William Bell Riley

William Bell Riley (March 22, 1861 – December 5, 1947) was an American Baptist evangelical Christian pastor who spoke against modernism and evolution. He was known as "The Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism."

Riley served as the pastor of First Baptist Church in Minneapolis for 50 years, between 1897 and his death in 1947. He founded the World Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919, one of the foremost anti-evolutionist organizations in the United States.

Biography Riley was born in Indiana, with Irish heritage.

He resigned after forty-five years but served as pastor emeritus until his death five years later

Views

Evolution In 1923 Riley set up the Anti-Evolution League of Minnesota, which blossomed the following year into the Anti-Evolution League of America (later run by T. T. Martin). While the anti-evolution crusade is often thought of as a Southern phenomenon, two of its foremost leaders, Riley and John Roach Straton, were from Minneapolis and New York City respectively. In the early 1920s Riley promoted a vigorous anti-evolutionary campaign in the Northwest and it was Riley's World Christian Fundamentals Association that wired William Jennings Bryan urging him to act as counsel for the association in the Scopes Trial.

Riley and Bryan tried to remove all teaching of evolution from public schools. One of the creationists in their movement, T. T. Martin claimed that German soldiers who killed Belgian and French children by giving them poisoned candy were angels compared to those who spread evolution ideas in schools. Riley also claimed that "an international Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist conspiracy to promote evolutionism in the classroom" was behind the changes in curriculum occurring in the 1920s. Riley advocated a form of "Day-Age Creationism".

Antisemitism

Some of Riley's beliefs and writings were considered antisemitic. He wrote and spoke extensively about Jews, especially in relation to Communism, crime and historical social influence. He promoted the antisemitic canard of linking Jews with mysterious sources of influence, power and money. In his Introduction to a collection of Riley's anti-evolutionary writings William Trollinger, the editor, describes Riley's belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to control the media and the economy. Trollinger believed Riley was partly influenced by the anti-Jewish Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Henry Ford had been promoting the Protocols at that time through his newspaper The Dearborn Independent. Riley believed that Jews had a prominent role in promoting evolution to undermine religious and social values. Riley saw this as part of a wider plot involving Communism's plan to conquer America, especially through the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he accused of being part of a communist conspiracy. Riley declared that Soviet Russia "was under the dominance of a successful mob of atheistic Jews." Riley described the origins of World War I as the result of the maneuvering of Jewish bankers and arms dealers. Riley preached a sermon entitled "Shivering at the sight of a shirt" in support of the Fascist Silver Shirts (of the Silver Legion of America) calling them "defenders of the Constitution." In his book, The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century, Glen Yeadon compares Riley's use of anti-Jewish imagery and rhetoric in his sermons and writings to Hitler's propaganda. Riley was an open supporter of Hitler who defended antisemitic views of the Nazis."Jewry, from the day that she crucified Jesus Christ until the present time, has given many occasions for her own rejection… Hear Hitler, who speaks from firsthand knowledge: 'the Jew is the cause and beneficiary of our slavery. The Jew has caused our misery, and today he lives on our troubles. That is the reason that as nationalists, we are enemies of the Jew. He has ruined our race, rotted our morals, corrupted our traditions, and broken our power.'" Some writers think that Riley moved towards anti Semitism after the failure of his crusade against evolution, blaming the Jews for his inability to influence Schools against teaching evolution. Trollinger also argues that Riley was influenced by and became a leading part of the antisemitism prevalent in Minneapolis. There were also parts of wider fundamentalist culture at that time adopting antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Riley denied that he was an antisemite. He argued that he was merely commenting on social conditions at the time, and that he theologically and personally supported the Jews. Soon after the British Army entered Jerusalem in 1917, Riley described his hopes of a restored Jewish state and the role of Jerusalem in end time events in a published sermon. Riley also believed that Jews as a race had been "under God's punishment", similar to the theology of Medieval antisemitism. Riley continued to be a supporter of more modern manifestations of antisemitism, such as belief in a worldwide Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist conspiracy.

Political views Early in his career, Riley was a radical leftist, opening the First Baptist Church to the working class and openly opposing the Spanish—American War. By the 1930s, Riley had become a fervent anti-communist, opposing Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs as well.