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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Evangelicals found many reasons to support American military might. On a pragmatic level, they believed a strong military would ward off a godless communist takeover. When it came to risks of nuclear annihilation, evangelical theology’s emphasis on eternal life for the faithful helped mitigate such earthly terrors. In end-times scenarios they believed God would protect them; a nuclear holocaust might even be part of God’s plan. But a strong military and an aggressive foreign policy also aligned with evangelicals’ view of masculine power. Representatives of the Christian Right were not above insinuating a deficit of manliness among those who opposed the president’s policies. “Freezeniks” were sissies who lacked the courage to stand up to the communist threat.25

After a trip to Nicaragua, Jim Wallis, the most prominent spokesperson for the evangelical Left, wrote a scathing report in Sojourners accusing the Contras of horrific acts of violence.27

Even as the White House was tapping evangelical networks to drum up support for a military intervention in Nicaragua, some members of the administration were pursuing more clandestine avenues as well. In 1984, Iran had secretly requested weapons from the United States to use in its war with Iraq. Despite an arms embargo, Reagan was desperate to secure the release of seven American hostages held by Iranian terrorists in Lebanon. With Reagan’s support, the administration arranged for the shipment of more than 1500 missiles to Iran. Three hostages were released (but three more taken), and a portion of the payment for the arms sales was then diverted to support the Contras in Nicaragua. The NSC staff member responsible for this transaction was Oliver North. Thanks in part to an improperly entered bank account number, the entire scheme came to light, and in May 1987 North was called to testify before Congress.

Oliver North had become a hero of the Christian Right. The affinities were clear. Conservatives in the SBC had skirted conventions and eschewed niceties in order to wrest control of the denomination, just as North had skirted the rule of law in order to pursue a greater good. For both, the ends justified the means.

Even as he faded from view among the general public, North’s stature only increased among conservative Christians who were hungry for a hero of their own. Jerry Falwell led the way in lionizing North. In the spring of 1988, he had started a national petition drive to pardon North, and in May of that year he welcomed North to Liberty University as the school’s commencement speaker. When North arrived on campus, just one day after retiring from the military, Falwell compared him to Jesus. Reminding his audience that “we serve a savior who was indicted and convicted and crucified,” Falwell christened North “a true American hero.”2

Democratic Senator George Mitchell, a devout Catholic with his own military pedigree, rebuffed North’s patriotic platitudes: . . . you asked that Congress not cut off aid to the contras, for the love of God and for the love of country. . . . Please remember that others share that devotion and recognize that it is possible for an American to disagree with you on aid to the contras and still love God and still love this country just as much as you do. Although he’s regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics. And in America, disagreement with the policies of the Government is not evidence of lack of patriotism.11

Conservative political operative Ralph Reed described North’s appeal in this way: “Part of politics is having the right friends, but an important part of politics is having the right enemies.” Conservative Christians loved him for the enemies he’d made. His strategist and pollster explained his appeal in the words of country singer Garth Brooks: North appealed to the “hard-hat, gun rack, achin’-back, overtaxed, flag-waving, fun-lovin’ crowd.” With his God-and-country heroism, North tapped a populist vein in American politics. Critics, however, warned of his authoritarian tendencies, and of his disrespect for the truth. But for his supporters there was “what’s right” and “what’s legal,” and the two were not always the same. If North lied, “it must have been necessary.” There was no doubt “he was a good soldier.”14

Edwin Louis Cole, a man widely considered to be the “father of the Christian men’s movement.”

“Christlikeness and manhood are synonymous,” he insisted, and to be Christlike, to be a man, required “a certain ruthlessness.”16

At a time when religious leaders lacked the heroism that was so urgently needed, evangelicals found that heroism in a place where virtue and discipline still prevailed: the United States military.

But it was James Dobson who would play the most critical role in cementing ties between evangelicals and the military.

Yet even as the Cold War came to an anticlimactic end, the crusade theory of warfare endured.

In the wake of the 1980 White House Conference, James Dobson had established the Family Research Council, a conservative policy research organization to support “pro-family” policies. With Reagan in the White House, Dobson became a “regular consultant” to the president. (Dobson even recorded one of his Focus on the Family radio broadcasts with Reagan in the Oval Office, and Reagan had appointed him cochair of Citizens for Tax Reform and to the National Advisory Committee to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.) In 1980, Tim LaHaye had set aside his pastoral ministry for a full-time career in political activism. The next year he founded his secretive Council for National Policy. Leaked membership directories reveal the thickening web of conservative alliances: James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Beverly LaHaye, R. J. Rushdoony, Howard Phillips, Gary North, Pat Robertson, D. James Kennedy, Tony Perkins, Bill Bright, Ken Starr, Michael Farris, Jesse Helms, John Ashcroft, Trent Lott, Richard DeVos, Elsa Prince, Erik Prince, Wayne LaPierre, Richard Viguerie, Grover Norquist, Gary Bauer, Paul Weyrich, and Oliver North.

