If you-like me-looked at the awful misconduct the #MeToo movement exposed in Hollywood and the mainstream media and thought, “This is a clear sign of a cultural crisis,” I defy you to read page after page of horrific Christian abuses-including in many of the most powerful institutions in Christendom-and think, “Those are just a few bad apples in a healthy church.” Mostly-male peers proved too weak to stand against the “great man.” There were Christian mini-Trumps long before there was Trump. Yet so long as they were perceived to be powerful and effective in their ministries, colleagues and allies would enable their predation.
Yet Du Mez meticulously documents how-time and again-Christian institutions have indulged and often valorized aggressive hyper-masculine male leaders who proved to be corrupt, exploitive, and abusive. In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them. In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of their own values. 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. 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. Here’s Du Mez:Įvangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. Rather, it’s consistent with the perceived need for a dominant male protector, even when that protector is so often an abusive aggressor. Du Mez takes particular aim at complementarianism, briefly defined as the belief that “God created men and women equal in worth and dignity but with different roles in the home and in the church.” (Full disclosure: I’d define myself as a complementarian.)Īdd all of these things together, and Du Mez argues that Evangelical support for Donald Trump isn’t a hold-your-nose aberration in the face of a binary choice. Third, when Evangelical cultural attachment to aggressive warrior-protector masculinity is combined with patriarchal strands of Christian theology, the result can be oppression and abuse. The desire to defend the nation in the Cold War, the desire to defend the country post 9/11, and the desire to defend masculinity itself from radical leftist and/or feminist attack combined to create (in some quarters) an obsession with an almost caricatured version masculine strength. Here Du Mez is correctly describing a strong strand of Evangelical culture. This is the John Wayne archetype-the man of strength and action. Second, Evangelical culture has had an unhealthy attachment to a particularly aggressive vision of masculinity, one that is modeled less on Christ than on secular warrior-figures who are deemed singularly effective at confronting and defeating enemies of the nation and the church. But Evangelicals are kidding themselves if they think their culture is always the result of their theology rather than their theology often following their culture. Of course this isn’t an exclusively Evangelical phenomenon-culture is at least as powerful as theology in shaping a number of groups of Americans. It’s a genius title, and it makes a compelling and challenging argument, especially after we watched a gang of mainly Christian insurrectionists storm the Capitol to save the presidency of Donald Trump.Īt the risk of oversimplifying her book, I’d summarize her argument as follows:įirst, culture (including political culture) is at least as important in defining Evangelicals as theology. It’s called Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, by Calvin University history professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez. But one thing became clear to me that day-and it was clear to me year after year in the decades that followed-that lots and lots of folks were very intent on tying Jesus to the vision of manhood they loved the most.Įarlier this year, I read a book that’s ignited an enormous amount of argument and debate across the length and breadth of the Christian intelligentsia.
I really wasn’t all that curious about how Jesus would play sports. “If Jesus played baseball,” he shouted, “he’d slide home hard, with his cleats up!” I was a teenager, and a Christian coach was talking to a group of young Christian athletes. I remember the first time I was exposed to Christian insecurity about masculinity. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.)
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