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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Rather than seeking to distinguish “real” from “supposed” evangelicals, then, it is more useful to think in terms of the degree to which individuals participate in this evangelical culture of consumption.

But conservative evangelicals had always thrived on a sense of embattlement, real or imagined,

For decades, evangelical leaders had worked to stoke them. Their own power depended on it. Men like James Dobson, Bill Gothard, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Mark Driscoll, Franklin Graham, and countless lesser lights invoked a sense of peril in order to offer fearful followers their own brand of truth and protection. Generations of evangelicals learned to be afraid of communists, feminists, liberals, secular humanists, “the homosexuals,” the United Nations, the government, Muslims, and immigrants—and they were primed to respond to those fears by looking to a strong man to rescue them from danger, a man who embodied a God-given, testosterone-driven masculinity. As Robert Jeffress so eloquently expressed in the months before the 2016 election, “I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are.”14

A new corporate, consumer economy meant that more men were earning a living by punching the clock, and self-discipline no longer promised the same payoff.

Accusing fundamentalists of substituting “propagandism” for a proper scholarly study of the Bible, they preferred to look to higher critical scholarship to parse the intricacies of the Scriptures. These liberal Protestants also tended to emphasize the social and environmental dimensions of Christianity, over against fundamentalists’ more individualistic focus on personal sin and conversion. Fundamentalists, in turn, accused modernists of abandoning the historic Christian faith.

In 1954, Congress added the words “one nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the following year Eisenhower signed into law the addition of “In God We Trust” to the nation’s currency. For evangelicals who believed that America was a Christian nation, the 1950s offered plenty of circumstantial evidence.

evangelicals raised the stakes. Communism was “the greatest enemy we have ever known,” and only evangelical Christianity could provide the spiritual resources to combat it.4

Eisenhower presided over the vast expansion of America’s military-industrial complex, and in his farewell address, he made the connection explicit: a strong military would keep Americans free to worship their God.

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.

At the same time, moderate proponents of civil rights began to cool in their support for further action. Graham, for example, withdrew his backing as activists began to engage in civil disobedience and to demand further government intervention. Many evangelicals followed his lead, concluding that it was not the role of government to interfere in issues of racial justice; only Jesus could change human hearts. Many evangelicals, too, found it hard to accept that the sin of racism ran deep through the nation’s history. To concede this seemed unpatriotic. 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.9

Goldwater wasn’t known for his religious beliefs, but that wasn’t really the point. He was bringing a message Sunbelt evangelicals wanted to hear.13

“I would rather see my four girls shot and die as little girls who have faith in God than leave them to die some years later as godless, faithless, soulless Communists,” Boone asserted. His audience was thrilled, even if his wife was not.14

When confronted with undeniable evidence of American brutality, evangelicals could always fall back on the concept of human depravity. With sin lurking in every human heart, violence was inevitable, and only Jesus was the answer. When the young army lieutenant William Calley faced trial for his role in the murder of some five hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children in what came to be known as the My Lai massacre, Billy Graham remarked that he had “never heard of a war where innocent people are not killed.”

For many Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam demolished myths of American greatness and goodness.

Instrumental to their efforts to reclaim power, this rhetoric of fear would continue to bolster the role of the heroic masculine protector. There might be a place for the softer virtues, but the perilous times necessitated ruthless power.

As late as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution urging states to expand access to abortion.

Only in time, as abortion became more closely linked to feminism and the sexual revolution, did evangelicals begin to frame it not as a difficult moral choice, but rather as an assault on women’s God-given role, on the family, and on Christian America itself.

What happens when you believe that men have voracious sexual appetites, that their very ability to lead their families and their nation is linked to the satisfaction of those appetites, but wives have been taught from childhood that their sexuality must be restrained, controlled, suppressed? What happens when good Christian wives have little sexual knowledge and little apparent desire? When they are filled with guilt and an overbearing sense of modesty? Obviously, this led to conflict in the bedroom, and the LaHayes offered a solution. They worked to convince modest Christian women that it was not sinful to let their husbands see them naked, that they should learn to talk about sex without embarrassment and educate themselves about how to have sex in a way they and their husbands enjoyed.

In adopting Reconstructionist teachings piecemeal, premillennialists patched over a long-standing division within conservative Protestantism. Such quibbles apparently paled in comparison to what they held in common—a desire to reclaim the culture for Christ by reasserting patriarchal authority and waging battle against encroaching secular humanism, in all its guises.12

The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was a particular target of conservative ire. Created in 1953, the department oversaw school integration, public-school curriculum revision, and welfare expenditures, money that conservatives felt could better be spent on national defense.16

Christians, “like slaves and soldiers,” ask no questions.

