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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Patriarchy was key to the success of nations, and to be “anti-patriotic” was “to be a spiritual ingrate.”5

By the 2000s, Phillips emerged as a leading figure in the Quiverfull movement, a pronatalist movement within conservative Protestantism that was especially popular in homeschool networks. It took its name from Psalm 127:4–5: “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.”

In 2000, Farris founded Patrick Henry College, a college catering to homeschoolers. Although the school accepted fewer than one hundred students a year, in its fourth year of existence it accounted for 7 percent of White House interns. In 2004, Farris and the HSLDA launched Generation Joshua to recruit homeschooled teenagers as foot soldiers for the Republican Party.

It wasn’t just junior culture warriors who were bringing militant patriarchy into the halls of power. In his investigation of the Family, the secretive group (also known as the Fellowship) that had organized the National Prayer Breakfast since the 1950s, journalist Jeff Sharlet found evidence of John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart warrior code, of knights-in-shining-armor purity culture, and of the Christian Reconstructionist-infused patriarchy of Doug Phillips’s Vision Forum. These sources fed a hypermasculine and authoritarian ethos within the organization, one that meshed well with their attempts to consolidate power nationally and globally.9

Driscoll sought to distance himself from earlier culture warriors like Falwell and Dobson, and he liked to bill himself as apolitical. But the trendy packaging masked a culture-warrior mentality every bit as belligerent as that of his predecessors, if not more so.

By listening to men like Driscoll and Piper, young evangelical men became part of a larger movement. They were called to be heroes.20

LIKE WILSON AND PHILLIPS, Driscoll was somewhat of an outlier, an independent operator intent first and foremost on building his own empire. But he also established himself as a highly respected, if controversial, leader among his fellow evangelicals, particularly among young male pastors.

Driscoll inspired by example, but he also helped construct new networks that would leave their imprint on twenty-first-century evangelicalism. Building on a foundation set by R. C. Sproul, John MacArthur, and John Piper, Driscoll helped fuel the movement of the “young, restless and reformed,” a revival of Calvinism that swept through American evangelicalism—and denominations like the SBC—in the 2000s. As cofounder of the Acts 29 network and as a founding member of The Gospel Coalition, Driscoll positioned himself at the center of an emerging movement that sought to revitalize evangelicalism with an injection of masculine “New Calvinist” doctrine.22

Strict gender complementarianism was at the heart of this Calvinist resurgence. For leaders of the movement, patriarchal power was at the core of gospel Christianity; in the words of John Piper, God had given Christianity “a masculine feel.”23

For all their emphasis on sin, New Calvinists seemed remarkably unconcerned about the concentration of unchecked power in the hands of men. Roger Olson, a Baptist theologian who opposed the Calvinist insurgency, compared the “young, restless, and Reformed” movement to Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts seminar, observing that there was “a certain kind of personality that craves the comfort of absolute certainty as an escape from ambiguity and risk and they find it in religion or politics of a certain kind.” Such people were attracted to an ideology that was “absolutistic, logical (or seemingly so), simple and practical.” The notion of “God’s chain of command” offered precisely this absolutist certainty. Needless to say, white men were at the top of that chain of command, at least in terms of human relationships.24

Meanwhile, The Gospel Coalition, founded in 2005 by Tim Keller and D. A. Carson, grew into “a towering, thundering goliath,” a network of nearly 8000 congregations. TGC’s website hosted a battalion of conservative bloggers and garnered around 65 million annual page views on thousands of posts, and TGC organized dozens of conferences that distributed and amplified their message throughout American Christianity and beyond.

As one blogger put it, “the Internet has done for Reformed theology what MTV did for hip-hop culture.” John Piper, cofounder of CBMW, was “the single most potent factor” in this rise of Reformed theology. Piper’s Passion Conference, a Christian worship conference first held in 1997, introduced the pastor and theologian to a generation of young Christians in America and around the world. Piper’s book Desiring God sold more than 375,000 copies and was “practically required reading for many college-age evangelicals,” and his Desiring God website and conferences served as another focal point of the expanding network.

