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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Understanding this ambivalence toward civil rights within white evangelicalism is key to understanding the role that race would play within evangelical politics more generally. By backing away from their support for civil rights, evangelicals like Graham ended up giving cover to more extremist sentiments within the insurgent Religious Right. Today some historians place race at the very heart of evangelical politics, pointing to the fact that evangelical opposition to government-mandated integration predated anti-abortion activism by several years. Others, however—including the vast majority of evangelicals themselves—prefer to point instead to the significance of moral and “family values.” But in many ways, this is a false dichotomy. For evangelicals, family values politics were deeply intertwined with racial politics, and both were connected to evangelicals’ understanding of the nation and its role on the global stage.10 In the wake of Brown, for example, many southerners turned to private Christian academies to maintain segregation, and when the tax-exempt status of these “segregation academies” was revoked in 1970, evangelicals defended their right to whites-only schools by arguing for the authority of parents to make decisions about their children’s education, free from governmental “overreach.” Later, “forced busing” would offend these same sensibilities, in the North as well as the South. Although blatant defenses of segregation and racial inequality would be rare, m...