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,

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.

“a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.”

While Eldredge claimed to root his notion of masculinity in a theology of creation, in the God-given “essence” of men and women, Smith and Mulder insisted that “what Eldredge attributes to creation, biblical Christianity ascribes to the Fall!”

Evangelicals loved the book. Meanwhile, historians panned it; the director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust described it as “a terrible oversimplification and at times misinterpretation of Bonhoeffer’s thought, the theological and ecclesial world of his times, and the history of Nazi Germany.”19

Clinton was a devout Christian, but the wrong kind. She spoke about her Methodist faith frequently during the 2016 campaign, reciting favorite passages of Scripture with ease.

On the issue of abortion, Democrats had long campaigned under the mantra “safe, legal, and rare,” but in 2016, “rare” seemed to disappear from their lexicon.

“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” wrote evangelical activist Randy Brinson. “It’s like this total reversal of the shepherd and the flock,” with congregants threatening to leave their churches if their pastors opposed Trump.9

In the aftermath of the election, it was #NeverTrump evangelicals who ended up on the defensive. Russell Moore found his job in jeopardy when more than one hundred SBC churches threatened to withhold donations unless he resigned.

“Christian, if you cannot say definitively, no matter what, that adults creeping on teenage girls is wrong, do not tell me how you stand against moral relativism.”

Caught up in authoritarian settings where a premium is placed on obeying men, women and children find themselves in situations ripe for abuse of power.

In 2016, CBMW’s Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware advanced a theology of the Trinity that made Jesus “eternally subordinate” to God the Father, in order—according to critics—to justify the eternal, God-ordained subordination of women to men.

in doing so they were parting ways with roughly two millennia of Christian orthodoxy.

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

And for other evangelicals, it was the election of Donald Trump that prompted them to abandon evangelicalism entirely.