Hour of White Power

Photo by Jack GouldA year-long investigation has revealed that the Crystal Cathedral's Reverend Robert H. Schuller relies on a man with ties to American neo-Nazis in a campaign to build relations between people of different faiths.

William W. Baker appeared three times as a guest lecturer at a Crystal Cathedral pastors' conference on Jan. 29 and 30. Now head of Christians and Muslims for Peace (CAMP), Baker was chairman of the neo-Nazi Populist Party in 1984 and organized its national convention that year. The Populist Party was established and directed by Willis Carto, head of the now-defunct Liberty Lobby. The dean of American neo-Nazi politics, Carto also founded the Costa Mesa-based Institute for Historical Review, a group whose central purpose is Holocaust denial.

Baker seems an unlikely acquaintance for Schuller, one of America's preeminent mainstream Protestant pastors and host of the nationally syndicated Hour of Power television program. According to Reverend Larry Sonnenberg, Crystal Cathedral's chief operating officer, Schuller has no comment on evidence that Baker operates among neo-Nazis. Sonnenberg said Baker has introduced Schuller and his family to important Islamic leaders, such as the Grand Mufti of Damascus.

In a written statement, Baker claimed he did not know the Populist Party was racist and that he never shared Carto's racist politics.

"I never supported the views of Willis Carto," he wrote. "I was chairman of the Populist Party for a short time and publicly resigned due to infiltration from various racist individuals and organizations."

But evidence supplied by the Anti-Defamation League shows that Baker delivered a 1983 speech to the racist Christian Patriot Defense League in Licking, Missouri, in which he made several references to Carto's neo-Nazi newspaper, Spotlight. A 23-page transcript of that rambling speech reveals a number of anti-Semitic remarks, including Baker's reference to Reverend Jerry Falwell as "Jerry Jewry." (Falwell is known to be friendly to Jews.) In the same speech, Baker described his disgust at traveling to New York City: "God help me. Why? 'Cause the first people I meet when I get off the plane are pushy, belligerent American Jews."

The printed Populist platform introduced at Baker's 1984 convention included states'-rights provisions that would allow states to restore Jim Crow segregation laws and repeal the public-accommodations sections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The platform also expressed a clear intention to create Nazi-style Nuremberg Laws: "The Populist Party will not permit any racial minority, through control of the media, culture distortion or revolutionary political activity, to divide or factionalize [sic] the majority of the society-nation in which the minority lives."

Schuller

During the same period, Baker wrote and published Theft of a Nation, a 1982 book whose salient feature is its unrelenting pro-Arab, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish politics. Writing on contemporary Middle East politics, Baker stated that "true justice and real conciliation" requires that "all Jews who entered Palestine during the British Mandate from 1917 to 1948 and after the establishment of the state of Israel should return to the various countries of their origin" and that the "Zionist state of Israel . . . should be dismantled and eventually eliminated."