Moral Combat
Page 22
BILLY JAMES HARGIS BEGAN TO make his mark on the world in October 1948, when, as a twenty-three-year-old pastor in the town of Sapulpa, Oklahoma, with little postsecondary education, he started a slim newsletter. With the unassuming title Christian Echoes and only a tiny circulation, the paper might easily have gone the way of countless other such publications put out by ambitious small-town preachers in that era. But Hargis’s tremendous self-confidence was matched by the luck of being in the right place at the right time, with a timely idea and fearsome rhetoric to match. His newsletter became the glossy, broadly distributed Christian Crusade, and Hargis founded an interdenominational organization by the same name in 1950. Through the magazine’s wide print circulation and Hargis’s success in harnessing radio and TV to deliver his message, he grew into one of the most influential evangelists and conservative crusaders of the 1950s and 1960s.28
Hargis saw Communism everywhere. A report in the Nation by an attendee at the Christian Crusade’s five-day Anti-Communist Leadership School in 1962 noted that, in Hargis’s mind, “all citizens who, in their political beliefs, range from slightly left of conservative doctrines to communism are Communists”; moreover, “there are only two political groups remaining—those who stand with us, and all others.” The reporter, Thomas Uzzell, expressed his fear at Hargis’s adept leadership among scores of fundamentalists present: “The man is an engine of energy, is something of a genius as an organizer, and has mastered the art of moving crowds who want to be freed of the burden of thinking.”29
Hargis believed that God had chosen him, as he said in 1965, “to launch a mass movement of resistance to the trend in American life to world government, apostate religion, and appeasement with satanic ‘isms’ such as communism.” As a young pastor in the 1940s—he was ordained to the ministry when he was seventeen, in his hometown of Texarkana, Texas—he had acted “like Moses” in initially running away from the truths of the Communist takeover of America and its churches. Once he accepted God’s call, however, he never looked back. “I am the first to admit I am not qualified” for this enormous task, Hargis later said, “but no logician or materialist can ever convince me that I am not in God’s Will. It has been proven again and again.… God needed a man to tell the truth to an ignorant and apathetic church.”30
After a very brief theological education (two and a half months at Ozark Bible College in Bentonville, Arkansas) and a succession of pastorates, he ditched local church ministry in favor of a career as a radio broadcaster and itinerant evangelist, founding the Christian Crusade in 1950 as a print and radio outlet. During the 1950s he collaborated with Carl T. McIntire, another formidable fundamentalist with a radio empire and enormous influence. Between 1953 and 1957, they worked together on a project of the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC)—a fundamentalist organization that opposed the more liberal World Council of Churches—to send “Bible balloons” into Soviet countries. As his radio and newspaper presence increased, Hargis moved to Tulsa, expanded into television, and started writing a newspaper column that was syndicated in papers across the country. At the start of 1962, two hundred radio stations and at least a dozen television stations aired Hargis in forty-six states. By 1964, his daily radio ministry had exploded to four hundred stations across the country, while subscriptions to his magazine were reportedly up to a hundred thirty thousand.31 Through his relentless denunciations in Christian Crusade magazine and his ubiquitous radio broadcasts, his multiple books and national conferences, his speaking engagements, and his record albums of sermons and songs, Hargis had become an extraordinarily effective communicator, iterating forceful messages about the wickedness of liberal politics and liberal religion to Christians throughout the country.
By 1964, Hargis was one of the most influential conservative evangelists in America, and a figure of fear and fascination among liberals.32 It was at precisely this time that sex burst into Hargis’s writing. He had spent recent years decrying the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision declaring prayer in public schools unconstitutional, alleging that John F. Kennedy’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald had been a Communist plot, and campaigning for the nomination of the ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater. Now there was another target. Sex was new territory for Hargis to tackle, and it had become highly relevant in the wake of both the emerging feminist movement and increasing liberal sympathy for what was then termed the “homophile” movement (the early gay rights movement). Such flagrant rejections of traditionalist gender norms and modes of patriarchal authority were ideal weapons for stoking conservative outrage. As usual, Hargis’s timing was perfect.
Evangelist, anti-Communist crusader, and SIECUS opponent Billy James Hargis. GEORGE CROUTER/THE DENVER POST VIA GETTY IMAGES.
