Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce (born February 12, 1961), is an English-born American writer, and as of 2014 Director of the Center for Faith and Culture[1] at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, before which he held positions at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan and Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida.
For other people named Joseph Pearce, see Joseph Pearce (disambiguation).
Joseph Pearce
February 12, 1961
East London, England
Biographer
He is a co-editor of the St. Austin Review.
Pearce has written biographies of literary figures, often Christian, including William Shakespeare, J. R. R. Tolkien, Oscar Wilde, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Hilaire Belloc.
Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
Joseph Pearce was born in Barking, London, and brought up in Haverhill, Suffolk.[P 1] His father, Albert Arthur Pearce, was a heavy drinker with a history of brawling in pubs with Irishmen and non-Whites, had an encyclopedic knowledge of English poetry and British military history, and an intense nostalgia for the vanished British Empire.[2] In 1973 the family moved back to Barking in the East End of London, so that the Pearce boys would grow up with Cockney accents. Pearce had been a compliant pupil at the school in Haverhill, but at Eastbury comprehensive school in Barking he led the racist disruption of the lessons taught by a young Pakistani British mathematics teacher.[P 2]
Early Political Activity[edit]
At 15, Pearce joined the youth wing of the National Front, an antisemitic and white supremacist political party advocating the compulsory repatriation of all legal immigrants and British-born non-Whites. He came to prominence in 1977 when he set up Bulldog, the NF's openly racist newspaper.[2] Like his father, Pearce became an enthusiastic supporter of Ulster Loyalism during the Troubles from 1978,[2] and joined the Orange Order, a Protestant secret society closely linked to Ulster Loyalist paramilitary organizations.[2] In 1980, he became editor of Nationalism Today, advocating white supremacy.[3] Pearce was twice prosecuted and imprisoned under the Race Relations Act of 1976 for his writings, in 1981 and 1985.[2][4] At one stage, he contacted John Tyndall to suggest coalition talks with the British National Party, but Tyndall rejected the plan.[5] Pearce was a close associate of Nick Griffin, whom he helped to oust Martin Webster from the NF's leadership.[6] As a spokesman for the Strasserite Political Soldier faction within the NF, Pearce argued for white supremacy, publishing the Fight for Freedom! pamphlet in 1984.[7] At the same time, however, Pearce adopted the group's support for ethnopluralism, contacting the Iranian embassy in London in 1984 in a vain attempt to secure funding from the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.[8] Pearce became a leading member of a new NF political faction known as the Flag Group, writing for its publications and contributing to its ideology. Pearce notably argued, based on the writings of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, for distributism as an alternative to both Marxism and Laissez faire Capitalism in a 1987 article for the party magazine Vanguard.[9]