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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

But evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad.

By the time Trump arrived proclaiming himself their savior, conservative white evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates “the least of these” for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses.

White evangelicals are more opposed to immigration reform and have more negative views of immigrants than any other religious demographic; two-thirds support Trump’s border wall.

Sixty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants—more than any other demographic—do not think that the United States has a responsibility to accept refugees.

Christian nationalism—the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians.

A substantial number of white evangelicals shared Trump’s nationalism, Islamophobia, racism, and nativism. They condoned his “nasty politics”: they agreed that injured protestors got what they deserved, that the country would be better off getting rid of “bad apples,” and that people were “too sensitive” about what was said in politics.

When defined in this way, “evangelicalism” manifests as a racially diverse and global movement. Yet when it comes to delineating the contours of modern American evangelicalism, the primacy of these four distinctives is arguable.

In like manner, when evangelicals define themselves in terms of Christ’s atonement or as disciples of a risen Christ, what sort of Jesus are they imagining? Is their savior a conquering warrior, a man’s man who takes no prisoners and wages holy war? Or is he a sacrificial lamb who offers himself up for the restoration of all things? How one answers these questions will determine what it looks like to follow Jesus.

The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit. Today, what it means to be a “conservative evangelical” is as much about culture as it is about theology.

Like Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues.

By the 1960s, the civil rights movement, feminism, and the Vietnam War led many Americans to question “traditional” values of all kinds.

The reassertion of white patriarchy was central to the new “family values” politics, and by the end of the 1970s, the defense of patriarchal power had emerged as an evangelical distinctive.

During the Cold War, the communist menace seemed to require a militant response. But when that threat had been vanquished, conservative evangelicals promptly declared a new war—a culture war—demanding a similar militancy.

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.

Contemporary white evangelicalism in America, then, is not the inevitable outworking of “biblical literalism,” nor is it the only possible interpretation of the historic Christian faith; the history of American Christianity itself is filled with voices of resistance and signs of paths not taken. It is, rather, a historical and a cultural movement, forged over time by individuals and organizations with varied motivations—the desire to discern God’s will, to bring order to uncertain times, and, for many, to extend their own power.

By the early twentieth century, Christians recognized that they had a masculinity problem. Unable to shake the sense that Christianity had a less than masculine feel, many blamed the faith itself, or at least the “feminization” of Victorian Christianity, which privileged gentility, restraint, and an emotive response to the gospel message.

As men moved to cities, the work they did changed significantly. For men whose strength had become superfluous, who no longer identified as producers, their very manhood seemed in question.

In the American South, white masculinity had long championed a sense of mastery over dependents—over women, children, and slaves.

Initially, this southern culture of mastery and honor seemed to conflict with the egalitarian impulses of evangelical Christianity. (In Christ there was neither slave nor free, male nor female, according to the apostle Paul.)

they effectively replaced traditional denominational authorities with the authority of the market and the power of consumer choice.

Some believed Christ’s atonement had nullified any “curse” placed on Eve in the Book of Genesis, opening the way to egalitarian gender roles; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelicals in this tradition had been enthusiastic proponents of women’s rights.

The myth of the American cowboy resonated powerfully with Sunbelt evangelicals. A model of rugged individualism that dovetailed with the individualism inherent within evangelicalism itself, the cowboy embodied a quintessentially American notion of frontier freedom coupled with an aura of righteous authority. Signifying an earlier era of American manhood, a time when heroic (white) men enforced order, protected the vulnerable, and wielded their power without apology, the myth of the American cowboy had been tinged with nostalgia from its inception. Half a century later, this nostalgia would be channeled into a powerful new religious and cultural identity, an identity harnessed for political ends.

With a broader Christian market replacing denominational distribution channels, authors and publishers needed to tone down theological distinctives and instead offer books pitched to a broadly evangelical readership.

