Gerald Burton Winrod (March 7, 1900 – November 11, 1957) was a self-educated fundamentalist American evangelist, author, and political activist. He was considered to be the Protestant counterpart to Father Charles Coughlin.
Winrod was a promoter of Christian Identity, with an impact on the early adoption of Identity by Wesley Swift. He was known to have strongly antisemitic views, which, along with his sympathies towards Nazi Germany in the 1930s, earned him the nickname "the Jayhawk Nazi".
During World War II, Winrod was charged with sedition. He was never convicted, as the judge died during the trial.
Biography
He was born on March 7, 1900, to Mable E. (1881–1971), originally from Illinois, and John W. Winrod (1873–1945), originally from Missouri.
His father, John, was a former bartender whose saloon was attacked by Carrie Nation.
In 1918, he was the chief clerk at the Kansas Gas and Electric Company in El Dorado, Kansas. By 1925, he formed the Defenders of the Christian Faith, a fundamentalist Christian-fascist organization that opposed teaching evolution in public schools, supported Prohibition, opposed homosexuality, and expressed support for racial segregation. Defenders of the Christian Faith existed in Kansas at least up to 1980, though many offshoots in Topeka, Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, and Kansas City were expected to exist.
Winrod professed strongly antisemitic views, earning him the nickname "The Jayhawk Nazi" ("Jayhawk" being a nickname for a person from Kansas). Winrod offered the following defense of his views in the introduction to his book The Truth About the Protocols which proclaimed the veracity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Winrod believed the United States to be the chosen land of God and, when the Great Depression struck, publicly stated that it was the work of Satan. He believed Franklin D. Roosevelt was a "devil" linked with the Jewish-Communist conspiracy, that the New Deal was a Jewish plot predicted by the Protocols, and that Hitler would save Europe from Communism.