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. For instance, one of the most notable theological differences among leaders concerned the question of cessationism—whether the spiritual gifts of tongues, prophecy, and healing ceased with the apostolic age (a view espoused by MacArthur) or continued into the present (a view expressed by charismatics and many New Calvinists, including Piper, Mahaney, and Grudem). 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.

On issues of race, Wilson’s views were similarly extreme. In the 1990s, Wilson had coauthored Southern Slavery: As It Was, which questioned the supposed “brutalities, immoralities, and cruelties” of slavery. The slave trade might have been unbiblical, he allowed, but slavery most certainly was not. To the contrary, the radical abolitionists were the ones “driven by a zealous hatred of the Word of God.” Horrific descriptions of slavery were nothing more than abolitionist propaganda. The life of a slave had been a life of plenty, of ample food, good medical care, and simple pleasures, marked by “a degree of mutual affection between the races” that could never be achieved through coercive federal legislation. In 2005 he published Black and Tan, a sequel that presented Robert E. Lee as “a gracious Christian gentleman, a brother in Christ,” and claimed that Christian slave owners were “on firm scriptural ground.”30

United in their concern about gender and authority, conservative evangelical men knit together an expanding network of institutions, organizations, and alliances that amplified their voices and enhanced their power.

Within this network, differences—significant doctrinal disagreements, disagreements over the relative merits of slavery and the Civil War—could be smoothed over in the interest of promoting “watershed issues” like complementarianism, the prohibition of homosexuality, the existence of hell, and substitutionary atonement. Most foundationally, they were united in a mutual commitment to patriarchal power.33

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. Evangelicals who offered competing visions of sexuality, gender, or the existence of hell found themselves excluded from conferences and associations, and their writings banned from popular evangelical bookstores and distribution channels. Through deliberate strategies and the power of the marketplace, the exclusion of alternative views would contribute to the radicalization of evangelicalism in post-9/11 America.

IF THERE WAS A CENTRAL HUB TO THE SPRAWLING network that was twenty-first-century American evangelicalism, it was Colorado Springs. The “Wheaton of the West,” Colorado Springs had displaced the original Wheaton, a center of a more genteel, establishment evangelicalism, and had surpassed Lynchburg and Orange County in terms of significance in the evangelical world.

The entrenchment of evangelicalism in Colorado Springs coincided with the growth of the military in the region. In 1954, the United States Air Force Academy was established in Colorado Springs. The city would eventually house three air force bases, an army fort, and the North American Air Defense Command. In the 1960s, the Nazarene Bible College opened its doors, and soon an array of evangelical, charismatic, and fundamentalist churches, colleges, ministries, nonprofits, and businesses took root. Lured by local tax breaks and drawn to the growing epicenter of evangelical power, nearly one hundred Christian parachurch organizations sprouted up within a five-mile vicinity of the academy, including Officers’ Christian Fellowship, the International Bible Society, Youth for Christ, the Navigators, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Christian Booksellers Association, Fellowship of Christian Cowboys, Christian Camping International, and, most significantly, Dobson’s Focus on the Family.2

Meanwhile, with Gary Bauer at its helm, the Family Research Council grew into the most powerful organization of the Christian Right in the nation’s capital.3

ALSO WITHIN SIGHT of the air force academy stood another evangelical stronghold, New Life Church. One of the nation’s most influential megachurches, New Life was founded in 1984 by Ted Haggard, one of “the nation’s most politically influential” clergy. His father had established an international charismatic ministry, but Haggard was “born again” at the age of sixteen after hearing Bill Bright preach at Explo ’72. After attending Oral Roberts University, Haggard came under the mentorship of Jack Hayford, founding pastor of a Pentecostal megachurch in Van Nuys, California—the church that essentially launched the megachurch model for suburban evangelicalism. Dobson had greater name recognition, but Haggard rivaled his friend and neighbor when it came to influence. He oversaw his own association of around 300 churches, and in 2003 he became president of the National Association of Evangelicals. By that time the organization represented 45,000 churches and 30 million Christians and was the country’s most powerful religious lobby.7

The academy, Antoon realized, had become “a giant Trojan horse for evangelicals to get inside the military.”15

But in the age of the War on Terror, pastors weren’t necessarily the most effective purveyors of Christian manhood. The military was where boys became men, and where men matured in the Christian faith. Military men, then, could serve as guides for civilian men, and for the church as a whole.

