These interviews summarize some of the points covered in the book: To learn more about the author, one can find a set of four interviews Skye Jethani did with Kristen Kobes Du Mez on The Holy Post podcast. It is troubling, indeed, and helpfully contextualizes much that is troubling in the church today.
I lived through much of it what she is writing about. It’s a fine historical account written for a general audience detailing exactly what the subtitle says, with extensive documentation of sources. The subtitle is even more provocative: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Patriarchy proclaims itself as the protector of national order, of the family, women and children, but its record shows a persistent tendency to uphold the (white) man in power, whether in government, church, or the home, against the vulnerable and victims.Jesus and John Wayne is the eye-catching title of a book by Kristen Kobes Du Mez. Some of it is cheesy and silly (like how one church changed its “Men’s Retreat” to a “Men’s Advance” since “real men never retreat”), but others are sobering: evangelical preachers approving of war crimes, sex abuse cover-ups, financial corruption of the most shameless sort. You will probably read the author's chronicling of evangelical literature (everything from sermons, Sunday school curriculum, parenting and marriage books, conference material, etc.) with a chuckle and a tear.
#Jesus and john wayne holy post how to
If you grew up in an evangelical church, there is a very good chance you would have been fed a heavy diet of books on how to be a biblical man or woman and how to stay sexually pure as be-all-end-all’s of the Christian life. What particularly hits home in the narrative the author brings together is that it is not just its explanation of politics (why did evangelicals choose Reagan over Carter, hate Obama and McCain yet love Trump, etc.): it illuminates the evangelical experience of church and home. That this is not obvious to so many is worrisome.
A penniless, wife-less, child-less, Jewish pacifist that preached love of enemies, embrace of powerlessness, and liberation to the oppressed, is an odd person to worship if you are committed to power, guns, and money. Evangelicalism, as she extensively documents, happily internalized these values, and where Jesus’ ways seem to conflict with, say, a political candidate, evangelicals have routinely chosen the latter over the former. A real man must wield authority in the home, be comfortable with violence, and exhibit, as the author notes, that John Wayne style of masculinity. A romanticized notion of masculinity merged with a nationalistic urgency to make sure men stayed “real men” in order to preserve a social order that could defend against America’s enemies. The author begins her account by looking at the cultural shifts that occurred as Americans urbanized, came home from WWII, and then saw the communist threat. It is here that one realizes that a movement that claims to be about the Bible and Jesus is actually about a lot more and, unfortunately, also a whole lot less. In this regard, looking at the cultural history of what evangelicalism has been about: what it looks like on TV, in its most-read books, its popular personalities, where funds and energy are spent, etc. The kind of deep-seated biases and prejudices one can have rarely comes into verbal form, and to see these unspoken convictions, one must see a tree by its proverbial fruit. This also neglects how many of our deepest convictions can be unarticulated. But that does not sufficiently distinguish American evangelicalism from so many other forms of Christianity that hold to these things in different ways (the author notes her own Dutch tradition that knew little of the sensibilities of American evangelicalism). Most would want to define evangelicalism theologically (as a theologian, I am chief among sinners here) and say that to be an evangelical is to be about biblical authority, a passion for Jesus, classic tenets of historical Christianity, evangelistic fervour, etc. I say “cultural tendencies” in that du Mez does something we often are not used to: she defines evangelicalism along cultural-historical lines.