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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

A few words preached on Sunday morning did little to disrupt the steady diet of religious products evangelicals consumed day in, day out.10

As a diffuse movement, evangelicalism lacks clear institutional authority structures, but the evangelical marketplace itself helps define who is inside and who is outside the fold.

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.

Representing federal government overreach or even an insidious communist agenda, desegregation also heightened the long-standing imagined threat to white womanhood, and to the power of white men to police social and sexual boundaries. 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.

Evangelical militancy cannot be seen simply as a response to fearful times; for conservative white evangelicals, a militant faith required an ever-present sense of threat.

Borrowing from modern advertising techniques, evangelical innovators crafted a generic, nonsectarian faith that privileged individuals’ “plain reading of the Bible” and championed a commitment to the pure, unadulterated “fundamentals” of the faith.

“Fundamentalists” who embraced this market-driven revivalism included rabble-rousing populists and “respectable,” middle-class professionals, and tensions and infighting between and among these factions would characterize the movement for the next century. It was only through the identification of common enemies that fundamentalists were able to fashion a powerful (if unstable) identity.6

Sherwood Eddy, a leading liberal Protestant proponent of the war, expressed dismay at his prowar activism: “I believed that it was a war to end war, to protect womanhood, to destroy militarism and autocracy and to make a new world ‘fit for heroes to live in,’” he confessed. The carnage and horrors of warfare put an end to all that.9

Why this??

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.9

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...

Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, was a former ministry student, son of an evangelical minister, and a deeply religious candidate. Despite having served as a fighter pilot in the Second World War, however, he opposed the war in Vietnam and proposed large cuts in military spending and amnesty for draft dodgers. In his acceptance speech, 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.” He called on Americans to live with more faith and less fear. Countering those who said “America—love it or leave it,” he instead urged Americans to work to change their nation for the better, “so we may love it the more.” A small group of Evangelicals for McGovern rallied around the Democratic candidate, but they were a tiny minority. Powerful evangelicals like Graham and Ockenga publicly endorsed Nixon, and when McGovern spoke at Wheaton College, he was greeted with resounding boos.25

The Vietnam War was pivotal to the formation of an emerging evangelical identity. 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. Evangelical support for the war seemed to grow in direct relation to escalating doubts among the rest of the public. After the Tet Offensive in the summer of 1968, a poll revealed support for continued bombing and an increase in US military intervention “among 97 percent of Southern Baptists, 91 percent of independent fundamentalists, and 70 percent of Missouri Synod Lutherans; only 2 percent of Southern Baptists and 3 percent of fundamentalists favored a negotiated withdrawal.” Aware of their outlier status, many evangelicals understood themselves to be a faithful remnant, America’s last great hope. With the fate of the nation hanging in the balance, conservative evangelicals “assumed the role of church militant.”34

As the established power of the Protestant mainline eroded in step with their critique of government policy, evangelicals enhanced their own influence by backing the policies of Johnson and Nixon. Moreover, by affirming the war and the men who fought it, evangelicals gained favor and status within the military. This partnership was acknowledged ceremonially in 1972, when West Point conferred its Sylvanus Thayer Award—an award for a citizen who exhibits the ideals of “Duty, Honor, Country”—upon Billy Graham.35

In 1973, progressive evangelical leaders issued the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern. Like members of the emerging Religious Right, they saw politics as an expression of their faith, but on nearly every issue they parted ways with their conservative brethren. They denounced racism and called for Christians to defend the rights of the poor and oppressed.

The evangelical Left and the Christian Right would pursue divergent trajectories, building their own networks and alliances. A common evangelical heritage and shared theological commitments diminished in significance as Christian nationalism, militarism, and gender “traditionalism” came to define conservative evangelical identity and dictate ideological allies. Conservative evangelicals would find they had more in common with conservative Catholics, Mormons, and with other members of the Silent Majority who were not particularly religious.

Elements of class conflict also helped define these emerging coalitions. As children of blue-collar workers gave their lives in Vietnam, children of the elite protested the war on college campuses across the nation.

As red-blooded American manhood became infused with God-and-country virtues, otherwise secular models would come to exemplify an ideal Christian manhood. This conflation of religious and secular can be seen in the cultlike status John Wayne enjoyed among American conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s.

If an evangelical could be defined as anyone who liked Billy Graham, by the 1970s a conservative might well be defined as anyone who loved John Wayne.

Offscreen, too, Wayne worked to recruit young men to the war effort, ridiculing as “soft” those who didn’t enlist.

