For a significant majority, filling courts with conservative judges, ending Roe v. Trusted evangelical leaders had long been preaching morality and “family values.” Now these fierce proponents who preached that “character matters” were backing a candidate who was the flagrant antithesis, not only of everything they had championed throughout their careers, but more significantly who was shamelessly antithetical to the teachings and example of Jesus.Įvangelicals had become politicized. This evangelical voting bloc was reinforced by public endorsements from a line-up of well-known evangelical leaders, such as James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, Wayne Grudem, Robert Jeffress, and Eric Metaxas.įor many it was difficult to imagine a more jarring dissonance than the one between historic Christian ethics and evangelical enthusiasm for Donald Trump.
Pundits and pollsters attributed his win largely to 81% of American evangelicals who voted for him. It was a stunning moment in American history for both supporters and detractors. Most Americans can tell you exactly where they were in 2016 when they heard the news that Americans had elected Donald J. In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them. In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of their own values. Publisher: Liveright Publishing Company, a division of W. 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.Title: Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation 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.
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