The first sign of Hargis’s new focus was an item in Christian Crusade magazine. The February–March 1964 issue included an item titled, “What to Do About Pornography.” It opened on a note of alarm: “A ‘natural’ outgrowth of the ultra-liberal, ‘free-thinker’ viewpoint, which has finally struggled into acceptance throughout the Nation, is the horrifying increase in the public, legal distribution of pornographic, smut literature, pictures, films, etc., in every city in the country” (emphasis in original). The head of Tulsa’s chapter of Youth for Christ was quoted in asserting that a billion dollars per year were now being spent on such materials in the United States alone—all because of the Communist-friendly liberals. The article continued, “That international Communism has long subsidized pornography in this and other countries will come as no surprise to our readers, for it fits ideally into their plans for the moral decay of non-Communist countries.” In response, readers should not merely wring their hands but boycott all local stores that sold any such materials. Pornography was “A BATTLEGROUND UPON WHICH EVERY AMERICAN CAN GET INTO ACTION TODAY” (emphasis in original). The message that evil lurked at one’s trusted grocery and drug stores fit well with Hargis’s warnings about a “far left” enemy within.33
Fulminations about America’s sexual degeneracy grew more and more prominent as a theme in the Christian Crusade for the next several years. Hargis crafted alarmist literature focused on sex, with the help of two men: David Noebel, his executive assistant and a Christian Crusade writer for many years, and Gordon V. Drake, who joined Christian Crusade in 1968 as the head of its Department of Education.34 The books each wrote during this period give a flavor of the themes that went with this emphasis on sex: Hargis’s published titles included Communist America—Must It Be? (1960), The Facts About Communism and Our Churches (1962), and The Far Left (1964). Noebel published Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles (1965), which he later expanded and repackaged as The Beatles: A Study in Drugs, Sex, and Revolution (1969). Drake wrote Blackboard Power: NEA Threat to America (1968) and Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? (1968), and it was these last two that heralded the campaign against SIECUS and Mary Steichen Calderone.
Like most Christian Crusade literature, both of Drake’s books aimed to be exposés. Blackboard Power charged one of the two major national teachers’ unions—the National Education Association (NEA)—with degrading American youth by promoting Communism, popular music, African American literature, and sex education. Drake’s account aimed to incite both racial and sexual panic, charging the NEA with promoting both dangerous African American writers and an anti-religious glorification of sex. The book’s title, an obvious play on the Black Power movement, was illustrated by the menacing, frontal fist that was that movement’s symbol—only this fist was distinctly white, set against a black background and marked by text in bright red. Whites could be as threatening toward the nation’s morals as blacks, the image implied, particularly when they were masquerading as civic-minded public school teachers. Don’t be fooled, Drake warned, for these men and women were as power hungry and violent as their radical black nationalist counterparts.
One of Drake’s major concerns in the book was to alarm readers about the radicalism of African American au
thors from W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes to Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dick Gregory, and Alain Locke. Drake quoted the conservative Texas columnist Earl Lively in referring to James Baldwin as “a purveyor of perverted pornographic smut.” But he also had a great deal to say about the NEA and sex education, slamming figures such as Mary Steichen Calderone, Lester Kirkendall, Sexology magazine editor and sex education writer Isadore Rubin, and the Reverend William Genné, and above all challenging SIECUS as promoting a “secular humanism” that was “pro-MAN and anti-GOD” and that would destroy the morals of American youth by separating instruction in human reproduction from education in “the higher ideals of marriage.” These “sexécutives,” as Drake heatedly called them, were not only anti-Christian but also anti-American; their purpose was not to reduce rates of venereal disease and teen pregnancy but merely “to glorify sex, and ensnare students into sexual promiscuity.” Cutting, decontextualizing, and reassembling their words for his own purposes, Drake darkly concluded that the young were now easily “prostituted for the ‘new morality’ now that the Bible and religious moral concepts have been banned in the schools.”35
Drake chose to excerpt allegations regarding sex education from Blackboard Power in the July 1968 issue of Christian Crusade magazine. The piece concluded by urging readers to “get organized!”36 Realizing this topic had struck a chord, Drake’s articles for Christian Crusade increasingly focused on the moral crisis in American culture. He warned parents that both educational and religious leaders were secretly hosting activities in which children and teens would touch each other’s bodies in order to get over their repressions, encouraging “sexual play in bedding down with new-found friends.” This “sneak attack on American morals” was occurring in schools, colleges, and churches across the country by means of “sensitivity training” as well as sex education. These techniques comprised a whole educational system that was “not some academic procedure; it is, rather, an insidious teaching method which aims to destroy the morality of America’s children and of young and old adults alike and then to destroy America if given the chance.”37
Drake expanded his earlier analysis of sex education from Blackboard Power into a separate pamphlet, Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? This manifesto had an enormous impact in community battles over sex education that took place across the country. Drake insisted yet again that Mary Calderone “has a burning mission: To alert and convert the youth of America to a new sexuality. She pursues children and youth for her cause as ardently as the missionary of old pursued souls.” Drake contended that Calderone’s method was “telling young people about their right to enjoy premarital intercourse—if they so desire.” Calderone’s “revolutionary gospel” aimed to get rid of God and traditional morality in one fell swoop, teaching American youth “a new sex morality independent of church and state.” Drake took especial umbrage at Calderone’s promotion of talking “nonjudgmentally” with youth, insisting that “nonjudgmentally simply means that SIECUS does not want teachers to inject into their discussions with children the restraints of old-fashioned morality.”38
