I spent some of the afternoon reading Jesus and John Wayne (by Kristin Kobes Du Mez). If anyone is interested in learning about the history of the evangelical right in the U.S., I would highly recommend this book. The writer is a Christian historian herself, but she does not shy away from illuminating the movement's hypocrisies and its lobbying power.
I couldn't help but share this week's spread, as I am very happy with it. I refrained from planning out the entire week, as sometimes I over plan when this happens. We'll take it one day at a time this week.
The first time I opened Tik Tok on my phone, within minutes, I was in stitches from laughing at the parade of “dogs being hilarious” videos that streamed across my screen. Later that day, I was speaking with a friend of mine who’d been dabbling in Tik Tok much longer than I, and he said, “I don’t think I’ve seen a single dog video on there”.
Social media is anything but a uniform experience for people. In fact, it may be worth remembering here that “media” is a plural noun. Through these various mediums, each of us have the potential illusion of engaging in a democratized information exchange, but in actuality it’s a kind of kingdom where we are the kings or queens… and yet there are (often nefarious) courtiers pulling strings behind the scenes that we have no idea about.
But hey, this isn’t a critique of social media, so don’t worry! The only reason I even brought that up is because on my particular social media feeds it looks as though everyone in the world has already read Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus & John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith & Fractured A Nation, and I’m just late to the party. Now, I know that’s not exactly the case (I don’t think my parents have read it yet), but I also know that if someone wanted to have a summary of the book or even engage deeply with its contents, there are countless blog posts out there which have already done that, and likely better than I could. A little over a year ago, I wrote up some reflections on Beth Allison Barr’s The Making Of Biblical Womanhood, and I’ve been gratefully following Scot McKnight’s engagement with these topics and authors recently as well.
So, below, I will toss in a veritable grab bag of quotes, reflections, and takeaways from Du Mez’s work, but before I get to that, I want to try and summarize my biggest takeaway from this book, and it’s one that really surprised me, since it wasn’t in the text at all.
It was by reading this book that I was most clearly confronted with an issue that plagues me in general. I’m not sure what the technical term is for it (though there almost certainly is one), but it’s something like "information-association-bias"… but, that’ll never catch on, so we may wanna workshop that later. Essentially, it means that I tend to consider pieces of information (surveys, arguments, opinions, even words) differently based upon associations. Those associations could be related to the person presenting the info, the means by which that info is presented, various terminology or imagery nested within that information, or (and perhaps most difficult to see) typical or assumed associations between that information and other information. Basically, it means I’m never just encountering data as it is, but always in relation to other data.
I know I’m more neurotic than your average guy, but… I bet I’m not alone with this issue.
In a way, it’s a question of hermeneutics, the lenses through which we view not only texts but the world around us. Any post-modern kid who’s made it through a high school English class knows this. But what I hadn’t noticed before was a subtle trick my mind has been playing on me for quite a while now. When someone presents data that I find questionable or that offends my sensibilities (you know this is happening when, instead of having a rational reaction to someone or something, you feel it in your stomach), I can tend to use that as an excuse to write-off other connected truth claims. I can also assume that if someone critiques a situation, they are in some sense promoting whatever might be the “opposite” of that situation. This last part is extra-ironic, since I am the consummate devil’s advocate. Perhaps a single example from the book will do to shed some more practical light on what I mean.
Throughout the book, Du Mez spends time exploring evangelicals’ connections to both anti-abortion campaigns and the so-called “purity movement”. Christians have long been pushed-back upon for promoting views against abortion, but the reaction to the purity culture of the 1990s/2000s is relatively recent (at least in trending terms). Du Mez presents a number of well-documented stories that illustrate how this section connects with and feeds into the overall narrative of the book. Though there are no particular sentences I noticed wherein she comes out and makes judgmental commentary on either of these issues, it feels clear from how the text is laid out that they are at least being framed as contributing factors to the overall negative outcome the book’s subtitle makes clear, if not intrinsically negative themselves.
