Billy James Hargis was born on August 3, 1925, in Texarkana, Texas, being adopted by Jimmie Earsel Hargis and Laura Lucille Hargis. He graduated from Texarkana High School, and briefly attended Ozark Bible College in Bentonville, Arkansas, before dropping out to become a preacher. Ordained as a minister by the Disciples of Christ denomination while still a teenager, he later received a degree in theology from Burton College and Seminary in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He served as pastor to churches in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, and Granby, Missouri, before becoming pastor of First Christian Church in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, in 1948. In Sapulpa he began editing the Christian Echoes magazine and founded the Christian Echoes Hour radio. In November 1950 he resigned his position with First Christian Church to establish a national ministry, the Christian Crusade Against Communism. In 1951 he married Betty Jane Secrest; together they had four children.

Hargis became affiliated with Carl McIntire of Collingswood, New Jersey, the leader of the fundamentalist International Council of Christian Churches. From 1953 to 1958 Hargis directed that organization’s Bibles by Balloons Project, which launched scriptures tied to balloons in West Germany across the border into communist countries. Afterwards he returned to Oklahoma, choosing Tulsa as his ministry’s headquarters. By the early 1960s he produced programs that regularly ran on 250 television and 500 radio stations. In 1966 he founded the David Livingstone Missionary Foundation, which ran medical clinics and orphanages in Asia and Africa. In 1971 he founded American Christian College in Tulsa. During his career he authored more than 100 books, as well as countless articles for the Christian Crusade Weekly newspaper.

An ultraconservative minister, Hargis’s career was plagued with controversy. In addition to his anti-communist views, he was a supporter of racial segregation, and reputedly held anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic views. In the early 1960s the Internal Revenue Service determined that his work was political in nature and stripped his organization of its tax exempt status. Then comments Hargis made in 1964 caused an opposing journalist to demand equal time; denied this, the journalist file suit, leading to the Supreme Court case Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969) which affirmed the Fairness Doctrine. In 1968 Hargis launched an attack on sex education programs, only to be accused in 1974 of having sexual relations with both male and female students at his college. This controversy resulted in his writing an autobiography, My Great Mistake, published in 1985; he denied the allegations. The controversies, along with poor health and the 3ffects of aging, eventually caused the decline of his ministry. Suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease and a series of heart attacks, Hargis died in Tulsa on November 27, 2004.