The roots, however, are a bit deeper, as Du Mez begins the book by exploring antecedents in the early 1900s, through the lionization of figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Billy Sunday, to introduce the central theme of her argument: the white American evangelical infatuation with rugged, individualistic, brazen, cowboy masculinity. The historical narrative of “Jesus and John Wayne” really takes shape in the Cold War-era 40s and 50s, especially through the fiery, anti-communist and explicitly political early activity of Billy Graham. Du Mez’s writing is lively and well-researched, her critiques both fair and unsparing, and her historical analysis perceptive and devastating. This is the thesis of Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s stunning new narrative history of the last century of white American evangelicalism. While these explanatory attempts have various degrees of merit, most acknowledge that there seems to be a blatant tension and contradiction between the “values” that conservative evangelicals hold and the “values” displayed by Trump himself, and it is this very contradiction that so many commentators have sought to explain or resolve.īut what if there isn’t actually a contradiction? What if Donald Trump actually embodies the very values that conservative evangelicals have been shaped to hold dearly? What if his evangelical support shouldn’t be viewed as a surprise, but rather as a natural outworking of a subculture of deep patriarchal, militant and nationalistic imagination that has been specifically cultivated in white American evangelicalism for over 75 years? What if Donald Trump is simply the fruit of the white American evangelical tree? Many explanations have been offered, from the pragmatic (they just wanted supreme court justices), to the immense dislike of Hillary Clinton, to the corruption of the term “evangelical” itself by the news media and pollsters, to fear and persecution complexes, to insidious and pernicious racism. Since 2016, no shortage of ink has been spilled on exploring the bafflingly-high support of Donald Trump among white evangelicals in America. A Feature Review of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nationīuy Now:

Review of jesus and john wayne