In this lecture Lerone A. 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. Martin draws on thousands of newly declassified documents to transform how we understand the FBI, white evangelism, and our nation's entangled history of religion and politics. The event is sponsored by the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life and cosponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History, the Department of History, the Department of Religious Studies, and the Legal Humanities Initiative.

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).