Trained to see the connection between gender and nation, my students sensed that there was something significant going on in a book most critics brushed off as trivial or even laughable. (Roosevelt wasn’t Eldredge’s only hero other favorites included mythical cowboys and American soldiers, Indiana Jones, James Bond, and of course Mel Gibson’s William Wallace.) My students wanted me to read the book because Roosevelt was one of Eldredge’s heroes, for the very reasons that Bederman had deconstructed in Manliness and Civilization. It wasn’t long before my own church was hosting a men’s Bible study on it, and soon after a women’s Bible study on the book’s feminine counterpart, Captivated. I can’t remember now if they had a book in hand, or only told me I needed to read it: John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart.Įldredge’s book was all the rage at that time on Christian college campuses and in evangelical churches. One day after class, some of my (white, male) students approached me. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.Like me, my students were shocked by how attention to race, gender, and power challenged their received narratives, how the old stories about Teddy Roosevelt suddenly seemed insufficient.
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And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes-mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of "Christian America." Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.Ĭhallenging the commonly held assumption that the "moral majority" backed Donald Trump in 20 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals' most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions.
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Many of today's evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they've read John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex-and they have a silver ring to prove it. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism-or in the words of one modern chaplain, with "a spiritual badass."Īs acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. The "paradigm-influencing" book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America.