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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

“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.

Sex, church secretaries, fraud, intrigue, prostitution, conspicuous consumption of the most tawdry sort—the revelations tarnished the image of evangelicalism generally, revealing the dark side of a religious movement driven by celebrity. Evangelicals had long framed sexual immorality as a worldly sin, the product of secularism, liberalism, feminism—that is, as something that happened outside the Christian fold. Yet the televangelist sex scandals revealed that their own religious heroes had feet of clay. If Christians needed manly heroes, Christian broadcasting was coming up short.

DURING THE VIETNAM WAR, evangelicals had come to admire the military as a bulwark against the erosion of authority and as a holdout for traditional values amid a hostile, secularizing, and emasculating culture.

In some ways, Reagan’s decisive victory took the wind out of evangelical sails. Conservative evangelicals had learned to trade on a sense of embattlement. When liberals, communists, feminists, or secular humanists seemed to be winning, supporters dug deep into their pockets. With Reagan in the White House, the sense of urgency diminished.

In 1991, the Cold War officially came to an end. For more than four decades, evangelicals had mobilized against an imminent communist threat. With American power restored and their enemy vanquished, the need for evangelical militarism was no longer self-evident.

The Cold War might have ended, but at the opening night of the Republican National Convention, Buchanan declared that a different sort of war had begun: “There is a religious war going on in this country . . . a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. This war is for the soul of America.”10

By advancing the absurdity of “children’s rights,” the Clinton administration, and the UN, threatened parental authority, an orderly society, and American sovereignty.

If this precedent prevailed, Schlafly prophesied, “Americans can look forward to a succession of TV charlatans and professional liars occupying the White House.”

The 1987 repeal of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, which had mandated honest and equitable on-air treatment of controversial issues, ushered in an era of talk radio that would change the tenor of American political conversation.

IN THE ABSENCE of a clear, external threat, culture warriors like Robertson, Dobson, Schlafly, and Buchanan identified a new battle, a war on which the soul of the nation depended. Thanks to the steady barrage of scandal, actual and imagined, issuing from the Clinton White House, they were often successful in stoking the fires of evangelical militancy.

For a time, both coexisted in creative tension, thanks in part to the idea of “servant leadership.” Less abrasive than “male headship,” servant leadership framed male authority as obligation, sacrifice, and service. Men were urged to accept their responsibilities, to work hard, to serve their wives and families, to eschew alcohol, gambling, and pornography, to step up around the home, and to be present in their children’s lives.

Although studies show that conservative Protestant men did less household labor than men in nonevangelical homes, they were more likely to express affection for their wives and appreciation for the housework women did. They also spent more time than other men with their kids, even if they tended to administer harsher discipline.

In one of his more infamous missives, Driscoll talked of God creating women to serve as penis “homes” for lonely penises. When a woman posted on the church’s discussion board, his response was swift: “I . . . do not answer to women. So, your questions will be ignored.”15

As in the Cold War era, for all their militant rhetoric and supreme confidence that God was on their side, evangelicals seemed curiously fearful.

Trafficking in a pornography of violence, these “experts” divulged graphic stories purportedly revealing the sadistic violence of Islam, and in doing so dehumanized Muslims while goading Americans (and especially American Christians) to respond with violence of their own.

Were evangelicals embracing an increasingly militant faith in response to a new threat from the Islamic world? Or were they creating the perception of threat to justify their own militancy and enhance their own power, individually and collectively?

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?

REMINISCENT OF THE WANING YEARS of the Reagan administration, conservative evangelicals had struggled to mobilize as the George W. Bush presidency came to an end. But the Religious Right had always thrived on a sense of embattlement, and in that respect, the Obama White House was heaven-sent. Between demographic changes portending an end to “white Christian America,” the apparent erosion of loyalty among young evangelicals, and steady assaults on their conception of religious liberty, white evangelicals perceived clear and present dangers to their very existence. Or at least to their social and political power. Obama’s election had issued a warning call to evangelical leaders. Leaving nothing to chance, they made the most of the moment, working arduously to stoke further fear and resentment. By the end of Obama’s eight years in office, even as the president’s overall approval ratings had been among the highest in recent presidential history, white evangelicals remained his most stalwart critics. Seventy-four percent viewed him unfavorably, compared to 44 percent of Americans generally. Perhaps more importantly, conservative evangelicals had reinvigorated their posture of embattlement. Drastic times would call for drastic measures. When 2016 came around, they were primed for the fight. They just needed the right warrior to lead the charge.

EVANGELICAL INFATUATION with Donald Trump wasn’t instantaneous, and it didn’t start with leadership. Initially, prominent evangelicals preferred more traditional Republican candidates, and they had plenty to choose from.

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.”6

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

How could Bonhoeffer’s biographer support a man like Trump? In his own book, after all, he had described Hitler’s rise to power in words that rang eerily familiar: “The German people clamored for order and leadership. But it was as though in the babble of their clamoring, they had summoned the devil himself, for there now rose up from the deep wound in the national psyche something strange and terrible and compelling.”

What Metaxas admired in Trump appeared to be precisely the fact that he was no great man of virtue, traditionally defined. But he was the perfect embodiment of a different set of masculine “virtues” that evangelical men had been touting for nearly half a century.26

Jen Hatmaker, a best-selling author, blogger, pastor, and all-around “avatar of the New Christian Woman,” castigated evangelical men who defended Trump: “We will not forget. Nor will we forget the Christian leaders that betrayed their sisters in Christ for power.”

