Biography
Ultra-fundamentalist preacher Billy James Hargis was born in Texarkana, Texas, on August 3, 1925. At 18 years of age he was ordained as a minister in the Rose Hill Christian Church and later became a minister with the First Christian Church at various parishes in Oklahoma and Missouri. In 1947 he founded the Christian Crusade, an organization he said was dedicated to fighting Communism, atheismm and its allies. He also had radio and television programs that were carried by hundreds of stations throughout the US.
A close friend of Gen. Edwin Walker--an Army general later cashiered from the service when he was caught using training sessions to indoctrinate young troops in racist, anti-Semitic and ultra-right-wing politics--Hargis became a member of the far-right-wing John Birch Society. He used his radio and television broadcasts to promote right-wing political figures, and for a time was a speechwriter for the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In one of Hargis' more famous incidents, he traveled to West Germany in 1953 and launched 100,000 balloons with Bible verses tied to them across the border into Communist East Germany.
Hargis came to believe that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was a conspiracy between American Communists and their Soviet "masters", and that the two were trying to place the blame on ultra-conservative political organizations, such as his. He became a fervent supporter of Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential campaign. On one of his radio broadcasts he accused a journalist of smearing Goldwater. When a station that carried Hargis' broadcast refused to let the journalist reply to the charges on the air, he sued, and won. From that case came the establishment of what became known as the "Fairness Doctrine".
In 1966 Hargis established the American Christian College in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as an alternative for Christian parents who didn't want to send their children to "secular" schools where they would come under the influences of what he called the "evils" of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, The Beatles, the women's liberation movement and long hair, which Hargis believed led to "rampant immorality". He also formed a college choir that he called "The All-American Kids" as an example of what clean-cut, moral American youth should be like. However, it wasn't long before stories began circulating that the main purpose of the "All-American Kids" was to keep Hargis provided with a steady supply of young sex partners. Those rumors were confirmed as fact in 1976 when Time magazine, which had been investigating the stories, found two former members of the choir--one male and one female--who had discovered on their wedding night that they had both been having sex with Hargis. Hargis vehemently denied the charges, but as a steady procession of former members of the "All-American Kids" choir, both male and female, came forward to corroborate the students' stories, and many others told their own stories of Hargis' sexual predations on both male and female members, he was forced to disband the "All-American Kids" and shut down American Christian College.
In spite of scandals such as these, Hargis still fervently pushed his ultra-right-wing fundamentalist Christian political beliefs, and published many books decrying Communist "influence" in everyday American life. He died in November of 2004.