And so, enter my previously mentioned bias. If being “anti-abortion” is framed as negative, then I implicitly feel that being “pro-abortion” is being framed as positive. If “purity culture” is a bad thing, then obviously “impurity culture” must be a good thing, right? Personally, I do not want to promote abortion, nor do I want to promote an "impurity culture", so I obviously can't learn anything from this book... right?
Obviously, no, this is not obvious, and once I realized that my mind was reading connections & comments that were not in the text (like, “reading between the lines”, as literally as this is possible to do), I became freed up to engage with what was actually in the text.
In Jesus & John Wayne, there are several assessments that I disagree with, and a handful of sources I am dubious of, but there is also a tremendous amount of story that is worth wrestling with and sifting through, some of which I pray will not escape my imagination until it has shaped me for the better.
If I had to guess, I’d say that Du Mez’s goals for this book would be something like:
1- Try and explain how Donald Trump not only became the president of the United States of America, but did so with the blessing of so many people who blatantly call themselves "Christian".
2- Try and distinguish Christianity in America from Nationalism and/or “culture”.
In my humble opinion, largely successful, on both counts.
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As promised, below is merely a repository of notable quotables and incomplete thoughts from the book. Hit me up if you have any questions!
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“Drawn to [Trump’s] populist appeals, white evangelicals demonstrated a preference for rejecting political compromise, for strong, solitary leadership, and for breaking the rules when necessary.” (pg 5)
“‘There is no American that I admire more than Richard Nixon’, Graham proclaimed at one of his crusades that year.” (pg 44)
“Fine doctrinal differences that may have separated Nazarene from Southern Baptist, evangelical from fundamentalist, made little difference when it came to Dobson's growing empire. [Focus On The Family] avoided divisive theological issues, and tuning in required no conversion experience, statement of faith, or claims of exclusivity.” (pg 85)
“Conservative political operative Ralph Reed described [Oliver] North’s appeal in this way: ‘Part of politics is having the right friends, but an important part of politics is having the right enemies.’ Conservative Christians loved him for the enemies he’d made.” (pg 124)
“‘Character DOES matter,’ Dobson opined. ‘You can't run a family, let alone a country, without it.’” (pg 143, in response to Bill Clinton)
“...Ralph Reed advised members to ‘avoid hostile and intemperate rhetoric’, and to instead embrace a more tolerant posture, emphasizing inclusion. ‘We have allowed ourselves to be ghettoized by a narrow band of issues like abortion, homosexual rights and prayer in school’, he warned, and it was time for a new direction.” (pg 149)
“‘What if we told men up front that to join the church of Jesus Christ is... to enlist in God's Army and to place their lives on the line? This approach would be based on the warrior spirit in every man, and so would offer the greatest hope for restoring authentic Christian manhood to the Body of Christ.’” (pg 161, Gordon Dalbey)
“Feminized men don’t walk into burning buildings. But masculine men do.” (pg 181)
“...chaplains would refrain from proselytizing, ‘but we reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched.’ [Brig Gen Richardson] distinguished the two by suggesting that evangelizing ‘is more gently sharing the gospel’, as opposed to ‘trying to convert someone in an aggressive way.’ it was a distinction without a difference.” (pg 213)
“But in truth, evangelical leaders had been perfecting this pitch for nearly 50 years. Evangelicals were looking for a protector, an aggressive, heroic, manly man, someone who wasn't restrained by political correctness or feminine virtues, someone who would break the rules for the right cause.” (pg 253, on the election of Donald Trump)
“When you are in a war mentality, you say ‘who is going to stand up where we need to stand up.’” (pg 263, Eric Metaxas)
“...it is the relationship between the centers and the margins that demands scrutiny. Those who occupy what center there is have largely failed to define themselves against the more extreme expressions of ‘biblical patriarchy’, and there are reasons for this.” (pg 293)
“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.” (pg 297) // On the following pg, she asks if men were “defending patriarchy because they believed it to be biblical, or were they twisting the scriptures in order to defend patriarchy?”
“If you believe that America is God's chosen nation, you need to fight for it and against others, [Don Jacobson] realized. But once you abandon that notion, other values begin to shift as well. Without Christian nationalism, evangelical militarism makes little sense.” (pg 303)
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She explains how John Wayne did not live a virtuous life by the standards of evangelicals, but was embraced by them nonetheless as a paragon of their type.
