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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

How could “family values” conservatives support a man who flouted every value they insisted they held dear? How could the self-professed “Moral Majority” embrace a candidate who reveled in vulgarity? How could evangelicals who’d turned “WWJD” (“What Would Jesus Do?”) into a national phenomenon justify their support for a man who seemed the very antithesis of the savior they claimed to emulate?

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.

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.

The evangelical consumer marketplace was by then a force to be reckoned with, but this expansive media network functioned less as a traditional soul-saving enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals created and maintained their own identity—an identity rooted in “family values” and infused with a sense of cultural embattlement.

The myth of the American cowboy resonated powerfully with Sunbelt evangelicals. A model of rugged individualism that dovetailed with the individualism inherent within evangelicalism itself, the cowboy embodied a quintessentially American notion of frontier freedom coupled with an aura of righteous authority. Signifying an earlier era of American manhood, a time when heroic (white) men enforced order, protected the vulnerable, and wielded their power without apology, the myth of the American cowboy had been tinged with nostalgia from its inception. Half a century later, this nostalgia would be channeled into a powerful new religious and cultural identity, an identity harnessed for political ends.

Contemporary evangelical partisanship can only be understood in terms of a broader realignment that transformed partisan politics from the 1950s to the 1980s, a realignment that evangelicals themselves helped bring about. At the heart of this realignment were attitudes toward civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and “family values.” For conservatives, a defense of white patriarchy emerged as a unifying thread across this range of issues; for conservative evangelicals, a defense of white patriarchy would move to the center of their coalescing cultural and political identity.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff has proposed that competing metaphors of the family constitute a key divide in modern society. Morality is imagined through metaphor, and family metaphors reside at the core of contemporary political worldviews; whereas liberals favor a nurturing parent model, conservatives embrace a strict father metaphor. At the center of Dobson’s worldview—and that of many conservative evangelicals—was the strict enforcement of patriarchal authority.

As word leaked out about the president’s “inappropriate relationship” with the former White House intern in January 1998, Schlafly lashed out: “At stake is whether the White House will become a public relations vehicle for lying and polling, akin to a television show, or will remain a platform for the principled articulation of policies and values that Americans respect.” Clinton had “converted the once-serious offense of lying to the American public into a daily rite,” extinguishing all reverence for the presidency. The issue wasn’t really “what Bill Clinton did or didn’t do with Paula or Gennifer or Monica,” but “whether we are going to allow the president to get by with flouting the law and lying about it on television, while hiding behind his popularity in the polls.” If this precedent prevailed, Schlafly prophesied, “Americans can look forward to a succession of TV charlatans and professional liars occupying the White House.”17

Were evangelicals embracing an increasingly militant faith in response to a new threat from the Islamic world? Or were they creating the perception of threat to justify their own militancy and enhance their own power, individually and collectively?

An African American with the middle name of Hussein, Barack Obama challenged the values—spoken and unspoken—that many white evangelicals held dear. As an adult convert to Christianity, he could speak with eloquence and theological sophistication about his faith, but for many evangelicals this mattered little. For some, racial prejudice shaped their political leanings. But even for those who did not hold explicit racist convictions, their faith remained intertwined with their whiteness.

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?

The election was not decided by those “left behind” economically, political scientists discovered; it was decided by dominant groups anxious about their future status.

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.

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”?

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.