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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

What could compel “family-values” evangelicals to flock to this “immodest, arrogant, foul-mouthed, money-obsessed, thrice-married, and until recently, pro-choice” candidate?

Trump was hardly the first man conservative evangelicals had embraced who checked off this list of qualifications. With the forces of evil allied against them, evangelicals were looking for a man who would fight for them, a man whose testosterone might lead to recklessness and excess here or there, but that was all part of the deal. Not all evangelicals were as puzzled as Gerson and Moore. “Evangelicals see what’s going down,” explained a senior advisor to Huckabee, before Huckabee—the onetime Baptist pastor—exited the race; they were looking for somebody “to be strong and stern,” somebody with an aggressive leadership style.

In short, support for Trump was strongest among white Christian men. The election was not decided by those “left behind” economically, political scientists discovered; it was decided by dominant groups anxious about their future status. This sense of group threat proved impervious to economic arguments or policy proposals. Research discounting the role of economic hardship in predicting support for Trump reinforces earlier research into white evangelical political behavior. For evangelicals, cultural alignments dictated responses to economic circumstances, rather than the other way around.

In the end, Doug Wilson, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, James Dobson, Doug Phillips, and John Eldredge all preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. It was a vision that promised protection for women but left women without defense, one that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making. Though rooted in different traditions and couched in different styles, their messages blended together to become the dominant chord in the cacophony of evangelical popular culture. And they had been right all along. The militant Christian masculinity they practiced and preached did indelibly shape both family and nation.

Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology.