Michael McVicar | Under Cover: Sedition and Antisemitism in the Fundamentalist Underground

Join the Blokker Workshop for Religion, Politics, and Culture for a Book Chapter Workshop with Dr. Michael McVicar, Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. We'll be workshopping the seventh chapter of Dr. McVicar's forthcoming book, God's Watchers: Surveillance and Protestant Political Activism from the Great War to the Reagan Revolution.

God’s Watchers analyzes the historical convergence of American Protestantism and domestic intelligence gathering. The project argues that a Protestant culture of surveillance emerged as a primary mechanism for negotiating the theological and political boundaries of American public life during the twentieth century. The book explores how Fundamentalist countersubversives weaponized documentary evidence and racism—notably through their embrace of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—to frame ecumenical Protestantism as a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy threatening a white, "100% American" political order. The study details this internecine battle between Fundamentalism and mainline Protestantism, revealing how liberal activists functioned as state-aligned informants determined to dismantle a Fundamentalist underground framed as a fascistic fifth column, while Fundamentalists responded with an aggressive campaign to portray the mainline as Communist-aligned subversives. With the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies acting as de facto mediators between these countervailing forces in American Protestantism, God Watchers shows how state agencies played a critical role in legitimizing and expanding these sectarian intelligence networks. From the cataclysm of the Great War to the domestic turmoil caused by the Cold War, the work demonstrates how the tools of the national security state—indices, dossiers, and informants—were adopted by religious actors to enforce racial and religious boundaries, fundamentally transforming American Protestantism into a mechanism of political surveillance and social control.