Du Mez describes how this mythology was born in the crucible of the world wars, when – believe it or not – it was conservative Christians who were tarred by liberal believers as insufficiently patriotic.Īfter Pearl Harbor, they were determined to make sure that never happened again. You can see how Trump fits into this mold, but he’s just the latest in a long line. As Du Mez puts it, they want “a protector, an aggressive, heroic, manly man… someone who would break the rules for the right cause”. This ideal leader is always ready to unleash violence to defend his world – whether that’s his wife and kids, or Western civilization as a whole – against the hordes of barbarians at the gates. Over the decades, white evangelicals have constructed an image of their ideal leader: a man (obviously) who’s unpolished, tough-talking, and rough around the edges who may not fit the choirboy ideal, but is unrestrained by political correctness or wishy-washy liberalism and who, most importantly, believes that the world is a dangerous place and the only way to be safe is to be tougher than all adversaries. It builds a quietly damning case that Donald Trump not only isn’t an aberration, but the most consistent expression of this ethic.īriefly summarized, the book’s thesis is this.
It shows how evangelicalism has adapted and evolved in response to the times, but has always centered a certain set of ideas about masculinity, race, hierarchy, militarism and authority. Jesus and John Wayne is a history of white evangelical Christianity in America in the 20th and 21st centuries. (She also blogs at Patheos, at Anxious Bench.) Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University. Now I’ve read a book that makes this argument far better than I could: Jesus and John Wayne by Dr. Trump was the culmination of a mythology that white evangelicals spent years constructing. And yet, white evangelical Christians are devoted to him with cultlike intensity, more so than for many other politicians with actual Christian bona fides.
He’s a beloved leader of the religious right who embodies the total opposite of the values they’ve always claimed to stand for: a narcissistic, prideful, greedy, sexually predatory tycoon who scarcely even pretends to be religious. I’ve written about the paradox of Donald Trump. A sweeping history of sexism, power and toxic masculinity in white evangelical Christianity.
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