceived human civilisation
to be some version of the Galapagos Islands, in which various plants and animals struggled to
survive in a highly competitive and unforgiving environment. Through a process of natural se-
lection, the most adaptable creatures prevailed and the weaker and less adaptable ones became
marginalised or extinct. Progress was the result of this evolutionary process.

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178 Leonard B. Weinberg and Eliot Assoudeh

The social Darwinists then applied these scientifically grounded theories to the human con-
dition. The results of these applications were twofold. First, social Darwinist developed a collec-
tive understanding of the process, in which the world was divided into competing races. Some
races they believed were superior to others, Japanese, Nordic, or Germanic ones for example. In
this context, when the result of the collective struggle among the races for dominance produced
the subordination of the inferior races, progress and human development were achieved. Efforts
to ameliorate the racial struggle through humanitarian measures were to contravene the laws of
nature and represented a barrier to progress.
The same logic applied at the individual level. Individuals were, likewise, engaged in a com-
petitive struggle for survival, especially in the economic realm. Progress was achieved when in-
dividuals who showed the strongest skills at economic enterprise rose to the top. The less
successful, the impoverished especially, deserved their fate. Attempts by the state to improve
their circumstances via social security and other welfare-state measures violated natural laws
and represented a hindrance to progress.
It took a certain kind of intellectual Jiu-Jitsu to reconcile social Darwinism with the admo-
nitions in the Bible to feed the hungry and provide shelter for the homeless. Social Darwinism
was and is an atheist’s formulation about the pitiless way the world works. Yet, until the coming
of the great Depression in 1929–1930, the USA abounded with Protestant clergy and the orga-
nisations they sponsored to replace Christian notions (e.g. ‘turn the other cheek’, ’blessed are
the merciful for they shall receive mercy’ ‘blessed are the peace-makers for they are the children
of God’, and ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to
enter the Gates of Heaven’). ‘There is general agreement that the Protestant clergy were dispro-
portionately represented in the membership and leadership of the Klan. The moralism, religious
fervour, fundamentalism, and anti-Catholicism espoused by the ‘hooded order’ appealed to
many who were occupationally committed to these values and were themselves embodied sym-
bols of displacement. A report the National Catholic Bureau of Information stated that 26 of the
39 national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers’.6
The coming of the great depression added a new element to radical right activity in the USA.
During the 1930s, catholic extremists joined their protestant counterparts in attacking the
Roosevelt’s new deal reforms and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Jewish advisers.
In addition to such Protestant religious bigots as the Reverend Gerald Winrod’s Defenders of
the Christian Faith, the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith and his Christian Militia, and William
Dudley Pelley’s (son of a Methodist minister) Silver Shirts, a new cast of characters appeared
on the public scene. During the Depression era, some American Catholics came to play a sig-
nificant role in far-right politics. Here, the most significant figure was the Detroit-based Father
Charles Coughlin, the radio priest. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Coughlin used his radio show
(sponsored by the Ford Motor Company) to denounce the Roosevelt Administration,
Communism, and conspiracy-minded Jews bent on entangling the USA in a European war
against the leading fascist powers—Italy and Germany.7
To stem the inf luence of Jews in the media and the banks, Coughlin promoted the formation
of the Christian Front. The latter became a series of groups particularly active in New York and
Boston (e.g. the followers of the demagogic George Deatherage and Joe McWilliams and his
Christian Mobilisers) devoted to street corner agitation against Roosevelt and the Jews. Young
‘Mobilisers’ often physically attacked Jews as they went about their business in the Yorkville
section of New York and South Boston.8
The Depression and World War II were obviously major events in American history. So far,
as the country’s far-right is concerned, the Soviet Union and communist ideology more gener-
ally came to be seen as the major threats to the country. Anti-communism became a central
theme for the far-right. For the most part, the struggle against the largely imaginary domestic

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 Religion and the Radical Right in American Public Life 179

