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| "Jesus and John Wayne" by Kristin Kobes Du Mez |
By Sarah Pulliam Bailey
July 16, 2021
When historian
Kristin Du Mez’s latest book, “Jesus
and John Wayne,” came out in the summer of 2020, it received little
attention from mainstream gatekeepers and reviewers.
But the book,
which explores evangelical fondness for former president Donald Trump and
strong masculine figures, has since sold more than 100,000 copies through word
of mouth, podcasts and book clubs. When it came out in paperback last month,
the book shot up to No. 4 among nonfiction paperbacks on the New
York Times bestseller list.
As journalists and
academics tried to explain how evangelicals could bring themselves to vote for
Trump, Du Mez argued that evangelical support was not a shocking aberration
from their views but a culmination of evangelicals’ long-standing embrace of
militant masculinity, presenting the man as protector and warrior.
“In 2016, many
observers were stunned at evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of their own values,”
Du Mez wrote. “In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their
beliefs, but because of them.”
The book also
described a pattern of abuse and its coverup by several mainstream evangelical
leaders, many of whom are still in leadership. Du Mez contended that
evangelical leaders’ emphasis on militant masculinity created a culture where
abuse was able to flourish and often kept secret, an argument that has both
caught fire and created controversy.
Du Mez, who
teaches at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich., wrote that mainstream
evangelical leaders such as John Piper, James Dobson and John Eldredge,
preached a “mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity — of
patriarchy and submission, sex and power.”
“The militant
Christian masculinity they practiced and preached did indelibly shape both
family and nation,” Du Mez wrote.
Piper, Dobson and
Eldredge did not return requests for comment.
Bible teacher Beth
Moore’s split with Southern Baptists has some women wondering whether to follow
her
Russell Moore, who
was the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy arm until earlier this
year, said in an email that everywhere he goes someone asks him about the book.
Moore, now a
public theologian for Christianity Today magazine, said that many evangelicals
are trying to understand recent developments like Trump’s rise and revelations
of sexual abuse in evangelical spaces. Moore said that Du Mez has shown that
“much of what has passed for evangelicalism over the past decades was more John
Wayne than Jesus” and that some of the characters in her book who have been
portrayed by some as fringe turned out not to be fringe at all.
“ ‘Jesus and John
Wayne’ is not the whole picture, but it’s on target in enough places that we
should take seriously the mirror put to our faces to reform ourselves by the
gospel we believe,” Moore wrote in an email. “I don’t agree with this book on
everything, by any means, but there are key aspects that are necessary for us
to see, and that can help us make sense of some things.”
The book showed
how masculine pop-culture figures like John Wayne could influence the
evangelical imagination and shape the way people act and think, said Karen
Swallow Prior, who teaches English at Southeastern Baptist Theological
Seminary.
“Among my own
group of friends and peers, this is the book that they have been talking about
more than any other in recent years,” she said. “I can’t think of the last one
that people talked about this much.”
In his review for
the journal Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture earlier this
year, Yale University historian Jon Butler called the book one of the most
important on modern evangelicalism in the past four decades. A review for the
Christian website Mere Orthodoxy said the book should be required reading for
evangelicals. Du Mez’s book also inspired a four-part episode for the popular
Holy Post podcast and was named book of the year last year by Englewood Review
of Books.
The book also has
its critics, including First Things magazine, the Council on Biblical Manhood
and Womanhood, and other reviewers for Mere Orthodoxy.
“Having announced
her thesis about militant Christian-nationalist, male-patriarchal supremacy,
she mines American history for classic deplorables,” Daniel Harrell wrote for
Christianity Today. “On the other hand are plenty of white evangelical men
canceled out for political acts never committed but only assumed and whose
patriotism gets distorted as nationalism simply because they’re white,
Christian, and male. As a political force they barely register compared to
Amazon, Facebook, and Hollywood.”
One of the more
frequent criticisms she receives is from the subtitle of her book: “How white
evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.” Du Mez said that she
wanted to challenge White evangelicals to examine their core beliefs about
Jesus’s teachings to “turn the other cheek,” love your neighbor and love your
enemy.
“I wanted to make
clear that I wasn’t going to woo evangelicals or cater to evangelicals,” she
said. The Bible lists virtues like love, peace, kindness and
gentleness that Du Mez argues would contradict the model of militant
Christianity that leaders have held up.
