Religion and Right-wing movements in early 20th century U.S.: An interview with PhD Candidate Austin Clements
Austin Clements is a 6th year PhD Candidate in U.S. History field, studying cultural and intellectual history of religion, political extremism, fascism, and white supremacy. He has been a recipient of American Religions in a Global Context Fellowship. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Fear for a Lost God: Religion and the Transformation of the American Right, 1890-1950,” is supported by a 2024-25 Stanford Humanities Center (SHC) Dissertation Prize Fellowship.
Congratulations on your fellowship. Please tell us about your research.
My dissertation project details the formation of the religious right in the first half of the twentieth century. I locate the origins of this rightwing ecumenism within multiple American religious traditions (including Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Adventists, Pentecostals, and fundamentalist Protestants) as they confronted the social changes wrought by secularization. I am particularly interested in the formation of an American “far right”—not an actor’s category—and how it came to be constituted within various religious traditions. I trace the history of conservative religious ideas about, and attitudes toward, secularism, from the encounter with liberal theological developments of the late nineteenth century, to the dawn of the Cold War.
Liberal theology incorporated historical approaches to the Bible and the theories of deep time and evolution deemphasized the supernatural. The American religious conservatives that I study feared that these new patterns of thought would lead to atheism, so they felt vindicated by the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) and especially the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), for which they blamed the “godless” and “materialistic” philosophies of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx that they argued to constitute the backbone of liberal theology. By the 1920s, millions of Americans worried that communism was threatening to burrow into American life and hollow out from the inside its treasured institutions and ideals, religion chief among them. White American Protestants in particular feared that radical and atheistic (“un-American”) ideas were being smuggled into the United States by immigrants, and that, without a strong religious core, Americans would succumb to the same destructive ideas that corrupted Germany under the Kaiser and Russia under the Bolsheviks. By the Great Depression, however, American anticommunists spoke less of radical “aliens” than of liberal and leftwing Americans at the highest levels of national culture, education, and government as abettors, if not allies and even members, of the communist enemy. Conservative religious adherents, not only Protestants but also Catholics, Jews, and Mormons, therefore had concluded by the onset of the Cold War that the enemy was not each other, but “godless” liberalism and communism, and indeed that they were allies against the forces of godlessness in American life. I argue that the formation of this ecumenical anticommunism marked the origins of the religious right, which contained moderate and extreme elements.
How did you get interested in this topic?
During my undergraduate studies at Arizona State University-West, I took a class titled “Total War and the Crisis of Modernity” with a historian of modern France, Professor Stephen Toth, where I wrote a final paper on the intellectual history of fascism. In many ways, I am still trying to answer the question that has been on my mind since that paper: what ideas constitute what we call the far right, and what about those ideas are attractive?
When I decided to apply to graduate school, I was advised to switch my focus to the United States, and for a very practical reason: as a father of three coming from modest means and as someone who worked in construction for ten years before completing my undergraduate degree, it would be financially and logistically difficult, if not impossible, to do the required research abroad. These constraints shaped the writing of my undergraduate honors thesis, “Homegrown Radicals: American Fascist Movements in the Interwar Years, 1919-1941.”
During my thesis research, I kept finding that, among all the American far right groups of the 1920s and 1930s, religious ideas played a prominent role. Furthermore, the religious assumptions that guided the American far right were hardly fringe, at least within particular denominations and traditions within American Christianity: they believed that human history was soon coming to a literal and total end and that it would conclude with an epic showdown between the forces of good and evil. To this they added particular flavors of their era: many worried that communism was a doctrine of the Antichrist, for example, that the global order that emerged from World War I was a sign of the end times prophesied by Daniel, that Satan was gaining in power thanks to evolution and Bolshevism. But neither the apocalyptic worldview nor the belief in a personal, supranatural, and interventionist God is necessarily rightwing. This interplay between traditional religious ideas and the far right continues to interest me greatly.
What brought such a spectrum of groups together around the same umbrella?
If there is any main enemy for these religious groups to rally together against, it is secularism, or as they call it, “godlessness.” Every evil they identify and combat –whether the Kaiser, communism, the theory of evolution, the New Deal order–they connect it back to what they see as an assault on God. For all their theological and doctrinal disagreements, adherents of major American religious traditions–whether Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Protestant–believed that theological liberals and communists were working together to oust God from American life, and were therefore tearing the moral fabric of society and condemning souls to wretched oblivion.
How does the U.S. emergence as a global power influence this process?
