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from foreign to domestic enemies that Hofstadter described in 1964. Though domestic subversives played leading roles in the communist conspiracy theories, the primary threat was still a foreign power. Anticommunists feared Moscow, much as anti-Catholics feared the pope and anti-Masons feared international societies. But the secular humanists were home grown, serving no higher power than themselves—at least no higher mortal power. They already controlled the levers of power and influence, including the media, the schools, the courts, and the White House. This perception that domestic enemies had subjugated the country persisted long after the secular humanists faded away; these days it manifests in Tea Party battle cries to “take our country back.”

The similarities between the communist and humanist conspiracy theories are not coincidental. Before joining the Moral Majority, anti-humanist Tim LaHaye was active in the JBS and inherited many of the organization’s conspiracist ideas.6 Nor was LaHaye the only religious right founder who began his career as a red-baiter. Jerry Falwell claimed that Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist subversive and that the Soviets had teemed up with Satan to promote public school desegregation. He proclaimed in a sermon:

The true Negro does not want integration. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race. Who then is propagating this terrible thing? First of all, we see the hand of Moscow in the background. We see the Devil himself behind it.7

Thus, in the 1970s, right-wing leaders like LaHaye and Falwell simply swapped one conspiratorial enemy for another, replacing the communist menace with the secular humanist menace. Some proponents were explicit about the exchange. At a 1977 conference for charismatic Christians, one speaker warned, “Secular humanism is more of a threat than the anti-Christ or communism.”8

Projecting Intolerance

There is one significant difference between Hofstadter’s anticommunists and the antihumanists of the 1970s and 1980s. Antihumanism became popular after the civil rights movement and amid the feminist and gay rights movements. Many of its proponents had been accused of racism, sexism, prejudice against homosexuals, and fascist tendencies. They were on the losing end of an emerging national ethic that reviled discrimination and intolerance, and this dynamic informed their paranoia in the form of projection.

Alluding to Freud’s theory, Hofstadter wrote, “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self.”9 Hofstadter’s use of projection is somewhat looser than Freud’s. Where Freud described projection as a defense mechanism in which the mind deals with an uncomfortable impulse by pretending that it belongs to someone else, Hofstadter argued that political paranoiacs attribute “both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self” to their enemies. That is to say, they imagine that their enemies have qualities to which they secretly aspire as well as qualities that they subconsciously abhor in themselves.

Thus, Hofstadter observed that paranoid organizations often emulated their enemies’ idealized qualities. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholic liturgy by dressing in priestly robes and developing elaborate rituals. The JBS masked its operations using front groups and secret cells, much like the supposed communist subversives. Conversely, Hofstadter suggested that conspiracists also projected their own unwanted and repressed sexual impulses into dark fantasies about bizarre sexual and sadomasochistic practices that they attributed to Masons, Catholics, Jews, and so on.

Postcommunist conspiracy theorists also seem to project both ideal and unwanted aspects of themselves onto their enemies. For instance, religious-right leaders have imitated their visions of secular youth indoctrination by expanding Christian schools to produce what one evangelical leader bluntly called an “army that is going to take the future,” and have sought to replicate secular humanists’ imagined political