communist threat could be fought on a non-sectarian basis. Clarence Manion, dean of the
Notre Dame Law School; Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, one of the first television personalities;
Senator Joe McCarthy; and a long list of other prominent Catholics were able to join the strug-
gle against communism. McCarthy, in particular, became a dominant figure in anti-communist
witch-hunting during the first half of the 1950s. Even Jews (e.g. McCarthy aides Roy Cohn and
G. David Shine, the scientist Edward Teller, and gossip columnist Walter Winchell) were able
to join the struggle.9
We should not overlook the role of major business firms. Worried about ‘creeping socialism’
and concerned about the reputation of private enterprise in the aftermath of the Depression,
business leaders turned to Christianity as a means of changing the country’s political climate.
For example, Kevin Kruse writes ‘Billy Graham partnered with a number of businessmen
[….] Graham helped introduce captains of industry to the incredible power of prayer. In his
hands, prayer was not simply a means of personal salvation but also a tool to improve the public
image of their companies [….] Graham’s warm embrace of business contrasted sharply with the
cold shoulder he gave organised labour. The Garden of Eden, he told a rally in 1952, was a par-
adise with ‘no union dues, no labour leaders, no snakes, and no diseases’ [….] Strikes in his mind
were inherently sinful and selfish’.10
During the 1950s and 1960s, religion was harnessed to the anti-communist cause. Dr Fred
Schwarz, an Australian, became an evangelic minister leading a Christian Anti-Communist
Crusade against the putative Marxist-Leninist threat. The Reverend Dr Billy James Hargis led
another ‘Christian Crusade’ to fight the by now virtually non-communist menace. And then,
at the end of the 1950s, these crusades were joined by the John Birch Society, founded by
Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer. Birchers claimed that the USA was already in
the grip of communists and their dupes. They also played an inf luential role in the 1964
Goldwater presidential campaign. Welch asked followers (particularly Middle
Western businessmen) to believe that Dwight Eisenhower, then President of the United States,
and Allen Dulles, the Central Intelligence Agency director, were both ‘communist dupes’! 11
During the 1970s and thereafter, right-wing populism became a powerful force in American
public life. Under the leadership of such figures such as Richard Viguerie, the Reverends Jerry
Falwell and Pat Robertson, Paul Weyrich, and others, a New Right and a new Christian Right
emerged.12 To quote Berlet and Lyons: ‘The New Right rhetoric mobilised a classic backlash
movement rooted in both economic and social grievances. Far from being a fringe movement
of the radical right, this was mainstream political activism’.13
In other words, by the 1970s and certainly thereafter, right-wing populism became a crucial
component of the Republican party: from the 1964 presidential nomination of Barry Goldwa-
ter forward to George Wallace’s 1968 Independent American Party bid for the White House to
the elections that brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency.14 The rise of the populist right,
heavily infused with evangelical Christianity, coincided with the decline and later disintegration
of the Soviet Union and the manifest failure of its ideology. Right-wing populism also appears
to have been a reaction to cultural changes: the breakdown of law and order, homosexuality,
and new urban lifestyles combined to provide strong themes for a backlash against these liberal
developments. When added to this list, the fact that many ‘conservative’ voters were concerned
with excessive taxation and government over-regulation, one of the dominant forces in
American politics was able to emerge.
If right-wing populism became a dominant perhaps the dominant force in American politics
in the Reagan years (1980–1989) and beyond, how can we explain its persistence and even
growth following the death of Marxism–Leninism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union
and its East European satellites? After all, contemporary right-wing populism was largely an
outgrowth of these domestic and international threats.

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180 Leonard B. Weinberg and Eliot Assoudeh

