Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

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History & Foreign AffairsTheology & Faith

A historian's argument that the Trump-evangelical alignment wasn't a sellout but the predictable endpoint of a 75-year project to fuse white evangelical identity with militant, patriarchal masculinity.

Core ideas
  • The cult of rugged white Christian masculinity — John Wayne, William Wallace, Mel Gibson's Passion, Mark Driscoll's church — was built deliberately from pulpit, book, and film.
  • "Family values" rhetoric coexisted with serial accommodations of male misbehavior (Bill Gothard, Doug Phillips, on through Trump) because the underlying value was male authority, not personal piety.
  • The 81% evangelical vote for Trump in 2016 is treated as predictable, not paradoxical — the gun-toting, anti-feminist, anti-immigrant strongman was the type the subculture had been describing as godly for decades.
Published2020
Pages356
ISBN9781631495731
ReadNov 2022
religious history, evangelicalism, political theology

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