Lol. He didn’t enlist himself.

Wayne himself had secured a deferment in order to avoid serving in a war with a far more clear-cut division between good and evil.45

Through his films and his politics, Wayne established himself as the embodiment of rugged, all-American masculinity. Understanding the man and the myth—and it was not clear where one left off and the other began—is key to understanding his enduring legacy. 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. Like Teddy Roosevelt, Wayne’s rugged masculinity was realized through violence, and it was a distinctly white male ideal.

Within evangelicalism itself, this activism is often depicted as an expression of long-standing opposition to same-sex relationships triggered by the gay rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but the virulence with which conservative Christians opposed gay rights was rooted in the cultural and political significance they placed on the reassertion of distinct gender roles during those decades. Same-sex relationships challenged the most basic assumptions of the evangelical worldview.5

Morgan’s message reached a large audience in part because she was able to take advantage of the new distribution network within the Christian publishing industry.

The Total Woman offered Christians a model of femininity, but it also presented, along the way, a model of masculinity. To be a man was to have a fragile ego and a vigorous libido. Men were entitled to lead, to rule, and to have their needs met—all their needs, on their terms. Morgan’s version of femininity hinges on this view of masculinity. It’s not difficult to see what part of this equation appealed to men, but Morgan’s primary audience was women. What attracted millions of women to The Total Woman? Morgan’s message appealed to women invested in defending “traditional womanhood” against the feminist challenge.

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.”

THE PERSON WHO WOULD most clearly turn the personal political for evangelical women wasn’t an evangelical at all. Phyllis Schlafly was Catholic, but her popularity among evangelical women reflected new alliances forming among conservative women, alliances she herself helped cement.

In 1952, Schlafly ran for Congress herself. Campaigning with the slogan “A Woman’s Place Is in the House,” she won the Republican primary but lost in the general election.

As late as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution urging states to expand access to abortion. 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. In 1973, Roe v. Wade—and the rising popularity of abortion in its wake—helped force the issue, but even then, evangelical mobilization was not immediate. 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

For its opponents, the ERA took on a symbolic quality, encompassing a larger moral and existential threat to women, and to the nation.

What is striking is just how much of Schlafly’s best-selling book is devoted to an explicit political agenda. Given Schlafly’s “lifelong hobby,” this isn’t entirely surprising, 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.

In an era when race was increasingly discussed through coded language, her ideas were embraced by the same communities who opposed civil rights. In fact, the ERA was the first issue conservatives rallied around after they lost the legal battle for segregation.

The very language that critics of the ERA employed mirrored that used by segregationists.

Opponents’ fixation on unisex bathrooms caught many feminists off guard, but it pointed to deeper social anxieties that this new movement for “equal rights” was tapping into. It also prefigured the furor on the Right, and the evangelical Right in particular, over transgender people and bathrooms in our own time.22

To Schlafly’s supporters, the ERA was a religious issue. As one of her STOP ERA state workers explained, “Phyllis is a religious leader—perhaps the most powerful in the country today. Because it’s women who generally keep the family’s faith and it’s women who support Phyllis.” STOP ERA was “a religious war,” and that’s why they were winning.

As women like Marabel Morgan and Elisabeth Elliot helped unify white Christian women around a shared domestic identity, Schlafly converted these women into political activists. Speaking directly to ordinary housewives across the nation, she endowed their quotidian lives with religious and national significance, uniting Catholic, evangelical, and Mormon women, women in the white middle and working classes—the women of the Silent Majority—in a common cause.

It’s hard to overstate Schlafly’s significance in marshalling the forces of the Religious Right. Years before James Dobson or Jerry Falwell entered the political fray, Phyllis Schlafly helped unify white Christians around a rigid and deeply conservative vision of family and nation.

Inspired by research he had conducted for his master’s thesis in Christian education at Wheaton College, Gothard sought to apply Christian principles to solving conflicts between parents and teens.

In this way, Gothard’s philosophy built on the Christian Reconstructionist teachings of Rousas John Rushdoony. A somewhat shadowy but influential figure in conservative evangelicalism, Rushdoony gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s by advocating a strict adherence to the authority of “biblical law.” By any measure, Rushdoony was an extremist. He believed that America was founded as a Christian nation, but also that Enlightenment notions of equality were dangerous and wrong and that democracy was antithetical to God-ordained governing structures. The Civil War wasn’t a battle over slavery, he insisted, but rather a religious war in which the South was defending Christian civilization. In his view, slavery had been voluntary, and beneficial to slaves. He opposed interracial marriage, looked unfavorably on the education of African Americans and women, and disapproved of women’s suffrage and of women speaking in public. Some of his writings bordered on anti-Semitism. Rushdoony believed that the disorder of modern society could be remedied with the institution of Old Testament law, and at the heart of this project was the assertion of hierarchical authority. For Rushdoony and his devotees, freedom was found not in individual autonomy, but in proper submission to authority, and he believed that God-ordained authorities in each sphere of life—family, church, and government—should function without outside interference. Churches must be free from government interference, and th...

