Activists like Phyllis Schlafly, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, and James Dobson promoted a complementarian view of women and men. The empire needed Christian boys for cannon fodder, so aggression itself was redefined as Christian.ĭu Mez profiles the thinkers and activists who authored this redefinition. To win, it had to make room for militarism and nationalism. This fused evangelicalism was born into a newly ascendant empire. One moment you find him integrating his crusades like a 19th-century Oberlin visionary the next moment he’s maligning Jews on the Nixon White House tapes. Billy Graham symbolizes this fusion, exemplifying its finest and worst traits. One of the ways they rebranded was by calling themselves “evangelicals,” as when several of them formed the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942.
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If so, it’s a lesson that conservatives spent the next century failing to heed.įundamentalists, marginalized as they were, saw the utility of any ideology that licensed them to be aggressive and combative, even as they sought to organize and rebrand. The war fever and nationalism that gripped early 20th-century liberal Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic may have been a sort of object lesson.
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She begins in the early 20th century, when both liberal and conservative Protestants offered visions of “muscular Christianity.” The liberals lost confidence in this idea after the pointless carnage of World War I, which many of them had foolishly supported and which one of them-Woodrow Wilson-had led us into. 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. 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. This personal aside sets up Jesus and John Wayne as something more than a book of cultural history. 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. United States - Church history - 21st century.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.A revelatory account of a uniquely influential subculture, Jesus and John Wayne incisively reveals why evangelicals have rallied behind patriarchal power and the least- Christian president in American history"- Read more. As historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez demonstrates, 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." Trump is hardly the first flashy celebrity to capture evangelicals' hearts and minds, having followed the path blazed by, among others, John Wayne, Oliver North, and Mel Gibson. While we assume the religious right has pragmatic reasons for backing Trump, in truth he represents the fulfillment of evangelicals' most deeply held values. Yet in 2016 he won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, and continues to rely on white evangelicals as his base of support.
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"A scholar of American Christianity answers perhaps the most bewildering question of our time: Why are evangelicals "the Donald's" most fervent supporters? Donald Trump is a libertine who lacks even basic knowledge of the Christian faith.