Various historians have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist group. The group is typically structured as a secret society containing several different organizations, that have historically resorted to terrorism, violence and acts of intimidation to impose their criteria and oppress their victims, most notably African Americans, Jews, and Catholics.
The KKK of the 1920s had a nationwide membership in the millions and reflected a cross-section of the native born white Protestant population. The third and current Klan formed in the mid 20th century, is much smaller. It was largely a reaction to the growing civil rights movement. It used murder and bombings to achieve its aims. All three iterations have called for the "purification" of American society.
The KKK of the 1920s had a nationwide membership in the millions and reflected a cross-section of the native born white Protestant population. The third and current Klan formed in the mid 20th century, is much smaller. It was largely a reaction to the growing civil rights movement. It used murder and bombings to achieve its aims. All three iterations have called for the "purification" of American society.
- Religion was critical. Kelly J. Baker argues that the KKK based its hatred on a particular brand of Protestantism that resonated with mainstream Americans: "Members embraced Protestant Christianity and a crusade to save America from domestic as well as foreign threats."[173] Member were primarily Baptists, Methodists, and members of the Disciples of Christ, while men of "more elite or liberal" Protestant denominations such as Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Lutherans, were less likely to join.[174]
- Though most members of the KKK saw themselves in holding to American values and Christian morality, virtually every Christian denomination officially denounced the Ku Klux Klan.[14]
- The cross became a symbol of the Klan's quasi-Christian message. Its lighting during meetings was often accompanied by prayer, the singing of hymns, and other overtly religious symbolism.
- Led by the minister of the First Christian Church, the Klan represented a rising group of politically oriented non-ethnic Germans who denounced the elite as corrupt, undemocratic and self-serving.
- Kenneth T. Jackson, in his The Ku Klux Klan in the City 1915-1930, reminds us that "virtually every" Protestant denomination denounced the KKK, and that most KKK members were not "innately depraved or anxious to subvert American institutions," but rather saw their membership in keeping with "one-hundred percent Americanism" and Christian morality.
- Writer W. J. Cash, in his 1941 book The Mind of the South characterized the second Klan as "anti-Negro, anti-Alien, anti-Red, anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Darwin, anti-Modern, anti-Liberal, Fundamentalist, vastly Moral, [and] militantly Protestant.
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