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Many of today’s evangelicals may not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex-and they have a silver ring to prove it. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism, or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the role of culture in modern American evangelicalism. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate’s staunchest supporters? These are among the questions acclaimed historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez asks in Jesus and John Wayne, which delves beyond facile headlines to explain how white evangelicals have brought us to our fractured political moment.
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How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential re A scholar of American Christianity presents a seventy-five-year history of evangelicalism that identifies the forces that have turned Donald Trump into a hero of the Religious Right. Her writing has appeared in a number of outlets including The Washington Post, and she regularly blogs at Patheos’ Anxious Bench.A scholar of American Christianity presents a seventy-five-year history of evangelicalism that identifies the forces that have turned Donald Trump into a hero of the Religious Right. She is also the author of A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism (Oxford 2015). Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor in the history department at Calvin University. The result is a book that covers a century of cultural and intellectual development, and gives us a sense of how Trump turned out to be the right man for the job of winning the Evangelical vote. The book traces a century of Evangelical ideas around masculinity, gender, family and identity, and how these ideas became intertwined with ideas around nationalism, militarism, foreign policy and race. This is the argument my guest today, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, makes in her new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation(Liveright 2020). However, some would argue that the Evangelical support of Trump makes total sense given that, in spite of his supposed moral failings, he was just the sort of man they were looking for. The fact that a thrice-married reality-TV star has been able to hold onto the ‘moral majority’ through thick and thin the last few years seems to many to be a sort of cultural contradiction. One of the most perplexing elements of Donald Trumps’s 2016 electoral victory was the overwhelming support he received from white Evangelicals, a demographic that has stubbornly clung to him in the face of everything he has done.