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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Mahaney’s friends were loyal because of a shared stake in a patriarchal “gospel,” and also, it turns out, because Mahaney had been lining their pockets. According to Detwiler, “Mahaney made a habit of doubling his friends’ honoraria (speaking fees) while also providing them with lavish hotels, flight arrangements, new computers, and other gifts.” He gave Mark Dever’s church $10,000, and he and Sovereign Grace donated “$200,000 or more” to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where Al Mohler, one of Mahaney’s strongest supporters, served as president.18

2014, Bill Gothard stepped down from his Institute in Basic Life Principles after more than thirty women—including some minors—accused him of molestation and sexual harassment. For over fifty years, Gothard had advocated modesty, parental authority, strict discipline, and other such “family values.” In 2016 ten women filed a suit against Gothard, charging him and ministry leaders with sexual harassment, abuse, and cover-up; one woman accused Gothard of rape. Gothard maintained his innocence. Conveniently, in his own writings Gothard had insisted that God had established “very strict guidelines of responsibility” for victims of abuse: if a woman failed to cry out for help, she was “equally guilty with the attacker.”

Moreover, Wilson suggested that women who rejected submissive femininity were “unprotected”; women who refused masculine protection were “really women who tacitly agree on the propriety of rape.”

Across conservative evangelicalism, it was not uncommon for allegations of assault to be met with skepticism or otherwise covered up or dismissed. In 2014, an independent report found that Bob Jones University had been telling victims not to report sexual assault to the police so as not to harm their families, churches, and the university. For decades, too, they’d told victims they were to blame for their abuse.

DESPITE MOUNTING EVIDENCE to the contrary, in the early 2000s many evangelicals persisted in the belief that sexual abuse was a problem plaguing the Catholic church, and that any instances within their own communities were exceptions that proved the rule. But in 2018, the #MeToo movement came to American evangelicalism. The increasing frequency and scale of revelations of abuse within their own circles made this assertion more difficult to sustain.

Over the next several months, it became clear that the problem of abuse within evangelicalism was not just one of a few high-profile leaders. In December 2018, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram uncovered at least 412 allegations of sexual misconduct linked to 187 Independent Fundamental Baptist churches and affiliated institutions, stretching across forty states and Canada. Victims suggest the number is far greater but suppressed by a culture of silence. At least forty-five alleged abusers continued in ministry positions even after accusations came to light, transferred from one church to another to evade accountability. Within this network, “men of God” ruled by fear. To question the pastor was to question God. Victims were accused of being “promiscuous,” were ostracized, and were at times made to apologize in front of their congregations.33

For a community that believed in the existence of sin, conservative evangelicals were curiously nonchalant about the dangers of unchecked power when that power was placed in the hands of a patriarch.

Since 1998, around 380 perpetrators within the SBC had left a trail of more than 700 victims. In the wake of these revelations, a number of SBC leaders denied collective culpability, drawing attention to the autonomy afforded local churches within the SBC. Yet the SBC had a record of promptly “removing from fellowship” churches that hired female pastors, even as they appeared unable to discipline those that hired known sex offenders. Many victims had been urged to forgive their abusers, and it was victims, rather than predators, who frequently ended up shunned by their churches. As one SBC victim testified, the crisis of abuse in the church was “an epidemic powered by a culture of our own making.”34

In her powerful victim statement at the Nassar trial, Denhollander had rebuked Nassar for asking for forgiveness without repentance. She said the same was true of churches. God was a God of forgiveness, but also a God of justice, and churches’ tendency to cover up abuse and quickly “forgive” perpetrators, often for the sake of the church’s witness, was misguided. “The gospel of Jesus Christ does not need your protection,” she insisted. Jesus only requires obedience—obedience manifested in the pursuit of justice, in standing up for the victimized and the oppressed, in telling “the truth about the evil of sexual assault and the evil of covering it up.”36

Those who occupy what center there is have largely failed to define themselves against the more extreme expressions of “biblical patriarchy,” and there are reasons for this. With the escalation of the culture wars in the 2000s, stronger affinities—both theological and cultural—bound together “normative complementarians” and “biblical patriarchs” than Finn cared to admit, and this was not happenstance. For decades, networks had been forged and alliances secured, linking the center and peripheries. At the same time, a vast consumer market cared little for such distinctions. One no longer needed to attend a Bill Gothard seminar to tap into his extremist ideology; one could buy Phillips’s latest DVD online. Or watch reality television. The Duggars, after all, were a national phenomenon.

When it came to evangelical masculinity, the ideological extreme bore a remarkable resemblance to the mainstream. In the end, Doug Wilson, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, James Dobson, Doug Phillips, and John Eldredge all preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. It was a vision that promised protection for women but left women without defense, one that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making. Though rooted in different traditions and couched in different styles, their messages blended together to become the dominant chord in the cacophony of evangelical popular culture. And they had been right all along. The militant Christian masculinity they practiced and preached did indelibly shape both family and nation.