Yet despite his rough edges, Wayne would capture the hearts and imaginations of American evangelicals. The affinity was based not on theology, but rather on a shared masculine ideal.33

Contemporary evangelical partisanship can only be understood in terms of a broader realignment that transformed partisan politics from the 1950s to the 1980s, a realignment that evangelicals themselves helped bring about. At the heart of this realignment were attitudes toward civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and “family values.”

For conservatives, a defense of white patriarchy emerged as a unifying thread across this range of issues; for conservative evangelicals, a defense of white patriarchy would move to the center of their coalescing cultural and political identity.

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

Use this in cold war powerpoint

a strong military would keep Americans free to worship their God.

(The nuclear family structured around a male breadwinner was in fact of recent invention, arising in the 1920s and peaking in the 1950s and 1960s; before then, multigenerational families relying on multiple contributors to the family economy had been the norm.)

In various ways, each of these disruptions challenged the authority of white men. In the 1960s and 1970s, then, conservative evangelicals would be drawn to a nostalgic, rugged masculinity as they looked to reestablish white patriarchal authority in its many guises. Over time, the defense of patriarchy and a growing embrace of militant masculinity would come to define both substance and symbol of evangelical cultural and political values.

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. Evangelicals’ response to civil rights varied, particularly in the early stages of the movement. It is easily forgotten, but some evangelicals—especially those who would come to constitute the “evangelical Left”—were vocal supporters of civil rights.

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.

In this way, the evangelicalism that gained respectability and prominence in Cold War America cannot be separated from its southern roots.

By the late 1960s, even fundamentalist leaders like Billy James Hargis and John R. Rice thought it best to distance themselves from the overt racism of a man like Wallace, and Nixon’s “Southern strategy” helped draw former segregationists into the Republican Party.

McGovern issued a prophetic critique of the nation and its culture of militarism. He promised to end bombing in Indochina on Inauguration Day, and within ninety days to bring every American soldier home: “There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools” and no more Americans sent to die “trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.”

For many Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam demolished myths of American greatness and goodness. American power came to be viewed with suspicion, if not revulsion, and a pervasive antimilitarism took hold. Evangelicals, however, drew the opposite lesson: it was the absence of American power that led to catastrophe.

Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern.

Look up later

To begin with, Wayne’s masculinity was unapologetically imperialist. All of Wayne’s greatest hits involved valiant white men battling (and usually subduing) nonwhite populations—the Japanese, Native Americans, or Mexicans.

Making yourself sexually available to your husband seven nights in a row, praising his whiskers, calling him at work to tell him you craved his body—none of this came easy for many women. But thousands if not millions deemed it an easier path than the one offered by women’s “liberation.” For many housewives, the new opportunities feminism promised were not opportunities at all. To those who had few employable skills and no means or desire to escape the confines of their homes, feminism seemed to denigrate their very identity and threaten their already precarious existence. It was better to play the cards they were dealt.

But with the liberalization of abortion laws, and as abortion proponents began to frame the issue in terms of women controlling their reproduction, evangelicals started to reconsider their position.

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.15

but it reveals that conservative Christian anti-feminism in the 1970s was intimately connected to a larger set of political issues—to anticommunism, Christian nationalism, and militarism, among others.

This blending of racism and the perceived sexual vulnerability of white women had a long history in the South, even if historical evidence irrefutably demonstrates that it was black women who had reason to fear white men’s sexual aggression, not the other way around.

White men had long positioned themselves as protectors of white womanhood—a tradition that cultivated male bravado, and one that could easily spill over into racial aggression.

The problem was that many Christian wives were failures in the bedroom. And here the LaHayes confronted a conundrum. 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.

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.’”

Falwell helped lead local efforts to resist school integration, even when that meant defying the Eisenhower administration, both national parties, and Lynchburg’s own business leaders.

He ran as a tough-on-crime candidate, and for conservatives, “tough on crime” generally connoted only certain types of crime: “street crime,” or the threat of black men. Domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse didn’t register.

From Reagan on, no Democrat would again win the majority of white evangelical support, or threaten the same.

Like Nixon, Reagan was adept at using racially coded rhetoric like states’ rights, “law and order,” and “forced busing” to appeal to white voters.