Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation     Kristin Kobes Du Mez     (2020)  The title encapsulates the author’s argument: that an iconic 20th-century actor who portrayed heroic soldiers and cowboys epitomizes the societal goals of the segment of white American society that identifies as evangelical. Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a respected historian at Calvin University, which is affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church in North America, so she writes with the authority of one who knows religion from within. Her meticulously researched and footnoted book traces 75 years of expanding white evangelical embrace of a hyper-masculine political vision that subjugates women and immigrants and elevates authoritarianism and aggression. The presidency of Donald Trump, she posits, did not come about just because evangelicals held their noses and voted for a libertine because he would stack the courts with anti-abortion judges. They voted for him primarily because he embodied their goals of “Christian nationalism.” Many self-described American evangelicals know little about theology. Their beliefs are instead cultural and political, based in what Kobes Du Mez calls a “bunker mentality” and a “persecution narrative” that only a badass autocrat can alleviate. This New York Times bestseller-list book is both enlightening and scary.

The evangelical movement in the United States has long been an interest of mine. Back in 2017, I read Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, and I summed it up this way:

The Evangelicals disentangles the many strands of a movement that now includes about 25% of the population of the United States. FitzGerald pulls data from the histories of religion, culture, and politics with ease, showing how evangelicals developed their stances on issues such as slavery, segregation, labor unions, the Vietnam War, communism, abortion, immigration, and gay rights. If you are bemused by the phenomenon of evangelicalism in America, or if you just want some background on a powerful segment of our society, this is the book to read. (You can see my entire review here.)

Also in 2017, I reviewed JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, concluding with this paragraph:

Vance treasures his hillbilly background and yet despises it. He hasn’t quite figured out where he stands, though he aligns himself politically with conservative Republicans. Hillbilly Elegy is an imperfect book, with far too many contradictions and generalizations and cherry-picked citations. But you may want to read it because it’s become highly influential in our present-day political climate of angry polarization. (You can read my entire review here.)

In early 2018, my guest reviewer, Paul Schwankl, assessed One Nation after Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not Yet Deported, by E. J. Dionne Jr, Norman J. Ornstein, and Thomas E. Mann. Click here to read his review.

In my next post, I’ll be back to fiction!