Book Review: "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation"

Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand White evangelical culture and political organizing.

One of the most enduring mysteries of 2016 was the support that White evangelicals gave Donald Trump, a presidential candidate who seemed to be the exact opposite of everything they would want to see in a candidate. Here was a boorish businessman infamous for his extramarital affairs and his disregard for women, someone who seemed to have almost no religious understanding or belief at all. However, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez documents in her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, this backing of Trump was actually the apotheosis of decades of an evangelical culture war mentality. 

Du Mez contends that White evangelicals have had an obsession with masculinity--and, more generally, with gender--since at least the Cold War, when evangelists such as Billy Graham wedded together a fierce message of anti-communism with a fiery zeal for muscular Christianity. For this generation, no figure more powerfully conveyed the male ideal than John Wayne. Though his private life might not have been what many evangelicals would have liked to see from one of their own, that didn’t really matter. What mattered was that he was the archetypal American male, willing to defend the weak (read: women) and vanquish the savage and the oppressor (read: Native Americans and various unsavory racial others). 

The challenge to patriarchy generated by the 1960s and the 1970s--particularly the American fiasco in Vietnam, the explosion of the feminist movement, and the rise of LGBTQ rights--caused, in Du Mez’s telling, both a crisis and an opportunity for evangelicals. Seizing on the opportunity this presented, they went on the offensive and, thanks to the efforts of people like Phyllis Schlafly, they managed to get Ronald Reagan elected, despite the fact that he was, like Trump, a seemingly strange fit (especially since his opponent Jimmy Carter was himself an evangelical). What mattered to evangelicals, however, was that Reagan, like Bush and Trump after him, presented as a “real” man, someone who would take the battle to enemies abroad and within.

Indeed, as Du Mez illustrates time and again, evangelicals never did better than when they felt as if they were on the offensive against an increasingly secular culture. Each time they seemed to be down for the count, they came back swinging, often with electoral results. Arguably their apotheosis was the election of George W. Bush, who was everything that they could have wanted, both a born-again Christian and a “man’s man,” willing to take the battle abroad, which he did, with spectacularly disastrous results, in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Throughout the 2000s, the already-existing ties between patriarchy, gun fanaticism, and Islamophobia created a heady mix, one that still characterizes some corners of the White evangelical world to this day. In fact, the Bush presidency perfectly set the stage for Trump, who would shed his predecessor’s gentler approach in favor of a brutality and an aggression that was everything that his White evangelical supporters could have wanted. 

Again and again, Du Mez reminds us that the White evangelical world is as much about culture as it is about politics. There’s an entire ecosystem supporting this group, ranging from publishing houses to homeschooling, entertainment to think tanks and universities. Her account is filled with larger-than-life personalities, ranging from James Dobson to Billy Graham, Pat Robertson to Jerry Falwell (and his son, a noted Trump supporter), Oliver North to Donald Trump. All, in one way or another, were and are invested in perpetuating a particular gender ideology, one that emphasizes masculine aggression and female submission. Anything or anyone that steps outside of this rigid ideology runs the risk of being seen as an apostate.

Du Mez isn’t afraid to delve into the darkest recesses and excesses of the evangelical world, and she devotes an entire chapter to the cases in which male evangelical leaders were taken to task (sometimes) for their misdeeds, which ranged from abuse of authority to sexual misconduct. She allows us to see how these sorts of pathological behavior are, in some ways, an inevitable result of evangelical ideology. You can’t spend decades telling men that they must be aggressive and destructive without producing men that are, well, aggressive and destructive. 

There’s much that will disturb readers of a liberal or progressive bent (such as myself), and I found Du Mez’s discussion of the evangelical infiltration of the military to be both illuminating and distressing. I suppose this is one of those things that I already knew to be true, but having it laid out in black and white--and seeing how entrenched evangelical theology has become in the armed forces, both among the enlisted and among officers--is something I think that we will all have to contend with in the coming years. 

In fact, one of the things I appreciated about Jesus and John Wayne is its clear-eyed and bracing approach to its subject. I’ve read several other books on the rise of White evangelical nationalism, and Du Mez’s particular contribution is that she gives us a deep history lesson about the cultural aspects of this phenomenon. To be an White evangelical is to be part of a subculture, and it really is past time for progressives (and even moderates) to understand what we’re up against. White evangelicals no doubt see themselves under attack at this exact moment--given that Trump lost in the 2020 election--so we can almost certainly expect them to begin pounding the drums of culture war with ever more fevered intensity. 

More than that, though, Jesus and John Wayne is also a call to action for evangelicals themselves to recognize the contradictions and the pathologies inherent in their worldview. Whether they’ll take up her criticisms remains to be seen but, given the dominant tendency among many evangelical leaders to either put their head in the sand or to adopt a recalcitrant position of defense, I don’t have a great deal of confidence in that possibility. If they don’t, their eventual obsolescence will almost certainly be the result of their refusal to change.