Lerone Martin will discuss his recent book, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover, which reveals how Hoover and his FBI teamed up with leading white evangelicals and Catholics to bring about a white Christian America by any means necessary. His research draws on thousands of newly declassified FBI documents, including a civil lawsuit against the US Department of Justice for FBI files on Billy Graham. Martin takes readers from the pulpits and pews of small-town America to the Oval Office, and from the grassroots to denominational boardrooms. In this talk, Martin transforms how we understand the FBI, white evangelicalism, and our nation’s entangled history of religion and politics.

Lerone A. Martin is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor and Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. He is the author of The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism (2023) and Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (2014).

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies, Department of History, Legal Humanities Initiative, and Center for Cold War Studies.