The answer was provided unintentionally by President George Walker Bush when he used
the phrase ‘new world order’ following the forceful expulsion of the Iraqi army from Kuwait in
1990–1991. What Bush had in mind was the reorganisation of political power in the world so
that the USA was the only remaining superpower. A peaceful international order would emerge
from this new unipolar distribution of power. Right populists in the USA heard something else.
They took the remark to mean that an effort was underway to compromise American sover-
eignty. Key ‘televangelists’—such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jimmy Swaggart—drew
audiences in the millions by emphasizing the threats posed to the family and traditional Christian
worship by the United Nations and others bent on globalisation and other new power-elite
threats.
By the first years of the Obama Administration, a new movement of Tea Party activists had
staged mass protests against health care reforms and attempts to protect the environment. At the
grass roots level, Tea Party groups appeared around the country following the 2008 presidential
election, stimulated at first by ‘talk radio’ personalities and later by wealthy conservative interest
organisations such as the Club for Growth. The Tea Party’s aim is to move the country and the
Republican Party especially in a rightist direction. The former succeeded in contributing to the
GOP victories in the 2014 congressional elections. Following these contests, Tea partiers
formed a faction within the Republican Party’s congressional caucus. It is this sizable group that
has succeeded in blocking compromise agreements with the Obama White House over an array
of executive proposals. In general, Tea Party-backed legislators regard compromises as acts of
betrayal. Republican congressmen who are deemed too willing to compromise then face Tea
Party endorsed challengers in GOP primaries at the next election cycle—which in many cases
constitutes a serious threat to those seeking re-election. Various analysts have identified the so-
cial backgrounds of Tea Party supporters. In addition to being older, wealthier and more con-
servative than other Americans, the composition, Tea Partiers also tend to be disproportionally
Evangelical Christians.15
Not all that long ago, anti-Semitism was an important component of Christian teaching, both
Catholic and Protestant. That has changed as well. The populist right is now pro-Israel, so that
when the Jewish state feels itself to be under pressure or threatened by its Arab neighbours,
evangelical Christians typically rush to its defence. Some Jews now occupy inf luential positions
in American politics; often as ‘neo-cons’, they have often become part of the ‘Establishment’.
What about the contemporary radical right in the United States? It has hardly disappeared.
Watchdog organisations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)16 and Anti-
Defamation League17 list hundreds of sometimes violent groups devoted to racial, religious,
and ethnic bigotry. They are part of what the English anthropologist Colin Campbell labels
‘the cultic milieu’. As he notes:‘ The cultic milieu may be regarded as the cultural underground
of society’.18
It is tempted to identify the hundreds of such groups presently active in the United States as
isolated, living in a largely imaginary world dominated by Zionist Occupation Government un-
identified black helicopters f lying over western ranch lands, RAHOWA (race war), United
Nations’ tanks roaming back country roads, and Chinese Communist armies massing on the
US border with Canada. But, this judgment would only be partially true. Thanks to the Internet
and its various social media manifestations, those belonging to the cultic milieu are now able to
develop a sense of belonging to some broader and potentially powerful movement.
As the mainstream Protestant denominations have become more tolerant of religious differ-
ences over the post-war decades, groups inside the far-right ‘cultic milieu’ have sought to be-
come what the watchdog organisations, the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League, label
‘hate groups’.19 Various religions have either been invented or updated to accommodate these
needs to provide religious justifications for their beliefs and actions.

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 Religion and the Radical Right in American Public Life 181

Some exponents of white supremacist ideas have sought to revive pre-Christian European
polytheism and worship the Norse gods, Odinism in particular. These worshippers appear to
believe that Jews, as part of their plots, to achieve world domination, foisted Christianity on pa-
gan Europe in order to weaken their warrior spirit.20 So that Asatura, Cosmotheism, and other
pagan versions of Odinism propound race-based ideas of Aryan superiority now under threat by
other cultures and civilisations.
Then there are the made-in-America racist versions of Christianity, the largest of which is
Christian Identity.21 Identity Christians do not reject the Bible so much as they reinterpret it
in such a way as to justify Aryan superiority, anti-Semitism, and White domination of so-called
‘mud people’. The latter are immigrants or long-standing residents of the USA from Asia and
sub-Saharan Africa. According to the Identity doctrine, Jews (‘seeds of Satan’) dominate the
American government (Zionist Occupation Government) from their headquarters in Tel Aviv.
What is needed is a racial revolution, in which White people literally eliminate the Jews and
compel the mud people to return to their countries of origin.22 Also, inter-racial sexual contacts
are mortal sins, and those participating in these relationships are to be targeted for murder: In-
dividuals known as ‘Phineas Priests’ are supposed to carry out executions of these couples when
the opportunity arises.23
A Ukrainian immigrant, Ben Klassen, was responsible for the invention of a new religion
(Klassen, 1992), Creativity. According to his doctrine, Aryans are the only source of creativity
in the world. They are currently engaged in a conf lict to restore their proper place in the world.
The doctrine dismisses the supernatural as ‘spooks in the sky’ and replaces it with the slogan ‘our
race is our religion’.24 At least two things appear to bind these pagan religions together. First,
they claim to possess occult knowledge about how the world is really organised, knowledge
rejected by the general population. And, second, their adherents have a propensity for violence,
or at a minimum, an advocacy of violent solutions to public problems.
We have drawn on data provided by the SPLC and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
to measure or attempt to measure the operations of contemporary hate group activity in the
United States. In the first instance, we use the SPLC’s annual count of hate groups active on
the American scene annually from 1995 through 2015. The graph (Figure 1) suggests that we
are dealing with a pattern of rise and apparent decline. The rise occurs over the years 2007
through 2012. Or, in other words, the increase is linked to the onset of the economic recession
and likely the election of Barak Obama, the first African American to win the presidency.

Figure 1. Active hate groups in the USA: SOURCE SPLC INTELLIGENCE R.