What had drawn Reagan to the Republican Party were the same things that had drawn evangelicals: a mix of anticommunism, Christian nationalism, and nostalgia for a mythical American past.

In 1980, the election widely hailed as the moment the Christian Right came into its own, evangelical voters bypassed the candidate who shared their faith tradition in favor of the one whose image and rhetoric more closely aligned with their values and aspirations.

By the 1980s, then, the Democratic Party had become the party of liberals, African Americans, and feminists, and the Republican Party the party of conservatives, traditionalists, and segregationists.10

Accounts of the battles over the SBC commonly focus on the question of biblical inerrancy, but the battle over inerrancy was in part a proxy fight over gender. Conservatives were alarmed by women’s liberation, abortion, and changing views on sexuality generally, but they also had concerns specific to the SBC. “Evangelical feminism” had been making inroads in Southern Baptist circles, and growing numbers of Baptist women had begun challenging male headship and claiming leadership positions; between 1975 and 1985, the number of women ordained in the SBC increased significantly. These women insisted on interpreting biblical texts contextually, attentive to the settings in which they were produced. Conservatives, however, insisted on a “populist hermeneutic,” a method privileging “the simplest, most direct interpretations of scripture.” For conservatives, this wasn’t just the right method, it was also the masculine one. They depicted biblical authors like Paul as uncowed by political correctness. Paul wasn’t afraid to prohibit female authority, and masculine men should do likewise. They accused liberals and moderates of waffling, of introducing needless complexity while they stood firm in their quick grasp of the obvious, literal truth of the Scriptures.

The issue of inerrancy did rally conservatives, but when it turned out that large numbers of Southern Baptists—even denominational officials—lacked any real theological prowess and were in fact functionally atheological, concerns over inerrancy gave way to a newly politicized commitment to female submission and to related culture wars issues.

Al Mohler, who oversaw the purging of moderates from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offered a revealing glimpse into this process: “Mr. and Mrs. Baptist may not be able to understand or adjudicate the issue of biblical inerrancy when it comes down to nuances, and language, and terminology,” he acknowledged. “But if you believe abortion should be legal, that’s all they need to know. . . .” The same went for “homosexual marriage.” Inerrancy mattered because of its connection to cultural and political issues. It was in their efforts to bolster patriarchal authority that Southern Baptists united with evangelicals across the nation, and the alliances drew them into the larger evangelical world. Within a generation, Southern Baptists began to place their “evangelical” identity over their identity as Southern Baptists. Patriarchy was at the heart of this new sense of themselves.

strong military would ward off a godless communist takeover. When it came to risks of nuclear annihilation, evangelical theology’s emphasis on eternal life for the faithful helped mitigate such earthly terrors. In end-times scenarios they believed God would protect them; a nuclear holocaust might even be part of God’s plan.

OLIVER NORTH ENDED UP being indicted on sixteen felony counts, including lying to Congress and destroying documents. Found guilty on three counts, he received a three-year suspended sentence. As commander in chief, Reagan was never directly implicated in the arms-for-hostages deal, and he emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed. In 1990, North’s convictions were reversed on a technicality. The following year, North was a featured speaker at the Southern Baptist Convention, the first where moderates were not expected to challenge the conservative majority. Oliver North had become a hero of the Christian Right. The affinities were clear. Conservatives in the SBC had skirted conventions and eschewed niceties in order to wrest control of the denomination, just as North had skirted the rule of law in order to pursue a greater good.

When North arrived on campus, just one day after retiring from the military, Falwell compared him to Jesus. Reminding his audience that “we serve a savior who was indicted and convicted and crucified,” Falwell christened North “a true American hero.”2

Trump

“as long as he was doing it for our country, it couldn’t be wrong.”

Ollie was popular with the studs because he was their image of what the Marine Corps was about. . . . He invented Rambo before Rambo made the movie. He was the creator of his own myth.

Although he’s regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics. And in America, disagreement with the policies of the Government is not evidence of lack of patriotism.

Without a common enemy, it would be more difficult to sustain militant expressions of the faith.

As the details of the Lewinsky scandal came to light, “Bill Clinton’s image went from that of the neutered househusband of an emasculating harridan to that of a swaggering stud-muffin whose untrammeled lust for sexual conquest imperiled all females in his orbit,” according to clinical psychologist Stephen Ducat. Perhaps, “behind the tongue-clucking disapprobation of some male commentators” there lurked “a thinly disguised envy.” Clinton’s job rating received a significant boost as the scandal unfolded—“the formerly feminized president had been resurrected as a phallic leader.”20

Among Clinton’s evangelical critics, it appears that their concern with Clinton’s predatory behavior was more about Clinton than about predatory behavior. Within their own circles, evangelicals didn’t have a strong record when it came to defending women against harassment and abuse.

