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Jesus and John Wayne - 00 - Introduction

⬅️ Book: Jesus and John Wayne - Kristin Kobes Du Mez · Next: Chapter 1 · Source: PDF pp. 7–19 (file not included in this release)

Introduction

Chapter Objective

Du Mez frames white evangelical support for Donald Trump as the historical culmination of a militant masculine ideology, not as a sudden betrayal of otherwise stable “family values.” The introduction identifies the elements the book will trace—patriarchal authority, Christian nationalism, racial identity, militarism, consumer culture, fear, and the longing for a strong protector—and explains why theology alone is insufficient to define American evangelicalism. Trump is the book’s opening problem and diagnostic symptom; the broader argument concerns the religious culture that made his rule-breaking toughness appear virtuous. PDF p. 9 (file not included in this release)

The Trump Puzzle and Du Mez’s Thesis

  • The opening scene is Trump’s January 2016 campaign appearance at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa—Du Mez’s alma mater and hometown. Trump presents Christianity as under siege, disparages weak leaders, attacks immigrants and Muslims, and promises forceful protection. The intimate setting lets Du Mez stage the central question from inside the evangelical world rather than as an outsider observing it. PDF p. 7 (file not included in this release)
  • Trump won 81 percent of the national white evangelical vote; in Du Mez’s Sioux County, 82 percent voted for him. His vulgarity, divorces, sexual conduct, and boasts of assault seemed to contradict the public moral standards evangelicals had applied to others. PDF p. 8 (file not included in this release)
  • Common explanations—the lesser of two evils, Supreme Court appointments, abortion, religious liberty, or bad polling categories—capture only part of the story. Du Mez’s stronger claim is that many evangelicals voted for Trump because his aggressive masculinity fit their operational beliefs, not merely despite his personal conduct.
  • The culture had already displaced gentleness, humility, sacrifice, and care for “the least of these” with a vengeful warrior Christ and an ends-justify-the-means politics. Trump did not create this turn; he embodied it. PDF p. 9 (file not included in this release)

The Ideological Bundle

  • Du Mez treats militant masculinity as the thread joining positions that may otherwise look separate:
    • support for preemptive war, torture, the death penalty, and gun rights;
    • opposition to immigration and refugee admission;
    • hostility toward Islam and fear of Christian persecution;
    • authoritarian political preferences and confidence in strong religious leaders;
    • opposition to gay rights and feminism;
    • defense of police force and punitive criminal justice;
    • anxiety about demographic change and the loss of white Christian dominance.
  • Christian nationalism binds domestic hierarchy to foreign policy. If America is God’s chosen nation, then the father’s rule in the home and the strongman’s rule on the national stage become parallel forms of protection. Gender order, racial order, and national power reinforce one another. PDF p. 10 (file not included in this release)
  • The affinities with Trump therefore extend beyond policy transactions. Du Mez emphasizes white evangelical preferences for uncompromising leadership, rejection of political restraint, punishment of perceived enemies, and rule-breaking when normal procedures seem unable to protect the group.

Theology, Race, and “Operational Theology”

  • Evangelical institutions often define the movement by four theological distinctives—biblical authority, Christ’s atonement, born-again conversion, and evangelistic or reforming activism. This produces a global and racially diverse definition, but Du Mez argues that it does not adequately describe how American evangelical identity operates. PDF p. 11 (file not included in this release)
  • A claim to biblical authority does not settle which of the Bible’s thousands of verses a community emphasizes, minimizes, or interprets away. Likewise, confessing Christ does not decide whether believers imagine Jesus primarily as a suffering servant or a conquering warrior.
  • Many people who identify as evangelical are theologically illiterate, while many Christians—especially Black Christians—who affirm the formal distinctives reject the evangelical label. Du Mez treats that rejection as evidence that “evangelical” has become more than a neutral set of doctrines.
  • Black Protestant political and moral judgments frequently diverge from white evangelical ones. This exposes the racial particularity hidden inside supposedly universal categories and helps explain why critics call evangelicalism a white religious brand. PDF p. 12 (file not included in this release)
  • Du Mez calls the lived bundle of Republican politics, patriarchal gender roles, Christian nationalism, and white identity an operational theology: beliefs disclosed by practices, heroes, fears, and loyalties, not only by creeds.

