by Jesse Walker
You might have heard Todd talking about music. “Rock music didn’t come out with Elvis Presley,” he preached. “It’s thousands of years old. If you take it away, witches can’t do witchcraft.”8 When he was in the rock business, “a witch would write the words and we’d dig up an old Druid manuscript containing a melody for the song.”9 Christian rock wasn’t any different: The lyrics might seem better, but it wasn’t the lyrics that gave the songs their demonic power. “It’s the music. The power’s in the music. . . . They don’t produce rock music to make money. They don’t need that money. They own everything anyway! They do it to put demonic influence in your life. The music is a spell.”10 Todd claimed that he had personally delivered a $4 million check to Pastor Chuck Smith of Maranatha Music to infiltrate the churches with “Christian” rock.
Smith espoused charismatic Christianity, an interdenominational movement that stressed the role of the Holy Spirit in believers’ lives. And the charismatic churches, Todd preached, were controlled by the Illuminati, though most rank-and-file charismatics didn’t realize it. Ralph Wilkerson, the pastor of the Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim, California, ran “one of the largest independent charismatic Bible schools and universities in the country. And they gave that man so much. Everything that is there, the Illuminati bought and built for him.”
You might have heard Todd talking about politics. Every president since Woodrow Wilson had been a member of the Illuminati, he claimed.11 The conspirators had used dirty tricks to defeat Ronald Reagan’s insurgency against Ford in the 1976 primaries, he added: “We have talked with Reagan’s son and other people, and they have told us about the violent threats, bribes, death threats, assassinations, and everything that never reached the news media, that went on during the nomination thing for the Republican Party.”12 Having beaten Reagan, Todd explained, Ford had the role of throwing the election to the Antichrist, Jimmy Carter.
You might have heard Todd’s survival tips for the coming hard times: how to stockpile food, where to find shelter, what weapons to have on hand. (“The Illuminati has decided if they can’t get your guns, they’ll make them so bad that they’ll blow up in your face. And they’ve recently bought both Smith & Wesson and Winchester.”)13 You might have run across a publication put together by Reverend Tom Berry, the pastor of a Baptist church in Elkton, Maryland, and the organizer behind Todd’s tour through Chambersburg and other eastern cities. It was called “The Christian During Riot and After Revolution,” and it was filled with Todd’s survivalist advice.
Maybe, after all that, you would have taken Todd’s stories to heart and started preparing for the bloodbath to come.
Alternatively, you might have decided he was full of crap.
It certainly wouldn’t take much digging to refute his most egregious claims. The Necronomicon, for example—not “Necromonicon,” as Todd kept mispronouncing it—was a fictional book invented by H. P. Lovecraft, who referred to it in several stories and encouraged other writers to do the same. (“I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation,” he told his fellow pulp writer Robert E. Howard.)14 Granted, there were Lovecraft cultists who were convinced the book actually existed, and by the time Todd came to Chambersburg more than one volume claiming to be the Necronomicon had been published. But that hardly excuses Todd’s claim to have had firsthand contact with the original tome. Clearly he had picked up the idea of the book from a pop-culture source—probably the Lovecraft-inspired 1970 film The Dunwich Horror, which Todd described as “one of the strongest movies, truthful, about witchcraft and their beliefs that ever existed.”15
Similarly, it didn’t require a lot of investigation to learn that Sharon Tate’s body had not been left in the position Todd described. Or that Ayn Rand was a laissez-faire capitalist, not a Communist—and an atheist, not a witch. (When Rand appeared on Phil Donahue’s talk show in 1979, a Toddian in the audience asked, “In your book Atlas Shrugged, isn’t it true that you gave a blueprint for the world takeover by the Illuminati?” The visibly puzzled Rand replied, “By whom?”)16 You might start to suspect that Todd’s claims about the “Collins bloodline” owed less to real history than they did to the TV show Dark Shadows. And with time, you’d be able to read journalistic accounts that debunked many of the claims Todd made about his life.
The most important of these were an article by Edward Plowman, printed in the February 2, 1979, edition of Christianity Today, and a book by the evangelical writers Darryl Hicks and David Lewis, published later that year. Hicks and Lewis’s book, called The Todd Phenomenon, identified a pattern that Todd seemed to follow in each place where he settled from 1972 to 1979:
1. Attempt to set up a coffeehouse—teen ministry.
2. Attempt to set up a rehabilitation ministry especially for drugs and the occult.
3. Set up some type of commune, usually thinly disguised as a rehabilitation ministry, or Christian retreat from something or from someone.
4. Have sex with as many seductees (young Christians or otherwise) as possible, all heterosexual according to available reports, but little discrimination as to age.
5. Always target on a select group of “bad guys” in an attempt to alienate “them” from “us.”
6. Refuse to submit to any type of authority except when it will expedite one’s own purpose.
7. Always manage “murder attempts” and “death threats” on his life, so that the “retreat” idea will be more feasible (and especially more supported by sympathetic followers).
8. Constantly seek promotion using “name dropping,” allegations, Biblical knowledge, and amazing ability and command to piece them together with current event information.