On pg 22 she posits that disparate & diverse evangelicals became a cohesive group in large part because of a sense of embattlement. Pg 202 has a great section on how cessationists and continuationists were willing to lay aside those differences as long as they maintained complementarianism as a doctrine, since “desperate times call for desperate measure.”
Coming after Elisabeth Elliot was a tough pill to swallow for me, as someone who grew up reading Through Gates Of Splendor...
On top of parachurch organizations, the role of Christian publishing, bookstores, and pop culture play an interesting role. There is something to be said about the involuntary need for hierarchical leadership and/or overall connectedness, the fractious nature of protestantism…
As an Amway kid, I was surprised by the mention of Rich Devos on pgs 89 & 103.
My ignorance is overwhelming; I was surprised to find that many Christians actively touted Ronald Regan as the “Christian choice” for president (ch 6). I was also somewhat surprised to learn how relatively recently some of these developments happened; namely, the post-1954 amendments to the pledge of allegiance, and the shift towards the Republican party being the favoured choice of Christians.
On pg 131, she talks about the fact that military superiors were “evangelizing” their subordinates. This is a highly problematic scenario, because of the power differential, but it left me to wonder how we are to evangelize or even educate our children if power differentials are disqualifying… We see some pushback on this practice on pg 210.
On pg 147, she mention that in 1987 the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine” was repealed, which allowed for the launch of partisan talk-radio, like Rush Limbaugh. I found myself wondering what radio and tv news were like BEFORE that, and to what degree left voices grew at the same time.
Now, as a Promise Keepers kid, all the PK talk in ch 9 was also hard for me.
On pg 156, she draws a line from war metaphor to sport metaphor… which seems astute.
By ch 9, we start to see the (more) modern calls for men to be masculine, like Eldredge’s “Wild At Heart”. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that folks like Jordan Peterson are perhaps swimming in similar streams with all their talk of calling men to “adventure”.
On pg 169, the talk of the so-called “Danvers Statement” and how it rooted patriarchy in a pre-Fall existence was useful. By contrast, she later (on pg 175) mentions relatively conservative folks (like James K A Smith) who disagree with this call, and say that since violence is a consequence of the Fall, then being a “warrior” cannot necessarily be intrinsically human / male.
It was surprising to me that in ch 14 she made explicit that it seems both B Obama and H Clinton were Christians, just not the right type of Christians.
Pg 244, she cites Eric Metaxas’ view that (post-Vietnam) we can no longer valourize people but only tear them down based on their sins. I’m not sure what to do with this, but I view it as a large problem. It reminds me of the problem hagiography, and the problem of what to do without it.
On pg 266, she cites how some non-Trump evangelicals were trying to claim that many of the co-called evangelicals that voted for Trump were not “real evangelicals”. I can’t help but think that, at the end of the day, if our churches have contributed to the formation of these folks, then like it or lump it, we might have to claim them… although, this is a slightly more complicated issue then that simple statement might let on.
Started this today, and it is fascinating. Thanks to @w.w.norton for the desk copy. #jesusandjohnwayne #kristinkobesdumez #religioushistory #whiteevangelicalism #bookstagram #myreligioushistorianheartishappy https://www.instagram.com/p/CO_W1ljDaYD/?igshid=xpt21ezam7n7
If you consider yourself a conservative, evangelical Christian, for the love of God, please read or listen to this book. I can personally testify to its accuracy in many areas. It's a history book. Not theology. . #jesusandjohnwayne #kristinkobesdumez #trumpsupporters #trump #quiverfull #submissions https://www.instagram.com/p/CKHYiFZpqaW/?igshid=1dq3lkmq1p647
#jesusandjohnwayne awesome book! I highly recommend this book if you want a non partisan view of how American Christianity and Politics have perverted one another. (at Oaks At Clover, Clover, South Carolina) https://www.instagram.com/p/CD6-U-ZB6kv/?igshid=eyaomxzr5wrf
