The Roots of Right Wing Religious Extremism: The Winrod Legacy 2/2

In PART ONE of this series we looked at the career of Reverend Gerald Winrod, the anti-Semitic preacher from Kansas. Decade after decade, from his fiery attacks on Roosevelt's New Deal to his admiration of the Nazi state, to his crusades against Communists (if only because he saw it as a Jewish conspiracy), Winrod rode every current wave of right-wing radicalism.

Gordon Winrod

In this post, we will look at how the Winrod legacy was passed on to his son, Gordon Winrod, and led to an even more direct expression of violent extremism.

The Torch Passed to a New Generation

Reverend Dr. Gerald B. Winrod passed the torch to his son, Gordon Winrod, who carried on the family tradition of virulent antisemitism. For a time, his son maintained his father's works until finally leaving Kansas, to re-settle in the Missouri Ozarks.

While it is fair to say that Winrod had nowhere near the charisma of his father, his tracts against the Jews were quite a bit more explicit. The Jews, said Gordon Winrod, drank the "warm blood of Christians" and "controlled the money, the media and thus all politics and all government." There was no end, according to Winrod, to the misery they caused. 

In 1960, he began publishing the monthly "The Winrod Letter" which was not only filled with his current rants against the Jews, it offered a list of other anti-Semitic books and tapes that could be ordered from his church. (Click here for a partial sample of a 1997 newsletter. ) 
Hating Jews had become a cottage industry for the Winrods.

The Roots of Right Wing Religious Extremism: The Winrod Legacy 1/2

by Nomad

Most Americans have not heard of the name Winrod but decades ago, Reverend Gerald Winrod was at one time a charismatic voice of right-wing dissent, His anti-Semitic message spread through the Midwest by radio at a time when the Nazi party in Germany were rising to power. 

This two-part post traces his rise and fall and his ideological rebirth through his son, a man who took the message to the next level.

Of all the books of the Bible, the Book of Revelations holds a particular spell over right-wing Fundamentalists. I suppose there's a good reason. It is colorfully written and vague enough to mean nearly anything, depending on current events, the mood of the preacher and the target of the sermon. And for the more literal- minded Christians it instills a sense of imminent unalterable doom and fear. A proven motivator. 

In our times, we have heard suggestions that Obama is somehow related to the coming of the Anti-Christ, the devil-incarnate from the biblical prophecies. 

However, Obama is hardly unique in this regard. In fact evangelists have used the prophecies to point fingers at well-known leaders nearly from the time the book was included in the official canon of Scripture. 

In this post, I want to examine the biographical history of the nearly forgotten Reverend Gerald Burton Winrod. Winrod used this particular technique against the president and against the progressive movement in general.

Reverend Gerald Winrod vs. Franklin Roosevelt

In the 1930s, for Christian fundamentalists, all the signs of the end times were obvious. It was a time of great -almost unbearable- tension and apprehension. The rise of totalitarianism in Europe and a world-wide depression unlike anything anybody had ever seen were just two signs that of the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies.

Matt Sutton, Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, notes that in the 1930s, a few influential Christian leaders began to impose their own view on political events.

Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal quickly emerged as the object of their most intense domestic scrutiny. Fundamentalists sensed something sinister in the thirty-second president. His consolidation of power, his controversial policies, and his internationalist sensibilities seemed consistent with biblical descriptions of politics and international relations in the last days.

As a result, fundamentalists did not interpret the growth of the modern liberal state in the U.S. as a reasonable response to the growing global economic depression but instead viewed it in conjunction with Mussolini’s visions of empire and Hitler’s Antisemitism. In short, fundamentalists across the continent came to believe that New Deal liberalism was the means by which the U.S. would join the legions of the Antichrist.

One of the more notable preachers that took this view was Rev. Gerald Burton Winrod in Wichita, Kansas.