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July 4 - August 13, 2025
“The readiness of our Army is directly related to the strength of our families,” he attested. “The stronger the family, the stronger the Army, because strong families improve our combat readiness.”
HAVING EMBRACED THE MILITARY, evangelicals would find it difficult to articulate a critique of militarism. If the military was a source of virtue, war, too, attained a moral bearing—even preemptive war.
By the end of Reagan’s second term, in the absence of a common enemy, the power of the Christian Right appeared to be ebbing away.
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.
When Hillary Clinton published It Takes a Village, a book describing how forces beyond the immediate family impacted the well-being of the nation’s children, Schlafly and other conservatives were adamant that it did not take a village to raise a child. They saw failed efforts to secure federal day-care legislation and the work of the Children’s Defense Fund and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as thinly veiled attempts to infringe on parental rights. Parents didn’t want a village “butting in.”
Clinton’s job rating received a significant boost as the scandal unfolded—“the formerly feminized president had been resurrected as a phallic leader.”20
Yet long after Thomas was safely ensconced on the highest court, conservatives continued to mobilize against measures to address sexual harassment and abuse. They opposed the Violence Against Women Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1994, on many counts.
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. Rush Limbaugh’s bombastic style set the tone. Each day, listeners could tune in to a world where white men still reigned supreme in the public and private spheres.
Fox News didn’t frame itself in religious terms, but it more than fit the bill. The fit wasn’t a theological one, at least not in terms of traditional doctrine; it was cultural and political. Fox News hawked a nostalgic vision where white men still dominated, where feminists and other liberals were demonized, and where a militant masculinity and sexualized femininity offered a vision for the way things ought to be.
Within two decades, the influence of Fox News on conservative evangelicalism would be so profound that journalists and scholars alike would find it difficult to separate the two.28
The notion of “servant leadership” had originated in the business world. With the decline of production in the 1970s and 1980s, service work took over a larger share of the labor market, and servant leadership helped redefine masculine authority in a way that didn’t conflict with men’s role in a service economy.
modern feminism, sports offered disaffected men a masculine haven. Like military metaphors, sports called to mind a world in which men, by virtue of their superior physical strength, still dominated. Both sports and the military, too, reinforced a dualistic view of the world. In athletics, as in battle, there were winners and losers. In this way, sports-infused rhetoric and pageantry allowed Promise Keepers to address male anxieties while maintaining the semblance of benevolent patriarchy.
“If you are a husband/father, then you are in a war. War has been declared upon the family, on your family and mine. Leading a family through the chaos of American culture is like leading a small patrol through enemy-occupied territory. And the casualties in this war are as real as the names etched on the Vietnam Memorial.”
In this respect, Farrar agreed with Dobson that “our very survival as a people will depend upon the presence or absence of masculine leadership in millions of homes,”
Like “servant leadership” and complementarian theology, the purity movement enabled evangelicals to reassert patriarchal authority in the face of economic, political, and social change. The widespread popularity of the purity movement was fueled in part by an injection of federal funds. As early as 1981, President Reagan began directing government funding to abstinence-only sex education, and this funding continued through the 1990s, reaching its peak under the George W. Bush administration; by 2005, more than 100 abstinence-based groups would receive more than $104 million in federal funding.
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According to Eldredge, a woman sinned when she tried to control her world, when she was grasping rather than vulnerable, when she sought to control her own adventure rather than share in the adventure of a man.
War, conflict, and enmity resulted from humanity’s sinfulness, not from God’s good creation; thus “it cannot be the case that being a warrior is essential to being a man.”
The very existence of the nation again depended on the toughness of American men, and raising young boys into strong men became elevated to a matter of national security. Instructional books already lined the shelves of Christian bookstores.
Again Farrar castigated the church for feminizing Jesus. Songs about Christ’s “beauty” were especially galling. As he wrote, “If you went up to John Wayne and said he was beautiful, he would separate several of your molars and bicuspids into a new world order.”
Phillips believed that patriarchy and patriotism were inextricably connected, and both were God-given duties. Patriarchy was key to the success of nations, and to be “anti-patriotic” was “to be a spiritual ingrate.”
“Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” Quiverfull women had a critical role to play in birthing an army of God; the culture wars needed as many soldiers as possible. Outbreeding opponents was the first step to outvoting them, and in their reproductive capacities, women served as “domestic warriors.”
Driscoll incited fear in order to maintain control. Tolerating no passive consumption, he demanded self-sacrificial service and absolute submission to (his) authority. As in wartime, dissent was quickly snuffed out. By ratcheting up a sense of alarm, Driscoll justified his demands for discipline, control, and unquestioned power.17
What was remarkable was that so many notoriously combative men could find common cause. There were certainly disagreements among leaders on a variety of topics, but they were able to smooth over these differences—including rather significant theological differences—because of a common reverence for patriarchal authority.
Agreeing that “desperate times called for desperate measures,” these men could agree to disagree about speaking in tongues and the gift of prophecy because other issues—including gender complementarianism and church discipline—were more pressing.28
Wilson endorsed the concept of “Biblical hatred,” a form of militant masculine faithfulness exhibited by one of his heroes of the faith, Scottish minister John Knox.
