Review: The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover

Published in Reading Religion

Martin’s prose brilliantly illustrates that to overcome these godless foes (in Hoover’s estimation), it was the FBI founder’s outlook that the nation had to succumb to his own personal faith

J. Edgar Hoover, the founding director of the FBI who led the agency from 1924 to 1972, has become a prototypical avatar of today’s debates about white Christian nationalism, especially in law enforcement. In The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, Lerone Martin masterfully demonstrates how the FBI director zealously worked to impose his religiosity on the United States as part of a patriotic duty to enshrine itself as God’s chosen nation. Martin argues that throughout the Bureau’s formative era, it was Hoover’s dogged conviction that it was the agency’s divinely ordained mission to confront and defeat forces of liberalism, pacifism, free thought, women’s rights, civil rights, and workers’ rights.

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