Not all evangelicals jumped on the anti-Muslim bandwagon. In 2007, nearly 300 Christian leaders signed the “Yale Letter,” a call for Christians and Muslims to work together for peace. Published in the New York Times, the letter was signed by several prominent evangelical leaders, including megachurch pastors Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, Christianity Today editor David Neff, emerging church leader Brian McLaren, Jim Wallis of Sojourners, and Rich Mouw, president of evangelical Fuller Seminary. Notably, Leith Anderson, president of the NAE, and Richard Cizik, the NAE’s chief lobbyist, also signed the letter.15

In 2007, white evangelical Protestants continued to register more negative views of Muslims than other demographics, and to persist in their belief that Islam encouraged violence. A 2009 survey also revealed that evangelicals were significantly more likely than other religious groups to approve of the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Sixty-two percent agreed that torture could be justified “often” or “sometimes,” compared to 46 percent of mainline Protestants and 40 percent of unaffiliated respondents. The widespread embrace of a militant Christian nationalism would have far-reaching consequences in the age of terror.17

Part of Boykin’s mission involved evading the Geneva Conventions, and he appeared to be working to replace international law with his own notion of biblical law. He understood himself to be in God’s direct chain of command. President Bush, too, was “appointed by God” to root out evildoers. Clearly, they answered only to the highest power.21

Boykin, however, had other things on his mind. At the height of the scandal, he was also engaged in a covert operation to “gitmoize” the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Boykin had flown to Iraq to meet with the commander of Guantanamo, who had been called to Baghdad to brief military commanders on interrogation techniques. Under Rumsfeld’s command, Cambone introduced these methods—both physical coercion and sexual humiliation—at Abu Ghraib to extract intelligence on the Iraqi insurgence. All of this was carried out secretly within the Defense Department. When news, including photographs, leaked of the tactics being employed, members of the 372nd Military Police Company took the fall. Boykin remained at his post until his retirement in 2007.23

The neoconservative agenda meshed exceedingly well with evangelical militarism. To the chagrin of neoconservatives, Bush had campaigned on a more restrained foreign policy, but the terror attacks had changed everything.

Whereas in previous generations a sense of the inherent risk of war had prevailed, a sense that war could lead to unintended consequences and that military power was “something that democracies ought to treat gingerly,” by the early 2000s this sense had all but disappeared. With evangelicals in the vanguard, Americans had come to see the military as a bastion of “traditional values and old-fashioned virtue,” a view only possible by turning a blind eye to reports of military misconduct and sexual abuse within the ranks. Members of the military tended to agree with assessments of their superior virtue, although some senior officials did express reservations, suggesting that such tendencies were not healthy in armed forces serving a democracy. But there were no serious checks on this inclination. When civilians become the leading militarists, the very concept of civilian control of the military loses its potency.27

SEVENTY-FOUR PERCENT of white evangelicals voted for the McCain/Palin ticket. But 24 percent of white evangelicals—up 4 percent from 2004—broke ranks and voted for Obama.