Through this expanding network, “respectable” evangelical leaders and organizations gave cover to their “brothers in the gospel” who were promoting more extreme expressions of patriarchy, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish margins from mainstream. Over time, a common commitment to patriarchal power began to define the boundaries of the evangelical movement itself, as those who ran afoul of these orthodoxies quickly discovered.
Dobson’s power was all too apparent to evangelicals themselves, for better and for worse. When asked about their greatest fear, Christian college presidents agreed: the possibility that James Dobson would turn against their school. The lesson was clear: “Don’t mess with Dobson or, by extension, with any of the moguls of the Religious Right.” With the decline of Falwell’s Moral Majority and Robertson’s Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family provided a critical fulcrum for evangelical political engagement.6
At the time, the sexual assault scandal and the coercive religious atmosphere seemed like two distinct problems, connected only inasmuch as the academy was eager to avoid another public relations fiasco in the aftermath of disclosures of abuse. Yet there was another statistic that suggested the two problems might not be entirely disconnected; one in five cadets felt women didn’t belong among them.18
In twenty-first century evangelicalism, the threat of radical Islam loomed large. Yet upon closer examination, this fear appears suspect. On the part of evangelical leaders, at the very least, fear of Islam appeared to be nothing more than an attempt to drum up support for the militant faith they were hawking.
The popularity of these “ex-Muslim terrorists” casts in stark relief the dynamics of an evangelical politics of fear. 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?
But even for those who did not hold explicit racist convictions, their faith remained intertwined with their whiteness. Although white evangelicals and black Protestants shared similar views on a number of theological and moral issues, the black Protestant tradition was suffused with a prophetic theology that clashed with white evangelicals’ Christian nationalism. It’s worth remembering that for both Barack and Michelle Obama, their unforgivable sins—at least as far as conservative white evangelicals were concerned—involved their critique of America.
“This government lied in its founding documents and the government is still lying today.” To white evangelicals steeped in Christian nationalism, this was blasphemy.
Palin’s candidacy, however, raised the issue of gender. For evangelicals who believed in male headship, was it appropriate for a woman to be in such a position of power? If the alternative was Barack Obama, then the answer they gave was yes.
The Obama campaign had targeted moderate white evangelicals, the sort who had been voting Republican for twenty years but who wanted to expand the list of “moral values” to include things like poverty, climate change, human rights, and the environment.
But militant evangelicalism was always at its strongest with a clear enemy to fight. Two weeks before the election, with an Obama victory appearing likely, one Colorado Springs pastor reminded fellow evangelicals of this: “This could be the best thing that ever happened to the evangelical cause. . . . We’re used to being against the tide.” He was right. The presidency of Barack Obama would strengthen evangelicals’ sense of embattlement and embolden the more militant voices within the movement.
Race had been central to the formation of white evangelicals’ political and cultural identity, and so it’s not surprising that evangelical opposition to the first African American president would reflect a belief in his “otherness.”
In Obama’s second term, evangelical opposition manifested around the issue of religious freedom, and for evangelicals, “religious freedom” didn’t apply equally to all faith traditions; their defense of religious freedom was linked to their defense of “Christian America” and to their conservative gender regime.
By the early 2000s, was it even possible to separate “cultural Christianity” from a purer, more authentic form of American evangelicalism? 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?26
But for white evangelicals, Clinton was on the wrong side of nearly every issue. A feminist and a career woman, she thought it took a village to raise a child. She promoted global human rights and women’s rights at the expense of US sovereignty, at least in the eyes of her critics. And she was pro-choice. The fact that she read the same Bible didn’t register for most evangelicals, and her faith testimony came across as political pandering, or just plain lying.
Why Trump, many wondered, including many evangelicals themselves. For decades, the Religious Right had been kindling fear in the hearts of American Christians. It was a tried-and-true recipe for their own success.
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.
“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.
Trump might not be the best Christian, but as a Christian nationalist he could more than hold his own.
For evangelicals, there were warriors on the actual field of battle, and there were those who emerged victorious in the rough-and-tumble world of capitalism. The same rules applied in each arena; daring, vision, and an “aptitude for violence and violation” generated success in both war and business. The warrior and the businessman were both worthy of emulation, and both entitled to command.
Writing in the Baptist News, Alan Bean later reflected that Jeffress embraced a “Jesus/John Wayne dualism.” Trump’s biblical ignorance was boundless, but Jeffress wasn’t interested in a president who would govern according to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Nor did he think that the Bible had anything to say about governments needing to forgive or “turn the other cheek.” The role of government was “to be a strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers.” Sure, Trump was a notorious womanizer, married three times. So was John Wayne. Wayne was “an unapologetic racist,” Bean added, “and Trump
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How could evangelicals identify with a man who fueled racist tension, endorsed religious discrimination, advocated war crimes, and promoted incivility and intolerance, a man “who holds a highly sexualized view of power as dominance, rather than seeing power as an instrument to advance moral ends”?21 Perhaps Gerson hadn’t been paying attention. Trump was hardly the first man conservative evangelicals had embraced who checked off this list of qualifications.
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.
Exit polls revealed that 81 percent of white evangelical voters had handed Trump the presidency. Once again, reports of the death of the Religious Right had been greatly exaggerated. The “Moral Majority” had reasserted itself, electing the least moral candidate in memory to the highest office of the land.
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. The election was not decided by those “left behind” economically, political scientists discovered; it was decided by dominant groups anxious about their future
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