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." As
acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding
this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular
culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. 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. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing,
and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. 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. Challenging the commonly held assumption
that the "moral majority" backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 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. 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 utterly remade their faith, with enduring
consequences for all Americans.
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