Kristin Kobes Du Mez's startling Jesus and John Wayne assesses the religious culture that produced an outpouring of evangelical support for the distinctly non-evangelical Republican Donald J. Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Detractors may tag it as a liberal political screed disguised by its author's impeccable evangelical credentials. Certainly, the book offers a stinging critique of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century evangelicalism. But whether screed or academic tome, Du Mez's portrait of American evangelicalism makes Jesus and John Wayne not only one of the most important books on religion and the 2016 elections but one of the most important books on post-1945 American evangelicalism published in the past four decades. It is an almost shocking counterweight to the largely comfortable evangelical history most of us have read, written, and taught over the last half-century.
Du Mez's assessment of the evangelical role in the 2016 presidential race takes two forms, one short and blunt, the other long and deep. The short, blunt assessment deflates the charge that the eighty-one percent of evangelical voters who told exit pollsters they supported Trump were “evangelicals-in-name only” (3). Critics typically argue that few of these voters upheld or even understood the four principles of evangelicalism laid out by the National Association of Evangelicals—belief in the authority of the Bible, belief in Christ's atonement, a born-again experience, and proselytizing. But Du Mez asserts that “the primacy of these four distinctives is arguable.” “What it means to be an evangelical has always depended on the world beyond faith,” she argues, and the movement's long, fluid history made the distinctly non-evangelical Trump the nearly perfect bearer of evangelicalism's broader messages (5). What did it mean to be an evangelical by 2016? Du Mez doesn't mince words: strong convictions about “patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism,” all “intertwined with white racial identity” (6–7). “Evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them,” she argues (3). Eager evangelicals, not reluctant ones, lifted Trump to his Electoral College victory, despite losing the popular race by nearly three million votes.
The bracing character of Jesus and John Wayne may explain why Du Mez devotes fourteen chapters and over two hundred pages to support her argument. The book will likely anger many evangelicals, their upset increased by bold chapter titles such as, “John Wayne Will Save Your Ass,” “Holy Balls,” and “Spiritual Badasses.” Less invested readers simply may find the exposition wearing. But the depth and detail that characterize Jesus and John Wayne upstage one potential avenue of criticism, namely, that Du Mez supports her arguments thinly, or too often through the shadowy, even kooky figures that have long haunted American evangelicalism.
Jesus and John Wayne stands far from that temptation. Du Mez taps a wealth of leading voices, second- and third-tier networks, plus occasional exotic, kooky figures to explore the eclectic non-denominational evangelical world whose embrace of an evangelical masculine ethos, militarism, subordination of women, and racism made Trump so evangelically comfortable. It may not have been Du Mez's purpose, but few books better document the ways that charismatic figures and intricately organized sub-movements can shape powerful fusions of religion, culture, and ultimately politics inside amorphously “structured” religious movements lacking centralized institutional authority.
Jesus and John Wayne calls on many big names to document American evangelicalism's post-1945 nationalism, masculine-drenched militarism, and anti-feminism that so matched Trump's 2016 candidacy. The Jesus of the young, body-building Billy Graham was “every inch a man,” not a “sissy,” and Graham jumped to endorse Christian American patriotism, anticommunism, General Douglas McArthur, and the Vietnam war while bemoaning “dictatorial wives” who might upend “God's representative[s],” their husbands (26, 27). John Wayne's personal life—his three marriages and affairs pre-trumped Trump—might have made him an unlikely candidate for evangelical admiration. But Du Mez sees his “heroic masculinity” as an evangelical “touchstone for authentic Christian manhood,” buttressed by his anticommunism, Republican Party activism, and belief in “white supremacy” (his words in a 1971 Playboy interview) (32, 57). Phyllis Schafly's conservative Catholic anti-feminist, anti-ERA, anti-abortion, and anti-government crusades buoyed evangelicals from across a long feared tradition and probably reduced evangelicalism's traditional anti-Catholicism. Prepped by his support for private “Christian schools” to avoid racial integration, Jerry Falwell's 1979 Moral Majority movement pulled evangelicals away from their traditional political aloofness and toward the Republican Party. James Dobson's powerful Focus on the Family organization attracted thousands of followers to its seminars and syndicated radio broadcasts eager to hear about masculine play for boys and “old-fashioned” discipline for families, including switches and belts for spankings (78).
