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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Instead, Falwell opened with graphic details of atrocities committed by the Russia-backed “Vietnamese Communists” and the “Red China”–backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Such slaughter would soon be upon America, he warned, if they didn’t hold communism at bay and fight the “moral decay” destroying American freedoms. Signs of this decay abounded: “welfarism,” “income-transfer programs,” divorce, abortion, homosexuality, “secular humanism” in public schools, federally funded day care, and the Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Act. The Domestic Violence Act was especially insidious, for it would do away with “physical punishment as a mode of child-rearing” and “eliminate the husband as ‘head of the family.’”