Jesus and john wayne christianity today
The book looks at places like Colorado Springs, a hotbed of literal militancy where believers built organizational juggernauts and aggressively made inroads with the military. In order to make this case, Jesus and John Wayne provides an expansive account of how conservative white evangelicals embraced a rugged and violent form of masculinity since the middle of the 20 th century. His testosterone-fueled masculinity aligned remarkably well with that long championed by conservative evangelicals.”
for many evangelicals, Donald Trump did not represent the betrayal of many of the values they had come to hold dear. Du Mez thinks the theories miss something: “. Before facing Hillary Clinton, Trump was able to beat out other Republicans in the primaries who seemed more favorable to evangelicals, like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. Yet none of these theories hold up strongly upon closer scrutiny. Some people simply threw their hands up and charged evangelicals with rank hypocrisy. Others pointed to economic motivations or to the notion that most evangelicals simply held their nose to choose the lesser of two evils. These are not genuine evangelicals, some protested. When a majority of white evangelicals aligned themselves with Trump in 2016, many people sought to explain the bizarre union with different theories. Her latest book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, argues that white evangelicals’ embrace of Trump is the manifestation of a militant masculine ideal that’s been more than 50 years in the making. And lest I appear to be committing plagiarism, let me be clear that I didn’t come up with this observation myself but got it from the historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez.
I’m not talking about Donald Trump but John Wayne. Far from being an emblem of “family values,” this man, who cemented his myth and persona by his on-screen acting, had married three times, divorced twice, carried on several high-profile affairs, and helped circulate racist stereotypes to the masses. 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.White evangelicals in the United States fell in love with a foul-mouthed man who never had a born-again experience of faith. 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.