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182 Leonard B. Weinberg and Eliot Assoudeh

The SPLC subdivides hate groups into these categories (Figure 2): the Ku Klux Klan, neo-
Nazi, Racist Skinhead, Christian Identity, Neo-Confederate, Black Separatist, and General
Hate. With the exception of those labelled ‘Black Separatist’, individual membership in these
categories need not be mutually exclusive. Klan groups may hold rallies in conjunction with
neo-Nazi organisations, and so on. (We are hardly dealing with perfect indicators.)
Each year, SPLC publishes a hate map, illustrating the distribution of hate crimes across the
United States. We converted the 2015 SPLC Hate Map into a polar chart depicting hate groups
in each state through a colour gradient, the 2015 Hate Ramp. California, Florida, Georgia,
New York, and Pennsylvania, each with more than 40 hate groups, rank the highest. Interest-
ingly, Florida, with 58 hate groups, is the only state where all hate groups have a presence. On
the other hand, there is no sign of hate groups in Alaska and Hawaii. Neo-Nazi groups (total 94)
are more evenly distributed across the United States, but a majority of Ku Klux Klan groups (to-
tal 190) are located in the Northeast and Southern regions. As for religiously biased hate groups,
Christian Identity groups have a bolder presence across states in the Midwest and South, while
Radical Traditional Catholics are located mainly in Northeast, and of course California in the
West (Figure 3).
The only explicitly religious grouping within the SPLC is ‘Christian Identity’. Identity
groups or churches follow about the same trajectory as groups in the other categories. There
are some exceptions, however. Within the overall pattern of rise and decline in the years leading
up to and following President Obama’s election, the number of Christian Identity groups de-
clines somewhat relative to the other formations. This development in turn may be the growing
attractiveness of explicitly pagan religions around concepts of racial purity.25 On the other hand,
when it comes to their presence on the Internet, Christian Identity groups do quite well. This
may ref lect a degree of stability in beliefs which might be less likely to be present for the other
groups (Figure 4).
Until 2010, American hate groups tended to target all four of their self-defined enemies in
roughly equal proportions (Figure 5). Since that year, we observe a rapid rise in attacks on Muslims

Figure 2. Active hate groups breakdown in 2015.

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 Religion and the Radical Right in American Public Life 183

Figure 3. Hate ramp in 2015: Available hate groups in each states.

Figure 4. Active hate groups count breakdown on Internet.

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184 Leonard B. Weinberg and Eliot Assoudeh

Figure 5. Enemies as defined by hate groups28.

and gays. Both targets appear to have increased their public visibility, gays by fighting for
marriage equality, and Muslims in vigilante reactions to terrorist attacks on American
targets.
We also made an effort to measure the victims of ‘hate crimes’ motivated exclusively by re-
ligious hostility (Figures 6 and 7). These figures were based on incidents recorded locally by po-
lice departments and then compiled annually by the FBI. We should bear in mind that those
who commit anti-religious hate crimes need not be members of hate groups but simply individ-
uals and youth gangs without any such affiliation. Nevertheless, the overall frequency of reli-
giously motivated hate crimes approximates the hate group distribution. There is a major
bump associated with the 2008 Obama election, which then appears to trail off. It is worth not-
ing here that expectations by civil rights advocates that the election of the country’s first African
American president would promote greater inter-group harmony throughout the country was
not born out by reality.
In thinking about the religions targeted for hate crime attacks, we would have expected
anti- Muslim violence to have mounted in the years following 9/11. But surprisingly, this
turns out not to be the case. Throughout the 2001–2014 period, Jews and their institutions

Figure 6. FBI hate crime statistics: religion motivation.

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 Religion and the Radical Right in American Public Life 185

Figure 7. FBI hate crime incidents: religion motivation count breakdown.

(synagogues and cemeteries) are far and away the most frequent targets of religiously inspired
hate crimes.26
The persistence of anti-Semitic attacks in recent times seems linked to Israel’s hotly disputed
role in the Middle East. The idea of Jews as targets of hate crimes seems to offer us a sign of con-
tinuity in radical right activity over the years. This judgment may be somewhat deceptive. The
source of anti-Semitic violence has shifted over the years. Many on the far-left in the USA and
Canada have come to regard Israelis as persecutors of Palestinians and thieves of Palestinian land.
Now, admirers of far-left ideas have joined those on the radical right in directing attacks against
Jews and Jewish institutions.27

Conclusion
This paper’s central theme has involved the irreconcilable link between Christian teachings and
the American far-right, both populist and radical. During the 20th century, social Darwinism
and conspiracy-minded anti-communism became the twin pillars of holding up the American
extreme right. Since the collapse of communism, both as a coherent ideology and rallying cause,
theories of racial supremacy or racial nationalism have become more significant in attracting
attention and, on occasion, winning votes.

