JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE:
How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and
fractured a nation
By Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Liveright. 356 pages. £14.99
ISBN 978 1 631 495 731
I was baffled when I read the 2014 tweet from Dr Owen Strachan, former President of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: ‘Satan hates testosterone. You can’t blame him – after all, he’s seen it used to crush his head.’
I was baffled again when the speaker at a recent men’s convention (a pastor) urged us not to hesitate to use violence to solve a situation. Apparently, men should be more like a Jesus who is in the image of John Wayne.
How could devout and otherwise orthodox believers go so far off track? When I read Du Mez’s book, things fell into place. These were not isolated aberrations. They were part of a powerful cultural movement among evangelicals in the United States, which has been promoted through evangelical consumerism and which has replaced the Jesus of the New Testament with a false icon of dominant masculinity.
What went wrong?
Especially since 2001, fears about radical feminism, godless socialism, and other perceived threats, have not merely provoked justified resistance to unbiblical ideas but have fuelled a movement in reaction – an overreaction. Evangelical Christian belief has become associated with rugged male dominance and nationalistic military prowess. In 2016 Donald Trump took full advantage of this movement, gaining the support of 81% of white evangelicals for his successful presidential bid. As Dr Robert Jeffress (senior pastor of ‘Bible-centered’ First Baptist, Dallas) opined: ‘I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are.’
This is an eye-opening and powerful book. At one moment one is amazed at absurdities, at the next grieving over moral failures of prominent evangelical leaders.
Corrupted
The book says more about the corruption of evangelical faith than about the political impact on the United States. Du Mez is an evangelical herself, a Professor of History at Calvin University. Jesus and John Wayne is important because it lays out how large segments of US evangelicalism have been corrupted by unbiblical ideology. It will help us be aware of some of the influences that may be at work when we read evangelical blogs or teaching materials from North America.