This Jesus was over half a century in the making. Inspired by images of heroic white manhood, evangelicals had fashioned a savior who would lead them into the battles of their own choosing. The new, rugged Christ transformed Christian manhood, and Christianity itself.

It’s not just the religious rhetoric that is striking here, or the fact that it could have been lifted straight out of dozens, if not hundreds, of books on evangelical masculinity. A common sense of embattlement also links the rhetoric of the NRA to that of conservative white evangelicalism. For both, a bunker mentality strengthens identity and loyalty, and fuels militancy. Even though conservatives have dominated public policy on gun control for decades, a persecution narrative rooted in a sense of cultural decline has long mobilized gun rights advocates and driven gun sales, especially during Democratic administrations. For conservative white evangelicals, guns carry a symbolic weight that can only be understood within this larger culture of militancy.3

consider evangelical views on immigration and border security. More than any other religious demographic, white evangelicals see immigrants in a negative light. Two years into Trump’s presidency, more than two-thirds of white evangelicals did not think the United States had a responsibility to accept refugees. In 2019, nearly the same percentage supported Trump’s border wall. Given that the Bible is filled with commands to welcome the stranger and care for the foreigner, these attitudes might seem puzzling. Yet evangelicals who claim to uphold the authority of the Scriptures are quite clear that they do not necessarily look to the Bible to inform their views on immigration; a 2015 poll revealed that only 12 percent of evangelicals cited the Bible as their primary influence when it came to thinking about immigration. But this does not mean that religion does not matter. Evangelicals may self-identify as “Bible-believing Christians,” but evangelicalism itself entails a broader set of deeply held values communicated through symbol, ritual, and political allegiances.4

What started as a backlash against hippies, antiwar protestors, civil rights activists, and urban minorities evolved into a veneration of law enforcement and the military. It’s no surprise, then, that the majority of evangelicals would agree that “building walls is not non-Christian,” that there is “nothing anti-gospel about protecting our nation from those who would do our nation harm,” and that those perceived as threats are members of nonwhite populations.5

Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it.

In 2016, CBMW’s Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware advanced a theology of the Trinity that made Jesus “eternally subordinate” to God the Father, in order—according to critics—to justify the eternal, God-ordained subordination of women to men. Grudem and Ware might have been following in the footsteps of Elisabeth Elliot, who had written about this notion in the 1970s, but in doing so they were parting ways with roughly two millennia of Christian orthodoxy.

For critics, this raised an important question: were men defending patriarchy because they believed it to be biblical, or were they twisting the Scriptures in order to defend patriarchy?6

Conservative evangelicals have long positioned themselves against “the secular,” but as the cultural evangelicalism of Hobby Lobby indicates, sacred and secular can be difficult to distinguish. For many evangelicals, the masculine values men like John Wayne, William Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Jordan Peterson, and Donald Trump embody have come to define evangelicalism itself.

Evangelical masculinity serves as the foundation of a God-and-country Christian nationalism, but that hasn’t stopped American evangelicals from exporting aspects of this ideology globally, to places like Uganda, India, Jamaica, and Belize. Evangelicals in Brazil, drawing on their own culture of machismo and borrowing from the playbook of American evangelicals, helped install Jair Bolsonaro—a thrice-married strongman known for his misogynistic statements, his antigay agenda, and his defense of “traditional” family values—as the nation’s president. Over the past decade, groups like Focus on the Family, the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association have funneled more than $50 million into right-wing European organizations. American evangelicals have also forged ties with Vladimir Putin, who is known for flaunting his bare-chested masculinity, and with conservative elements in the Russian Orthodox Church; in 2014, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s Decision magazine featured Putin on its cover, and Franklin Graham praised the Russian president for standing up to the “gay and lesbian agenda.” The next year, Graham met with Putin in Moscow, an occasion that prompted him to praise Putin as a defender of “traditional Christianity” while accusing President Obama of promoting atheism. In foreign policy as in domestic politics, the cult of masculinity can transform loyalties and reshape alliances.

For conservative white evangelicals steeped in this ideology, it can be difficult to extricate their faith, and their identity, from this larger cultural movement. As one man who grew up awash in evangelical masculinity and 1990s purity culture later reflected, “I lived and breathed these teachings, and they still shape me in ways I don’t understand even 20 years after rejecting them intellectually.”12

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

And for other evangelicals, it was the election of Donald Trump that prompted them to abandon evangelicalism entirely. Some attempted to use Trump to summon fellow believers to greater faithfulness. Michael Gerson sought to lead evangelicals out of “temptation,” warning that President Trump’s “tribalism and hatred for ‘the other’ stand in direct opposition to Jesus’s radical ethic of neighbor love.” Quoting Matthew 6, columnist Cal Thomas reminded evangelicals that “No one can serve two masters,” and he challenged Christians to choose their true master, Jesus or Trump: “They can’t serve both.” But, for evangelicals who have transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into a model of militant masculinity, the conflict is not apparent.17