Author and speaker on Freemasonry, director at the Masonic Library & Museum of Indiana, and glimpsed in ceaseless TV reruns.
Christopher L. Hodapp is the author of Freemasons For Dummies, the world's best-selling introduction to the Masonic fraternity. His Freemasons For Dummies Blog is the most widely read source of current national and international news about Freemasonry. He has written for more than twenty-five years about Freemasonry, fraternalism, 'secret' and secretive societies, the Knights Templar, and conspiracism.
Chris is the president of the Masonic Library & Museum of Indiana and the former Public Relations Director for the Grand Lodge F&AM of Indiana. He is a popular speaker around the world, and a frequent radio and television guest. He has been featured numerous times on NPR, History, Discovery, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and the American Heroes Channel. Most recently in 2025 he was featured on 'The UnXplained with William Shatner' on History.
His newest books in collaboration with his wife and co-author Alice VonKannon are RVs and Campers For Dummies and RV Vacations For Dummies (7th ed.). They live in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Revised 3rd Edition now available!
'Freemasons For Dummies'
Ever since its original publication in 2005, Chris Hodapp's Freemasons For Dummies has remained the best-selling introductory guide to the Masonic fraternity and its many related organizations.
The revised 3rd Edition features new material, updated with the most current information, statistics, web resources a more.
What Reviewers Have said About 'Freemasons For Dummies'
“No book since John Robinson’s ‘Born In Blood’ has created more interest and excitement in Masonic circles and among the general public.”
Carl Wilson, The Rite Recorder
“This might be the best general book on Freemasonry any Mason or non-Mason could want.”
Gary Dryfoos, A Page About Freemasonry
“The book is a delight; no Masonic prudery here, no academic dry as dust chapters, no grand lodge views as determined by a camel of a committee—rather, a simple, readable style that encourages one to read on.”
The Square Magazine
"Highly recommended, especially for the new Mason.”
Jim Tresner, Scottish Rite Journal
“Outside of a Masonic roast beef supper, it’s the best [money] you’ll spend this year. . . I recommend you buy a couple of copies because the first one will be dog-eared in no time.”
Stephen Dafoe, Author of Nobly Born
“If you are new to Freemasonry and want to learn more about it but cannot stomach dusty tomes with unpronounceable titles hidden in your local libraries, ‘Freemasons For Dummies’ is for you.”
Jose Diaz, Grand Lodge of Ohio
“This book is the best thing that has happened to Freemasonry in many a moon, causing many a brother to read a Masonic book for the first time...”
Ralph Herbald, PM, Southern California Research Lodge
“I have enjoyed reading many portions out loud to my wife. . . She now understands more of what I hold so dear to my heart.”
Greg Johns, Evansville, IN
“Chris Hodapp has written a darn good book.”
Dr. S Brent Morris, Author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Freemasonry
RVs & Campers For Dummies
Thinking of buying a trailer, motorhome or camper? Buy this book first! Whatever draws you to the mobile life―adventurous domestic vacations, life as a road working from the road, or the lure of waking up to a new view every morning―RVs & Campers For Dummies helps you feel right at home in your home away from home.
Completely revised in 2023!
RV Vacations For Dummies – 7th Edition
This companion For Dummies guide for RVers will clue you into the most RV-ready roads, camp sites, and attractions to make planning your RV vacation so much easier. Choose from journeys through New England, the American heartland, the Rocky Mountains, the South, America's coastlines and many other adventures.
FEATURED BOOK
HERITAGE ENDURES
Perspectives On 200 years of Indiana Freemasonry
by Christopher L. Hodapp
Freemasonry crossed the frontier into the Indiana Territory along the banks of the Wabash River in 1809. It would take nine more years and the declaration of statehood before the formation of the Grand Lodge F&AM of Indiana on January 13, 1818 in Madison. Since that time, Indiana's Freemasons have been at the center of their communities, their state, and the nation.
Heritage Endures is a different type of Masonic grand lodge history book. It frames the Hoosier state's fraternity within America's history and the Masonic world for the last two centuries. Heritage Endures explores some of the most fascinating, heroic, touching, turbulent, and occasionally unsettling moments of Indiana's and America's Masonic history.
This book was commissioned by the Grand Lodge F&AM of Indiana for its 200th anniversary. But Heritage Endures goes far beyond the borders of that state and tells a broader tale of Freemasonry as a fraternal and social force that has evolved and adapted to suit the times in which it has resided. It is a unique series of perspectives of the Masonic fraternity in America as a whole, using the Hoosier state's Masons and their lodges as an example of the nation's wider fraternal landscape.
"I don't know if the Grand Lodge of Indiana is special, but this history is—it's well written and fascinating to read..." S. Brent Morris, Scottish Rite Journal
Recent Work
Indiana Freemasonry and the KKK of the 1920s in 'Heredom'
My home state of Indiana was at the center of a brief but explosive mania in the 1920s, America’s involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. The total national Klan membership is thought to have reached nearly six million in 1924, and eventually encompassed 30% of Indiana's white adult male population: an estimated 250,000 at its height in the Hoosier State alone. It was perhaps inevitable that Masons and their lodges got swept up in its path.
My expanded paper, Indiana Freemasonry and the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s appeared in Volume 26 of Heredom, the 2019 collection of papers from the Scottish Rite Research Society (SRRS).