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.3

Robertson didn’t just talk the talk when it came to foreign policy. During the Reagan administration, he had expanded his evangelistic empire into Central America, and he came to support brutal right-wing regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala; CBN also became “the largest private donor to the Nicaraguan contra camps in Honduras” and a powerful advocate for aid to the Contras in Washington.

Nothing if not creative, Pat Robertson led the way in identifying the requisite crisis. Having failed in his presidential bid, Robertson used the millions of names on his campaign mailing list to found the Christian Coalition. In 1991, Robertson published The New World Order, arguing that President Bush was being duped into thinking the threat of communism was over.

Inspired by their interpretation of biblical prophecies in the Book of Revelation, conservative Protestants had long feared a “one-world” government that would be ruled over by the Antichrist. In the early twentieth century these fears had attached to the League of Nations, and during the Cold War these fears were often channeled into a virulent anticommunism—though Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) had warned of a European Community that would usher in the reign of the devil. With the fall of the Soviet Union, suspicions fell squarely on the UN. And, in the case of Robertson, on the Illuminati, on wealthy Jewish bankers, and on conspiratorial corporate internationalists.

Concerned about Buchanan’s level of support, Bush reached out to the National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention and began to more openly champion conservative social values. In this way, Bush ushered in what Reed termed “the most conservative and the most pro-family platform in the history of the party.” It called for a ban on abortion, opposed LGBT rights, and defended school prayer and homeschool rights. Buchanan didn’t unseat Bush, but he did shift the Republican Party farther to the Right.

Schlafly lashed out: “At stake is whether the White House will become a public relations vehicle for lying and polling, akin to a television show, or will remain a platform for the principled articulation of policies and values that Americans respect.” Clinton had “converted the once-serious offense of lying to the American public into a daily rite,” extinguishing all reverence for the presidency. The issue wasn’t really “what Bill Clinton did or didn’t do with Paula or Gennifer or Monica,” but “whether we are going to allow the president to get by with flouting the law and lying about it on television, while hiding behind his popularity in the polls.” If this precedent prevailed, Schlafly prophesied, “Americans can look forward to a succession of TV charlatans and professional liars occupying the White House.”17

Dobson found it “profoundly disturbing” that the rules seemed to be rewritten for Clinton.

“Character DOES matter,” Dobson opined. “You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it.”18

Ralph Reed, too, insisted that character mattered: “We care about the conduct of our leaders, and we will not rest until we have leaders of good moral character.” Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell sent a special edition of his weekly report to more than 160,000 evangelical pastors, urging them to call undecided House members to vote for Clinton’s impeachment. The Christian Coalition collected more than 250,000 signatures on petitions calling for the same. Dobson’s Family Research Council ran television ads calling for Clinton’s resignation due to his “virtue deficit.” Evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem signed a public letter criticizing Clinton for his “ill use of women” and his “manipulation of truth,” and SBC leaders Paige Patterson, Al Mohler, and Richard Land signed a letter taking Clinton to task.19

The unfaithful, draft-dodging, morally deficient president embodied all that was wrong with America.

Clinton’s job rating received a significant boost as the scandal unfolded—“the formerly feminized president had been resurrected as a phallic leader.”20

Among Clinton’s evangelical critics, it appears that their concern with Clinton’s predatory behavior was more about Clinton than about predatory behavior.

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. As Schlafly explained, the VAWA was just one more example of “the federal government’s insatiable demand for more power.” Schlafly also accused feminists of inflating rates of harassment and abuse, and she suggested that most of the exceedingly rare instances of actual harassment could be blamed on feminists themselves.

RELIGIOUS LEADERS WERE NOT the Clinton administration’s only, or even its loudest, critics. 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.

