“I’m not trying to protect the image of evangelicalism or even of Christianity I’m just trying to tell the truth and promote justice.” ( tweet this)
“With evangelical leaders, militancy often predated the fears and in fact required the manufacturing of fear in order to justify their militancy and bolster their power.” ( tweet this) “It was the issue of desegregation that really riled up a lot of conservative protestants, particularly in the south, and politically mobilized them.” ( tweet this) “Christian nationalism, as evangelicals embrace it, is a white racial identity and political vision.” ( tweet this) “This narrative-Christian America! Everything was great! And then the 1960s happened, and we need to make things great again!-only makes sense if you are a white Christian.” ( tweet this) “Paradoxically, the men who best exemplify this militant, ‘Christian’ masculinity are those who have not been deeply formed by Christian values.” ( tweet this) Du Mez on Twitter and Facebook, and find out more about her work at Quotables Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.įollow Dr. She has written for the Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, and Christian Century, and has been interviewed on NPR, CTV, the BBC, and by CNN, the New York Times, the Economist, and the AP, among other outlets. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. We delve deeper into why she wrote it, what in her research surprised her the most, and how knowing this history can uproot our faith-in a good way. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.Those of us who were raised evangelical are well acquainted with the terms “family values” and “Christian values.” But do we know where they came from, what came before them, and that they’re more political than they are rooted in Christ? That’s why historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s seminal new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation is a game-changer…for anyone willing to read it and take it seriously.
And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes-mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of "Christian America." Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.Ĭhallenging the commonly held assumption that the "moral majority" backed Donald Trump in 20 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals' most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. Many of today's evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they've read John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex-and they have a silver ring to prove it. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism-or in the words of one modern chaplain, with "a spiritual badass."Īs acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. The "paradigm-influencing" book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America.