Ideals of masculinity and femininity, of course, but also of purity and nationhood, of power and dominance, of how tailgate decals like the one above became commonplace in so many corners of the United States. If you didn’t, it will connect a different set of dots about how white evangelical culture has explicitly and implicitly shaped the dominant ideologies we wade through, no matter our own belief systems, every day. If you grew up in and around Christian churches or in spaces shadowed by evangelical culture, it will connect a whole lot of dots. Like The Season, it is academically rigorous but deeply absorbing. Instead of doing that, I asked Kristin if she’d do a Q&A - with particularly focus on the intersection between her work and “ The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill ,” a new podcast about the implosion of one of the most influential evangelical churches (and pastors) of the last two decades and the deeply toxic patriarchal ideology that defined it. Pride makes us do very weird things, including avoiding books we know we will love.Įarlier this month, I got over that pride and read Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, which is indeed so good, and so deeply aligned with my generalized interests, that I wanted to throw it across the room multiple times.
It’s a bizarre, illogical thing, and for me, at least, it probably has something to do with 1) resentment that my interests are so incredibly transparent (even though I spend most of my days yelling about them in various digital forms) and 2) fear that it’s going to be really good, like the sort of very good that makes me want to throw the book across the room. The sort that so many people recommend to you - to you, specifically, because of the way they intersect with your demonstrated interests and obsessions - that you almost develop an aversion to them. There are books out there that are so in your wheelhouse that you resist them.
Here is the first of a 4-part series of podcasts on Holy Post about the book.This tailgate decal can be yours for $49.95.Here is the Theology in the Raw podcast episode with Du Mez.Here is the Kingdom Roots podcast episode with Du Mez.Here is the Bible for Normal People episode with Du Mez.This book is willing to call out the varied roles that Christianity Today has played in the rise of the white evangelical power grab that allowed Donald Trump to waltz into the White House. If you enjoyed the recent podcast by Christianity Today: The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill you will find this book to be a more thorough account of the larger cultural phenomenon that Mark Driscoll took advantage of to grow an evangelical empire. It may sound odd at first, but Du Mez does a masterful job of showing what has been hiding in plain sight for a long time.
The connections between John Wayne and white evangelicals through history are many. The history is organized around the Christian obsession with the “man’s man” John Wayne and his political and religious involvement. There are 16 chapters tracing the history of white evangelicalism starting in the beginning of the 20th century and ending with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. This also deconstructs the ideology that made possible the evangelical support for Donald Trump. This book confronts many modern myths that alive and well in the evangelical world. This is not a book for the faint of heart evangelical.
The full title hints at what I learned from this – Jesus and John Wayne:How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. I think every white, evangelical church goer should read this book! It subverted many assumptions I had about why evangelicalism thought and did certain things politically. This book is a historical account of recent white evangelical history in the United States.