Dreams and Shadows

This chapter explains how the FBI targeted Martin Luther King, Jr. as an exceptional and uniquely dangerous threat to the nation’s internal security. The author demonstrates the numerous efforts by the bureau to oppose the influential activism of King and the organization he led, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The chapter explains the important shifts in American culture that pitted the more radical activism of civil rights leaders against an increasingly strident FBI that was determined to thwart law abiding activists who challenged the nation’s mainstream racial politics. The author argues that the pivotal issue behind the FBI’s repression of King was not personal antagonism between King and Hoover but the politics of race and repression.

Policing Public Morality

Most Americans are familiar with the bromides of the so-called culture wars, particularly as public religious figures of the 1960s and 1970s decried the perceived decline of sexual decency and morality. In this chapter, Charles Douglas examines a lesser-known dimension of this topic: the FBI’s decades-long campaign against obscenity. Charles explains how as obscenity’s legal definition constantly evolved after 1957, leading to the growth and proliferation of both obscenity and pornography, the FBI perceived the two as fundamental threats to American morality and culture. Consequently J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI devoted substantial resources to counter these social changes through an educational campaign spearheaded through its Crime Records Division — the bureau’s public relations machinery. This chapter amplifies attention to how the moralism of the Hoover period motivated efforts to police public morality well into the 1970s and 1980s.

J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the Religious Cold War

Despite Hoover's efforts to develop an alliance with the American Catholic Church, other Christian communities came under suspicion during the Cold War. This chapter by Dianne Kirby examines the surveillance of communities during the Cold War period that had transatlantic links and supported the continuation of the alliance with the Soviet Union or developed other contacts beyond the Iron Curtain. Her case studies include surveillance of the Russian Orthodox Church in America, which in the course of the war sought to transfer allegiance to the Moscow Patriarchate, a move that was stymied in the post-war period by deteriorating US-Soviet relations and Roman Catholic opposition.

American Religion and the Rise of Internal Security

In this chapter, Kathryn Gin Lum and Lerone Martin sketch the decades leading up to the formation of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908—later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This chapter offers readers a summary of the cultural and institutional context that led to the Bureau’s creation and the nature of American religion during that period. The chapter sets the stage for readers to understand the initial historical and cultural milieu in which the long history of the FBI’s relationship with religion took root.

“True Faith and Allegiance”—Religion and the FBI

This chapter explains on how the FBI’s relationship with various American religious groups complicates the typical category of religion-and-state issues. It begins with the post-9/11 era then relates the long history of the FBI engaging with religion. The chapter explains how the bureau has practiced skepticism toward religion at times while also seeking an alliance with religion at other times. The chapter argues for the importance of situating the post-9/11 era within a longer history of the FBI’s interaction with America’s religious communities.

Policing Kashmiri Brooklyn

This chapter explains the arrest and incarceration of Kashmiri political activist Ghulam Nabi Fai and his connections to the Pakistani neighborhoods of Brooklyn. In so doing, the author accounts for the special significance of the so called War on Terror and its impact on American Muslims. The chapter explains how this expanded scale of policing stifles everyday forms of political organization and dissent. Because this involves non-state actors who are involved in liberationist nationalist activity, the notion of ‘terror’ itself is blurred and becomes a convenient scapegoat in a complex of criminalization and illegality of political acts of critique, debate, and the organization of funds. Thus, the FBI program of counter-terrorism builds upon legacies of surveillance, infiltration, and profiling based on intermingling notions of race, religion, and immigration.

The FBI and the Nation of Islam

This chapter examines the FBI’s repression of the Nation of Islam. The FBI placed several of its own operatives into leading positions in this religious community, forging along the way a unique relationship with New York City’s police department. The essay explains how Bureau's efforts to destroy the Nation of Islam produced what is arguably its most violent repression of religious groups at the time. The author Karl Evanzz focuses on Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, both of whom targeted by the FBI for years. By explaining the bureau’s efforts to disrupt the best known organization of African American Muslims, the chapter interprets for readers a pivotal episode in the nation's history of religion and the security state.

“If God be for you, who can be against you?”

This chapter explains how during the First World War the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s official name at the time) targeted the Church of God in Christ, one of the nation's largest Pentecostal denominations. The author Theodore Kornweibel, who has written extensively on the Federal government’s campaigns against black militancy in the period during and following World War I, examines the nature and consequences of this episode that marked the Bureau's first formal engagement with an American religious community.

The FBI’s “Cult War” against the Branch Davidians

This chapter examines the FBI’s engagement of the Branch Davidians and the eventual bombing of the group at their Waco compound. The author explains how the cult essentialist perspective, which places all blame on “cultists” for violent outcomes in conflicts, was promoted by FBI agents during and after the siege and prepared the majority of Americans to view the assault as reasonable. In this essay, Catherine Wessinger, a leading scholar of new religious movements and active in engaging with the FBI in the early years after the Branch Davidian siege, questions this understanding in light of evidence including internal FBI memos reporting on agents’ interviews with people who knew the Branch Davidians and FBI summary documents and evaluations in the Lee Hancock Collection at Texas State University, San Marcos.

The FBI and the Catholic Church

The relationship between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Catholic Church was complex and changed over time. It is well-known that the bureau and the hierarchy of the church cooperated and supported each other during the early part of the Cold War. However, there is more to the story than that. This chapter explains how the bureau, for a number of reasons, pursued a relationship with Catholics during the late 1930s and World War II. As the author explains, however, the Catholic Church was never a monolithic entity, and the bureau maintained surveillance of progressive and radical Catholics who questioned the Cold War consensus. This chapter will focus on a little-known event at the end of World War II when the bureau played an important role in influencing the hierarchy of the Catholic Church to abandon its traditional liberal (or positive) anticommunism for a conservative (or negative) anticommunism.