For Christian nationalists, casting doubt on Obama’s faith functioned in the same way as questioning the legitimacy of his citizenship. The president’s problem, according to Graham, was that “he was born a Muslim”—the “seed of Islam” had passed through his father to him, and “the Islamic world sees the president as one of theirs.” Graham saw “a pattern of hostility to traditional Christianity by the Obama administration” while Muslims seemed to be “getting a pass.”11

During Obama’s first term, conservative evangelicals worked to woo back wayward members of the younger generation. Two years after Obama was elected, Wayne Grudem, cofounder of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, former president of the Evangelical Theological Society, and one of the leading proponents of gender complementarianism, decided to weigh in on politics directly. Until then, Grudem had focused primarily on theology and gender, writing several books promoting “biblical manhood and womanhood,” serving as general editor for the ESV Study Bible, and penning an evangelical approach to systematic theology. In 2010, he published what amounted to a systematic guide to politics; weighing in at over six hundred pages, the book offered an exhaustive guide to the “biblical” view on all things political. Grudem denounced abortion and LGBT rights and defended religious freedom and national sovereignty. Illegal immigration was a problem, but so were the “too many” legal immigrants who didn’t seem to be assimilating. He recommended immediately and effectively closing the borders, especially the border with Mexico. For Grudem, loving one’s neighbors meant going to war to protect them from “evil aggressors.” Military strength was a blessing, and it was wrong not to use it, especially in the case of the nation’s greatest threat, Islamic terrorism. Treating terrorism as a “law-enforcement problem” wouldn’t work; preemptive war was required.

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

Both Christian theology and “this constitutional republic” reserved “a high and honored place for the warrior.”30

The “Moral Majority” had reasserted itself, electing the least moral candidate in memory to the highest office of the land.34

In the aftermath of Trump’s election, many pundits pointed to economic motivations behind support for Trump more generally, and some applied this reasoning to his white evangelical base as well. But surveys before and after the election disproved this theory. Fears about cultural displacement far outweighed economic factors when it came to support for Trump.

In fact, among white working-class Americans, economic hardship predicted support for Hillary Clinton rather than for Trump. Among white evangelicals, economic anxiety also didn’t register as a primary reason for supporting Trump. Although evangelicals may have celebrated rural and working-class values, many were securely middle-class and made their home in suburbia. 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 status.

Many evangelicals themselves claimed to have “held their noses” when they voted for Trump as the lesser of two evils. It is true that concerns about Clinton’s moral character, corruption, and deficiencies on national security had reached a fevered pitch among conservative evangelicals, though it’s worth noting that similar—or significantly more serious—questions about Trump’s character, corruption, and security liabilities were more easily dispatched. Still, there was the Supreme Court to consider. Certain “character flaws” might be overlooked in the interest of defending religious freedom and protecting the lives of the unborn. Trump would indeed come through on this front as far as evangelicals were concerned. Yet in the weeks and months after the election, after the specter of Hillary Clinton had been vanquished and court appointments secured, few evangelicals seemed willing to critique behaviors they might otherwise have been expected to find repulsive, or at the very least troubling. White evangelical support held steady for the man who redefined the meaning of “presidential.” In the aftermath of the election, it was #NeverTrump evangelicals who ended up on the defensive. Russell Moore found his job in jeopardy when more than one hundred SBC churches threatened to withhold donations unless he resigned. (When Trump invited evangelical leaders to a Rose Garden ceremony to celebrate his executive order on religious freedom, Moore was not in attendance—a matter of grave c...

For some, the question of evangelical support for Trump had a simpler explanation: rank hypocrisy. Indeed, in the weeks between the release of the Access Hollywood tape and the election, PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) social scientists identified a curious “Trump effect.” Five years earlier, only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed that “a person who commits an ‘immoral’ act could behave ethically in a public role.” The month before the election, 72 percent believed this was possible. According to the PRRI’s Robert P. Jones, “This dramatic abandonment of the whole idea of ‘value voters’ is one of the most stunning reversals in recent American political history.”38

Evangelicals hadn’t betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity. He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn’t afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn’t let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done. Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace. He was a hero for God-and-country Christians in the line of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Oliver North, one suited for Duck Dynasty Americans and American Christians. He was the latest and greatest high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity.