THE BOOKS BY Wilson, Dobson, and Eldredge appeared in the months before September 11, 2001. When terrorists struck the United States, their call for “manly” heroes acquired a deep and widespread resonance among evangelicals. A very real, not merely rhetorical, “battle to fight” had suddenly materialized for American men. The success of these books, and their cultural impact, can be understood in light of the renewed sense of crisis.

In October 2002, five evangelical leaders sent a letter to President Bush to assure him that a preemptive invasion of Iraq did indeed meet the criteria for just war.

As one evangelical parishioner explained, Jesus might have preached a gospel of peace, but the Book of Revelation showed that the suffering Messiah turned into the conquering Messiah; in the Bible, God didn’t just sanction “war and invasion,” God encouraged it.

United in their concern about gender and authority, conservative evangelical men knit together an expanding network of institutions, organizations, and alliances that amplified their voices and enhanced their power. Wilson invited Driscoll to speak at his church; Piper invited Wilson to address his pastor’s conference; leaders shared stages, blurbed each other’s books, spoke at each other’s conferences, and endorsed each other as men of God with a heart for gospel teaching. Within this network, differences—significant doctrinal disagreements, disagreements over the relative merits of slavery and the Civil War—could be smoothed over in the interest of promoting “watershed issues” like complementarianism, the prohibition of homosexuality, the existence of hell, and substitutionary atonement. Most foundationally, they were united in a mutual commitment to patriarchal power.

Evangelicals who offered competing visions of sexuality, gender, or the existence of hell found themselves excluded from conferences and associations, and their writings banned from popular evangelical bookstores and distribution channels.

In order to protect Focus on the Family’s tax exemption, Dobson retired from his position as CEO of the organization so he could take up political organizing directly.4

When reviewing materials the team had compiled, Major General Charles Baldwin, air force chief of chaplains, repeatedly wanted to know why “Christians don’t ever win.”

Muslims quickly raised red flags concerning a number of assertions in the book, accusing the brothers of “either purposely or ignorantly” presenting “half-truth after half-truth, mischaracterization after mischaracterization and falsehood after falsehood.” But the book told conservative evangelicals exactly what they wanted to hear.

Stoking fear in the hearts of American Christians played into the hands of conservative evangelical leaders, too. Just as Jack Hyles, Jerry Falwell, and Mark Driscoll had stage-managed in their own churches, evangelicals in post-9/11 America enhanced their own power by ratcheting up a sense of threat—a tactic that only worked within a militarized framework.

It’s worth remembering that for both Barack and Michelle Obama, their unforgivable sins—at least as far as conservative white evangelicals were concerned—involved their critique of America.

In Obama’s second term, evangelical opposition manifested around the issue of religious freedom, and for evangelicals, “religious freedom” didn’t apply equally to all faith traditions; their defense of religious freedom was linked to their defense of “Christian America” and to their conservative gender regime.

What did it mean to be an evangelical? Did it mean upholding a set of doctrinal truths, or did it mean embracing a culture-wars application of those truths—a God-and-country religiosity that championed white rural and working-class values, one that spilled over into a denigration of outsiders and elites, and that was organized around a deep attachment to militarism and patriarchal masculinity?

And then Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy. Clinton was a devout Christian, but the wrong kind.

For decades, the Religious Right had been kindling fear in the hearts of American Christians. It was a tried-and-true recipe for their own success. Communism, secular humanism, feminism, multilateralism, Islamic terrorism, and the erosion of religious freedom—evangelical leaders had rallied support by mobilizing followers to fight battles on which the fate of the nation, and their own families, seemed to hinge. Leaders of the Religious Right had been amping up their rhetoric over the course of the Obama administration. The first African American president, the sea change in LGBTQ rights, the apparent erosion of religious freedom—coupled with looming demographic changes and the declining religious loyalty of their own children—heightened the sense of dread among white evangelicals. But in truth, evangelical leaders had been perfecting this pitch for nearly fifty years. Evangelicals were looking for a protector, an aggressive, heroic, manly man, someone who wasn’t restrained by political correctness or feminine virtues, someone who would break the rules for the right cause. Try as they might—and they did try—no other candidate could measure up to Donald Trump when it came to flaunting an aggressive, militant masculinity. He became, in the words of his religious biographers, “the ultimate fighting champion for evangelicals.”