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

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

By 2009, Time magazine was labeling “The New Calvinism” one of “10 ideas changing the world right now.” As Ted Olsen, managing editor at Christianity Today explained, “everyone knows” that the energy and passion in the evangelical world were “with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle’s pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention.”27

Agreeing that “desperate times called for desperate measures,” these men could agree to disagree about speaking in tongues and the gift of prophecy because other issues—including gender complementarianism and church discipline—were more pressing.

On issues of race, Wilson’s views were similarly extreme. In the 1990s, Wilson had coauthored Southern Slavery: As It Was, which questioned the supposed “brutalities, immoralities, and cruelties” of slavery. The slave trade might have been unbiblical, he allowed, but slavery most certainly was not.

Within this network, differences—significant doctrinal disagreements, disagreements over the relative merits of slavery and the Civil War—could be smoothed over in the interest of promoting “watershed issues” like complementarianism, the prohibition of homosexuality, the existence of hell, and substitutionary atonement.

Evangelicals who offered competing visions of sexuality, gender, or the existence of hell found themselves excluded from conferences and associations, and their writings banned from popular evangelical bookstores and distribution channels.

IF THERE WAS A CENTRAL HUB TO THE SPRAWLING network that was twenty-first-century American evangelicalism, it was Colorado Springs.

Speaking in Montgomery, Dobson compared Moore’s civil disobedience to that of Rosa Parks: “We as people of faith are also being sent to the back of the bus.”

In order to protect Focus on the Family’s tax exemption, Dobson retired from his position as CEO of the organization so he could take up political organizing directly.4

When asked about their greatest fear, Christian college presidents agreed: the possibility that James Dobson would turn against their school.

ALSO WITHIN SIGHT of the air force academy stood another evangelical stronghold, New Life Church. One of the nation’s most influential megachurches, New Life was founded in 1984 by Ted Haggard, one of “the nation’s

After attending Oral Roberts University, Haggard came under the mentorship of Jack Hayford, founding pastor of a Pentecostal megachurch in Van Nuys, California—the church that essentially launched the megachurch model for suburban evangelicalism.

The chapel contained computers where visitors entered personal prayers; the center’s staff provided more politically oriented prayers—for a marriage amendment, for the appointment of new justices, and for the president. The center also offered prayers for US foreign policy, for God to “crush [the] demonic stronghold and communist regime of Kim Jun II,” and for the forces of good to prevail in Iraq.9

“The church is not a passive, milquetoast organization,” it was “Militant! Aggressive! Victorious!” The Christian life wasn’t to be compared to war, it was war, and Christians needed to engage in “an all-out offensive assault.” Too many Christians believed that a passive, defensive posture was more Christlike, but that left one a sitting target.

Then, fighting and killing had been spoken of “soberly and with humility”—killing was accepted as a fact of war, not exalted. But “somehow that had all been transformed into a kind of holy bloodlust.”

Some estimates put the number of women victimized at nearly 20 percent of all female cadets, and it appeared that a systematic cover-up had been going on for years. Victims were blackmailed, threatened, or expelled, while the accused were “allowed to graduate with honors despite multiple accusations.”

Yet there was another statistic that suggested the two problems might not be entirely disconnected; one in five cadets felt women didn’t belong among them.18

IN THE WAKE OF SEPTEMBER 11, ISLAM REPLACED communism as the enemy of America and all that was good, at least in the world of conservative evangelicalism.

Evangelicals’ pro-Israel sympathies had fueled anti-Muslim sentiments even before the terrorist attacks, and in the 1990s, as evangelicals looked for alternatives to a foreign policy agenda long framed by Cold War categories, many had turned their attention to the persecution of Christians in other nations, attention that often ended up focusing on the oppression of Christian minorities in Islamic countries.

After September 11, the long history of Christian Zionism and heightened interest in the fate of global Christians became intertwined with evangelicals’ commitment to defend Christian America.

Pat Robertson assured his viewers that Muslims were “worse than the Nazis.” James Dobson began to characterize Islamic fundamentalism as one of the most serious threats to American families, explaining that “the security of our homeland and the welfare of our children” were, after all, “family values.”

In the fall of 2002, 77 percent of evangelical leaders held an overall unfavorable view of Islam, and 70 percent agreed that Islam was “a religion of violence.” Two-thirds also believed that Islam was “dedicated to world domination.”2

War was “not a sidebar of history for Islam,” they wrote, but “the main vehicle for religious expression.”