Christian Defense League
White supremacist activist group in 60s and 70s
The Christian Defense League was founded as a white supremacist activist organization in California, and it later moved to Louisiana. According to the Anti-Defamation League, it also had a paramilitary function.
Although who actually founded the organization is disputed, under James K. Warner, it moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana where it merged with the New Christian Crusade Church.
History
The initial history of the organization is unclear due to contradictory accounts. According to Bertrand Comparet and Richard Girnt Butler, they founded the organization. William Potter Gale claimed that he had founded the CDL along with San Jacinto Capt sometime between 1957 and 1962, later bringing in Butler and Comparet.
Butler served as the national director from 1962 to 1965. Gale, Swift, and Comparet all served on the board of the organization.
An introductory mailing for the Christian Defense League led with the following:
The NAACP represents the negro, the ADL represents the Jews; who represents you--the white Christian?
Following the death of Wesley Swift, Butler took over as the head of Church of Jesus Christ–Christian and moved it to Idaho, leaving the leadership of the CDL to James K. Warner.
“Christian Defense League” enters the record as white supremacist activist group in 60s and 70s. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Christian, Defense and League can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q109313233. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1957, 1962 and 1965.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Christian Defense League” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.