The Blue Army and the Red Scare: Politics, Religion, and Cold War Paranoia

Abstract

In 1964 Richard Hofstadter argued that American history was permeated with episodes when shared feelings of persecution and forms of conspiratorial thinking dominated the political landscape. Hofstadter suggested that these episodes had a distinctive flavor, or style, that he described as ‘paranoid.’ Taking this suggestion as a point of departure, this paper examines the creation of the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, a Catholic organization that formed in 1947 to rescue humanity from a prophesied catastrophe. The paper ties the writings of Blue Army leaders to American Cold War politics, focusing on the ways Soviet communism was equated with Satanism, prompting calls for Blue Army members to wage spiritual warfare against their perceived enemies. The paper concludes with an exploration of the links between individual and group paranoia, and paranoid psychopathology and religious fundamentalism.