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July 8 - July 23, 2025
evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. 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.
Christian nationalism—the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians.
The diffusion of evangelical consumer culture extends far beyond the orbit of evangelical churches. Cultural evangelicalism has made deep inroads into mainline Christianity,
one can participate in this religious culture without attending church at all. Yet this cultural evangelicalism remains intertwined with “establishment evangelicalism.”
it is more useful to think in terms of the degree to which individuals participate in this evangelical culture of consumption.
Offering certainty in times of social change, promising security in the face of global threats, and, perhaps most critically, affirming the righteousness of a white Christian America and, by extension, of white Christian Americans, conservative evangelicals succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of large numbers of American Christians. They achieved this dominance not only by crafting a compelling ideology but also by advancing their agenda through strategic organizations and political alliances, on occasion by way of ruthless displays of power, and, critically, by dominating the production
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The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit. Today, what it means to be a “conservative evangelical” is as much about culture as it is about theology.
Like Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues.
it was in the 1940s and 1950s that a potent mix of patriarchal “gender traditionalism,” militarism, and Christian nationalism coalesced to form the basis of a revitalized evangelical identity.
The evangelical political resurgence of the 1970s coalesced around a potent mix of “family values” politics, but family values were always intertwined with ideas about sex, power, race, and nation.
by the end of the 1970s, the defense of patriarchal power had emerged as an evangelical distinctive.
The evangelical consumer marketplace was by then a force to be reckoned with, but this expansive media network functioned less as a traditional soul-saving enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals created and maintained their own identity—an identity rooted in “family values” and infused with a sense of cultural embattlement.
By the 1980s, evangelicals were able to mobilize so effectively as a partisan political force because they already participated in a shared cultural identity.12
Evangelical fears were real. Yet these fears were not simply a natural response to changing times. For decades, evangelical leaders had worked to stoke them.
By fashioning a violent, fantasized masculinity, and then injecting that sensibility into national politics, Roosevelt offered ordinary men the sense that they were participating in a larger cause. Roosevelt’s hypermasculinity appealed to men anxious about their own status, and the nation’s. For many, these anxieties would become inseparable.
Borrowing from modern advertising techniques, evangelical innovators crafted a generic, nonsectarian faith
they then marketed this faith directly to consumers. Through religious merchandising and with the help of celebrity pitchmen like Sunday himself, they effectively replaced traditional denominational authorities with the authority of the market and the power of consumer choice.
fundamentalists emerged from the war more patriotic, combative, and cantankerous than ever.
By asserting this militant masculinity in the postwar era, however, fundamentalists found themselves increasingly out of step with mainstream American Christianity, and with American culture more broadly.
opening address of the first meeting of the NAE in 1942, the Reverend Harold John Ockenga warned his fellow “lone wolves” of the ominous clouds looming on the horizon that “spell[ed] annihilation” unless they decided to “run in a pack.”
As “children of the light,” they could learn a thing or two from “the children of this world,” from the Soviets and the Nazis. In matters of both church and state, defensive tactics had proven disastrous. Evangelicals must unite and take the offensive, before it was too late.13
it was incumbent upon Graham to prove that Christianity was wholly compatible with red-blooded masculinity. The Second World War provided an ideal context in which to make this case.
Among Americans more generally, the war rehabilitated a more militant—and militaristic—model of masculinity, and fundamentalists and newly branded evangelicals, many of whom had never entirely abandoned the older muscular Christianity, joined the fray.
the myth of the American cowboy had been tinged with nostalgia from its inception. Half a century later, this nostalgia would be channeled into a powerful new religious and cultural identity, an identity harnessed for political ends.
In accord with Ockenga’s plan—and with Graham as their lodestar—evangelicals began to fashion a vibrant media empire, along with a national network of institutions and parachurch organizations that flourished outside of denominational structures.
Assisted by an expanding postwar economy, entrepreneurial evangelicals would bring Ockenga’s vision to fruition.
evangelical celebrities—singers, actors, and authors, popular pastors and revivalists—would play an outsized role in both reflecting and shaping the cultural values evangelicals would come to hold dear.
Combining resurgent nationalism with moral exceptionalism, Americans divided the world into good guys and bad guys, and the Western offered a morality tale perfectly suited to the moment, one in which the rugged hero resorted to violence to save the day.34
