“Evangelicals hadn’t betrayed their values. Responding to conventional wisdom which claims 21st-century evangelicals sold their birthright for a bowl of Trumpian stew, she writes:
Du Mez underlines this connection in more ways than one. Both Wayne and Reagan “played the war hero, and among admirers this fiction was often confused for fact.” Like Trump, Wayne served as a stand-in for something like traditional values, despite a pockmarked history with marriage and women.Īll three men donned white hats as they expressed concern for America’s soul, naming their enemies and tying might, manhood, and morality into a single knot. This is no game of “six degrees of separation” we’re working with one or two degrees, at most.Įach figure performed a style of masculinity from the highest stages and biggest screens. Even our politically “neutral” figures like Billy Graham fail to resist this particular pull.ĭu Mez’s most fascinating-and, frankly, dispiriting-analysis connects the dots between Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Trump. Du Mez methodically exhibits how the muddy waters of American civic religion wash through the work of everyone from James Dobson and Jerry Falwell to John Eldredge and Sarah Palin. What better way to make manly men than to baptize them?Įvangelism and empire, discipleship and Manifest Destiny twine through the decades. The new New World required fighters, not lovers men who would reclaim a rugged faith and expand its territory. Among the causes she identifies, the need of some early 20th-century Christians to respond to the perceived “‘feminization’ of Victorian Christianity, which privileged gentility, restraint, and an emotive response to the gospel message.” The Duke represents “one of many rugged and even ruthless icons of masculinity that evangelicals imbued with religious significance,” she writes.Įach painful truth and trenchant observation Du Mez articulates might be summed in her quotation of scholar Alan Bean: “The unspoken mantra of post-war evangelicalism was simple: Jesus can save your soul but John Wayne will save your ass.”ĭu Mez carefully handles the catalytic chemicals which reacted in history and spilled into our moment.
“By the time Trump arrived proclaiming himself their savior, conservative white evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates ‘the least of these’ for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses,” she writes.ĭu Mez traces Trump’s ascendance to Wayne, then even further back, displaying evangelicals’ enthusiasm for typecasting. In remarkably thorough fashion, she fleshes out a truth oft-stated yet rarely unpacked: the president is a symptom, not an illness unto himself. Rather than take cheap shots, Du Mez does the work. Wayne pops up throughout the book as an avatar for another sort of “pilgrim’s” progress, a reckless snowball rolling downhill to form an antagonistic culture driven by white men, bearing little resemblance to the way of Jesus.ĭu Mez keeps company with Christians who ask why Donald Trump speaks at their alma maters, screams through their parents’ television sets, and steals the allegiance of their pastors. Jesus and John Wayne isn’t about the cowboy icon, not really. Jesus and John Wayne is history as confession, history as lament, a type of history that hopes in a God who never puts us to shame, even as hope in America does. Prospective disciples need not apply-this Jesus is forming a posse. Showing no interest in turning the other cheek, he leaves a red right-hand print across his enemy’s face. A ten-foot-tall Jesus who swaggers through every scene, speaking softly and carrying hot steel. In a new book, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez contends that, over the last 100 years, most white evangelicals would cast a John Wayne type.
Sifting risks and rewards, you might pluck your savior from the ranks of the unknown, a face audiences don’t recognize, without form or majesty.
Someone like Oscar Isaac, brimming with hangdog charisma? No doubt Adam Driver could navigate the many moods of Jesus-from holy sarcasm to matchless compassion-in a few easy moves. If, tomorrow, Hollywood handed you the keys to a major motion picture about the life of Jesus, who would you cast as the lead?