Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020, 356 pages
This is a highly disturbing–and informative–book.
In an interview with Religion & Politics, the author discusses how she came to its writing:
Yes! Since about 2010, I had been giving talks on evangelicalism and masculinity and had been approached by publishers, but there were two things at that point that made me a little hesitant to dive into a book project. For one, the things that I was uncovering were very depressing. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to live with that for the years that I knew it would take to write a book. For another, I wasn’t sure at first how mainstream it all was. As a Christian myself, I wanted to be careful about shining a bright light on this dark underbelly of American Christianity if it was merely a fringe phenomenon . . . However, just before the [2016] election, things clicked for me. The Access Hollywood tape came out, white evangelical elites continued to defend Trump, his support among white evangelical voters remained strong, and I thought, “Ugh, I think I know what’s going to happen and I think I know why.” That’s when I pulled some of that old research and wrote [a paper] “Donald Trump and Militant Evangelical Masculinity.”
And then the book was published in 2020.
The words “dark underbelly” and “Ugh” hardly begin to express the blatant evil majority American White evangelicalism has embraced during the past 50 years that the author uncovers.
This reviewer was 22 years of age 50 years ago, and had been raised in a (“quintessential fundamentalist”—historian Ernest Sandeen in The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism) sect known as Plymouth or Christian Brethren. Two years later, under the auspices of a mission arm of said group—Literature Crusades (now International Teams)—I embarked with 12 late-teens-and-20-somethings on a two-year evangelistic gig to West Berlin, Germany. That experience was to change the direction of my life ever after.
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For the PDF of the above, click on: Jesus and John Wayne.
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