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. Topics have included an East Grand Rapids walking tour of Ramona Park, a downtown Grand Rapids historical river walk, and a historical walking tour of beer in Grand Rapids.The “paradigm-influencing” book ( Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Kristin Du Mez teaches courses in US women’s history and US social and cultural history, and has enjoyed working with students on historical walking tours of Grand Rapids for the GR Walks app. She is currently working on Live Laugh Love, a cultural study of white Christian womanhood. Her first book, A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism (Oxford 2015) traces the remarkable life and innovative theology of Katharine Bushnell (1855-1946), an intrepid social reformer and anti-trafficking activist. She has written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, NBC News, and The Washington Post, among other outlets. Coverage of Jesus and John Wayne can be found in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and on NPR, and also internationally (in Germany, the Netherlands, China, Japan, Brazil, Australia, and in Al Jazeera). New York Times best-selling author and Calvin University history professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez will deliver the 2022 Meador Lecture on Law and Religion on her latest work, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
She is the author of the New York Times bestselling Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright 2020). As I begin, please indulge me as I make a few personal prefatory remarks. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (New York: Liveright, 2020), 386 pages, 18.95 (Hardback). Kristin Du Mez’s research areas focus on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics in recent American history. But hope is central to a Christian historical method.
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