Jesus and john wayne criticism
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, sociologists and political scientists tried to understand how Trump became president with overwhelming evangelical support. The relevance of the book is perhaps best understood by working backwards chronologically. Because this review will be net negative, I’d like to begin with the positive aspects of the book, those which make it so compelling to so many people, including a large swath of conservative evangelicals. Her conclusion is that “evangelical support for Trump the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad” (p. 4) among evangelicals in the 20th and early 21st centuries. As a historian, Du Mez charts the rise of “militant white masculinity” (p. It was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition and received social media recommendations from Beth Moore, Jemar Tisby, Karen Swallow Prior, and Duke Kwon. Indeed, the values and viewpoints at the heart of white evangelicalism today―patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community―are likely to persist long after Trump leaves office.Ī much-needed reexamination, Jesus and John Wayne explains why evangelicals have rallied behind the least-Christian president in American history and how they have transformed their faith in the process, with enduring consequences for all of us.Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Waynehas struck a chord with both Christians and non-Christians. Trump, in other words, is hardly the first flashy celebrity to capture evangelicals’ hearts and minds, nor is he the first strongman to promise evangelicals protection and power.
And evangelical popular 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. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions.
Many of today’s evangelicals may 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 account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades 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.” As Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the role of culture in modern American evangelicalism. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values.
How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate’s staunchest supporters? These are among the questions acclaimed historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez asks in Jesus and John Wayne, which delves beyond facile headlines to explain how white evangelicals have brought us to our fractured political moment. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Posted on Septemby PLT Staff