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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

He promised to lead. He had no doubts about the loyalty of his followers: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he claimed.1

Jeffress wasn’t alone. Already at that point, before the Iowa caucuses at the beginning of February, 42 percent of white evangelicals supported Trump—more than any other candidate. The reason was simple, Jeffress contended. Evangelicals were “sick and tired of the status quo.” They were looking for the leader who would “reverse the downward death spiral of this nation that we love so dearly.”2

A small group of residents, including students from the college and the Christian grade school, stood bundled against the chill, holding handmade signs proclaiming “Love Your Neighbors” and “Perfect Love Casts Out Fear.” But their numbers were dwarfed by Trump’s supporters. Their numbers were again dwarfed on November 8, 2016, when 82 percent of Sioux County voters voted for Donald Trump—a proportion remarkably close to the 81 percent of white evangelical voters who backed Trump, according to national exit polls, and proved crucial to his victory over Hillary Clinton.3

Evangelicals were thinking in purely transactional terms, as Trump himself is often said to do, voting for Trump because he promised to deliver Supreme Court appointments that would protect the unborn and secure their own “religious liberty.” Or maybe the polls were misleading. By confusing “evangelicals-in-name-only” with good, church-attending, Bible-believing Christians, sloppy pollsters were giving evangelicalism a bad rap. But evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad. By the time Trump arrived proclaiming himself their savior, conservative white evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates “the least of these” for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses. Rather than turning the other cheek, they’d resolved to defend their faith and their nation, secure in the knowledge that the ends justify the means. Having replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with a vengeful warrior Christ, it’s no wonder many came to think of Trump in the same way. In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of their own values. In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them.