“It is easy to overlook the roots of a longstanding fear of a socialist or communist takeover in the United States. For many Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists, communism and anarchism were literally tools of the devil. According to Frank Donner, ‘Bolshevism came to be identified over wide areas of the country by God– fearing Americans as the Antichrist come to do eschatological battle with the children of light,’ as prophesied in Revelation. Although based in Christianity, this apocalyptic anticommunist worldview developed a ‘slightly secularized version,’ explains Donner, and it was ‘widely shared in rural and small–town America,’ where leaders of evangelical and fundamentalist groups regularly ‘postulated a doomsday conflict between decent upright folk and radicalism – alien, satanic, immorality incarnate’.”

— Chip Berlet & Spencer Sunshine, Rural rage: the roots of right-wing populism in the United States