Like Rushdoony, Gothard believed that most problems could be solved by submitting to the proper authorities in each domain of life. To this end, he advanced the idea of a divinely ordained “chain of command” similar to that of the military. In the family, the father was the ultimate authority. A wife owed her husband total submission, requiring approval for even the smallest household decisions, and children owed parents absolute obedience in both action and attitude. The church was also part of the proper functioning of society, and church leaders were to wield absolute, God-given authority over members. Government, too, administered divinely sanctioned authority, with national leaders exercising authority over local officials, who in turn exercised authority over citizens. Proper authority structured business as well; the employer wielded God-given authority over employees. In this way, proponents of “biblical law” married “traditional” gender roles to unrestrained, free-market capitalism. It was a match made in heaven.

For Gothard, those in authority were stand-ins for God and were owed absolute obedience. In his moral universe, the notion of personal rights interfered with the hierarchical structure of authority, contradicting God’s design and provoking only anger and resentment. The meek would inherit the earth; the solution for the aggrieved was not in changing their circumstances, but rather in wholesale submission to the authorities placed over them. For both Gothard and Rushdoony, this order found expression in the authoritarian rule of men. Men who forsook their duty to impose order abdicated their masculinity, allowing women to usur...

LaHaye strove to arouse Christians’ sense of embattlement.

An evangelist, Robison was there to convert his audience to politics.

In 1980, the election widely hailed as the moment the Christian Right came into its own, evangelical voters bypassed the candidate who shared their faith tradition in favor of the one whose image and rhetoric more closely aligned with their values and aspirations.

election to Reagan, but it did succeed in securing the loyalty of evangelicals to the Republican Party. From Reagan on, no Democrat would again win the majority of white evangelical support, or threaten the same. Evangelicals’ loyalty to the Republican Party would continue to strengthen, and they would use their electoral clout to help define the Republican agenda for the generation to come.9

Since the 1950s, white southerners had been abandoning the Democratic Party, and Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Acts accelerated this process. Like Nixon, Reagan was adept at using racially coded rhetoric like states’ rights, “law and order,” and “forced busing” to appeal to white voters. Indeed, Reagan had launched his campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, praising states’ rights just a few miles down the road from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, and he campaigned at Bob Jones University at a time when the school was a flashpoint for private Christian schools fighting against desegregation mandates. By the 1980s, then, the Democratic Party had become the party of liberals, African Americans, and feminists, and the Republican Party the party of conservatives, traditionalists, and segregationists.10

To be sure, many Southern Baptists backed the status quo, including both patriarchy and white supremacy. By the end of the 1960s, when explicit white supremacy was no longer tenable, gender became even more significant. Until that time, Southern Baptists held varying views on gender roles. Some believed the Bible prohibited women from preaching and teaching, while others supported women’s religious leadership. Beginning in the 1960s, however, fundamentalists began to battle for control of the SBC, and gender was at the heart of the struggle.12

By 1979, conservative Southern Baptists’ sense of cultural crisis was acute, and they set out to take over the denomination.

One by one, conservatives gained control of the denomination’s seminaries, purging faculties of moderate voices. Moderates denounced this “power-crazed authoritarianism, a win-atany-cost ethic and a total disregard for personal values and religious freedom,” but to little avail.13

Al Mohler, who oversaw the purging of moderates from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offered a revealing glimpse into this process: “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. It was in their efforts to bolster patriarchal authority that Southern Baptists united with evangelicals across the nation, and the alliances drew them into the larger evangelical world. Within a generation, Southern Baptists began to place their “evangelical” identity over their identity as Southern Baptists.

Perhaps the most influential evangelical book on military rearmament was Hal Lindsey’s The 1980’s: Countdown to Armageddon, a sequel to his best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth that was timed to the 1980 election. For Lindsey, rearmament was not simply a pragmatic decision; it was a religious requirement. The Bible was telling the United States to build a powerful military force, to “become strong again.” The book spent twenty-one weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list.21