Acknowledgment
The authors are indebted to the Southern Poverty Law Center staff for providing data on hate
groups in the United States (2000-2015) used in this study.

Short Biographies

Leonard B. Weinberg, b. 1939, PhD in Political Science (Syracuse University, 1967) is the
Foundation Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Nevada Reno. His cur-
rent main interests include political terrorism, radical, right-wing extremism, Holocaust studies,
Western Europe, and the Middle East.
Eliot Assoudeh is a PhD candidate of political science at University of Nevada Reno. He is a
2015 recipient of the Association for the Study of the Middle East Africa research grant for his

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Religion Compass 10/7 (2016): 176–187, 10.1111/rec3.12203
186 Leonard B. Weinberg and Eliot Assoudeh

project on fascism and religion. His research interests are religion and politics, fascism, right-
wing extremism, modernity, Europe, and the Middle East. He holds an MA in Liberal Arts from
Western Washington University (2010) and an MA in Political Science form University of Ne-
vada Reno (2014).
Notes

* Correspondence address: Eliot Assoudeh, Department of Political Science, University of Nevada Reno, Mail Stop 0302,
Reno, NV 89557-0302, USA. E-mail: eassoudeh@nevada.unr.edu.

1
See Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970
(New York: Harper & Row, Lipset & Raab, 1970).
2
Chip Berlet and Mathew Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (New York: the Guilford Press, Berlet & Matthew
Nemiroff Lyons, 2000), p. 6.
3
See for example, David Bennett, The Party of Fear (New York: Vintage Books Bennet, 1995), pp. 80–104.
4
Quoted by Bennett, p. 214.
5
See for example Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: George Braziller Inc., Hofstadter,
1944), pp. 13–30.
6
Lipset & Raab, 1981, pp. 123–124 L.
7
See Shenton, James P. “The Coughlin Movement and the New Deal.” Political Science Quarterly 73, no. 3 (Shenton, 1958):
352–373. See Cremoni, Lucilla. “Antisemitism and Populism in the United States in the 1930s: The Case of Father
Coughlin.” Patterns of prejudice 32, no. 1 (Cremoni, 1998): 25–37.
8
See especially the volume by O. John Rogge, then an assistant US Attorney General, The Official German Report (Boston:
Little, Brown, Rogge, 1961). See also, Bennett, The Party of Fear, pp. 256–262.
9
See Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Vol. 166. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
Schrecker, 1998.
10
Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God (New York: Basic Books, Kruse, 2015) p. 37.
11
See for example, George Michael, Confronting Right-Wing Extremism and Terrorism in the USA (New York: Routledge,
Michael, 2003) pp. 44–46.
12
For a vivid description of this phenomenon see Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right (New York: Pantheon, Crawford,
1981).
13
Berlet and Lyons, p. 220.
14
For an extended of these developments see the volumes by Rick Perlstein beginning with Before the Storm (New York:
Hill and Wang, Perlstein, 2009).
15
See Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York:
Oxford University Press, Skocpol & Williamson, 2011).
16
See https://www.splcenter.org/.
17
See http://www.adl.org/?referrer=https://www.google.com/.
18
Colin Campbell, “ The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularisation” in Jeffrey Kaplan and Helene Loow (eds.), The Cultic
Milieu (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, Campbell, 2002) p. 14.
19
For the SPLC 2015 Hate Map see https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map.
20
See for example, Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood (Durham NC: Duke University Press, Gardell, 2005) pp. 137–164.
21
Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
22
See especially Richard Kelly Hoskins, Vigilantes of Christendom (Lynchburg VA: Virginia Publishing Company, Hoskins, 1997).
23
See Davis, Danny W. The Phinehas Priesthood: Violent Vanguard of the Christian Identity Movement. ABC-CLIO, 2010.
24
See Klassen, Ben. “Nature’s eternal religion.” (Klassen, 1992); Betty A. Dobratz. “The Role of Religion in the Collective
Identity of the White Racialist Movement.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40, no. 2 (Dobratz, 2001): 287–302.
25
Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood (Durham NC: Duke University Press, Gardell, 2005) pp. 137–190.
26
For the latest FBI hate crime statistics see https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2014/december/latest-hate-crime-statistics-
report-released.
27
Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession (New York: Random House, Wistrich, 2010) pp. 494–514.
28
The SPLC started gathering data on anti-Muslim activities in 2010.

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Religion Compass 10/7 (2016): 176–187, 10.1111/rec3.12203
 Religion and the Radical Right in American Public Life 187

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