There are two main ways: first, it transforms American liberalism, which is what the groups I study were responding to; second, it changes conservative religious Americans’ conception of what role the American nation would play in God’s plan for the end of the world. After World War I, the U.S. federal government began to expand, a process that was further sped up by the Great Depression and with the New Deal order. The state was now interfering with the private lives of Americans in a way that would have seemed impossible only years before. Religious conservatives began to feel like the nation’s elites in charge of the federal government were out of touch with the needs of ordinary Americans.
How did the U.S. right wing mobilization engage its global counterparts?
When we think of a “global right” during the interwar period, we probably think of fascism, whether under Benito Mussolini in Italy or Adolf Hitler in Germany. And to be sure, there were Americans who were enamored with both: In fact, Mussolini was praised, though often reservedly, by Americans ranging from modernist poet Ezra Pound to Hugh Johnson, the architect of the National Recovery Act (NRA) of the first New Deal. Far less Americans approved of Hitler, but those who did made a lot of noise. For the most part, the people I study did not care for fascism. Many evangelicals, for example, thought Mussolini was the Antichrist, and most right-wing Americans disliked fascism because, like communism, it was anti-religious.
My 2021 article in Journal of Contemporary History analyzed the thoughts and attitudes of Americans who supported Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, concluding that while Americans on the whole had no love for fascism, some saw it as a necessary evil. Fascism had no place in the United States, American Francoites insisted, but in Spain, Italy, and Germany, fascism was necessary to combat the greater evil of communism. However, this view was primarily held by American Catholics, who had always been suspicious of liberalism and understood communism as a far greater threat to the global Church. On the other hand, American Protestants, liberal and conservative alike, felt that the Catholic church in Spain got what was coming to it, and did not care for Franco any more than they did for Stalin. Yet, even then, there was a shared disdain among the global far right for communism, and American anti-communists in the interwar period frequently took part in peddling propaganda and conspiracy theories regarding, for example, the idea that communism was part of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity and Western civilization.
Tell us about your archival sites and sources.
The core of my research comprises “radical right” archives housed in different collections across the United States: pamphlets and books, occasionally journals, newspapers, and magazines, produced and distributed by people and organizations deemed “radical” and “extreme” by watchdog groups, scholars, journalists, and other collectors of the material, who then donated them to an archive or a library. These archives pose a hermeneutical challenge, as “extreme right” or “radical right” are not the categories used by the actors themselves–no one in the interwar years is saying, “I’m the far right, here is my far right opinion.” Furthermore, the formulation of a “right-center-left” spectrum did not enter popular usage in the United States until around the 1950s, and often the sources I use do not map neatly onto any political position we might recognize today.
The other source base I rely on is archives from religious denominations and groups that I have seen represented in the “radical right” archives: Latter-day Saints, Seventh-day Adventists, American Catholics, Christian Scientists, and numerous fundamentalist Protestant groups have libraries and archives located across the country that are open for research. These are helpful for getting a sense of how the “radical right” sources relate to American religions more broadly. Oftentimes the “radical right” authors have been excommunicated from their religious homes, but more often they are well within the bounds of acceptable religious thought and discourse of their time, and might even be leaders within their respective traditions, for instance as priests, bishops, preachers, founders and presidents of bible colleges and seminaries.
How does studying the early 20th century right wing politics help us better understand the United States today?
We often use auditory metaphors–there are “echoes” or “resonances” of the past–that may seem self-evident yet offer little in analysis for understanding today. Or we might use botanical metaphors: we can find the “deep roots” of the present in the soil of the past. I’m partial to a different botanical metaphor: in focusing on superficial similarities between the American right today and the American (and even European) right of a century ago, we might miss the forest for the trees. The big picture–the forest–that I see in my dissertation is the transformation that occurred within American religion during the interwar period, namely, that religious groups who had for centuries seen one another as the greatest evil were able to come together to fight an even greater foe: godlessness.
As one of my dissertation readers pointed out early in the process, conservative members of these religious groups still absolutely believe that everyone except themselves are going to hell. And yet, in my research I continue to find instances of groups coming together–inviting other religious members to speak at their churches, reading their material and reprinting it in their magazines, building organizations together, all of which would have been impossible a generation before. When we see today that some pronatalist conference has brought together a smattering of Mormons, Catholics, and evangelicals, or that a far right militia group in the Pacific Northwest pulls its members from a composite of different faiths, or that a variety of American religious groups were actively participating together coordinating and executing the January 6 insurrection, it is tempting to think that perhaps religion does not matter that much at all to such people. But it does, I would argue, so much so that they will band together to fight for religion-as-such, and, as the saying goes, let Jesus sort out the rest.
Stokes, Jeremiah. Americans’ Castle of Freedom Under Bolshevik Fire on our Home Front: Fateful Facts All America Must Know. Salt Lake City, UT: Federated Libraries, Inc. 1944.