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May 3 - May 23, 2023
TO WHITE AMERICANS who were willing to listen, the civil rights movement argued that America had never been a country of liberty and justice for all.
Having embraced the idea of America as a “Christian nation,” it was hard to accept a critique of the nation as fundamental as that advanced by the civil rights movement.
one working-class Vietnam veteran later recalled, he went to Vietnam to “kill a Commie for Jesus Christ and John Wayne.” It
The allegations came to light after a student at Hargis’s college revealed to his bride on their honeymoon that he’d had sex with Hargis, only to discover that she had, too.
Falwell had lamented that the United States was “no longer the military might of the world,” no longer “committed to victory,” no longer “committed to greatness”; for the first time in two centuries, Americans’ survival as a free people was in doubt.
Never the point of Christianity
Evangelicals had long framed sexual immorality as a worldly sin, the product of secularism, liberalism, feminism—that is, as something that happened outside the Christian fold. Yet the televangelist sex scandals revealed that their own religious heroes had feet of clay. If Christians needed manly heroes, Christian broadcasting was coming up short.
On the home front, it could validate questionable or even ruthless tactics wielded in defense of Christian America. In heroic pursuits of a higher good, the ends would justify the means.
Will defend anyone but the marginalized
Conservative evangelicals knew they were called to fight the Lord’s battle. It just wasn’t entirely clear what that battle would be.
Lolz
Harris was the son of pioneering Christian homeschoolers—his parents helped establish the Christian homeschooling movement, and his father’s 1988 book, The Christian Home School, was a Christian Booksellers
Rip my childhood
Here was a case of government intrusion into the most intimate of matters, yet evangelicals didn’t seem to mind.
He praised Phyllis Schlafly and recommended homeschooling as “a means of coping with a hostile culture.”
The moral certainties of the War on Terror—framed as they were by an evangelical president—put an end to any post–Cold War uncertainty among evangelicals.
By listening to men like Driscoll and Piper, young evangelical men became part of a larger movement. They were called to be heroes.
Along with Jesus, Welch looked to figures like Robert E. Lee and KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest as models of warrior leadership.
Even after his retirement, Boykin pressed his agenda. He founded Kingdom Warriors, an organization to promote militarized Christianity, and he accepted a position as executive vice president of the Family Research Council.
Wright critiqued the “few Muslims” who called for jihad, but he also criticized Christians calling for “crusade,” Christians who condoned the killing of civilians, collateral damage, “shock and awe” tactics, preemptive strikes, and the unilateral takeover of another nation while secure in the notion that the ends justified the means, that God would bless their efforts.
few days after Trump’s 2016 visit to Liberty, he arrived at Dordt College, where he made his claim about being able to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody without consequence. Three days later, Falwell officially endorsed Trump.
“The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking ‘foreigner’ who is probably not all that impressed by chants of ‘Make America great again.’”
God-given testosterone came with certain side effects, but an aggressive and even reckless masculinity was precisely what was needed when dealing with the enemy. If you wanted a tamer man, castrate him.
