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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

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.

“a certain kind of personality that craves the comfort of absolute certainty as an escape from ambiguity and risk and they find it in religion or politics of a certain kind.” Such people were attracted to an ideology that was “absolutistic, logical (or seemingly so), simple and practical.” The notion of “God’s chain of command” offered precisely this absolutist certainty. Needless to say, white men were at the top of that chain of command, at least in terms of human relationships.