The "Jayhawk Nazi" of Kansas: Gerald Winrod, Antisemitism, and the Evangelical Far Right, 1925-1944

Abstract

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber suggested that as the religious rationales of Calvinist workers were forgotten under the urge to acquisition, capitalist society would become a steel-hard casing holding only the “ghost of dead religious beliefs” and racing toward a soulless dystopia. Gerald Winrod agreed, although for different reasons, and feared for the future. Born in 1900, Winrod was a Fundamentalist who responded with stringent anti-modernism and anti-feminism to the loosening of the traditional social hierarchy that accompanied industrialization and the rise of the urban lifestyle. In 1926, as an effort to turn back time, Winrod led a movement opposing evolution curricula in schools. It failed, however, and he became a proponent of the conspiracy theory that accelerating modernism reflected Jews’ plans to enslave non-Jews by distracting them with licentious entertainment while hijacking the economic machinery of their nations. As Winrod watched his Christian idyll slip away, he endeavored to backfill the emptying iron cage with dangerous religious fictions in the hopes that consensus would help reinstate social solidarity and the privileges of white, Christian men. He escalated his appeals to ethnocentrism, antisemitism, militant conspiracism, and biblical apocalypticism, calling out to Christian duty in his effort to rally support for traditional patriarchy. Many of the tropes that Winrod promoted are resurgent among the far right today.