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You can learn more about Kristin Kobes Du Mez's work on her website, and be sure to follow her on Twitter.įollow Blake on Twitter and on Instagram and review this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Support the show by subscribing to The Post-Evangelical Post newsletter. Her most recent book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White. If you've spent time in white evangelical circles, much of this will ring true if you wonder why evangelicals are drawn to "strong men" like Donald Trump, her work will help explain why.īy tracking the development of "masculinity" through 20th & 21st century popular evangelical culture, Du Mez helps us understand our present moment better. and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her book examines the role that cultural ideals of evangelical masculinity have been influenced more by John Wayne than by Jesus of Nazareth. I hope it will be widely read.My guest this week is Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of the new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (, Amazon ). It is impossible to do justice to the richness of Jesus and John Wayne in a short review. Du Mez’s theological position is established subtly in a book that cannot be called polemical, even if it indulges in the occasional delicious bit of academic snark. While I occasionally found myself wanting more primary source illustrations of a particular point, for the most part, Du Mez holds her abstract narrative and concrete examples in expert balance, keeping the reader engaged through her lively, colorful prose. Du Mez leads us with apparent ease, as only a seasoned historian can, from the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Billy Sunday, through the early Cold War mainstreaming of Christian nationalism and the subsequent white evangelical backlash against the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam protesters, into the rise of the Christian Right as a powerful voting bloc that crystallized in the 1980 election, and finally on to the present. Du Mez more than adequately substantiates her thesis that evangelical Trump support represents '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'.
JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE CHRISTIANITY TODAY FULL
When she considers her deep roots in an Iowa city that welcomed a Trump rally with open arms, her personal pain speaks volumes about what’s really been lost amid the religious right’s rush to pound their chests and make Jesus Great Again Read Full Review > A history professor at a prominent Christian college, the author of A New Gospel for Women and a contributor to Christianity Today, she’s in an ideal position to expose the hypocrisy, crudeness, and chauvinism of the religious right.
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Du Mez makes it clear that she’s not criticizing from the ivory tower or explicitly from the left. One of the book’s missed opportunities is a more thorough exploration of the prosperity gospel, or the bizarre notion that, as one book put it, 'Jesus Wants You to Be Rich.' If ultra-manliness is the goal, then for Americans raised on the Protestant ethic money is the means to that worldly end. Historian John Wilsey, in a perceptive review of Kristen Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, says that he offers his criticism through the lens of one of the most powerful essays he has ever read.The essay is Beth Barton Schweiger’s Seeing Things: Knowledge and Love in History, Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation, ed. One of the book’s subtle insights is that being evangelical isn’t just about agreeing to a certain set of theological principles-that’s just where the rest of the lifestyle management begins. Du Mez’s work throws the closet doors wide open, and our skeletons are on full display. Because we cannot continue to claim that abuse scandals or Christian nationalists are outliers. Evangelicals need to come to terms with how they have used power and gender to harm people. Du Mez argues, using an extensive amount of research, that white evangelical culture often glorifies the aggressive, patriarchal idea of manhood, which has become intertwined with what it means to be a conservative Christian in the modern age. Jesus and John Wayne is well-timed, and important.