THREE MONTHS INTO DONALD TRUMP’S presidency, three-quarters of white evangelicals approved of his job performance, nearly twice as high as his approval rating among the general public. Trump’s evangelical support was strongest among regular churchgoers. Most evangelicals appeared to be far less conflicted about their crude, egotistical, morally challenged president than many had imagined them to be. But this shouldn’t have come as a surprise.1

DRISCOLL, MAHANEY, PATRICK, MacArthur, and MacDonald had all risen to prominence through their aggressive promotion of patriarchal power. To those who cared to notice, it was clear that Trump wasn’t the first domineering leader to win over evangelicals.

This was too much for Russell Moore (no relation to Roy): “Christian, if you cannot say definitively, no matter what, that adults creeping on teenage girls is wrong, do not tell me how you stand against moral relativism.” Yet once again Russell Moore found himself in the minority; one poll suggested that 37 percent of the state’s evangelicals were more likely to vote for Moore in the wake of the allegations. In the end Moore lost his bid, the first Republican to lose a Senate race in Alabama since 1992, but white evangelicals had voted for him at the remarkably resilient rate of 80 percent.7

By this point in time there was nothing shocking about allegations of Trump’s sexual conduct, and the response of Trump’s evangelical supporters was also predictable. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, explained that evangelicals “gave him a mulligan”—“they let him have a do-over.” Why? Evangelicals were “tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists,” Perkins groused, and they were “finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”8

Moreover, close to half of all white evangelicals thought Kavanaugh should be confirmed even if the allegations proved true. Once again, observers were left wondering: How could evangelicals—who for half a century had campaigned on “moral values,” who had called on men to “protect” women and girls—find so many ways to dispute, deny, and dismiss cases of infidelity, sexual harassment, and abuse? Was this simply the case of political expediency, or naked tribalism, eclipsing “family values”?9 History, however, makes plain that evangelicals’ tendency to dismiss or deny cases of sexual misconduct and abuse, too, was nothing new.

Reminiscent of the 1980s, the 2000s saw a spate of sex scandals topple evangelical leaders. In many cases, the abuse or misconduct stretched back years, even decades. Many of the men implicated in the abuse, or in covering up cases of abuse, were the same men who had been preaching militant masculinity, patriarchal authority, and female purity and submission. The frequency of these instances, and the tendency of evangelicals to diminish or dismiss cases of abuse in their own communities, suggests that evangelicals’ response to allegations of abuse in the era of Trump cannot be explained by political expediency alone. Rather, these tendencies appear to be endemic to the movement itself.

Within this framework, men assign themselves the role of protector, but the protection of women and girls is contingent on their presumed purity and proper submission to masculine authority. This puts female victims in impossible situations. Caught up in authoritarian settings where a premium is placed on obeying men, women and children find themselves in situations ripe for abuse of power. Yet victims are often held culpable for acts perpetrated against them; in many cases, female victims, even young girls, are accused of “seducing” their abusers or inviting abuse by failing to exhibit proper femininity. While men (and women) invested in defending patriarchal authority frequently come to the defense of perpetrators, victims are often pressured to forgive abusers and avoid involving law enforcement. Immersed in these teachings about sex and power, evangelicals are often unable or unwilling to name abuse, to believe women, to hold perpetrators accountable, and to protect and empower survivors.10

When it became clear that Jones’s allegations could indeed be substantiated, Mark Driscoll offered a different line of defense. Although no women were involved in this sex scandal, that didn’t keep Driscoll from finding a woman to blame. It wasn’t unusual, he explained, “to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go.” Women who knew their husbands were “trapped into fidelity” could become lazy. Moreover, a wife who wasn’t “sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about” might not be responsible for a husband’s sin, but she certainly wasn’t helping him.12

the assessment of former member T. F. Charlton, “the combination of patriarchal gender roles, purity culture, and authoritarian clergy that characterizes Sovereign Grace’s teachings on parenting, marriage, and sexuality” created an environment where women and children—especially girls—were “uniquely vulnerable to abuse.”

As Charlton recognized, “submission theology protects the privileges of the powerful.”15