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. White evangelicals were drawn to the network, and the network, in turn, shaped evangelicalism. But this is not a case of politics hijacking religion; the affinities between Fox News and conservative evangelicalism ran deep. Long before O’Reilly invented the “War on Christmas,” evangelicals knew he was on their side. 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

No longer preoccupied with defending against the spread of communism, many evangelicals began to embrace a more expansive foreign policy agenda as they turned their attention to global poverty, human trafficking, the global AIDS epidemic, and the persecution of Christians around the world. In 1996, the NAE issued a “Statement of Conscience” that elevated religious persecution and human rights as chief foreign policy concerns. As Richard Cizik, the NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs, explained, in the post–Cold War era evangelicals had become “more interested in making a difference than in making a statement.” For a time, it seemed evangelicals’ “knee-jerk bellicosity” might be waning as they began to embrace a more diffuse set of commitments.29

Tensions between militant and more forward-looking expressions that characterized evangelicalism in the 1990s found expression in evangelical discussions of Christian manhood as well. Here, too, old certainties did not necessarily hold sway. Without the threat of godless communism to justify militant Christian masculinity, many evangelical men began to express uncertainty about what manhood in fact required.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Falwell used military and sports analogies interchangeably. By the 1990s, however, as some evangelicals began to back away from militaristic rhetoric, sports offered a more palatable alternative. In 1996, for instance, Ralph Reed sent a memo instructing grassroots leaders of the Christian Coalition to “avoid military rhetoric and to use sports metaphors instead.”

WITH ITS MASSIVE PUBLIC RALLIES and the enthusiastic participation of men across the nation, Promise Keepers captured the attention of the larger public. Yet, within evangelicalism two parallel movements would also play key roles in shaping understandings of Christian masculinity. One was the “complementarian” theology espoused by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW). The other was the sexual purity movement.

In 1986, in an address before the Evangelical Theological Society, theologian Wayne Grudem had called for a new organization to uphold biblical manhood and womanhood. The next year an informal group gathered to discuss the rise of “unbiblical teaching” about women and men, and in December of that year they convened more formally, this time in Danvers, Massachusetts. There, under the leadership of Grudem and fellow Reformed evangelical John Piper, they crafted a statement affirming what would come to be known as “complementarianism”: God created men and women “equal before God” yet “distinct in their manhood and womanhood.” The statement attested that God had established male headship as part of the order of creation and closed the door to women in church leadership. In 1989, CBMW published this “Danvers Statement” in a full-page advertisement in Christianity Today, drawing “a huge response.”33

The Danvers Statement was a response both to an alleged “gender confusion” ushered in by the 1960s and to the “evangelical feminism” that had emerged in the 1970s. It was not, however, a call to an aggressive, militant masculinity. It dictated that a husband’s headship be humble and loving rather than domineering, and it stipulated that “husbands should forsake harsh or selfish leadership and grow in love and care for their wives.” Yet in asserting female submission as the will of God, it foregrounded a biblical defense of patriarchy and gender difference that would come to serve as the bedrock of a militaristic Christian masculinity.34

Alarmed that “Biblical norms for the exclusively male vocation of warfare” were being ignored, CBMW noted that the whole purpose of combat was “to kill, slay and destroy,” a purpose and essence that aligned with masculinity, not femininity. Moreover, the moral justification for war involved the protection of vital national interests, most essentially the security and welfare of families. In other words, moral justification for combat was derived from and thus linked to self-sacrificial male headship. On a practical level, integrating women into combat weakened unit cohesion and threatened military order by “escalating sexual tensions,” straining the marital fidelity of “male warriors,” and subjecting “female warriors” to rape and abuse when taken as POWs. In short, it threatened national security and fundamentally controverted the will of God.36

LOL. Apparently the Hebrews read this very differently.

The fact that Bill Clinton was a moderate Southern Baptist only furthered the aims of conservatives. The SBC became increasingly political during his administration, endorsing capital punishment and affirming Americans’ right to bear arms.37

Like the Danvers Statement, this new position rooted the submission of women in the pre-Fall creation, not as a result of the Fall—overturning previous characterizations of submission issued in 1984.

Among complementarians, other doctrinal commitments seemed to pale in comparison to beliefs about gender, and ideas about male authority and the subordination of women increasingly came to distinguish “true evangelicals from pseudo evangelicals.”

IN TANDEM WITH EFFORTS to promote “biblical manhood and womanhood,” an elaborate “purity culture” was taking hold across American evangelicalism. Purity culture emerged as a cohesive movement in the 1990s, but it drew on teachings long championed by conservative evangelicals accustomed to upholding stringent standards of female sexual “purity” while assigning men the responsibility of “protecting” women and their chastity. Female modesty was a key component of purity culture. If men were created with nearly irrepressible, God-given sex drives, it was up to women to rein in men’s libidos. Wives were tasked with meeting husbands’ every sexual need, but it was the responsibility of women and girls to avoid leading men who were not their husbands into temptation.

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. Here was a case of government intrusion into the most intimate of matters, yet evangelicals didn’t seem to mind.42

Earlier in the decade, it might have appeared that the more egalitarian and emotive impulses had the upper hand. It was a new era for America, and for American evangelicals. Rhetoric of culture wars persisted, but evangelicals’ interests had expanded to include a broader array of issues, including racial reconciliation, antitrafficking activism, and addressing the persecution of the global church. At the end of the decade, however, the more militant movement would begin to reassert itself. When it did, this resurgent militancy would become intertwined both with the sexual purity movement and with the assertion of complementarianism within evangelical circles. In time it would become clear that the combination of all three could produce toxic outcomes.