Raised in a Dutch
immigrant community in Sioux Center, Iowa, Du Mez’s mother was a Dutch
immigrant and her father was a longtime Reformed theologian at Dordt University,
where in 2016 Trump famously told a crowd he could shoot someone in the
middle of New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters.
Du Mez said she
began working on the topic around 2005 when she started teaching at Calvin, a
Christian university rooted in the Reformed tradition of Protestantism. Du Mez
was teaching a class on U.S. history and lecturing on President Theodore
Roosevelt to show how American ideas about masculinity have changed over time
through economics, foreign policy and race.
Two male students
came up to her after class one day and suggested she read the book “Wild at
Heart,” by Colorado-based author John Eldredge, which has sold more than 4
million copies. She bought a copy and found “a particularly militant conception
of masculine Christianity that Roosevelt had been promoting.”
In the early years
of America’s war with Iraq, Du Mez considered how Eldredge’s vision of
masculinity promoted militaristic ideas about America as an empire. Du Mez said
she also reviewed data that showed White evangelicals were more likely to
condone the war in Iraq and the military’s use of torture.
“I was trying to
tease out: Is this mainstream or is this fringe?” she said in an interview. “As
a Christian scholar, I thought, is this what I should be doing? If this is
fringe, should I hold this up as though it’s mainstream?”
Newly
leaked letter details allegations that Southern Baptist leaders mishandled sex
abuse claims
Du Mez set the
topic aside for a few years but picked it up again in 2016 in the days after
the “Access Hollywood” tapes came out — in which Trump is heard making vulgar
comments about women — and many evangelical leaders came to Trump’s defense.
That’s when she decided what she had been working on wasn’t fringe.
Du Mez is a
longtime member of a Christian Reformed Church, part of a denomination under
the umbrella group called the National Association of Evangelicals. She was
influenced by cultural evangelicalism through popular Christian music and the
“purity culture” movement that encouraged sexual abstinence before marriage.
However, she wasn’t exposed to popular evangelical leaders like John Piper,
Wayne Grudem or Jerry Falwell Sr. until adulthood.
Her book,
published by a nonreligious publisher called Liveright, an imprint of
W.W. Norton & Co., found its way into the evangelical world through
powerful word-of-mouth networks. Du Mez’s editor Daniel Gerstle said “Jesus and
John Wayne” was the publisher’s “surprise hit” of 2020, selling over 300
hardcover copies every week in its first months of publication. The first jump
came in late December when the book began selling more than 900 copies a week.
Popular Bible teacher Beth Moore, Gerstle noted, has tweeted about the book,
describing it as the one she hopes evangelicals read in 2021.
While the book is
almost entirely focused on White evangelicals, Du Mez said she has received
feedback from a number of Black Christian leaders about it as well. John
Onwuchekwa, a Black pastor in Atlanta who left the Southern Baptist Convention
last summer, said he felt “vindicated” when he read the book because it seemed
to affirm his experiences and connected dots for him.
“The book was
refreshing because it wasn’t someone who [seemed] angry or vindictive,”
Onwuchekwa said. “There was a courage, a boldness, a matter-of-factness.”
Other books about
evangelicals, politics, gender and race that published in the past year include
“The
Making of Biblical Womanhood,” by Beth Allison Barr, “White
Too Long,” by Robert P. Jones, “White
Evangelical Racism,” by Anthea Butler, “American
Blindspot,” by Gerardo Marti, “God’s
Law and Order,” by Aaron Griffith and “Taking
America Back for God,” by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry.
Du Mez said that
many “troubled” evangelicals who have read her book are going through a
“religious reckoning” where they’re grappling with what they have been taught
both culturally and theologically. However, she said she hasn’t seen much
change by many evangelical institutions.
Evangelical
leaders and institutions continue to promote their versions of masculinity.
This weekend in Dallas, thousands of evangelical men are expected to gather for
a conference called Promise Keepers that will include speakers who once sat on
Trump’s evangelical advisory council. Attendees are promised “biblical and
spiritual tools that will empower you to be the man Christ intended you to be.”
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/07/16/jesus-and-john-wayne-evangelicals-surprise-bestseller/
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