Understanding the catalyzing role militant Christian masculinity has played over the past half century is critical to understanding American evangelicalism today, and the nation’s fractured political landscape. The historical lens of Jesus and John Wayne gives me this gives us this, and readers will only benefit from seeing the stark realities she uncovers. In her own words, Jesus and John Wayne helps us in I can identify and resist a false cultural narrative that is intentionally constructed for political gain in the name of Christianity. What I can have is an appropriate amount of recognition and determined refusal.
I was reminded how an evangelicalism modeled after John Wayne, Braveheart, Mark Driscoll, James Dobson, Wayne Grudem, and John Piper (just to name a few) impacted me and my family. Still, I believe it’s important to understand what Du Mez reveals about an “evangelical, white, male faith” and the stronghold it has on the cultural it spawned. Having lived less than 2 miles from Focus on the Family campus headquarters, New Life Church (featuring the utter hypocrisy and massive moral failings of Ted Haggard see here), and having spent 18 of my 20 years stationed at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, there are not a few touch points that caused not a little grief as I look back (see especially pp 205-218). Practically every page confronted me with the kind of Christianity I was exposed to the first few decades of my Christian life. To sum the book simply, I would say it’s an especially well-written, carefully documented annotation of what has come to define evangelicalism in America. Reviewing the perspectives, mindsets, and ideologies integral to the ongoing conflation of religion with politics in the name of Christianity in America was not easy. For me, reading through Jesus and John Wayne was an arduous task.
She argues (convincingly) that a “militant white evangelicalism thrives on a sense of embattlement” (p xviii). Like it or not, these ingredients promote or facilitate nationalism, racism, sexism, white maleness, authority, and political power. History scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez rehearses the ingredients of a distinctly American evangelical culture.
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