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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

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.

In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them.

More than any other religious demographic in America, white evangelical Protestants support preemptive war, condone the use of torture, and favor the death penalty.

Christian nationalism—the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians.

To be an evangelical, according to the National Association of Evangelicals, is to uphold the Bible as one’s ultimate authority, to confess the centrality of Christ’s atonement, to believe in a born-again conversion experience, and to actively work to spread this good news and reform society accordingly.

Evangelicals claim to uphold the Bible as the highest authority in the Christian life, but there are more than 31,000 verses in the Bible. Which ones are considered essential guides to faithful Christian practice, and which are readily ignored or explained away? In like manner, when evangelicals define themselves in terms of Christ’s atonement or as disciples of a risen Christ, what sort of Jesus are they imagining? Is their savior a conquering warrior, a man’s man who takes no prisoners and wages holy war? Or is he a sacrificial lamb who offers himself up for the restoration of all things? How one answers these questions will determine what it looks like to follow Jesus.

Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.

For conservative white evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity.

The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit. Today, what it means to be a “conservative evangelical” is as much about culture as it is about theology.

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.

Generations of evangelicals learned to be afraid of communists, feminists, liberals, secular humanists, “the homosexuals,” the United Nations, the government, Muslims, and immigrants—and they were primed to respond to those fears by looking to a strong man to rescue them from danger, a man who embodied a God-given, testosterone-driven masculinity.

Contemporary white evangelicalism in America, then, is not the inevitable outworking of “biblical literalism,” nor is it the only possible interpretation of the historic Christian faith; the history of American Christianity itself is filled with voices of resistance and signs of paths not taken. It is, rather, a historical and a cultural movement, forged over time by individuals and organizations with varied motivations—the desire to discern God’s will, to bring order to uncertain times, and, for many, to extend their own power.

Religious “modernists,” too, had wanted to make their faith relevant to the changing times, but they rejected fundamentalists’ “plain reading” of the Bible. Accusing fundamentalists of substituting “propagandism” for a proper scholarly study of the Bible, they preferred to look to higher critical scholarship to parse the intricacies of the Scriptures. These liberal Protestants also tended to emphasize the social and environmental dimensions of Christianity, over against fundamentalists’ more individualistic focus on personal sin and conversion. Fundamentalists, in turn, accused modernists of abandoning the historic Christian faith.7

(The nuclear family structured around a male breadwinner was in fact of recent invention, arising in the 1920s and peaking in the 1950s and 1960s; before then, multigenerational families relying on multiple contributors to the family economy had been the norm.)

Today some historians place race at the very heart of evangelical politics, pointing to the fact that evangelical opposition to government-mandated integration predated anti-abortion activism by several years. Others, however—including the vast majority of evangelicals themselves—prefer to point instead to the significance of moral and “family values.” But in many ways, this is a false dichotomy. For evangelicals, family values politics were deeply intertwined with racial politics, and both were connected to evangelicals’ understanding of the nation and its role on the global stage.10

When confronted with undeniable evidence of American brutality, evangelicals could always fall back on the concept of human depravity. With sin lurking in every human heart, violence was inevitable, and only Jesus was the answer.

The Vietnam War was pivotal to the formation of an emerging evangelical identity. For many Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam demolished myths of American greatness and goodness. American power came to be viewed with suspicion, if not revulsion, and a pervasive antimilitarism took hold. Evangelicals, however, drew the opposite lesson: it was the absence of American power that led to catastrophe.

The evangelical Left and the Christian Right would pursue divergent trajectories, building their own networks and alliances. A common evangelical heritage and shared theological commitments diminished in significance as Christian nationalism, militarism, and gender “traditionalism” came to define conservative evangelical identity and dictate ideological allies.

If an evangelical could be defined as anyone who liked Billy Graham, by the 1970s a conservative might well be defined as anyone who loved John Wayne.

