“For conservative evangelicals, a defense of white patriarchy would move to the center of their coalescing cultural and political identity” (33). “At the heart of this realignment were attitudes toward civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and ‘family values,’” Du Mez wrote.
The 1960s brought a massive political and ecclesial realignment. All of this was in an effort to bring revival to America through a restoration of order to families, churches, and eventually nations. Graham nimbly linked these three themes together in his “crusades,” bringing a range of manly (and popular or powerful) men into his orbit, whether Stuart Hamblen or Pat Boone, Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad” (3).Īfter a quick orientation to the early part of the twentieth century, Du Mez connect the dots between evangelical Christianity, masculinity, and nationalism, starting with Billy Graham’s rise to prominence in post-World War II America. In trying to explain the pervasive evangelical support for Donald Trump, Du Mez argues that this support “was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice.
#JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE KARAOKE PLUS#
It’s all true.” Jesus Plus Masculinity for America’s SakeĪnd especially true and irrefutable is Du Mez’s main contention.
Thus, while I might quibble with some of the details in Jesus and John Wayne, I finished this book and felt like Han Solo in The Force Awakens: “Crazy thing is, it’s true-all of it. As the young people say, “I have the receipts.” I went to a white-flight Baptist academy for high school in northern Virginia, graduating right after George H. I’ve been to all three “levels” of Bill Gothard’s Institute for Basic Life Principles (basic, advanced, and pastors). I’m a two-time graduate of Bob Jones University, that bastion of fundamentalism, after spending a year at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. I worked at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After all, I serve as a pastor in a Presbyterian denomination that is committed to male-only ordained leadership. As I reflected on Calvin University professor Kristin Du Mez’s brilliantly provocative and painful, Jesus and John Wayne, I realized how many different intersections I had with her subject.