9. When the fact/fantasy walls begin caving in . . . seek sympathy from the most ardent followers by using the “What’s the use, I might as well go back into the occult, nobody cares anyway, especially Christians” routine.
10. When all else fails—SPLIT!17
The book included statements from Smith, Wilkerson, and other figures denying the charges that Todd had leveled against them. Like the Christianity Today piece, it demonstrated that Todd’s tale of a secret court-martial in Germany was extremely unlikely. And like the Christianity Today piece, it showed that Todd’s religious history was more complicated than he had claimed.
Todd, it turned out, had entered and exited the Christian world several times both before and after his burlesque-house salvation in 1972. After that particular conversion, he had hooked up with a Christian coffeehouse affiliated with the hippieish Jesus Movement. (It was also oriented toward charismatic Christianity, which at that point Todd was not yet denouncing as an arm of the Illuminati.) By the end of 1973, Plowman reported, Pastor Ken Long “began getting reports that Todd was trying to seduce teenage girls at the coffeehouse. (Two later confessed that they had sexual relations with him.) Four girls revealed that Todd wanted them to form a witches’ coven and that he told them that he was still in witchcraft. Long later removed Todd from the coffeehouse ministry.”18
Todd’s first taste of fame came when he appeared on The Gap, a Christian TV show in Phoenix. There, Plowman wrote, Todd
claimed that the Illuminati were financing some fundamentalist churches, that he had been the Kennedy family’s personal warlock (“John F. Kennedy was not really killed; I just came back from a visit with him on his yacht”), and that he had witnessed the stabbing of a girl by Senator George McGovern in an act of sacrifice.
More than $25,000 was pledged during the telethon and management offered to employ Todd—who was then, reportedly, packing a .38 snub-nosed revolver. He eventually declined. Doug Clark heard of Todd and invited him to appear on his “Amazing Prophecies” show. Overnight Todd became a hit in charismatic circles in southern California, and he and [his then wife] Sharon moved to Santa Ana.
Soon the Todds were hosting dozens of young people at a weekly Bible study in their home. A few young people were converted
, said Sharon, but there were distressing things, too. She said that Todd was blending elements of witchcraft with his Christian teaching and seducing some of the girls, several of whom confided in leaders at Melodyland Christian Center. In an ugly confrontation with Melodyland church leaders around Christmas, 1973, Todd denied the charges and stormed out.19
Yes, that’s the same Melodyland center that Todd would later denounce as “bought and built” by the Illuminati. It’s not hard to imagine what might have motivated that charge.
The next year Todd moved to Dayton, Ohio, where he ran an occult bookstore and conducted classes in witchcraft. Todd’s version of the craft turned out to involve a lot of sex rites. When a sixteen-year-old student informed police that Todd had forced her into oral sex, he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. (He was released after two.) He called on the pagan community for support, and Gavin Frost of the Church and School of Wicca and Isaac Bonewits of the Aquarian Anti-Defamation League soon arrived in Dayton to investigate Todd’s claims that he was being persecuted for his beliefs. Frost was so disturbed by what he found that he asked his church to revoke the charter it had granted to Todd’s Watchers Church of Wicca. Bonewits warned that “Todd may be using his own peculiar version of the religion of Witchcraft as cover for illegal, immoral and/or infiltrative purposes” and recommended that “as many different Federal, State and Local law enforcement agencies as possible” should investigate him.20 Frost and Bonewits began to form a conspiracy theory of their own: According to an FBI report, the two pagans told the police that they suspected neo-Nazis had “planted Todd in their midst to disrupt their efforts.”21
Bonewits also predicted that Todd would soon be firing off “wild accusations” against Frost and himself.22 Sure enough, Todd soon returned to the Christian circuit with an even more elaborate story to tell, one where the two pagans had offered to make a deal with him if he would stop telling the truth about the Illuminati. He had refused, he said, so they had colluded with the police against him.
By 1978, Todd’s lectures had made him more famous than ever before. Then the exposés arrived and his reputation came crashing down. The John Birch Society published a paper condemning Todd. The Journal Champion, published by Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, editorialized that Todd’s message was “an unscriptural and deceitful attempt to rob the church of Jesus Christ of its vibrant joy, its aggressive soul-winning, and its trust in God.”23 The Christian Research Institute advised that Todd be “avoided and rejected by the body of Christ until such time as he does repent.”24 Ministers who had hosted Todd at their churches said that they wouldn’t have him back. His only significant supporter remaining was Jack Chick.
But if you weren’t going to accept Todd’s lurid stories, you still might accept one or more of the strains of folklore that Todd drew on as he developed those tales. The people who attacked Todd didn’t necessarily reject the concept of a grand conspiracy. Hicks and Lewis’s book declares it “very possible that the Illuminati still exists.”25 The Journal Champion dismissed the idea that the Illuminati were still out there, but it did raise the possibility that Todd was “an under-cover witch.”26 By the mid-1980s, when Todd was largely forgotten, the idea of a vast Satanic conspiracy survived, taking hold in much of the media and seeping into some police departments.
