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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

For Don Jacobson, whose Multnomah Press published Dobson, Weber, Farrar, Piper, Holton, and Evans, a growing discomfort with Christian nationalism led him to distance himself from the movement he helped foster. After studying more closely the history of Native Americans and accounts of imperial conquest, he could no longer sustain the idea of America as an anointed nation. If you believe that America is God’s chosen nation, you need to fight for it and against others, he realized. But once you abandon that notion, other values begin to shift as well. Without Christian nationalism, evangelical militarism makes little sense. “Jesus makes it really clear in John 13,” Jacobson reflected. “People will know you’re my disciples if you love me”—but too many evangelicals have forgotten “where our true citizenship is.”16