Jesus and John Wayne also wades in the weeds of second- and third-tier evangelical networks and proselytizers to explore the depth and breadth of evangelicalism's culture of male authority and subordination of women. Bill Gothard's Institute in Basic Life Principles trafficked Rousas John Rushdoony's masculine-driven discipline for families and churches in workshops reaching 2.5 million participants by the 2010s. The Promise Keepers, led by former Colorado football coach and evangelical convert Bill McCartney, drew men by the tens of thousands to football stadiums to renew their “Christian manhood” and recover a softer if still authoritative male dominion in families (150). Doug Philips's Vision Forum used Christian homeschooling conferences to promote classroom materials “celebrating a patriotic, militant Christian masculinity,” then the Quiverfull movement training homeschooled children as soldiers in “an army of God” (191). John Piper's enormously popular Desiring God website promoted a widely shared “complementarian” theology that advertised the need for husbands to “love and care for their wives” and men's and women's equality “before God.” But this scarcely precluded the righteousness of men's authority in family and church. Joined by his evangelical colleague Wayne Grudem, Piper insisted that that men and women remained resolutely “distinct in their manhood and womanhood,” a difference that “foregrounded a biblical defense of patriarchy and gender difference” (167). As Du Mez summarizes, quoting Piper, “God had given Christianity ‘a masculine feel’” (200).
Du Mez's stress on evangelicalism's “cult of masculinity” triggers her vigorous penultimate chapter on evangelical reaction to Trump's graphically lewd comments on the so-called Access Hollywood tapes released just a month before the 2016 election. The movement's long-standing complaints about America's decaying sexual morality, epitomized in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, might have triggered a mass evangelical exodus from Trump's candidacy. But that did not occur, and Du Mez lays the responsibility at the doorstep of the movement's own dissembling. From the 1990s into the 2010s, a string of well-known evangelical leaders—James Dobson, Joe White, John Piper, Al Mohler, and Doug Wilson—often stepped forward to defend other well-known evangelical ministers accused of sexual impropriety, harassment, and abuse: Bill Gothard, Doug Phillips himself, Ted Haggard, C. J. Mchaney, Jack Hyles and his son Dave, and Jack Schaap, if not quite Jimmy Swaggart. Piper, for example, rushed to preach at Mahaney's church to show his support. It was not out of character. When Piper was asked about a woman's right to reject a sovereign husband's sexual abuse four years earlier, he responded that she “might very gently refuse to submit” to “group sex or something really weird.” But she also might justly put up with “verbal abuse for a season” and “perhaps being smacked one night” if her husband only requested rather than demanded aberrant sex (293). Du Mez's point is simple: evangelicals looked past Trump's words much as they looked past their own leaders’ behavior.
Critics might contend that Du Mez ignores less pejorative explanations for Trump's evangelical support—his promise to make conservative judicial appointments, his belief in American exceptionalism, his dislike of immigrants who were transforming American culture, his fulminations against Islam, and his support for evangelicals’ version of religious freedom. Perhaps Trump's trust in gut feelings matched evangelicals’ trust in belief, both eliding learning, science, or scholarship. Perhaps evangelicals saw uncanny resemblances between sermons from megachurch sound stages and Trump's rally talks. Or perhaps evangelicals simply found Hillary Clinton unbearable, her Methodism a mere disguise for her secularism. Could evangelicals really flee to Clinton no matter how disgusting Trump's sex talk and the multiple accusations about his affairs, sexual harassment, even rape? In the end, then, perhaps evangelicals eagerly voted for the policies Trump touted while holding their nose on Trump himself, unable to go anywhere else.
Whatever the final judgment on Du Mez's argument about evangelicalism's “cult of masculinity” and the movement's support for Trump, historians would wisely grapple with Du Mez's portrayal of modern American evangelicalism after 1945. Most histories of post-1945 American religion and, especially, evangelicalism have touched on many if by no means all the issues Du Mez raises, whether by academic historians such as Thomas Kidd, Grant Wacker, and Mark Noll, or by more popular writers, such as Frances Fitzgerald and Katherine Stewart. But not even the more critical histories by Fitzgerald and Stewart have painted such bleak pictures of post-1945 American evangelicalism, especially on masculinity and the subordination of women.
Historians well versed in political science may reject the argument that a corrupted faith produced evangelical support for Trump, the claim of Du Mez's book title. But would the failure stem from a crude understanding of voter motivations or from a warped portrait of post-1945 evangelicalism, or both? In pushing this question forward, Jesus and John Wayne becomes the proverbial shot across the bow, ostensibly aimed at the specific question about evangelical support for Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but more broadly contesting the rather benign ways we have understood post-1945 American evangelical development and character.