Think of Todd as a distorted mirror, a surface that could absorb his audiences’ fears and shine back a strange, fantastic story about them. Churches that distrusted modernity now had a tale that reinforced their worries about everything from pop culture to the occult to new forms of Christian worship. In a time of economic hardship, the narrative also indicted the oil companies and department stores. The seventies spirit of suspicion toward the government and corporate America affected Christian conservatives as well as secular liberals, and Todd’s tales exploited that. With “all these investigations,” a minister who had seen Todd speak told the Baltimore Sun, “there’s very little credibility left in government. And so this guy comes along, and he puts together a package that, at first hearing, makes sense: Eureka, we’ve found it!”27 Like Mae Brussell and John Smith Dye, Todd translated anxieties into myth.
It isn’t clear to what extent Todd was a con man and to what extent he was a crazy man. His military records included a diagnosis of “emotional instability with pseudologia phantastica” and a comment that he “finds it difficult to tell reality from fantasy.”28 If his talks were compelling enough to convince people he was telling the truth, that might be because he had persuaded himself, some of the time if not all of the time, that the things he preached were true. Either way, his life was a long string of deception and exploitation, and it ultimately led to a prison cell.
But we’re not quite ready for that part of the story yet. There are other issues to be explored first, starting with Todd’s interest in the Illuminati. How did a half-forgotten bugaboo of the Federalist Party become the starring villain in the John Todd apocalypse show?
The most important figure for the transition is Nesta Webster, an early-twentieth-century British writer who had grown fascinated with secret societies and revolutionary movements. Picking up where John Robison and Augustin Barruel had left off, she argued that the Illuminati and related groups were responsible not merely for the French Revolution of 1789 but for all the revolutions to hit Europe since then. Webster’s Illuminati were simultaneously Communist and capitalist, a braid of banks, Bolsheviks, Masons, occultists, Germans, and Jews.
Webster allowed that many Jews “have shown themselves fearless opponents both of Germany and Bolshevism.”29 In other words, her worldview had room for “good” Jews. But she was obsessed with her conspiracy’s Jewish qualities, and she was prone to writing such lines as “German Atheism and Jewish antagonism to Christianity have combined to form the great anti-religious force that is making itself felt in the world today.”30 And although she stopped short of pronouncing The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion authentic, she insisted that the document had “never been refuted.”31
One person impressed by Webster’s arguments was Winston Churchill. In 1920, he contrasted the Jews he admired with the evil “International Jews” of Webster’s books:
This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg [sic] (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.32
After Webster, even anti-Illuminists who wanted to avoid anti-Semitism—or at least avoid the appearance of anti-Semitism—sometimes found ways to draw The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion into their theories. The Canadian conspiracist William Guy Carr drew liberally on the Protocols while insisting that the conspiracy had altered the document “in such a way that suspicion was turned away from the directors of the Illuminati”; the “Jews were picked to be the scape-goats.”33 (That didn’t keep Carr from using the sort of loaded language you’d expect from an anti-Semite, as with his ruminations on “international Jewry”34 or his description of the conspiracy as the “Synagogue of Satan.”)35
Carr wasn’t the only Illuminati hunter to follow in Webster’s footsteps. I already mentioned that William Dudley Pelley included the Illuminati in the Silver Shirts’ demonology. Eli A. Helmick, the inspector general of the U.S. Army from the end of World War I until his retirement in 1927, gave speeches drawing a direct
line from Weishaupt to Lenin.36 Edith Starr Miller, a.k.a. Lady Queenborough—an American transplanted to Europe—declared in her posthumously published 1933 book Occult Theocrasy that the Jews were behind the Bavarian Illuminati and that the Illuminati’s plans were essentially the same as those of “Judeo-Masonic Russian Soviet Communism.”37 Gertrude Coogan of Chicago, whose populist monetary theories attracted a following during the Depression, wrote in 1935, “All of the theories and practices advanced by the present-day Socialists are copied directly from the organization known as the Illuminati.”38 That same year the Kansas anti-Semite Gerald Winrod produced “Adam Weishaupt, a Human Devil,” a booklet that drew heavily on Webster while arguing that the Illuminati were Jewish. There were less prominent anti-Illuminists too, churning out small-press books and pamphlets with titles such as Red Shadows and Roosevelt and the Illuminati. Many of the writers drew other secret societies into their theories as well, from the Rosicrucians to the Knights Templar. One student of the literature, the political scientist Michael Barkun, has called the resulting web “a kind of interlocking directorate of conspirators who operate through a network of secret societies.”39
Some of the writers who followed Webster imagined the Illuminati as an almost all-encompassing force of evil. Carr, for example, believed that the order was behind everything from white-slavery rings to the drug trade to a boating mishap that had killed his dog. Other theorists were relatively restrained. G. Edward Griffin, a writer associated with the John Birch Society, was humble enough to say that we “don’t know” whether Adam Weishaupt’s secret society was directly linked to the later machinations of Communists and bankers, though he maintained that “we do know that it is not impossible, and certainly not absurd.”40