Book jesus and john wayne
How did a movement that, in the 19th century, was synonymous with Methodist feminists and circuit-riding antislavery activists come to be identified with a view of men, America, and history best described as Confederate? How did so many evangelical Christians come not only to tolerate but to like the kind of masculinity that Trump performs? No single book can answer these questions, but Du Mez fills a lot of gaps in the story.
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Du Mez is facing a problem that besets many ex-evangelicals and former fundamentalists these days: How did the people who taught us to love Jesus end up braying and hooting for this reality television star? Trump hates losers Jesus broke metaphysics in order to become one.
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This personal aside sets up Jesus and John Wayne as something more than a book of cultural history.
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But as I watched those in the overflow crowd waving signs, laughing at insults, and shouting back in affirmation, I wondered who these people were. We married in a church just down the road. Standing on the stage where Trump now stood, I had led prayers, performed in Christian “praise teams,” and, during choir rehearsal, flirted with the man who would become my husband. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.Every year as a child I’d attended Easter sunrise services in that auditorium, and as a college student I faithfully attended chapel services in that same space. 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. The "paradigm-influencing" book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America.