Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.

For conservative white evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity.

Within evangelicalism itself, this activism is often depicted as an expression of long-standing opposition to same-sex relationships triggered by the gay rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but the virulence with which conservative Christians opposed gay rights was rooted in the cultural and political significance they placed on the reassertion of distinct gender roles during those decades. Same-sex relationships challenged the most basic assumptions of the evangelical worldview.

“I lived and breathed these teachings, and they still shape me in ways I don’t understand even 20 years after rejecting them intellectually.”

After studying more closely the history of Native Americans and accounts of imperial conquest, he could no longer sustain the idea of America as an anointed nation. If you believe that America is God’s chosen nation, you need to fight for it and against others, he realized. But once you abandon that notion, other values begin to shift as well. Without Christian nationalism, evangelical militarism makes little sense.