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.
