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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

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.

FOR AMERICAN CHRISTIANS, the challenge was to reconcile this aggressive new masculinity with traditional Christian virtue. With its emphasis on gentility and restraint, Victorian Christianity suddenly seemed insufficiently masculine. Virile, aggressive men could hardly be expected to submit themselves to such an emasculating faith, and so in the 1910s, Christian men set out to “re-masculinize” American Christianity. Seeking to offset the “womanly virtues” that had come to dominate the faith, they insisted that Christianity was also “essentially masculine, militant, warlike.” It was time for men to take back the church. There was precedent for such tinkering with Christian virtue. In the American South, white masculinity had long championed a sense of mastery over dependents—over women, children, and slaves. Southern men kept vigilant watch over these dependents and, by extension, over the larger social order. Initially, this southern culture of mastery and honor seemed to conflict with the egalitarian impulses of evangelical Christianity. (In Christ there was neither slave nor free, male nor female, according to the apostle Paul.) But southern evangelicals found a way to define Christian manhood in a manner that sanctified aggression; to maintain order and fulfill their role as protectors, there were times when Christian men must resort to violence.