Despite the fact that this pamphlet, no less than Blackboard Power, was laden with false accusations and his “evidence” was thick with words taken wholly out of context, Drake’s book quickly became a vital weapon for fighting sex education by “plugging SIECUS directly into the hot current of right-wing paranoia.” Drake painted a dire picture of mind control and insisted, “The public school is intruding into a private family and church responsibility as it frightens and coerces parents to accept the teaching of sex in their schools.” Calderone and her cronies were purportedly teaching children as young as three years old everything there was possibly to know about sex, their pedagogy utilizing images of animals and humans having sexual intercourse. Besides written materials, SIECUS teaching aids also included “unbelievably clever models which even include multi-colored plastic human figures with interchangeable male and female sex organs—instant transvestism.” This “erotic stimulation” had untold ill effects on the nation’s most vulnerable population, Drake maintained. Drake accused Calderone of promoting an “animalistic viewpoint of sex which is shocking,” the same charge that Kinsey’s detractors had aimed at him twenty years earlier. Worst of all, Calderone and SIECUS were hell-bent on destroying the credibility and authority of home and family. Sex educators wished to eliminate “any inhibitions or moral and religious taboos,” thereby driving “a wedge between the family, church and school” and bolstering educators’ authority above traditional family values. “If this is accomplished,” Drake continued, and the new morality accepted, “our children will become easy targets for Marxism and other amoral, nihilistic philosophies—as well as V.D.!” By wrecking the ties between parents and children, church and flock, the sex educators had found the greatest weapon imaginable for destroying America—clearly the liberals’ dearest goal.39
Drake took pains to allege that the sex educators themselves were closely allied with some of the most debauched sexologists and sex perverts in the nation, from pornographers and prostitutes to predatory homosexuals who smacked their lips at the thought of enticing young children into their snares. Readers should not be fooled by sex ed advocates’ professional degrees, medical credentials, or pretensions to the Christian ministry, he warned: sex educators and sexologists representing “every shade of muddy gray morality” were in league with “ministers colored atheistic pink,” campy psychiatrists, and “ruthless publishers of pornography.” All were part of “interlocking directorates” and national organizations that “provide havens for these degenerates.” The goal of seducing children into devoting their lives to narcissistic pleasure seeking was inextricably linked to plans for Communist takeover of the nation: Communists would stoke children’s erotic desires and then urge them to slough their parents’ moral teachings in favor of erotic fulfillment.40
Liberal ministers, so trusted by naïve parents and children, were central to that plot, in Drake’s telling. Indeed, several liberal clergy sat on the SIECUS board, and Drake made sure to name them—not only the Protestant William Genné but also the two Catholic priests, Fathers John Thomas and George Hagmaier. Finally, noted Drake, “To complete the religious cluster of SIECUS sexologists, the Jews have offered the services of Rabbi Jeshaia Schnitzer of Montclair, New Jersey.”41 Drake’s listeners needed little reminder of the accusations of Communist influence that had long been leveled at the liberal clergy.
Gordon Drake speaking at a Christian Crusade meeting that opposed sex education in the public schools, 1969. MICHAEL MAUNEY/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES.
In early 1969, Drake joined forces with Noebel to present two-day seminars on “Family, Schools and Morality” in Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Atlanta, Birmingham, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Louisville. Noebel’s talks were titled, “Rhythmic-Hypnotic Music for Elementary School Children,” “Dangers of Rock ’n’ Roll,” and “Communist Subversion of American Folk Music.” Drake complemented these with his own: “Agents of Change—The Target Is You,” “Sensitivity Training in the Schools—The Hidden Threat,” “The Octopus of Education Control,” and, for the electrifying finale, “Raw Sex in the Classroom.” The seminars aimed to rouse parents into pressuring local schools to uphold Christian morality and American patriotism by avoiding sex education in the classrooms.42 So successful were these talks that by March each was touring outside the south: Noebel in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, and Drake in Pennsylvania and New Jersey—his first stop on this anti-sex education tour being Princeton University in March 1969. The national press began paying closer attention to the sex education controversy.43
The Crusade’s dire warnings about sex education, and Drake’s books in particular, helped to foment a wave of controversies over sex ed in local communities beginning in the spring of 1968. One of the most notable occurred in Anaheim, California, a town whose public schools had incorporated a sex education program since 1965 bu
t that was also home to a number of organizations that opposed sex ed.44 By 1968, the school district had implemented a thorough family life and sex education program for grades seven through twelve, and it was in that year that questions about the program arose at a late August school board meeting. At a special session in October, opponents of the program presented a slide show and taped messages that took specific claims and even whole passages out of Drake’s Raw Sex pamphlet, many of them denouncing SIECUS. The presenter sought to prove that Anaheim’s program was the product of this organization run by “so-called experts with a long Ph.D. degree behind them that doesn’t necessarily signify that they’re qualified to drive a jeep across the street.”45
The Anaheim battle was fierce and raged for months. Sex ed opponents were led by citizens who also fought gun control legislation and worried about interracial dating at desegregated schools, as they anguished over the morality of their children.46 In April 1969 the California State Board of Education passed a resolution that banned the use of “SIECUS materials” in the schools. Since SIECUS did not actually produce curricula for schools—it provided information, data, consultations, and other resources for school systems and other organizations that wished to put their own sex education programs together—this technically did not much matter, but everyone understood its meaning.47 That same year, the California legislature repealed an earlier state law in support of sex education, and the state’s board of education adopted a report drafted by Christian conservatives that warned, “A moral crisis is sweeping the land,” and presented a program of moral lessons based in part on the Bible.48