The “Moral Majority” had reasserted itself, electing the least moral candidate in memory to the highest office of the land.34

But surveys before and after the election disproved this theory. Fears about cultural displacement far outweighed economic factors when it came to support for Trump. In fact, among white working-class Americans, economic hardship predicted support for Hillary Clinton rather than for Trump. Among white evangelicals, economic anxiety also didn’t register as a primary reason for supporting Trump. Although evangelicals may have celebrated rural and working-class values, many were securely middle-class and made their home in suburbia. More than economic anxieties, it was a threatened loss of status—particularly racial status—that influenced the vote of white evangelicals, and whites more generally. Support for Trump was strongest among those who perceived their status to be most imperiled, those who felt whites were more discriminated against than blacks, Christians than Muslims, and men than women. In short, support for Trump was strongest among white Christian men.

Evangelicals hadn’t betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity. He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn’t afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn’t let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done. Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace. He was a hero for God-and-country Christians in the line of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Oliver North, one suited for Duck Dynasty Americans and American Christians. He was the latest and greatest high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity.

To obey God was to obey patriarchal authorities within a rigid chain of command, and God had equipped men to exercise this authority in the home and in society at large. Testosterone made men dangerous, but it also made them heroes. Within their own churches and organizations, evangelicals had elevated and revered men who exhibited the same traits of rugged and even ruthless leadership that President Trump now paraded on the national stage.

Reminiscent of the 1980s, the 2000s saw a spate of sex scandals topple evangelical leaders. In many cases, the abuse or misconduct stretched back years, even decades. Many of the men implicated in the abuse, or in covering up cases of abuse, were the same men who had been preaching militant masculinity, patriarchal authority, and female purity and submission. The frequency of these instances, and the tendency of evangelicals to diminish or dismiss cases of abuse in their own communities, suggests that evangelicals’ response to allegations of abuse in the era of Trump cannot be explained by political expediency alone. Rather, these tendencies appear to be endemic to the movement itself.

Within this framework, men assign themselves the role of protector, but the protection of women and girls is contingent on their presumed purity and proper submission to masculine authority. This puts female victims in impossible situations. 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. Yet victims are often held culpable for acts perpetrated against them; in many cases, female victims, even young girls, are accused of “seducing” their abusers or inviting abuse by failing to exhibit proper femininity. While men (and women) invested in defending patriarchal authority frequently come to the defense of perpetrators, victims are often pressured to forgive abusers and avoid involving law enforcement. Immersed in these teachings about sex and power, evangelicals are often unable or unwilling to name abuse, to believe women, to hold perpetrators accountable, and to protect and empower survivors.10

Moreover, Wilson suggested that women who rejected submissive femininity were “unprotected”; women who refused masculine protection were “really women who tacitly agree on the propriety of rape.”

For a community that believed in the existence of sin, conservative evangelicals were curiously nonchalant about the dangers of unchecked power when that power was placed in the hands of a patriarch.

Two years into Trump’s presidency, more than two-thirds of white evangelicals did not think the United States had a responsibility to accept refugees. In 2019, nearly the same percentage supported Trump’s border wall. Given that the Bible is filled with commands to welcome the stranger and care for the foreigner, these attitudes might seem puzzling. Yet evangelicals who claim to uphold the authority of the Scriptures are quite clear that they do not necessarily look to the Bible to inform their views on immigration; a 2015 poll revealed that only 12 percent of evangelicals cited the Bible as their primary influence when it came to thinking about immigration.

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. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it.

Conservative evangelicals have long positioned themselves against “the secular,” but as the cultural evangelicalism of Hobby Lobby indicates, sacred and secular can be difficult to distinguish. For many evangelicals, the masculine values men like John Wayne, William Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Jordan Peterson, and Donald Trump embody have come to define evangelicalism itself.

For those who have come to reject aspects of this belief system, motivations have varied. For some men, a wild, aggressive masculinity has always been untenable. One man with a physical disability recalls feeling that there was no place for him in the evangelicalism of the 2000s. If you weren’t “a sports or hunting fanatic in an evangelical church,” your position was marginal, as he put it. Another man, too, recounted that those who weren’t particularly athletic, who weren’t looking to “jump across ravines and climb rock walls” could feel like inauthentic men and second-class Christians.

Quoting Matthew 6, columnist Cal Thomas reminded evangelicals that “No one can serve two masters,” and he challenged Christians to choose their true master, Jesus or Trump: “They can’t serve both.” But, for evangelicals who have transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into a model of militant masculinity, the conflict is not apparent.

Although the evangelical cult of masculinity stretches back decades, its emergence was never inevitable. Over the years it has been embraced, amplified, challenged, and resisted. Evangelical men themselves have promoted alternative models, elevating gentleness and self-control, a commitment to peace, and a divestment of power as expressions of authentic Christian manhood. Yet, understanding the catalyzing role militant Christian masculinity has played over the past half century is critical to understanding American evangelicalism today, and the nation’s fractured political landscape. Appreciating how this ideology developed over time is also essential for those who wish to dismantle it. What was once done might also be undone.