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Billy James Hargis (August 3, 1925, Texarkana, Texas - November 27, 2004, Tulsa, Oklahoma) was a far-right-wing Protestant Christian evangelist who, it could be argued, was one of the founding fathers of the Christian Right. At the height of his popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, his Christian Crusade ministry had shows on more than 500 radio stations and 250 television stations. He was disgraced after accusations of sexual misconduct by young adults in his organization. Hargis preached continually on the evils of sex education, Communism, Catholicism and liberalism, and urged the return of prayer and Bible reading to public schools long before the modern Religious Right. On many occasions he referred to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as revolutionist foundations of Marxism. He often accused the government, media and pop culture figures---among whom he included the Beatles---of promoting Communism. (A subordinate, Rev. David Noebel, was the author of the 1965 work Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, which he expanded into Rhythm, Riots and Revolution the following year. Both books were published by Christian Crusade.) He publicly alleged that John F. Kennedy was killed by a Communist conspiracy, which brought him a good deal of notoriety in the immediate post-assassination media furor. Hargis was also a member of the John Birch Society, and made his pro-segregation stance clear, once accusing Martin Luther King Jr. of being a Communist-educated traitor and publishing James D. Bales's anti-King book The Martin Luther King Story. He often urged his listeners to take action by writing their Representatives and Senators, and was one of the first fundamentalist Christian personalities to urge his audiences to become politically involved - a tactic that was not lost on his successors. Hargis targeted rural audiences with his pulpit-pounding, thunderous messages, and was not averse to engaging in publicity stunts such as his 1953 scheme to release 100,000 balloons, with Biblical quotations attached to them, across the Iron Curtain into Communist countries. He was the author of at least 100 books, including The Far Left, and Why I Fight for a Christian America. In addition, his organization published an extremely influential pamphlet on sex education entitled Is the Classroom the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? by Gordon V. Drake, who worked very closely with him on his educational mission.
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