For Gothard, those in authority were stand-ins for God and were owed absolute obedience. In his moral universe, the notion of personal rights interfered with the hierarchical structure of authority, contradicting God’s design and provoking only anger and resentment. The meek would inherit the earth; the solution for the aggrieved was not in changing their circumstances, but rather in wholesale submission to the authorities placed over them. For both Gothard and Rushdoony, this order found expression in the authoritarian rule of men. Men who forsook their duty to impose order abdicated their masculinity, allowing women to usurp their power, and Rushdoony eagerly awaited the day when “once independent and feministic women” would be humbled and “seek the protection and safety of a man.”2

The draconian measures of surveillance and discipline Gothard introduced at IBLP, the closed system of authority, and the enforced submission of women and children created a climate ripe for abuse. In 1980, news broke that Gothard’s brother and vice president of the institute had been involved in affairs with seven of the institute’s secretaries. The scandal eventually grew to include fifteen people, and it became clear that Gothard had known of the improprieties for years but had silenced witnesses and covered up the abuse. In 1976, in fact, he had introduced a new teaching based on Matthew 18, requiring staff to promise that they would never “give an evil report but only say good things about other people.” Only later would the full extent of the abuse be revealed.4

In 1975, Dobson took it upon himself to articulate the “critical difference” between men and women. “Males and females differ biochemically, anatomically, and emotionally,” he asserted. “In truth, they are unique in every cell of their bodies.” He portrayed the distinction in stark terms: Men liked to “hunt and fish and hike in the wilderness” while women preferred to “stay at home and wait for them.” Men played sports as women watched, “yawning on the sidelines.” But perhaps the most profound difference between men and women, according to Dobson, was their source of self-esteem: “Men derive self-esteem by being respected; women feel worthy when they are loved.” Five years later, in his book Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives, he expanded on this theme. Echoing Marabel Morgan, he explained that because of a man’s fragile ego and “enormous need to be respected,” together with a woman’s vulnerability and need to be loved, it was “a mistake to tamper with the time-honored relationship of husband as loving protector and wife as recipient of that protection.”

AS EVANGELICALS BEGAN TO MOBILIZE AS A partisan political force, they did so by rallying to defend “family values.” But family values politics was never about protecting the well-being of families generally. Fundamentally, evangelical “family values” entailed the reassertion of patriarchal authority. At its most basic level, family values politics was about sex and power.

Although white evangelicals and black Protestants shared similar views on a number of theological and moral issues, the black Protestant tradition was suffused with a prophetic theology that clashed with white evangelicals’ Christian nationalism. It’s worth remembering that for both Barack and Michelle Obama, their unforgivable sins—at least as far as conservative white evangelicals were concerned—involved their critique of America. For Michelle, it was a confession she made while stumping for her husband; reflecting on the engagement of his supporters, she declared that, “for the first time” in her adult life, she was proud of her country because “it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” Conservatives pounced. Hadn’t Michelle been an adult when the Cold War was won? Was there nothing to be proud of in the last twenty-five years of American history? For her part, Cindy McCain was quick to assert that she had always been proud of her country.2 For Barack Obama, it was a controversy involving his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that threatened to derail his campaign. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Wright had reminded Americans that their country had displaced Native Americans by way of “terror,” had bombed Grenada, Panama, Libya, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and had supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and in South Africa. Quoting Malcolm X, he warned that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” A 2003 sermon also came to light in whi...

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

The evangelical cult of masculinity links patriarchal power to masculine aggression and sexual desire; its counterpoint is a submissive femininity. A man’s sexual drive, like his testosterone, is God-given. He is the initiator, the piercer. His essential leadership capacity outside the home is bolstered by his leadership in the home, and in the bedroom. The responsibility of married women in this arrangement is clear, but implications for women extend beyond the marriage relationship. Women outside of the bonds of marriage must avoid tempting men through immodesty, or simply by being available to them, or perceived as such. 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.

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.

The vast majority of books on evangelical masculinity have been written by white men primarily for white men; to a significant degree, the markets for literature on black and white Christian manhood remain distinct. With few exceptions, black men, Middle Eastern men, and Hispanic men are not called to a wild, militant masculinity. Their aggression, by contrast, is seen as dangerous, a threat to the stability of home and nation.10

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