Despite its 16th-century birth in revolutionary anarchism, the Protestant movement of Christianity had settled down within a century to become a conservative, if somewhat divided, religious establishment. The record of modern infiltration by Amaleki revolutionaries can be traced to at least the late 1700s, when the underground organization known as the Illuminati, based in Germany, actively recruited Protestant ministers to serve as infiltrating agents within Christianity.¹ They were assigned the mission of spreading propaganda in disguised form, preparing Christian followers to participate in the world revolution without realizing what they were doing.

By the late 1800s, the Illuminati and its allied secret societies had given birth to the Communist International, and the hidden influence of Marxism was making its way to Christianity in the United States through American ministers trained in Europe. Having spread widely among all Protestant denominations, Marxist subversion began surfacing openly in 1908 with the founding of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC). Its published social and political agenda, or “Social Creed,” so brazenly advocated the Communist line on a variety of issues that in 1935 U.S. Naval Intelligence raised alarm bells of subversion.² As the mask dropped and the new, leftist movement of “modernism” was unveiled in thousands of American churches, conservative members of the clergy rebelled and began breaking away from the established organizations and denominations. Led by such figures as Princeton University theologian J. Gresham Machen and Presbyterian minister Carl McIntire, the dissenters formed a movement for a return to the fundamental beliefs of Protestant Christianity — “fundamentalism” — which grew steadily, enough to interfere with the FCC’s goal of unifying all denominations under its program.³

Their momentum having been disrupted, the Communists tried again in 1950 with the founding of the National Council of Churches (NCC) in Cleveland, Ohio, which quickly absorbed many entire Protestant denominations encompassing tens of millions of members.⁴ Its agenda was no less radical than its FCC predecessor; the NCC consistently pushed the hard Communist line on virtually every political and social issue, while its top officials and allies have included numerous Communists and their close collaborators.⁵

At about the same time, Communists from America and other countries established the World Council of Churches (WCC), headquartered to this day in Geneva, Switzerland. The WCC likewise worked hard to support the Communist agenda among Protestant and Eastern Orthodox churches worldwide, and its leadership was drawn from Communists not only in America and Western Europe, but also in the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and elsewhere. The WCC soon pulled together the American NCC and various parallel “National Councils of Churches” in nations all around the globe.⁶

During the 1960s, the growing radicalism of the NCC and WCC sparked an equally strong backlash among Protestant Christians, who began streaming out of the Marxist-tainted denominations into new, more independent fundamentalist churches led by conservative clergy.⁷ Already by the early 1970s, the rebellion was spreading rapidly throughout the Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, and other denominations, with tens of millions choosing more traditional beliefs while the NCC-affiliated churches were actually losing membership.⁸ By the late 1970s, the revolt had grown into a full-fledged movement with conservative political influence, led by such prominent ministers as Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority organization.⁹ Fundamentalist backlash continued to grow throughout the 1980s and 1990s; by 1993, one out of every three Americans professed belief that “the Bible is the actual word of G-d and is to be taken literally, word for word.”¹⁰

Although the size and persistence of the fundamentalist reaction caught the Communists by surprise, they were prepared to deal with some degree of opposition. Beginning in the 1920s, while the radical agenda of “modernism” and the “social gospel” were triggering the first wave of fundamentalist revolt, a parallel “evangelical” movement was arising and mixing itself among the fundamentalists, struggling with some success to make the two movements appear to be one and the same. Over the decades, evangelical leaders such as Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, Billy Graham, Hal Lindsey, and Chuck Missler, and organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and Fuller Theological Seminary, have alternated between trying to neutralize conservative Christian political activism and trying to pull fundamentalist Christians leftward into the Marxist camp — or at least into a collaborating leftist activism. Their struggle to subvert fundamentalism while trying to maintain a fundamentalist image is a subject for related profiles on ATTAC Report.