#986: David Noebel

David A. Noebel is the founder of Summit Ministries, and former leader of the Christian Crusade. He made his real breakthrough in the 1960s and 1970s when trying to start a moral panic over rock and folk music. Though he has subsequently assumed a lower profile than, say, Jerry Falwell, Noebel is still one of the most influential and ragingly insane figures on the religious right (the people at Rapture Ready, for instance, are devoted fans).

Noebel’s anti-pop efforts are immortalized in his books Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles (1965), which contains exactly the arguments you’d suspect it to contain from the title, Rhythm, Riots, and Revolution (1966), and the audiobook The Marxist Minstrels (1974), which, once again, asserted the Beatles as well as several popular folk musicians were deliberately using musical styles intended to induce hypnotism in the listener, dumb them down, and then implant subversive communist thoughts in their minds (obviously, for someone like Noebel, communism and Satan are two sides of the same coin). Noebel also claimed that at least one major company making children’s educational records was controlled by Communist organizations and that their records contained hypnotic induction techniques while having children sing along with lyrics like “I’m a little puppet.”

His list of books is extensive, and in addition to the ones mentioned includes his 1977 book The Homosexual Revolution (dedicated to Anita Bryant), which was the publications that led people like Falwell to take up the issue (indeed, some have blamed Noebel for starting the culture wars), as well as Mind Siege: The Battle forTruth in the New Millenium with Tim LaHaye, which concerned the subversive threat against civilization posed by secular humanism. Alleged secular humanist plots included the Trilateral Commission and the National Council of Churches, and the whole book is crammed with conspiracy stuff that would make even Jeff Rense hesitate (review here). The targets included the ACLU (Noebel is a staunch opponent of civil rights and the Constitution), the National Organization of Women, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Association of Biology Teachers, the major television networks and foundationsm, the Democratic Party, the United Nations, UNESCO, Harvard, Yale, and “two thousand other colleges and universities!” Because those institutions try to educate people with facts, truth and evidence rather than Noebel’s own cherished notion of Jesus.

Also worth mentioning are the 1986 anti-gay book AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, co-authored with absolute madman Wayne C. Lutton and anti-gay Family Research Institute head Paul Cameron, Clergy in the Classroom: The Religion of Secular Humanism from 1995 (with J. F. Baldwin and Kevin J. Bywater), the video Countering Culture: Arming Yourself to Confront Non-Biblical Worldviews (with Chuck Edwards), and Understanding the Times: The Religious Worldviews of Our Day and the Search for Truth (1991), a textbook “interpreting” current intellectual movements, including biblical Christianity, secular humanism, Marxism-Leninism, the New Age Movement, Islam, and postmodernism. It is apparently still widely used among Christian schools, churches and colleges.

His anti-gay efforts are not limited to books. For the WND (surprise) he has written columns blaming the Obama administration and supporters of gay rights for the child abuse scandal at Penn State University, which according to Noebel signified “the demise of moral relativism at the hands of liberalism’s most cherished activity – homosexuality,” despite the, well, the facts. Writes Noebel: “Obama and his radical homosexual mafia plan to sodomize the world and make such perversion seem as wholesome as apple pie and vanilla ice cream,” displaying all the love of Jesus and showing how the “Democrat party espouses a shameless morality in the direct line of Rehoboam, king of Judah, who ‘did evil in the eyes of the LORD.’” Through the nefarious efforts of the “homosexual mafia,” says Noebel, “prayer, the Bible, the 10 Commandments and God may well be illegal, but sodomy is not. Has America fallen for the devil’s spin or no?” (Oh, the cherished fundie myths and distortions, rattled of quicker than you can say “persecution complex”).

His attempts to combat against communism aren’t over either, as shown by his 2010 book “You Can Still Trust the Communists ... to Be Communists (Socialists and Progressives too)” (with Fred Schwarz), where he argues that the US is now a communist country since it espouses virtually all the tenets of the Communist Manifesto (being a communist country apparently means being noticeably different from the Jesus-like situation in Manchester anno 1848?) He also laments the absence of tireless fighters such as Joe McCarthy, whom in Noebel’s eyes “was a hero”.

Diagnosis: An extremist’s extremist, whose rabid bigotry, denialism, paranoia and lack of understanding of reality make him always on the verge of lapsing into the grammatically incoherent. He is nevertheless extremely powerful, and must be considered one of the most dangerous people alive today.