Consumer Culture as an Authority System

  • Evangelicalism’s reach depends on a dense marketplace of books, radio, television, music, films, conferences, curricula, ministries, blogs, and household products. People learn evangelical norms through everyday consumption even when they cannot state formal doctrine or do not attend church regularly. PDF p. 13 (file not included in this release)
  • This marketplace crosses denominational boundaries and connects “cultural” evangelicalism to seminaries, publishers, celebrity pastors, parachurch organizations, and other parts of establishment evangelicalism.
  • Authority is networked: leaders promote one another, publishers and retailers decide who reaches the market, and consumers inhabit a partially separated media world. This helps explain why pastors who opposed Trump often discovered they had less influence over congregants than the culture consumed all week.
  • Conservative leaders gained dominance not only by offering compelling ideas but also by controlling production and distribution. Retail decisions such as LifeWay’s removal of Rachel Held Evans and Jen Hatmaker while stocking pro-Trump and anti-Islam titles illustrate how the market policed evangelical boundaries. PDF p. 15 (file not included in this release)

Heroes, Fear, and the Historical Road Map

  • Evangelical popular culture elevated a pantheon of militant heroes—William Wallace, Theodore Roosevelt, cowboys, Generals MacArthur and Patton, the American soldier, and especially John Wayne. These figures supplied virtues of toughness, violence, protection, and unapologetic power that did not depend on conventional Christian morality.
  • Wayne’s divorces, affairs, drinking, and lack of evangelical faith did not disqualify him. His symbolic work mattered more: he represented a mythical Christian America, fixed gender roles, racialized patriarchal authority, and a protector willing to get his hands dirty. PDF p. 16 (file not included in this release)
  • Du Mez rejects the story that fundamentalists withdrew from politics after the Scopes trial and suddenly returned in the 1970s. She traces continuities from southern mastery and early muscular Christianity through the 1940s–50s fusion of patriarchy, militarism, and nationalism; the upheavals of civil rights, feminism, and Vietnam; the family-values coalition; and post–9/11 and Obama-era fears.
  • Fear is not merely a response to real danger. A militant faith requires enemies, and evangelical leaders repeatedly produced an embattled identity by naming communists, feminists, liberals, gay people, Muslims, immigrants, and government as threats. That environment primes followers to seek a “meanest, toughest” rescuer. PDF p. 18 (file not included in this release)
  • The introduction closes with an important boundary: militant white evangelicalism is not the inevitable result of Christianity or biblical literalism. Christian history and scripture contain both violent and peaceable trajectories, and American Christianity includes resistance to privilege and domination. The book explains a historically produced movement and the paths its institutions chose, not Christianity’s only possible outcome. PDF p. 19 (file not included in this release)

Key Concepts

  • Militant masculinity: An ideal that treats aggression, patriarchal command, toughness, and redemptive violence as necessary virtues for protecting family, faith, and nation.
  • Christian nationalism: The belief that America is divinely chosen and that defending its power and Christian identity is a religious duty.
  • Operational theology: A community’s functioning religion as revealed by its political loyalties, gender expectations, heroes, media habits, and enemies, whether or not these align neatly with its formal doctrine.
  • Cultural evangelicalism: Participation in a shared religious marketplace and identity that crosses denominations and may exist with little formal theological knowledge or church attendance.
  • Establishment evangelicalism: The mutually legitimating network of leaders, denominations, seminaries, publishers, retailers, and parachurch organizations that creates and distributes evangelical authority.
  • Culture of embattlement: A durable sense that Christianity and the nation are under siege, making fear and the demand for a forceful protector central to group identity.

Questions for Reflection

  1. What evidence would distinguish a genuinely transactional evangelical vote for Trump from Du Mez’s claim that his persona expressed longstanding religious values?
  2. If evangelical identity is produced through both doctrine and consumer culture, which source of authority is more capable of changing the movement?
  3. How does the concept of operational theology clarify the gap between a community’s stated virtues and the leaders it rewards?
  4. Which historical alternatives within Christianity most directly challenge the claim that militant patriarchy is the necessary result of biblical faith?
  5. Can a movement organized around embattlement retain solidarity without continually producing new enemies?

Citations and References

Author’s complete endnotes

Introduction endnotes 1–14 are attached to this section in the source: notes beginning on PDF p. 300 (file not included in this release) · notes continued on PDF p. 301 (file not included in this release).

  • Trump, voting, and public opinion (notes 1–6): Trump’s Dordt campaign video; Lauren Markoe; the New York Times/CBS poll; Politico election results; Pew Research Center; PRRI; James L. Guth; Andrew L. Whitehead; Samuel L. Perry; and related survey research. These sources support the opening scene, voting totals, and the claimed relationships among nationalism, patriarchy, race, guns, policing, and foreign policy.
  • Definitions and racial boundaries (notes 7–10): National Association of Evangelicals; David Bebbington; Thomas Kidd; Christianity Today reporting; Anthea Butler; Jemar Tisby; Deidra Riggs; and Molly Worthen. These sources ground the discussion of theological definitions, Black Christian resistance to the label, and evangelical authority networks.
  • Masculinity, popular culture, and fear (notes 11–14): Garry Wills, John Wayne’s America; Sara Moslener, Virgin Nation; Emma Green; and Robert P. Jones. These works support the roles of Wayne, consumer culture, gender, and perceived national softness.