“Manly” heroes were needed to protect the American way of life, and the purity movement had prepared a generation of men to become those heroes.
When the two towers fell on 9/11, the evangelical culture was primed for a quick militaristic response and had the political power to do so. Patriarchy became not just a model for the family but a model for the nation.
What was needed, evangelicals believed, was a return to the gender roles of the past. Everything that hinted of feminism was suspect, and even things like protecting domestic violence victims and school racial integration were clumped together as the “feminist agenda” and rejected by evangelicals. Communism was replaced with feminism, and evangelicals rose to stand against this new threat to the evangelical way of life. Over time, the moral enemy of the Christian American family became non-evangelical Americans. It was a moral crisis that threatened the American family and way of life, and only a strong military could protect the people. Beginning in the Cold War era, communism was pitted not simply against capitalism but against (Christian) morality itself. To use a metaphor, the book showed how white evangelicalism began as a trickle of Cold War fear and was fed by tributaries of gender roles, homophobia, the homeschooling movement, Christian publishing and media industries, militarism, Islamophobia, and Christian nationalism until it became the raging river it is today. And so “Evangelicals may self-identify as ‘Bible believing Christians,’ but evangelicalism itself entails a broader set of deeply held values communicated through symbol, ritual, and political allegiances” (p. Du Mez explains that while many black protestants are aligned with evangelical theological doctrines, “on nearly every social and political issue, black protestants apply their faith in ways that run counter to white evangelicalism” (p. The subtitle of the book asserts that race is a core feature of this American subculture. And, in fact, the book has the feel of a sociological study of evangelicals themselves rather than a history of the movement. Though theoretically evangelicalism is a set of specific theological propositions, in reality it is less a religious belief system and more accurately defined as a culture. Jesus and John Wayne is the history of evangelicalism, tracing the movement from its roots in the early twentieth century to its modern-day iteration. That was exactly how I felt reading Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.
It was a key that made a lot of strange family behaviors make sense. No one ever had, so my grandma told the story of an aunt whose tragic story had become a family skeleton. Years ago, while visiting my grandmother, she pointed to a photo from my parents’ wedding and asked me if anyone had ever bothered to tell me who that random woman was.