Calvin College professors Mark Mulder and James K. A. Smith also called out Eldredge’s failure to reckon with the reality of sin, but they considered it a more fundamental flaw.

Less than five months after Dobson’s book appeared, Douglas Wilson published Future Men: Raising Boys to Fight Giants. The son of an evangelist who settled in Moscow, Idaho, Wilson had helped found “a Baptist-leaning, ‘hippie, Jesus People church.’” He had little formal theological training, and his church was, in his words, a “Baptist-Presbyterian ‘mutt.’” After encountering the teachings of Rushdoony, he inculcated Reconstructionist-inspired values within his faith community. Due to his hybrid theology, and no doubt also to his cantankerous personality, no established Reformed denomination would claim him. Undaunted, Wilson started his own denomination. In 1981, he founded the Logos School, a classical Christian academy, and he became a leader in the classical Christian education movement, establishing the Association of Classical and Christian Schools in 1994, and that same year founding New Saint Andrews College, a four-year classical Christian college with the motto: “For the faithful, wars shall never cease.”12

but the peace Christ brings was purchased with blood.

Um, the peace Christ brings was purchased with offering his own blood, not offensively spilling others’…

Woman was made for man, not the other way around. Young women should be instructed to be homemakers; women became “increasingly beautiful” when they cultivated “a gentle and quiet spirit.” Not surprisingly, Wilson thought women had no place in combat; they were a sexual distraction to male soldiers, they could get pregnant, they distorted “covenantal lines of authority,” and they were not as good as men in “the important work of violence.”14

He also parted ways with those who advocated a hierarchical authority structure that placed men under the authority of their employers. He couldn’t stomach the idea that a boss “holds God’s proxy as our employer,” although he expressed no such discomfort with a hierarchy of authority based on gender.20

In October 2002, five evangelical leaders sent a letter to President Bush to assure him that a preemptive invasion of Iraq did indeed meet the criteria for just war. Written by Richard Land, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and signed by fellow evangelicals Charles Colson, Bill Bright, D. James Kennedy, and Carl Herbster, the “Land letter” expressed appreciation for Bush’s “bold, courageous, and visionary leadership” and reassured him that his plans for military action were “both right and just.” Referencing the appeasement of Hitler, they urged Bush to disarm “the murderous Iraqi dictator” and reminded him that “the legitimate authority to authorize the use of U.S. military force” belonged to the United States government, not the UN. Elsewhere, Land cited Romans 13 to argue that “God ordained the civil magistrate” to punish evildoers.25 It wasn’t just the evangelical elite who supported a preemptive strike. In 2002, ordinary evangelical Christians were “the biggest backers of Israel and Washington’s planned war against Iraq”: 69 percent of conservative Christians favored military action, a full 10 percentage points higher than the general population. In 2003, once the war commenced, 87 percent of white evangelical Christians supported Bush’s decision to go to war, compared to 70 percent of Protestant mainliners and 59 percent of secular Americans.

Steeped in a literature claiming that men were created in the image of a warrior God, it’s no wonder evangelicals were receptive to sentiments like those expressed by Jerry Falwell in his 2004 sermon, “God is Pro-War.” Having long idealized cowboys and soldiers as models of exemplary Christian manhood, evangelicals were primed to embrace Bush’s “‘cowboy’ approach” and his “Lone Ranger mentality.” God created men to be aggressive—violent when necessary—so that they might fulfill their sacred role of protector.27

As militant masculinity took hold across evangelicalism, it helped bind together those on the fringes of the movement with those closer to the center, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the margins from the mainstream.

Christian homeschooling remained an effective mechanism for instilling and reinforcing “biblical patriarchy.” Within Christian homeschool circles, Bill Gothard continued to operate his IBLP and publish his homeschool curriculum infused with his understandings of masculine authority, female submission, and the need to restore America to its mythical Christian past. Gothard’s influence was not small; he estimated that more than 2.5 million people had attended his seminars. A number of leaders of the Christian Right had direct connections to Gothard. Mike Huckabee is an IBLP alumnus; Sarah Palin attended an IBLP conference while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska; and as governor of Texas, Rick Perry spoke at one of Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute conferences. Gothard remained in the shadows, preferring to teach his precepts in the context of highly controlled seminars. But in the 1990s, Doug Phillips began to introduce a Gothard-inspired “biblical patriarchy” far beyond the cultlike community Gothard had established.4